Sinkable, p.13
Sinkable, page 13
Woolley, however, was dead serious. If he was running a con, it was simply a Ponzi scheme of enthusiasm, reinvesting deposits of fascination from one person to the next, until he had spun a web so complete that he found himself caught in it. Not only was he personally committed to raising the Titanic, a crowd of people around the world was waiting for him to get it done.
* * *
Every deck on a ship has a name. Starting from the top, the uppermost deck is called the weather deck, followed by the main deck, and then the upper deck, the deck best known for where Leonardo DiCaprio declared he was king of the world. Under the upper deck comes the middle deck, and if there is no middle deck, then one would descend straight to the lower deck, home to berths, staterooms, and cabins. Somewhere in this collection of decks might be a promenade deck, where one could stroll around the superstructure of a ship.
Depending on its purpose, a vessel can have any number of additional decks. The gun deck, helicopter deck, and hangar deck need no explanation. Cargo ships have tween decks between other decks to store weight low and centered. The most kid-friendly deck is the lido deck, usually home to swimming pools and water slides.
And finally the poop deck. For all nautical terminology’s high-class veneer, at some point every captain, commodore, and midshipman eventually must reference the lowest brow but highest deck on the back of a ship, whose name comes from a Middle English translation of a Middle French interpretation of the Latin word puppis, meaning the stern of a ship. The Titanic had a poop deck, and it was where Kate Winslet almost jumped in her almost-suicide scene. But passenger ships aren’t often built with poop decks anymore. The real estate is too valuable, and cruise vessels long ago converted poop decks to first-class cabins with sprawling balconies and seafood buffets.
The Titanic was built with ten decks divided into cabins, social areas, and cargo. The leisure space was interrupted by four boilers, whose smokestacks extended through the interior of the ship, up through the weather deck, and into the air. The mix of compartments and columns is what rationalized the term unsinkable, under the assumption that if water flooded in, the affected compartments would seal and the ship could sail on. Having neutralized water as a threat, few could imagine that the ship’s fatal blow would come from the ship itself. The shear stress that ripped the hull in half was enough to rip through all ten decks and tear apart the first-class lounge, the reading and writing room, the promenade deck, the bridge deck, the shelter areas, the saloon, a group of third-class cabins, and more than three decks stuffed with enough coal to get to New York.
As the ship settled on the seabed, its decks were still largely intact. Columns had snapped and steel had buckled, but the dining rooms were still dining rooms and second-class cabins were still second-class cabins. The ship had lost its functionality as a ship and some areas were irretrievably destroyed, but other parts largely retained their structure. A deep-sea creature capable of surviving such conditions could still wander from room to room, checking out the wood carvings and the imploded furniture.
Each wreck is a time capsule in the process of falling apart, but until it does, you can swim through the hallways and lie in the bathtubs, which is the main draw of wreck diving. After it was struck by a mine in 1942, the SS President Coolidge, an art deco passenger liner turned World War II troopship, took its ornate decorations and twelve thousand tons of government cargo to the seabed off the island of Vanuatu. Eighty years later, every day of the year, divers swim through the cargo holds, the engine room, the galley, and the infirmary. They swim ironic laps in the underwater swimming pool and gawk at the classic chandeliers and mosaic tile. Far and away, the most remarkable part of the Coolidge is its accessibility. Stuck in relatively shallow water with easy beach access and high underwater visibility, the Coolidge is a guaranteed marvel. Thousands more ships offer equally jaw-dropping views of former eras if divers could reach them.
Wrecks disappear often one deck at a time. By 1968, it’s likely that the Titanic’s ten decks had become six or seven as the structure slowly pancaked its weakening steel. No one was there to witness the moment the weather deck or poop deck collapsed onto the decks below, but the corrosion scientist Ian MacLeod thought that the first fifty years after the sinking were kinder than the next fifty years. MacLeod has spent four decades studying how ships break down by measuring the chemicals swirling around aging wrecks, and particularly the invasion of rust.
“One way to think about a wreck’s devolution is to picture your house falling apart,” MacLeod said one morning while I ate breakfast in California and he, in Perth, liberally sipped a late-night whiskey. He asked me to imagine if every year my walls got one millimeter thinner. For a long time I wouldn’t notice, but eventually, the walls would be too weak to support the roof and the ceiling would fall in. A ten-story house would last longer, collapsing usually from the bottom up as the weight bore down, but with enough time and enough exposure to the elements, even the sturdiest house would be a flattened pile of rubble. And eventually, the rubble would be blown away, eaten by microbes, or swallowed by the earth, too.
After a half century, the two halves of the Titanic remained in decent shape. “A lot of the critical metal thickness that enabled the structure to stand was still there, so if it was possible to take photos in the sixties, they would have been considerably more evocative than the ones the world saw later,” MacLeod said. “In the sixties, the two halves still had the appearance of a ship, and seeing them would have easily convinced the average person that it was still possible to raise the Titanic.”
Raising it, however, would create a new set of problems. The same year Woolley was amassing influence and money for his beloved wreck, another British ship underwent almost the exact process Woolley had in mind.
When it set sail in 1848, the SS Great Britain was one of the first passenger steamers and the largest vessel ever built. It was deployed to shuttle wealthy passengers between Bristol and New York, and, with its novel steam-powered propeller technology, it was proudly seen as the arrival of a modern era. Unlike the Titanic, it survived its maiden voyage and made dozens more across the Atlantic. Sturdy and well-apportioned, the Great Britain spent thirty years carrying immigrants from England to Australia and then, after a fire, served as an immobile warehouse and coal storage ship in the Falkland Islands off the east coast of Argentina until she was unceremoniously scuttled and abandoned in 1937—an extraordinarily long working life of eighty-nine years.
The Great Britain would be forever submerged if a British millionaire who owned a football club hadn’t happened to read about it in the newspaper one day. Wanting to preserve a symbol that had embodied England at its peak, in 1970, the millionaire pulled together a crew, rented a submersible pontoon to refloat the ship, and enlisted the help of a German tugboat to drag the hull eight thousand miles from Argentina back to England. It was showered with rose petals as it traveled up the river Avon to its original dry dock in Bristol.
But once the crowds left, engineers realized they had a major problem. While it was submerged, the Great Britain was rusting and falling apart. But once it resurfaced, it began to rust much faster from oxygen and humidity in the air and the salts embedded in every crevice. Left alone, the hull was in such poor shape that structural engineers gave it six months before it completely crumbled.
Rather than abandon an effort that had already cost millions, engineers constructed a giant dehumidification chamber for the bottom half of the ship that effectively preserved the hull in conditions comparable to the Arizona desert. The outer structure was filled with resin and coated in anti-corrosion paint. Inside, dining rooms were reapportioned with nineteenth-century furniture and passenger bunks were finished in new wood. Start to finish, the conservation took three years and £11 million. It was reasonable at the time to wonder if the effort was worth the price. The issue was settled, however, when the tourists began buying tickets to see it. Fifty years later, the SS Great Britain remains Bristol’s most visited attraction. You can get married on it, sleep on it, or, according to its website, rent it to host your corporate event.
Like the Titanic, the draw of the Great Britain is the result of good storytelling. A formerly regal ship, lost and refound, returned to its home dock on the anniversary of the date it was launched. Were the Titanic built smaller or sunk in shallower water, one could expect almost this exact treatment to unfold in the early seventies, and today, tourists would flock to Belfast to see the Titanic the same way tourists gawk at Buckingham Palace or the Tower Bridge. Not a dollar or pound would be spared to return the ship’s original sheen, and visitors would wander through its hallways with audio guides pressed to their ears recalling the stories of heroics and cowardice.
This shallow-water alternate reality would’ve been a done deal except for two wrinkles. One, unlike the SS Great Britain, the Titanic sank not by intentional scuttling but from a tragic accident that killed hundreds. Lifting the ship would require disturbing a grave with all the legal, physical, and spiritual red tape that entailed. And two, the Titanic would require a significantly more elaborate restoration, a race against rust on a larger ship that would deteriorate dramatically faster than engineers could preserve it.
This guaranteed notoriety for the person or people responsible for any screwup in salvaging the Titanic. Any weakening of the fragile structure, or, worse, a fatal miscalculation, would ironically leave one of the great relics of the twentieth century worse off above water than it was below.
“You’d go down in history as the person who accelerated the decay of the Titanic,” MacLeod told me. “Who would want to be that person?”
* * *
By the summer of 1969, Woolley was stretched thin. So many people were calling, writing, and offering to help him that he returned from work and stayed up sometimes all night answering every message. During the day, he was working as a clock winder at a medieval church in Baldock, which entailed the daily chore of climbing eighty steps up the church tower to wind it. Then he would walk to his other job as a dye operator in the pantyhose factory.
Something had to give, and after several months, Woolley decided to quit the church, and in quitting, he managed to squeeze a dollop of publicity for his Titanic plan. He called a local newspaper and told them the clock would soon stop because he had to devote his full attention to the Titanic. The paper took the bait and printed the story under the headline “Titanic Task to Stop Clock.”
Woolley was also playing whack-a-mole with anyone who questioned him, or, worse, mocked him. While shopping for groceries one day, a man recognized Woolley from the papers and asked him how he could travel two miles underwater when no one had ever done it before. Easy, Woolley told him. The French already invented a bathyscaphe. His sister called one night and asked how he was going to get the money. Simple, he told her, the £5 to £7 million—a number based on Woolley’s changing whims—would come from “people interested in the Titanic.” A Canadian newspaper sent a reporter all the way to England to meet Woolley and ask whether extensive damage might have made the ship unsalvageable. “In fact not,” Woolley told him. “The lower depth the less oxygen you get and the less damage to the wreck.”
Almost nothing Woolley said was based in fact. The French bathyscaphe was not suited to loading pontoons under such a sprawling wreck at such extreme depth. Titanic buffs would not line up to donate millions of pounds to a man lacking both credentials and experience in underwater engineering. And the bit about oxygen in the water column was at best only partially true. Oxygen is at a maximum at the surface and decreases significantly until about three thousand feet, but it begins to gently increase again with depth, a strange quirk of seawater that lets dissolved gases travel easily side to side but not up and down.
At home, Woolley concocted experiments to test his theory that he could inflate deep-sea pontoons. His idea centered on electrolysis, in which energy can split apart hydrogen and oxygen molecules of ocean water. If the hydrogen could be isolated, it could inflate the pontoons underwater and they would become buoyant.
Woolley worked on this experiment in his bathtub and spent several weeks building an oblong contraption capable of performing electrolysis. When it was ready, he affixed it to a balloon and turned it on. Hours later, the balloon had barely inflated. The next morning it appeared to have made no progress. At that rate, inflating hundreds of pontoons thousands of feet underwater would take millions of years.
Facts, however, didn’t diminish Woolley’s confidence that the details would work themselves out. Big projects always seemed impossible until they were inevitable. This was the same year Boeing unveiled the first jumbo jet and British Airways inaugurated the Concorde supersonic passenger turbojet, which could fly from New York to Paris at more than thirteen hundred miles per hour. Earlier that summer, two American astronauts walked on the moon for the first time, and that display of human capability enchanted the world. Woolley drew a direct comparison. “Of course I know it’s an odd obsession,” he said in October 1969. “But flying to the moon is an odd obsession as well.”
Later that month, at the precise moment that Woolley had seemed to squeeze every drop of attention from a hypothetical idea lacking any forward motion, he announced that he had assembled an international team of experts. Two Hungarian engineers had written to Woolley, which, in his view, was enough to consider them on the team. There was an Austrian chemist who offered to help with the floating component. Two of his co-workers from the hosiery factory wanted in, along with a London accountant, two Massachusetts businessmen, and the proprietor of a local fish-and-chips shop.
With the exception of his hosiery friends and the fish-and-chips fellow, Woolley never met anyone on his team. All of the coordination was done through the mail. The Hungarian engineers wrote to Woolley to tell him they had “a machine” fitted with underwater lights and mechanical arms to manage the nylon bags. The Austrian fellow said he had done calculations about gas buoyancy or something or other. And the rest offered to help with publicity and fundraising the £4.8 million someone had suggested to Woolley as a budget. For something so uncertain, the whole affair in Woolley’s mind was a done deal. All that remained was the most important detail of all: once the ship was surfaced and the brass, copper, and other valuables on board were sold, every member of the team would receive £600,000, a number big, round, and largely plucked from thin air.
Plenty of people declined to be on Woolley’s team because they found the idea ridiculous—or, worse, they didn’t care. But one notable absence was Woolley’s own government. Despite well-publicized but misleading reports that “the Hungarians” were on board and “Austria” might pitch in as well, the British Crown laughed Woolley out of the room in the most British of ways: silence. He couldn’t get a single letter answered by the Sea Transport Branch of the British Board of Trade or the Royal Navy or from Buckingham Palace itself.
This was ironic and, in Woolley’s view, unfortunate because it was wholly reasonable that if a government as powerful as England’s got involved, the Titanic could at least be visited, if not salvaged in small pieces. The price would be steep, and conservatively, the effort would require a navy. But Woolley was correct in believing that the technology, expertise, and appetite existed for nations to rescue old ships in the deepest parts of the ocean if they wanted to badly enough.
The proof was sitting, inconveniently, twelve thousand miles away from Baldock, England, in the North Pacific. A year earlier, a Soviet submarine carrying three nuclear-armed ballistic missiles sank about fifteen hundred miles north of Hawaii. The crew was lost, and the vessel sat under three miles of water, even deeper than the Titanic. The Soviets, not wanting their secret sub to be discovered, wrote off the loss as if nothing had happened. They might have gotten away with it if not for American intelligence analysts who eavesdropped on Russian shipping communications while the ship went down. If the Americans could recover the wreck and the undetonated missiles—and especially if they could do it in secret—the wreck would yield invaluable intelligence of Soviet capabilities at the height of the Cold War.
The Soviet submarine, the K-129, was smaller than the Titanic. But it rested nearly a third deeper, at sixteen thousand feet, in a remote part of the Pacific. Getting to it would be difficult, but resurfacing the entire seventeen-hundred-ton, 132-foot-long vessel would be far harder. In secret, the CIA spent two years planning a feasible approach: using a large mechanical claw suspended from a surface ship by enormous winches. The plan was not unlike Charles Smith’s idea in 1914 or Doug Woolley’s in 1969, except Project Azorian, as the top secret maneuver became known, was underwritten with almost $1 billion by the U.S. government. It was also cloaked under the plausible cover story of being an undersea mining venture ostensibly sponsored by the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. When visited by CIA agents, Hughes allowed the government to use his name on the deep-sea drill platform, the USNS Hughes Glomar Explorer. He consented to establishing an elaborate cover story using fake bank accounts and government contracts. And when curious reporters started calling, Hughes agreed to field questions about the project with evasive non-answers.
The cover story held up perfectly, and the ship was designed and built in secrecy. The Glomar included a derrick similar to what would be found on an oil-drilling rig. It had a crane that extended by adding or subtracting pipes, along with two tall docking legs, a claw-like capture vehicle capable of holding the entire submarine, a center well for docking the vessel once it surfaced, and payload doors that would open and close on the bottom of the rig. When finished, the James Bond–like vessel with hidden compartments and secret capabilities could conduct the entire operation underwater without being seen by other ships, aircraft, or spy satellites. While ocean currents jostled the platform, the ship had to lower the capture craft by adding sixty-foot sections of pipe one at a time. Once it reached the Soviet sub, the vehicle would hover above the wreck and close its jaws. Then the pipe sections would be removed one at a time until the Russian sub arrived in the ship’s docking bay.
