Daniel Stone - Sinkable: Obsession, the Deep Sea, and the Shipwreck of the Titanic

The Food Explorer

If I asked you to guess, a shot in the dark, how many shipwrecks sit at the bottom of the oceans as relics of accidents past, what would you say? I have some advantage in asking this question because for several years I have asked almost everyone Ive met. All of human history, all of earths water, how many shipwrecks?

Guesses range widely from very tiny to very big. But what they all have in common is that they are all too small. They are most underestimated by kids, who cant be blamed; their education of early human sea travel begins with the relatively recent eras of Magellan, the Spanish Armada, the Nina and the Pinta and the still-missing Santa Maria. Maybe theyve heard of the Titanic, but likely through the lens of Leonardo DiCaprio or, more likely, Celine Dion. Adults are wrong too, but theyre wrong by less. Most adults think of ships in the modern sense, such as the USS Arizona they saw in Pearl Harbor while on vacation or the Costa Concordia from the news a few years ago. Looking backward, our historic understanding of ships clings to a few historical nuclei: Captain Cook, Columbus, the Maine, Ernest Shackleton, the Lusitania, or, again, the Titanic.

Maybe a quarter million was the highest estimate I ever heard, from a friend who is a U.S. marine and the kind of guy who spends a lot of time in naval museums. It wasnt a bad guess, but when you account for all of human history and our planets mostly aquiferous surface, the number is substantially higher. According to a UNESCO estimate, the number of ships that sit in underwater graves, wasting away year after year, is an incredible three million.

When the Titanic sank in 1912, it plunged an astounding two and a half miles and hit the seafloor at more than thirty miles per hour. Its ocean grave was so remote that its location remained a mystery until 1985, when a team that had the benefit of government-developed submarines and deepwater crafts was able to take some blurry snapshots. It took seventy-three years, almost an entire human life-span, to find the most illustrious and fascinating shipwreck of all time.

This is the story of what happened after the night the ship sankhow the Titanic changed the world and how the world longed desperately to piece it back together.

Shipwrecks have a habit of attracting colorful and unusual characters. Those characters tend to be overwhelmingly male and most often whitea reflection of a historically macho industry that runs on expensive machinery and huge sums of money. Many will tell you that they work in the most punishing environment on earth (true) and also that working in the deep sea is harder than working on Mars (possibly true). Yet just as many are armchair enthusiasts, amateurs, and white belts, whose sole credential is their obsession. They get drawn into races, fights, and elaborate lawsuits. The odd quirk that ships are typically female is a holdover from times when vessels and their wrecks couldand still canstand in as full-blooded companions.

In the process of writing, I interviewed dozens of historians, salvage professionals, wreck experts, and lawyers, people who earn their livelihoods drilling for oil, hunting for treasure, investigating accidents, and filming documentaries. Theres a common characteristic I noticed they share, perhaps best described as a polite but profound impatience for your crap. They have work to do, and theyve seen more otherworldly stuff than you ever will. Theyre usually under pressure from rich investors and impatient scientists, and they carry an enormous amount of risk managing equipment, timelines, and peoples lives.

But every single one will eventually soften up and readily dish about the granddaddy of them all. In cultural lore, the Titanic is the wreck around which all others orbit. The same way a pop musician cant escape the influence of the Beatles or Michael Jackson, shipwreckers cant bypass the brightest star. In scientific terms, the Titanic embodies the waves of technological growth, failure, and advancement during its life-span above water, and relentless obsession and elaborate deep-sea engineering below.

This is not, in the words of Walter Lord, who wrote A Night to Remember, the seminal volume on the Titanics final night, another book about the Titanic. This is a look at our oceans and the junk weve left in them. It is a yarn about the oddballs and misfits who devote their lives to wayward ships. And it is a deep dive into the waters of our planet and what lurks, in every sense, just below the surface.

DANIEL STONE

Santa Barbara, California

April 2021

When snow falls, the properties of water perform a delicate dance. Snowflakes fall like dominoes fall. A piece of dust forms a crystal, and the appearance of that crystal attracts more crystals until they form long dendrites around the speck of dust like ants around a piece of chocolate. As long as the growing snowflake remains lighter than air, it will float. But as soon as one extra crystal crosses the tipping point, the structure will succumb to gravity and fall.