Ralph White’s Titanic Adventure : A Visit With a Member of the Woods Hole Expedition

It’s a Saturday morning in mid-September, and Ralph White is so gleeful about his secret he can barely stay in his seat. Just two days earlier he had returned from a two-month voyage aboard the Woods Hole oceanographic research vessel Knorr, where he was one of two photographers on a French-American expedition to find the wreckage of the Titanic. When the Titanic sank in the frigid North Atlantic 73 years ago, more than 1,500 people lost their lives. It’s the most famous shipwreck in history. And White, as he explains, is one of only four people in the world who knows its precise position.

“Where’s that?” he’s asked.

“I cannot divulge the exact location of the ship.”

“Why can’t you?”

Because, White explains, if he does, everyone and his brother will be out there trying to bring something up before the Woods Hole group can mount a return expedition next spring. “Can you imagine,” White asks, “what the wheel from the Titanic would go for?”

White’s name is Ralph Bradshaw White, but his friends call him R. B. (“I always wanted a nickname like Rock or something,” he says. And Bradshaw was “too effeminate”). He lives with his second wife, Astrid, in a log-cabin condominium complex in the hills above Silver Lake. On his front door is a yellow-and-black decal showing a head-on view of a gun muzzle; an accompanying message warns potential intruders that the occupant is more than able to defend himself and that nothing inside “is worth risking your life for.”

In White’s living room, a harpoon hangs by the stairwell. There’s a Walther semi-automatic pistol on top of his three-screen TV, and on the walls are batches of photographs of and by White, parachuting insignia (he’s made 2,992 jumps), medals, maps, expedition flags and a world map with perhaps 150 pins showing everywhere he’s been.

“You’re quite a collector,” he’s told.

“No, these are all awards I’ve been given,” White says.

“But you’ve got all these flags with signatures.”

“I’m a sentimental fool.”

White is a trim 44 years old, combs his hair across his forehead and has a penetrating laugh. On this occasion he’s wearing khaki shorts, an expedition T-shirt, a gold bracelet, a shark’s tooth around his neck and, on his belt, a stainless-steel folding knife.

If anyone asks about it, he whips it out of the sheath with one hand, and then, flicking and twisting his wrist, opens the blade and locks the handle. The knife, White explains, is a Filipino balisong and the only knife “you can open or close with one hand.” White was a knife-fighting instructor in the Marine Corps. “But that,” he says, “is a whole different story.”

Despite the impressive success of the Woods Hole expedition, it was not without its detractors. And some other Titanic hunters complained that the group had an unfair advantage in that the Navy provided the grant to develop the deep-ocean photographic equipment used to find the Titanic and allowed military personnel to help in the search.

“The controversy will rage on: Why was it done, and why was it done on the Titanic?” White says. “And the point is, it was done. The equipment did work. The Titanic was found.” Although it’s true that there were a few Navy people on board, they were there to observe the sea trials of the new equipment, not to find the shipwreck. “We had to test something in deep water. What finer test than to go out and find the Titanic?”

Besides, White says, it wasn’t as though they came into the area, lowered their camera array and found the ship on the first try. The ship was resting on the ocean bottom in 13,000 feet of water. It took two hours just to lower the camera gear. At that depth, the water was pitch-black and an icy 31 degrees Fahrenheit, and the pressure was 5,800 pounds per square inch. Once, their research ship got blown 20 miles off course by Hurricane Bob; another time, it was caught in a gale.

Furthermore, they had no guarantee that the Titanic was either detectable or still in one piece. In 1926, 14 years after the Titanic sank, an earthquake ripped through the area. If the Titanic had been in its path, it might have been buried under a mud mountain or else tumbled along the bottom so many times that it would have been nothing more than twisted scrap.

“We got real scared the day before we found it,” White says. “We had covered a lot of ocean. Three-quarters of our search area had been searched with nothing to show for it.” Once the allotted search time was up, they would have to go back whether they’d found it or not.

When their camera array did pick up the Titanic early in the morning of Sept. 1, White was in his bunk, off watch. “Someone came running down and said, ‘We’re starting to pick up something that could be the debris field.’ Within 30 seconds of the time I got there, we passed over the boiler.” Shortly after that they picked up the Titanic on sonar, 200 to 300 yards away. “We found the boiler at 1:04:53 a.m., and we found the ship at 1:40. I didn’t get the seconds.”

The Titanic, which was covered with a light layer of sediment, was in surprisingly good shape, White says, though there was a hole in the bow where the boilers had torn through the hull and the mainmast had toppled over. Also, a four-foot crack had opened aft of the bridge, and the stern had broken off.

To keep the location of the Titanic a secret, White says, Robert Ballard, a Woods Hole marine geologist and leader of the expedition, immediately seized the ship’s navigation charts. But White, thanks to his Marine Corps reconnaissance training, “memorized the chart upside down across the table.”

By this time, White says, it was nearly 2:20 a.m.--the time that the Titanic went down. “Dr. Ballard said he was going to go out on the fantail and say a prayer and that anyone was welcome to come along.”

The Knorr spent another four days at the site, photographing the Titanic foot by foot. And then, at the end of both the supplies and the contract for the ship’s time, it headed back to Woods Hole.

Because the expedition members had worked so hard to find the Titanic in the first place, White says, no one stopped to consider how much attention they would get when they docked at Woods Hole. Cannons were firing; bands were playing. The captain of the Knorr spun the ship in a circle and the crowd went wild. Although the TV networks wouldn’t even talk to them before their trip, now there were seven or eight satellite antennas for live transmission of the TV coverage, and so many reporters and photographers, White says, that it looked “like a Nikon convention on the dock.”

White plans to spend the winter helping to put together a television documentary on the finding of the Titanic. Then next spring, once the North Atlantic weather clears up, the Woods Hole group will return to the Titanic with submersibles that will carry three people each. “George Lucas can eat his heart out, because when we start flying the remotes and the submersibles and everything down there, it’s going to be ‘Star Wars’ on location for real. This time we’ll have a system called Jason, which is an off-load robot that can go inside the hull. It will fly in on a tether, and it will be able to photograph the interior of the ship.” The element of having people on board the submersibles, White believes, is what will make the expedition both so dangerous and exciting. The crushing power of the water at that depth is beyond comprehension. “If anything went wrong down there, (the crew) would instantly turn into the (jellylike) consistency of Campbell’s consomme.”

White has been an adventurer of one sort or another all his adult life. He was born in San Bernardino, grew up in Hawaii, attended a military academy and eventually ended up in the Marine Corps, where he served first with a parachute-test unit and then with a reconnaissance unit in Vietnam. (“I’m an ardent former Marine,” White says. “And if you haven’t done your time in the Marine Corps, you still haven’t fulfilled your military obligation.”)

After his discharge in 1966, White started a parachuting school in Lancaster and then became a free-fall cameraman for the TV show “Ripcord.” He photographed the World Parachuting Championships for ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.” He began doing TV commercials, in-flight photography for North American Rockwell’s test-flight facility and piloting Rockwell’s deep-ocean submersible.

He also went on various excursions for National Geographic magazine, working on the Loch Ness expedition (“We found a lot of big eels”), diving through the ice to find a sunken ship 123 miles from the North Pole and helping to develop the deep-ocean technology that led to the discovery of tube worms, a hydrogen-sulfide-based life form living off volcanic vents in the ocean floor.

“Then recently,” White says, “I’ve been in Sri Lanka doing underwater filming of blue whales, sperm whales, just about any whale you can think of. Basically, I travel the world doing expeditions and going to remote places.”

Despite his practical experience with underwater photography, White didn’t know very much about the Titanic before last summer’s expedition. The only research materials they initially had on board, he says, were “A Night to Remember”--Walter Lord’s famous book about the sinking of the Titanic--and a 12-inch-long plastic model of the ship. Most of his historical knowledge of the Titanic comes instead from his friend, Charles Sachs, who has come by this morning to hear about White’s recent expedition.

Sachs is founder of the Oceanic Navigation Research Society, a Universal City organization dedicated to “the golden era of transatlantic travel.” In the past, they’ve held annual dinners on the Queen Mary, serving the same menu that the Titanic served in its first-class dining room on its last night--roast beef, creamed carrots and cream of barley soup. Then at midnight, they would go up to the main deck and fire distress rockets over the harbor.

Sachs is a witty raconteur with a fondness for pornographic puns. He collects shipboard tableware and fine wines and spends a lot of time on cruise ships, lecturing on the Titanic. He is also a bit of a revisionist historian, and this morning he casually tells White, between sips of Earl Grey tea, that there’s a new theory afoot that the Titanic might have been much further south than anyone previously supposed. “It was common practice that ship captains would steer 20 to 30 miles south of the sea lanes to save time,” he says. And the ship’s officer sent to plot the Titanic’s position after it hit the iceberg might not have been aware of that.

Although Sachs has apparently just been talking off the top of his head, White thinks that this is a subtle trick to goad him into revealing the Titanic’s true position: “You’re baiting me. Aren’t you?”

Sachs shrugs and White laughs triumphantly. “Ain’t working, Chas. Ain’t working.”

“But what do you think of the theory?”

“It’s interesting,” says White, “but no comment.”

White suddenly turns to Sachs: “Hey--did you see the telegraph I got from Mr. T?”

“The big T sent you a telegram?”

“Yes. He said, ‘Thanks for finding my boat, sucker.’ ”

To White, it’s been a minor revelation to learn how many people believe things about the Titanic that aren’t true. Because of the film “Raise the Titanic,” half the people he meets think that the ship was raised a long time ago and now is sitting alongside a dock in New York Harbor. The rest wonder why it’s taking so long to bring it up. “It’s the hardest thing I have to explain to people,” White says. “It would take $2 billion to $3 billion to raise it, and there isn’t the technology to raise it anyway. It took a year and a half to raise the Normandie at her pier in New York in only 60 feet of water with thousands of people working. They didn’t raise the Andrea Doria, which is in about 300 feet of water. With the Titanic, you’re dealing with 13,000 feet.”

At best, White says, they’ll be able to bring up artifacts such as china, silver and cases of wine.

“There were 20,000 bottles of wine aboard the Titanic,” Sachs says. And after 73 years at 31 degrees on the bottom of the ocean, certain sauternes may have aged quite nicely, such as D’Yquem, a very expensive, rare and sweet after-dinner wine. “Thirty degrees is the proper serving temperature for D’Yquem,” Sachs says. “It will age hundreds of years. And it would be delightful to bring up a bottle.”

When White is asked why anyone would want to go to the trouble of finding the Titanic, he says, “Because it’s there and because it’s the most famous shipwreck in the world.” But to Sachs, the reason people still talk about the Titanic 73 years after it went down is the poignancy of the loss.

Sunday, April 14, 1912, was a cold, clear moonless night. The stars were sparkling; visibility was 20 miles; the sea was as calm as polished steel. Because the passengers were sending hundreds of wireless messages to their friends, a certain critical message regarding ice in the sea lane never made it up to the bridge. When the lookout spotted the iceberg--which was quite small as icebergs go--it was 400 yards ahead, only a little more than the length of the ship. The bridge ordered a hard left turn, full speed astern. In the 37 seconds before the ship hit, it turned 22 degrees to port and listed 5 degrees to starboard. If the ship had hit the iceberg head on, it might have survived. But as the ship turned, the starboard list depressed the double-bottom low enough that the iceberg struck above it and cut a long fatal gash into the ship’s soft single skin.

“It was a million-to-one odds,” Sachs says. “The moon, the ice, the key messages not getting to the bridge. Also, 1912 was not a good year for wine. It was a tough year all around.”