Titanic Has No Iceberg Gash, Divers Discover

As the mini-submarine Alvin swam back and forth in the dark ocean depths, Robert D. Ballard, expedition leader, peered expectantly through the tiny portholes at the rusting wreck of the Titanic.

Ballard knew that most accounts of the sinking--even recent press kits by his sponsors, the U.S. Navy and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution--assumed that the giant ship had suffered a 300-foot fatal gash when it hit an iceberg on April 14, 1912.

Bow Half-Buried

But after studying the half-buried starboard bow, Ballard concluded that, like so many other enduring legends of the fabled luxury liner, the infamous 300-foot gash is a myth.

“We couldn’t find any of the iceberg’s gash,” Ballard told The Times via ship-to-shore radio. “We found buckled plates and sheared rivets. There is not a 300-foot gash.”

As Ballard’s ship of scientists sails home with thousands of detailed photos of the ghostly wreck--and with no plans to ever return--their 11 days of undersea exploits are raising new questions and exploding old myths about the most famous shipwreck in modern times.

Separating myth from reality is a tough task when it comes to the Titanic, and even reality is hard to swallow. It was as long as three football fields, as tall as an 11-story building, with a lounge modeled after Versailles--and lifeboats for only one-third of the passengers and crew. The storied ship has spawned five films, several plays, an opera, and hundreds of books, songs and poems.

‘A Remarkable Story’

“It was such a remarkable story,” said Walter Lord, the author, who has just published a sequel to his 1955 classic, “A Night to Remember,” debunking many of the ship’s myths. “It was the largest ship, the biggest thing man had ever built, the most luxurious ship, proclaimed unsinkable, filled with the most glamorous people of the age, sinking on its first voyage, taking 1,500 lives. Who could believe it?”

But the myths persist. According to Lord, for example, the eight-man band generally depicted playing the dirge-like “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” as the icy Atlantic swirled around their feet on the tilting boat deck, did no such thing.

“I discovered the hymn is played to an entirely different tune in England than in the U.S., so there’s no way everyone could have recognized it,” Lord said in a telephone interview from New York. “Plus, the whole idea of the band playing was to cheer people up.”

Likely Played a Waltz

Lord figures the band more likely was playing a then-popular light waltz called “Songe d’Automne,” which was confused with the Episcopal hymn “Autumn.” And, sorry, he says, but when the waters neared, the musicians threw down their instruments and ran like everyone else.

Other myths, according to Lord: A man did not dress as a woman to escape in a lifeboat; the ship’s official number does not spell “NO POPE” when held before a mirror; and other ships of the time used better bulkheads and were far more “unsinkable.”

“It really wasn’t the state of the art,” Lord said. “It was built for comfort and speed, not safety.”

Other revisionists are also at work. Charles Haas, a schoolteacher, and Jack Eaton, a hospital clerk, president and historian, respectively, of the Titanic Historical Society, returned recently from touring towns in Ireland and England where the Titanic was built and launched.

‘Pernicious Myths’

Haas said they are now writing two books to “puncture some of the pernicious myths.”

Such as? “The famous mummy legend, that the Titanic sank because she carried a mummy with a curse on her. Not true.”

The same goes, Haas added, for the tale that Capt. E. J. Smith did not go down with his ship but survived and “was seen wandering around the Great Lakes mumbling, ‘I’m Smith of the Titanic.”

More mundane myths are exposed at the Philadelphia Maritime Museum, where the Titanic’s last lunch menu and Mrs. John Jacob Astor’s tattered life belt are in a roomful of poignant memorabilia.

Exhibits show the sea was not stormy that terrible night, for example, as often shown in paintings. Survivors said it was like “polished glass” and a “mill pond.” Nor was there dancing before the crash. British ships did not allow it on Sundays.

An Oft-Forgotten Truth

Lists of the 703 survivors reveal a grimmer, oft-forgotten truth. It was “women and children first” in the lifeboats, but only up to a point. More than twice as many men in first class survived as children in third class. More than half of all first- and second-class passengers were rescued. In steerage, only one in four survived.

One of the steerage survivors was British-born Frank Aks, now 75 and living in Norfolk, Va. In a telephone interview, Aks insisted his stranger-than-fiction story is true.

“I was 10 months old and a man went berserk and grabbed me out of my mother’s arms and threw me overboard,” he said. “Somehow, I landed in a lady’s lap in a lifeboat.”

Probably the recent expedition’s most important discovery is that the giant ship did not sink intact, as most books and films portray it, but broke up and sank in pieces in 12,500 feet of water.

“It reinforces the witnesses who said it broke up on the surface,” Ballard said. “There’s just a question of whether it imploded on the way down.”

Missing Mid-Section

Ballard said that could account for the ship’s missing mid-section. Nearly a third of the ship, around the third and fourth smokestacks, was destroyed, presumably when the icy sea reached the steaming boilers.

What’s left are the bow and aft sections, a third of a mile apart on the muddy ocean floor. The bow appears to have nosed into the mud about 30 to 40 feet, and the steel hull has buckled near the bridge, Ballard said. Behind that, the superstructure is sheared off at a 45-degree angle below the third stack.

About 600 meters south, a city- block-long section of the stern sits upright in the mud. The propellers are buried, but the top of the rudder is still visible. Around and behind for another 600 meters are thousands of artifacts that spilled from the stern as it sank.

A ‘Kitchen Out There’

“There’s an entire kitchen out there,” Ballard said. “I’ve never seen so many huge copper pots, serving pans, coffee mugs with the White Star emblem, porcelain pots, crockery, wine and champagne. Plus toilets, bathtubs, bedsprings, chandeliers, doorknobs, stoves, a ceramic doll’s head, you name it.”

A single china coffee cup sits upright and unbroken atop a huge twisted and overturned boiler in the mud, he said.

“It’s amazing,” he said. “To see a big twisted steel bulkhead, then next to it a stained-glass window still unbroken. To see twisted steel pipes next to still-corked champagne bottles. To see gentleness next to massive destruction.”

Ballard also found four safes with shiny brass handles and crests. He tried to open one with the submarine’s mechanical claw, but failed. Is treasure stored in the strongboxes of a floating palace dubbed the “millionaires’ special?” Probably not.

Passengers Took Jewelry

“Passengers were observed taking their jewelry and valuables out of the safes,” Eaton said. “The purser and his assistants took the rest in canvas mailbags. And they all died.”

The 23-year-old Titanic Historical Society, which claims about 3,000 members in 25 countries, has kept close tabs on Ballard and his deep-diving crew. For one thing, Ballard placed a brass plaque to the society’s founder on the ship’s stern.

For another, they say, Ballard made mistakes.

“At one point he announced he was looking for the word ‘Southampton’ on the ship’s stern,” said Society President Haas. “If he found it, he would have been on the wrong ship.”

Hass said the Titanic sailed from Southampton, but Liverpool was the port of registry and thus was painted on the stern in foot-high gold letters. In the end, Ballard found only rust where the letters once gleamed.

Bug-Shaped Video Scout

Similarly, Ballard said he hoped to send the bug-shaped video scout called Jason Jr. into a hold carrying “some antique cars.” He later canceled that investigation because the hold’s walls had collapsed.

“There was only one car,” Haas corrected. “It was a 1912, red, 25-horsepower Renault touring car.”

Titanic Enthusiasts

How--and why--do they know these things? Eaton said the Titanic enthusiasts are inspired by a little-known Latin motto, “Studium omnibus habendum est. “

“It translates as ‘Everybody needs a hobby,’ ” he explained.

Ballard says he will not make a hobby of the Titanic. After two trips, he does not plan to return again.

“There’s nothing left to do,” he said. “We have thoroughly documented the ship and the area around it. We’ve reached a point of diminishing returns.”

And while Ballard says salvage is “impossible,” given the ship’s breakup and decay, others may try to pick up the safes or other artifacts.

Oilman Is Candidate

Texas oilman and explorer Jack Grimm is one candidate. He says he has spent $2 million in three previous expeditions searching for the Titanic and claims to have photographed one of the ship’s propellers. Others say the murky photo looks more like a rock.

Grimm says he plans to rent a French government submarine to dive to the wreck next summer. “We’ll definitely recover some of the artifacts off the ocean floor,” Grimm said in a telephone interview from Abilene, Tex.

“It costs $600,000, $700,000 to do it,” he said. “But what’s a silver platter worth, or a plate with the Titanic crest, or a safe? Who knows?”

Another candidate is Michel Jean-Pierre, Belgian diver and promoter. He wants to take 40 passengers down at $25,000 apiece to see the ship and pick up a wine bottle or two. Potential passengers may note that the submarine he plans to use has not been underwater since 1972 and never went deeper than 6,500 feet--half the Titanic’s depth.

End of a Gilded Age

Historians say the death of the Titanic ended a gilded age, a time of blind faith in technology. God may not have gone down with the Titanic, as the last line in a recent film put it, but a dominant Western view of the world may have. Industrial progress and great wealth were not infallible, after all.

Today, some point to parallels in a more recent disaster in which warnings were ignored, schedules came before safety, and lives were lost to hubris and hype.

“It was like the shuttle Challenger crash this year,” said Jane Allen, Maritime Museum curator. “People pin their hopes on the technology. So there’s a crisis of confidence when it fails. Just like with the Titanic, everybody was thinking, ‘How could this happen?’ It was like the end of the world.”