Devoted to the Deep

So you’re Robert D. Ballard, a famed ocean explorer, and when you’re only 43, you find the wreck of the Titanic, a prize that has eluded you and other undersea hunters for decades.

What do you do for an encore?

“I don’t think you do,” says Ballard, now 56. “You just move on.” And “I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” he adds. “I would hope my best discoveries are still ahead of me.”

No, he has no wish to return to the storied ship’s resting place, 2 1/2 miles down in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland, Canada. “Why would you want to go back?” he asks. “Would you want to re-create the journey of Lewis and Clark if you were Lewis and Clark?”

Certainly he has no interest in plucking souvenirs from her rusting hulk, as have a host of scavengers since Ballard’s team of American and French scientists found her on Sept. 1, 1985. He prides himself, in fact, on not having taken so much as a bottle of still-corked wine from the debris, either then or on a photographic expedition to the wreck 10 months later.

“I feel very good about it. There was nothing stopping me. As my mother would say, I did the right thing.”

Though Ballard’s quest for the ship had dominated his thoughts since 1973, he says he “didn’t go after the Titanic emotionally, but rather as an explorer with new technology,” including a remote-controlled deep-sea video vehicle and swimming robot that for the first time made it possible to search the ocean floor in the region where the Titanic had gone down.

Still, he acknowledges, when the wreck “spoke to me, it spoke to me loud and clear.

“When was there something comparable in my life? It was Gettysburg”--his visit to the site of the Civil War battlefield where soldiers from two Ballard clans died. The Virginia Ballards and the New England Ballards all had emigrated from England in 1635.

“I went to Gettysburg without any concept of being moved,” Ballard recalls. But he walked the battlefield to the farthest point reached by the advancing Confederate Army and “just started crying. I just lost it. Ballards were on both sides of that charge.”

He pauses. “The Titanic did the same to me.”

Still, he stops short of saying that finding the liner was the thrill of a lifetime. On the thrill scale, he gives the Titanic a 9 1/2. But “being on the 50-yard line” at the birth of daughter Emily Rose 14 months ago, “that was a 10.” (Ballard also has two sons by an earlier marriage; another son was killed in a car accident at age 20 in 1989.)

Expedition Caught the Public’s Imagination

Ballard, who graduated from UC Santa Barbara and has a doctorate in marine geology and geophysics from the University of Rhode Island, grew up in Southern California and made his first seagoing expedition as a summer scholar at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography while attending Downey High School. He since has made 110 expeditions, but obviously none of his discoveries captured the public fancy in the way the Titanic did.

Not even the discovery of the wreck of the Bismarck, the pride of the German Navy, sunk by the British in 1941 in the eastern Atlantic, nor that of the carrier Yorktown, sunk in the Battle of Midway in 1942.

And why was there never a Titanic-sized mystique surrounding the other lost luxury liners, such as the Lusitania, which sank off the coast of Ireland with great loss of life in 1915? “The Lusitania’s just as pretty as the Titanic, and it was sunk by a German U-boat, which is even more dramatic,” Ballard observes. “The big difference is that the Lusitania sank in 20 minutes.

“If the Titanic had gone down like a stone, there wouldn’t have been the heroes and heroines,” the dramas that unfolded in the three hours between the moment she hit the iceberg shortly before midnight on April 14, 1912, and the moment the last bit of her stern slipped into the sea.

He mentions among players in that drama Ida Straus, who stayed with her husband, Isidor (the owner of Macy’s), instead of joining the women and children in the lifeboats, and Bruce Ismay, president of the White Star Line, whose cowardly act of hopping into a lifeboat earned him public vilification that dogged him to the end of his life. And there was Alfred Rush, who, having turned 18 during the voyage, passed up a chance to escape as a “child.”

“And the band played on. Wow! There’s some button there for everybody. You couldn’t have written it.” Indeed, he sees the sinking as the last gasp of the Edwardian era. “After World War I, the age of innocence came to an end. The world lost its virginity.” And the Titanic legend grew and grew.

Ballard thinks last year’s Oscar-winning film “Titanic” had it all (plus Leonardo DiCaprio). Yes, Ballard saw the movie--twice!--and liked it very much “for two reasons. It was a cute love story and I cried both times I saw it. And I had seen the old ‘Titanic.’ That movie showed me how beautiful the old lady was when she was young.”

He had spoken with director James Cameron during the filming, and Cameron flew a print to a theater near Ballard’s home in Old Lyme, Conn., for a private preview showing for the explorer and his wife, Barbara, a TV producer.

Ballard says he ribbed Cameron about the cost of making the film, telling him, “I wish I had $200 million. I could mount 400 expeditions.” Perhaps, the director replied, but Cameron would be getting his money back.

Explorations Easier in Wake of Titanic

For Ballard, discovering the Titanic has brought far more than 15 minutes of fame. “The Titanic has made it easier for me to mount expeditions,” he says pragmatically. “Certainly, the National Geographic Society (his primary sponsor) is very happy. The Titanic has been good to me.”

Ballard’s own media savvy hasn’t done him any harm. The day of the discovery, Ballard telephoned the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, on Cape Cod, Mass., a sponsor of the expedition, and asked the duty person to relay a message to then-director John Steele: “Tell him I found the boat.” But it was Labor Day weekend and the person who took the call opted not to disturb Steele.

Ballard, meanwhile, had called NBC, ABC and CBS, and “their response was a bit different.” As Ballard and his crew returned to Woods Hole, news helicopters hovered above their ship. Within hours, the networks had erected a wall of satellite antennae to send word around the world.

On a recent day, Ballard was in Los Angeles promoting “Titanic: Challenge of Discovery,” a 3-D adventure-simulation CD-ROM developed over two years by 40 Russian scientists and distributed by Panasonic Interactive Media. Players use their computers to search for the Titanic, the Bismarck and an ancient Roman trade ship.

It’s so realistic, says Ballard, that “you can hear the sea gulls.” The player is given a certain amount of money to hire a crew, buy the right equipment and set sail. If he overspends, the game’s over and he must head home--”the way of the real world,” notes Ballard, who found the Titanic in his fifth week of searching and only five days before the team would have headed home in defeat.

Sharing Discoveries With Students

Making science fun is part of Ballard’s mission. “You’ve got to compete for a child’s mind,” he says--and there’s more competition now than when young Ballard and a buddy would go down to the San Diego shore with a trap and a wheelbarrow, bring back a barrel full of smelts, and “go knock on doors and sell it.”

But the mystery of the sea remains a constant.

“When I came home from the Titanic,” he recalls, “there were 16,000 letters from children saying, ‘The next time you do this, I want to go.’ ” Through Ballard’s Jason Project (as in Jason and his mythical quest for the Golden Fleece), 700,000 junior high students have gone with him on electronic field trips through the magic of interactive satellite hookups. Underwater cameras allow students to go with Ballard’s robot (named Jason) and sometimes even guide it as it examines giant coral reefs and inspects sunken ships. They see everything Ballard is seeing from his three-man mini-sub. Ballard calls it “telepresence.”

Ballard has no permanent claim on the Titanic. Through a quirky law, the wreck officially belongs to George Tulloch, a wealthy car dealer in Connecticut, and Tulloch’s company, RMS Titanic, as they were the first salvors on the scene. “Our ancient Admiralty law is finders keepers, but if he stops salvaging, he’s abandoned the wreck and anyone can follow. Plus, no other nation has to observe these laws.”

Meanwhile, Ballard is among those pushing for legislation to prevent the stripping of shipwrecks. One goal, being explored through the U.N., is to expand the 12-mile territorial limit to 200 miles. Ballard wants a law of the sea that will spell out not only such things as oil rights, but will “add human history” and prevent destruction of these wrecks, which he sees as deep-sea museums.

Public opinion appears to be shifting to his view, he says. A number of museums, including the Smithsonian Institution, have turned down treasures from wrecked ships, deploring commercial salvaging as “rape and escape.”

“It’s like the Elgin Marbles that are in London and probably ought to be at the Acropolis,” says Ballard--who now keeps secret the locations of his discoveries.

Of current concern to him are marine antiquities, such as the wrecks of eight Roman ships he recently discovered in the Mediterranean, where tens of thousands of Roman ships once plied a trade route between ancient Rome and Carthage. “They had their own Bermuda Triangle.” The wrecks are going to be found and, Ballard says, “there’s no law that would stop you from going out there and blowing them up” in an effort to take their treasure.

Ballard says he’s been told by recent visitors to the Titanic site that Tulloch “has removed a vast amount of stuff.” Presumably to access the interior, “the crow’s nest has been destroyed, which I think is unforgivable.” Ballard deplores both the desecration of what is a grave for 1,500 victims and the ecological damage wrought by scavengers.

“The deep sea doesn’t heal,” as the sedimentation rate is only a centimeter every 1,000 years. If salvors keep disturbing the bottom, Ballard says, “pretty soon it’s going to look like a parking lot.”

Little Chance of Raising the Titanic

One thing he doesn’t worry about is someone raising the Titanic, which is in two gigantic pieces 1,900 feet apart. “There was a kooky Brit who wanted to raise her with pingpong balls. That’s outrageous physics. They’ll never raise her. She’s in the bottom for good, more buried than not buried.”

Meanwhile, Ballard--who has hosted TV specials for National Geographic and written 15 books, including the bestseller “The Discovery of the Titanic” (Warner Books)--has been on to other adventures, including a recent journey to the Amazon for Project Jason. He figures each phase of his life occupies 10 to 15 years, and, at 56, “I’ve got one really good run left. You can climb tall mountains. It just takes longer than short ones.”

Set for a May opening is the Institute for Exploration at the Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Conn. Ballard, the institute’s director and a self-described “closet historian,” plans to meld the worlds of oceanography, history, anthropology and archeology by bringing together academics from prestigious universities.

But “the real work will be done in the field” on institute-backed expeditions, he says--adding as he gestures in the general direction of the Getty Center: “I’m convinced there’s more history in the deep sea than all the museums combined.”

Most people, he observes, know little more about the oceans than what they’ve seen at an aquarium. “They think the ocean is that deep [he holds his hands a few feet apart], well-lit and full of pretty fish. I want to take them to our world.”

And will the Titanic expedition be part of what visitors to Mystic see?

Ballard grins. “Is the pope a Catholic?” Yes, he’ll use a simulated dive down to the Titanic “to get them through the door.”

It was the Titanic, he adds, that showed him that “the deep sea is really a giant museum. The more we look, the more we find,” including “the exotic life forms and creatures that live in total darkness” at great depths.

“The ship I don’t yet know exists is going to be the most important . . . something that pops up where it shouldn’t be, like a Roman galleon off Brazil.”

Exploring, he’ll tell you, is “so much fun. It’s a kick in the head.” One senses that Ballard (who wears a Mickey Mouse watch with pride) is still partly the little kid who used to bring home snakes and bugs (“my mother was terrified of emptying my pockets”).

He really does think of his expeditions in terms of Jason’s journey. “You have a vision that becomes a quest. You prepare yourself.

“You then assemble your team of Argonauts and go forth on these great journeys where Neptune keeps throwing everything he’s got at you. Eventually, you find the truth, and you share.

“People see what I do and say, ‘That’s what I want to do’ or ‘That’s what I’m doing in another way.’ Life is a continuous series of journeys in search of the truth. We’re all on that journey.”

A Close Call Is Part of the Thrill

It’s risky business, but Ballard thrives on risk.

In a three-man mini-sub exploring the wreck of the Titanic in July 1986, he flirted with disaster, landing on the Titanic and narrowly missing a brass bollard. At that depth, at that pressure, “if that bollard (had been) like a half-inch over (and cracked a window), we were toast . . . fish meal.”

Things like that, he says, “certainly keep you focused.”

His worst fears? Loss of life support, a fire in the sub, getting trapped in a wreck. Does he ever feel claustrophobic? “Only when I get in trouble,” he answers, but if his sub “didn’t have windows, I’d be a screaming meemie.”

In July, Ballard will lead an expedition to the Black Sea, spurred by the findings of William Ryan and Walter Pitman, geophysicists at Columbia University and authors of the newly published “Noah’s Flood” (Simon & Schuster).

After probing the floor of the Black Sea, using sound waves and coring devices, Ryan and Pitman say they have clear evidence that the sea was a low-lying freshwater lake until some 7,000 years ago, when a mighty flood burst through the Bosporus valley, inundating the lake with saltwater from the Mediterranean. The geophysicists hypothesize that inhabitants of the villages on the rim of the lake were most likely farmers who fled and never returned.

Although the flood took place long before written history, Ryan and Pitman think it possible that, through oral history passed from generation to generation, the Black Sea flood could have been the source of the Noah’s Ark story in the book of Genesis.

Ballard says “they’re confident if we go down there, we’re going to find those villages.” And, he notes, there is no oxygen in the depths of the Black Sea, “which means the wood borers that ate the grand staircase of the Titanic aren’t there” and there may be intact ships.

In any event, he says, “we’ll find something.”