As an example, Lynch pointed out to me how the little black bulldog spoken about so eloquently by passenger Eva Hart in later years did not exist in her earlier accounts; nor did many other details she gave, some of which became self-contradictory as the decades passed. It seemed that constant replay through numerous retellings could be damaging to memory and to historical reality.
We began to wonder what percentage of our collective human history might be illusion, brought about quite innocently by the mutation of memory. Aboard the Titanic alone, some famous examples were emerging. In her May 31, 1964, interview with Lord, Renee Harris recalled different details about her last card games aboard the Titanic from those she had written in an earlier family memoir. By 1964, she had begun relating clear recollections of being invited to a poker game in one of the two B-deck suites with its own private promenade sundeck.
Lynch did not think this possible, for Harris was identifying the Cardeza suite (B-51, B-53, and B-56—which, along with parts of Titanic owner Bruce Ismay’s suite, was replicated as the Cal Suite in Jim Cameron’s film, Titanic). Lynch strongly suspected that the game of poker recalled by Harris fifty-two years later must actually have taken place on another private promenade, on another ship, probably years after the disaster—having subsequently been composited into Harris’s memory of that last Sunday afternoon aboard the Titanic.
Lynch’s reason for such suspicion was that the Cardezas were, to put it as politely as he could, “rather snobbish.” During an era in which racial prejudice, including anti-Semitism, was perfectly acceptable—war correspondent Edith Russell had been required to Anglicize her Jewish-sounding name (Rosenbaum) in order to be successfully published—the Cardezas were fashionably prejudiced against Jews and would have shunned the Harrises, who were also Jewish.
Most of the individuals aboard the microcosm called the Titanic simply behaved as people trapped by their time. The norms of the time were such that Fifth Officer Harold Lowe could be perfectly open, without fear of rebuke, about having attempted to keep nonwhites out of boat 14. He was remembered more for bringing the boat into the midst of survivors and floating wreckage after the Titanic had sunk and rescuing nearly thirty people. Lynch was quick to point out that there would have been one fewer in boat 14 had a child and a woman working the oars not dissuaded Lowe from abandoning a survivor he found clinging to a wooden door, after the fifth officer saw that the man was not white.
Lynch personally knew one of the young women who stayed aboard boat 14 at least up to the point at which Lowe off-loaded most of the passengers onto other lifeboats so he could return to the site of the sinking in search of anyone who might still be alive. The woman told Lynch that the one horror from which the lifeboat passengers could never fully recover was hearing the call of a familiar voice here and there in the dark, then rowing toward the caller only to hear the voice weaken and die out before they arrived. Lynch said this happened to them repeatedly. Like the emerging picture of often inhumane treatment aboard the Titanic, which had once been called the “ship of dreams,” Lynch’s oral history of the silenced voices was traumatic, and the trauma tended to reassert itself in surprising ways.
During a free hour in our mission, Lori Johnston, Bill Paxton, and Big Lew Abernathy invited me to go out through a gangway door with them aboard the Zodiac to enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime event: swimming in water two and a half miles deep. Before I could step through the door, it occurred to me that the missing boatswain and his team must have opened the Titanic’s shell door when a similarly quiet sea was similarly close to their feet. Distracted, I lost my footing and my glasses fell off overboard.
“Zodiac transfers to and from the ship are a good way to break an arm,” John-David Cameron warned, while my spare set of glasses headed down to Medusa and the Mirs.
“Gee, thanks,” I said, and asked, “Can you tell me of any other good ways to break an arm?”
“You want to stop and think about this,” said the Marine. “You’ve waited fifteen years for a chance to get down to the stern. If you break an arm, you can’t dive.”
Nothing more needed to be said. I stayed aboard at the shell door and watched my friends swim in water that during the past few hours had become dead calm (what we had come to call “Titanic calm”). Suddenly I could think only about the freezing water of that April night eighty-nine years before—and the people in the water, with the Titanic gone.
As the others prepared to come back aboard, Abernathy asked Paxton if he had ever played hide-and-seek in a graveyard. Paxton said no—and Abernathy told him, “Look around.”
Paxton said later that his mind was taken instantly back in time to Lynch’s story about the women with Fifth Officer Lowe, trying to find those voices in the dark. He very quickly came back aboard. They all came back, shivering—and certainly not from swimming in the North Atlantic on a summer afternoon.
AUGUST 24, 2001
Late at night, after Johnston and I discovered the cyclic (and possibly annual) layer of tree ring–like growth bands in our first and second sets of rusticle samples brought up by the Mir-2, I went to bed with a copy of Arthur Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. It had been a full day of new discoveries, including clear indications that some of the microbes in the rusticle consortium came from hundreds of miles away in the east, at the volcanic vent zones. Microbial cysts must have been drifting along the bottom for centuries until one by one they washed up against a friendly substrate named the Titanic. Sooner or later, we would have to journey to the vents themselves, looking for the origin of the Titanic’s rusticle reef.
Alienness—that’s what the rusticles were: glimpses of how multicellular, tissue-based life might have gotten its start on Earth, or perhaps also as far away as the subsurface seas of Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede or Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Titan. Alienness; utter alienness.
The questions answered this day, each answer springing open the door to ten new questions, left us in a wonderful state of information overload—and tired.
I did not get far beyond the top of page 2 in Clarke’s Rama adventure before I dozed off. And at the very top of that page, Clarke had written about the approach of a dazzling firebalclass="underline" “At 0946 GMT on the morning of September 11…”
Coincidence. All is coincidence. Or so we scientists like to say.
More often than not, the idea that a coincidence was an omen or of some other prophetic significance existed in the eye of the beholder only and not in reality. Attributing foresight through hindsight was a way of meddling, and meddling usually turned out to be a way of causing trouble.
During this final week of August, as a sample of iron from boat 8’s railing came up and the rusticle roots revealed a shared yet poorly understood circulatory system, Abernathy marveled over the latest live images from the Medusa showing rusticles hanging from walls of riveted steel like stalactites, and exclaimed, “There must be millions of them!” Johnston corrected him, “Not them, Lew. It. They’re all one organism.” A consortial life-form, new to science, was converting the 460-foot length of the Titanic’s bow into one of the largest “creatures” on Earth.