When the bow section crashed onto the deep-ocean prairie at approximately forty miles per hour, the slipstream of water that trailed down behind it burst down the stairwell without meeting any resistance at alclass="underline" a strip of bulkhead from the boat deck was swept back as though steel sheeting were merely a flag of cloth rippling in the wind. The flag of steel was raked down the stairwell, through the promenade deck and B deck, meeting none of the obstacles that would have blocked such raking had the stairway been standing in the well.
The force of impact was so great that it was difficult to imagine medicine jars surviving unbroken in their racks in the crew infirmary, or Edith Russell’s mirror standing unbroken. This second crash of the night, combined with a slipstream that obeyed the law of inertia and continued speeding toward the bed of the Atlantic even after the Titanic had stopped, pushed in the steel roof of the officers’ quarters, the reception areas, and both sides of the gymnasium—and pressed sheet metal bulkheads outward. Both wing bridges were peeled away from the bridge itself, as though their metal frames were slabs of warm taffy caught in an explosion emanating from the center line of the ship.
On the well deck, all of the railings were blown outward from the center and fell to either side of the bow; only the vertical steel walls between the rails survived, each bent outward, away from the center. The foremast lay across the well deck during the down-blast; it was bent downward toward the deck, suffering a series of fractures behind the crow’s nest that by 2012, aided by rusticle buds taking root within the fractures, would cause the entire mast to sag and break. As the ship’s width narrowed toward the front of the forecastle, the rails suffered a proportionally decreased bending out, until the forepeak rail on which Georgyj Vinogradov’s gorgon grew stood with no bends at all.
Near the great open well that had been the grand stairway, the combined forces of the crash and the down-blast had pressed B deck down upon C deck and bowed out, like rows of bent knees, every vertical steel column that had bracketed the stairwell at C deck.
The down-blast effect, born of inertia, punched down to E deck and then burst out laterally indoors—where the portion of the inertial fist that punched aft must have found its way blocked by an opposing fist of water being forced from the tail end of the bow section, where decks already massively weakened by the breakaway of the stern compressed like an accordion. At the rear end of the broken bow, the down-blasting and stacking of the decks one upon another over boiler rooms number 2 and 3 added a complex series of interior surges and colliding eddies that tore some tables, beds, and chairs to splinters while leaving others intact. Metal-framed chandeliers showed signs of having been dented by speed-slung furnishings. Wooden beams went crashing through the walls of forward cabins, and the surge that went with them blew down the remaining wall supports. Yet amid such devastation, the forces of destruction had occasionally collided and diverged or simply died.
The stems of palm trees still stood undisturbed in mahogany flowerpot holders, and Russell’s cup never moved. The bot Jake squeezed through the crushed flooring beneath C deck, through a narrow grotto so thick with rusticle stalactites that we were reminded at once of a beautiful limestone cavern—until a wall of unbroken leaded glass and mahogany loomed out of the dark and we saw a type of rat-tailed fish we had never encountered before, almost as translucent as frosted glass; in one corner among the wooden eaves, there was an animal that Vinogradov and I could only tentatively classify as a new variety of cuttlefish. It’s huge “wings” made it look like a semitransparent undersea bat, as graceful as a manta ray.
The other rooms were no less intriguing. The best guesses about who had occupied a given stateroom followed a partial list recovered from the body of a steward named Herbert Cave, and this had been known ever since as the Cave list. By the 1920s, young Walter Lord’s interest in the Titanic had grown so large that he convinced his parents to make one of their Atlantic crossings with him aboard the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic, and by age fourteen (in 1931) he had already written his first draft of A Night to Remember.
Lord also started arranging his first meetings with survivors, and he began discovering from firsthand interviews and from letters provided by the families that there was a tendency for people to change their accommodations once they actually boarded the ship. Russell, for example, had decided to rent a second, inboard stateroom, simply for the purpose of storing all of her luggage nearby. The official, pre-sailing list could not be taken as the last word on who had occupied the beds.
Most of the corridors had lost their walls and were sometimes outlined only by an occasional closed door standing in its frame. As Jake prowled the corridors, we continued uncovering evidence that the mystery of the final room assignments was far from completely resolved. Room D-31 had been officially assigned to two individuals who had canceled their plans to board the Titanic and whose room was believed until now to have been unoccupied during the voyage.
Yet the wooden drawer at the bottom of the shaving and washing sink had spilled out a set of brushes, combs, and a pair of eyeglasses. There was luggage in the room, buried amid the Titanic’s increasingly familiar paradox of preservation existing side by side with destruction. The mirror had cracked, but the mattress was still on the bed, underneath a fold-down bunk that had crashed upon it. A chair nearby was crushed but still recognizable, whereas the dresser drawers behind it remained closed and undamaged.
About ten minutes after Elwood’s battery melted, Jake had flown over a service cart that appeared to have rolled and crashed behind the elevators. It was broken wide open, somehow with its dishes and teacups intact. As we reviewed the video, Ken Marschall and I began to wish we knew the secret of Edwardian packing.
Then, out of nowhere—the deep, impersonal nowhere—came a reminder of when and where we were really probing. Jake pointed a finger of light at something I had at least half expected to see ever since microbiologist Roy Cullimore and I investigated what had come aboard the Ocean Voyager during the 1996 expedition. A rusticle-embedded soup tureen, found in a field of down-blasted ejecta from the stern section’s port side, had been attached to a pocket of organic material that caught us by surprise—much as the amount of wood standing almost perfectly intact inside the Titanic now seemed surprising to most people who had never sailed aboard the Ocean Voyager and the Nadir with the submersible vessel Nautile.
Shreds of clothing came up with the tureen, having fared no worse than the mattress fibers inside cabin D-31. Then, in the tureen’s mixture of mud and rusticle reef fragments, Cullimore and I had found two pieces of bone—one of them large enough to be easily identifiable as a lamb bone. Strangest of all, we discovered that bacterial threads from the rusticle encrustations had enclosed and preserved bits of tendon still attached to the bone.
On August 17, 1996, I had written in my Ocean Voyager log that the presence of even a single animal bone should have prepared our minds for the idea that we would eventually encounter human remains. According to all of the textbooks, bones should have long ago decomposed into their calcium-deficient surroundings, but evidently this was just another self-perpetuating textbook dogma based on too little actual data.