At the beginning of the 1996 expedition, Cullimore and I had found calcium-absorbing and -secreting mollusks living on the iron-oxide shells of the Titanic’s rusticles. “We now know that [throughout the wreck site] bones might still exist,” I wrote in the log. “The game we thought we were playing is not the game at all.”
Five years later, Jake swept a beam across an object that made it suddenly seem wrong to have wanted to equip the bot with claspers so we could capture some of the strange Alice in Wonderland–like wildlife that inhabited the grotto of the white worms.
The floor of the reception area was covered with fallen rusticle stalactites and a powdering of deep-ocean dust, so shapes were softened by rusticle encrustations and the shadows could easily play tricks on the eyes. Near one wall, the layer of fallen plaster and rusticle debris was knee-deep; near another, it was only ankle-deep. There in the shallows, I saw something, and I cried out for historian Don Lynch to run the tape back and freeze the frame. I knew almost to a certainty that I had just seen the left side of a human skull, half sunk in dust, and in perfect profile. Producer John Bruno came up behind us as Lynch slowly ran the tape backward and forward, trying to deny that it could be what I thought it was, trying to insist that it was a trick of the lighting played by the geometry of shadows.
Naturally, this part of the ship was a likely place for such a discovery. Near the end, as the last lifeboats began lowering away, the light and the warmth of the grand stairway and its surrounding lounge areas would have become attractive shelters. When the ship started to take its final plunge and as the stairway suddenly broke free, many people would have fled into and been trapped in the adjoining corridors and reception areas. Scores of them must have been swept into and around the grotto and its halls when the bow section crashed two and a half miles down; then their bodies would have faced the same down-blast and random shock-cocooning (preservation in the midst of destruction) effects as the reception area doors and the vestibule wood.
Lynch ran the tape back again repeatedly, and I pointed out the brow ridge and the profile of a cheekbone. Bruno saw it too and agreed. Lynch and Marschall let the video continue running forward after that and decided not to let it run backward again.
“It’s a whole roller coaster of emotions out here,” I wrote later to Mary and other family members. “Every emotion imaginable. One moment we hear Ken [Marschall] getting all excited because he never knew the Titanic had electric fans in the reception area. The next [moment], I had to go away and be alone—I was in tears.”
Two notes were written on Styrofoam coffee cups, to be shrunk down to shot-glass size by the pressures two and a half miles down, outside the Mir-2 submersible:
Dear Mary, I’m sending Charlie down to the stern tomorrow because he’s finally reached the stage where he can be more annoying up here than down there.
To my Mary: With love, from 10 Twin Tower lengths down—at the world’s ultimate haunted mansion.
DIVE 7
MIR PREDIVE CHECKLIST
OBSERVER 1, RIGHT SEAT
Upon entering:
Power up DVcam decks.
Check focus and iris on 3 fixed cameras (iris should be wide open).
Insert new tapes in all 3 decks. Hit record and confirm roll on all.
Set digital timer for 2 hours, 50 minutes.
Confirm to sub crew that you are ready for Observer 2 to enter.
Put on your audio headset, and prepare Observer 2’s headset.
Confirm audio inputs are working.
12:06 p.m. Begin descent at 2.5 feet per second.
12:08 p.m. Water becomes a deep blue.
12:12 p.m. Deep violet outside. Robot arm outside our viewport is in silhouette.
12:13 p.m. Violet fading to black—quickly.
12:14 p.m. All black now. Depth 178 meters.
12:15 p.m. Should soon be in Deep Scattering Layer—upper daytime limit.
12:16 p.m. Seeing first bioluminescent flashes. Depth 261 meters.
12:26 p.m. Deep Scattering Layer quite thick [meaning at least 3 or 4 organisms, 2 centimeters or more in length, per cubic meter]. We’re riding through cloud-tops of deep-ocean snow.
12:30 p.m. Deep Scattering Layer [DSL] thins out between 700–800 meters.
12:32 p.m. DSL thickens again at 800 meters.
12:35 p.m. DSL thinning, but still with us at 872 meters.
12:37 p.m. At 900 meters, occasional large “jelly” [up to fist-sized], with small red shrimp inside [being digested, or parasitic]. Most DSL organisms 3 millimeter diameter or less. 99% of them unidentified invertebrates [we are descending past them too quickly for a close look at everything]. Occasional fish trying to ride away from our wake.
12:43 p.m. DSL thinning considerably. Depth 1,130 meters.
12:50 p.m. DSL thickens again [equal to or greater than 3 or 4 organisms, 2 (centimeters) or more in length, per cubic meter] at 1,295 meters, then thins out at 1,335 meters. Thick cloud deck of invertebrates at 1,415 meters. Observe large fish (10 cm long) swimming vigorously under our wake—needle-shaped and fluorescing.
12:55 p.m. DSL ends at approx[imately] 1,500 meters—then thickens [into a whole new cloud deck of life] at 1,545 meters. Seems as if DSL is going to be with us all the way, [shifting between] thick and thin. Lantern fish at 1,795 meters.
1:07 p.m. Thick and thin, multideck DSL continues. Almost once per minute, we pass through a layer and see a species of translucent fish, about 4 cm long, with its lights on.
1:15 p.m. Still encountering decks of DSL. Have just passed 2,000 meters. Mir-1 1,000 meters below us. Lori calls down from the Keldysh: Medusa is positioned 10 meters from [the Titanic’s] stern, traveling NW [northwest], 5 meters off bottom.
1:30 p.m. Depth 2,520 meters. DSL has thinned out to mere, deep-ocean snow of seemingly dead biological particles. DSL gone.
1:38 p.m. Depth 2,789 meters. No DSL.
1:45 p.m. We are completely below DSL. Contact from MIR-1. They have reached bottom.
1:57 p.m. Depth 3,200 meters. Lifeless outside. Mostly microscopic, dead drift matter from above.
2:24 p.m. Depth 3,780 meters. Lifeless [still, during the] past 500 meters. Descending to 3,820 meters. We are at altitude 38 meters. The view from High Gate [approach to landing]: Greeted by a rat-tailed fish. Starfish and sea cucumbers occupying almost every square meter. And a few things not yet in the books. An invertebrate tumbleweed (echinoderm?) blows by.
2:50 p.m. Flying over flooring from inside Titanic. Railing. Sheets of thin metal in a pile. Encountering eject[ed material] from engine room—approaching stern from starboard side.
A huge section of steel framing arched down toward us, over the edge of the stern—twisted in a manner consistent with the stern section having crashed into the bottom even more forcefully than the bow section, at perhaps nearly twice the bow’s speed. Marine archaeologist John Broadwater (who had been investigating the wreck of the Mir’s remote ancestor, the Hunley) noticed that a very troubled expression seemed to have crossed my face.
During our first moments under the arch of steel, I felt physically ill. The arch seemed somehow to remind me of a mass of twisted steel I had seen hanging over me in this same configuration once before—yet I knew I had never seen the like. I thought of all the people who had struggled above me and who were probably brought down to the bottom behind imploding walls of steel. As nausea and headache began to take over and as I wondered if oxygen and carbon monoxide levels in the sub had gone out of balance, my thoughts turned inexplicably to Mary’s friend, Captain Paddy Brown. That’s what you get for going two days without sleep and skipping breakfast before climbing into the sub, I told myself. Ghosts of the imagination.