A handful of nuts and raisins seemed to bring me around. Yet even our flight over the center of the stern did not lessen my sense of foreboding—actually, something stronger than mere foreboding—adding at least one more to the list of “every emotion imaginable” being felt out here. Gone was the elation of passing through the living cloud decks of the deep scattering layer. The landscape over which we hovered, in which solid steel hull sections and deck plates had down-blasted and surged out until the terrain resembled an explosion in a taffy factory, did indeed seem to trigger every emotion imaginable, including one that could no more be described in words than it could be described in a color one had never seen before.
It was not a pleasant emotion, either. I could never have imagined that after so many years of wanting to investigate the mysteries of the stern I could feel something that would make me want to leave just as the most rarely visited part of the ship began to give up its secrets.
The shaft wing to which the starboard propeller was attached had been pulled four decks high from the bottom of the stern, all the way above the rear cargo hold. The cargo hold itself was probably squashed flat, occupying the very same space as the two decks that had lain below it.
The Titanic’s severed stern section appeared to have struck bottom somewhere between a thirty- and a forty-five-degree angle—tail first, hammering its rudder deep into the earth. The rudder was turned all the way to the port side and had likely swung into this position and stayed there from very near the surface all the way down. Acting as the leading edge, it would have kept the stern in a tight, clockwise spiral until the moment of impact. Everything we saw was consistent with a strange, high-velocity spiral to the bottom.
Yet for some unimaginable reason even the thrill of discovery could not keep my thoughts from turning to Mary’s friend Captain Brown—a man with whom I’d spoken only twice, on the phone. I tried to shrug off what Big Lew Abernathy had called “playing hide-and-seek in a graveyard,” and what Lori Johnston had called, after her dive, “a sense of quiet voices.” I was almost militantly agnostic, so I stowed away any further thoughts of Captain Brown in favor of the present reality.
Every prior map of the Titanic’s stern section was wrong. When the aftermost portion of the stern embedded itself, the front portion continued turning clockwise around a center of rotation located (and suddenly mud-locked) near the propellers. The rotation must have continued for approximately one second—long enough to break the stern’s back and to split the deck plates—straight across the well deck, just behind the anchor cranes. The clockwise rotation continued about twenty degrees before the down-blast struck, with all the force of a tsunami striking a skyscraper at almost ninety feet per second (sixty miles per hour).
For up to one second before the down-blast squashed the front end of the stern like an insect, the entire front half of the portside hull was dragged as it crashed down level with the bottom. The dragging motion pulled the wall of steel sharply to starboard, thirty feet or more—stretching and smearing it out of shape like a slab of warm taffy and thrusting a huge wedge from the double-hulled bottom out through its side.
Farther back, behind the point where the well deck snapped and almost as far back as quartermaster George Rowe’s post on the (now missing) after-bridge, the down-blast splayed out both sides of the hull—what was left of it—and compressed the central decks one upon another.
According to Anatoly Sagalevich, the stacking had been intensified during the past decade because of rusticle activity, which helped gravity to finish what the down-blast had started. There was no hope of sending Jake into the ship’s hospital or seeking out the Laroche, Hosono, or Mellinger quarters. No deck in that region any longer stood more than a foot tall.
Between the aftermost part of the stern and the reciprocating engines at the front end, the combined height of all the decks was now generally no more than twelve to fifteen feet.
Sculpturally, the stern was such a masterwork of twisted agony that I was overcome by a totally unexpected sense that we did not belong here and should leave. Once again, emotions crept in, causing abrupt shifts from scientist mode to the stubborn reality that we were exploring the place where the majority of the Titanic’s people had died. Then, barely more than an hour after we arrived, the command to leave the stern came upon us—from our machines.
At 4:12 p.m., Johnston reported from mission control with news of an electrical problem: “Do not have control over Medusa.” Electrical problems were also reported from the Mir-1; then, in the Mir-2, we started to lose external lighting and were suddenly down to half of our battery power. Jim Cameron canceled our planned bot exploration inside the heart of the Titanic (the reciprocating engine room) and said that we would move across the debris field to the bow section, using whatever power remained in the Mirs to make preparations for the next day’s rescue of Elwood.
As we departed the stern, we suddenly regained full power and control—both the Mir submersibles and the Medusa robot were in perfect health again—for what developed into the longest dive, thus far, of the entire expedition. We did not surface until shortly before midnight, Titanic time [within the Newfoundland time zone].
After we were back aboard the Keldysh, I ate a hearty meal, but I could not sleep. I prepared the davit bitt and the boat 8 railing for their return to the boat deck the next day, and in my sleep-deprived state, I wrote a letter to Mary Leung and the children, trying to describe what I later characterized as “the shriek in the night.”
I explained how, as we flew over the part of the stern where chief baker Charles Joughin had eventually made one of history’s most impossible escapes and where hundreds of others were either swept off into freezing waters or carried to the bottom, there were moments during which I had to look away and close my eyes, despite years of waiting to actually see the stern.
Of all the oddest things I could think of, in trying to describe how it had felt to be there, I recalled the pre-expedition train rides I had taken with Mary to the stopover point at the World Trade Center, en route to her office in New Jersey. I reminded her of the fright I had felt when we first met and I learned that she was living literally in the shadow of the Twin Towers. I reminded her of how, from the moment they were built, those towers had filled me with a strange mixture of fascination and dread. “The stern,” I said, “was something like that.”
Only someone who constantly viewed even Manhattan through archaeological eyes—who saw how graffiti in a flooded subway station should, along with the cave paintings of Spain, last twenty thousand years or more while everything above disappeared—would have had thoughts wandering (quite naturally) in the direction my own thoughts wandered that night. Given the more than six billion people on the planet, someone from New York was bound, just by coincidence, to be an archaeological thinker having just surfaced from the ruins of the Titanic, looking westward toward New York.