By the time World War II broke out and the first war had finally been named, Charles Lightoller had graduated beyond his own Churchill-like Gallipoli campaign aboard the Titanic to become a hero of the Battle of Dunkirk, rescuing 131 British soldiers from the advancing Germans. His yacht, the Sundowner, returned across the English Channel so badly machine-gunned and shrapneled that it seemed unlikely it should have floated long enough to complete the rescue. “We’ve got our tails well up,” Lightoller wrote to his brother-in-law several days afterward, “and we are going to win no matter when or how.”
Fellow boat B survivor Albert Moss returned to sea about the same time. While his family remained trapped in Nazi-occupied Norway, Moss transported freight along the British coast. When a V-2 rocket fell onto the docks, obliterating a ship near Moss, his ship, the Munin, survived to deliver ammunition across the English Channel for the invasion forces in Normandy. Captain Moss returned to Norway as a survivor of German torpedoes, rogue storms, and Wernher von Braun’s rockets, but after Walter Lord’s book, A Night to Remember, was published in 1955, all anyone ever wanted to ask him about was the Titanic.
Throughout the same decades, Jessop did not speak of the Titanic at all. In June 1920, the Olympic had been revitalized from its wartime function as a troop carrier and returned to service as a luxury passenger ship, with even its third-class cabins (now renamed “tourist class”) paneled and “spruced up.” Jessop joined the last of the three sister ships as a stewardess, keeping her history on the other two ships a secret.
The passengers were by then very different. Immigration was no longer management’s bread and butter. The U.S. Congress had instituted severe restrictions on immigration that reached from Ireland across southern and eastern Europe, across Lebanon and India and into China. In the wake of the congressional acts, new profit margins developed in the ferrying of immigrants who had prospered in the United States into international waters, where even some of the politicians who had actively supported the Prohibition amendment to the Constitution used the Titanic’s sister to circumvent the law. The Olympic became a drinking and bootlegging vessel.
Jessop’s niece Margaret would remark, years later, that her aunt became a master at brewing a particularly fine-tasting (and potent) tangerine liqueur. Jessop had looked after a passenger in first class who was proud to call himself “the chief bootlegger of the United States.” She and all of her staff became expert at helping the Olympic’s passengers to dodge U.S. Customs. Jessop told her niece about voyages that became parties on all decks and across all classes; she prided herself on eventually being able to smuggle passengers’ little bottles of grain spirits undetected beneath her uniform skirt—a method topped only by “one ample-bosomed stewardess [who] found that she could carry off a quart of champagne in her ‘balcony.’”
In July 1926, when nine-year-old Walter Lord’s family needed to travel abroad, the boy convinced his parents to book passage on the Olympic. Already transfixed by what to most people of the period was an arcane subject, young Walter took photos for comparison with the Titanic, and managed to talk members of the crew into giving him tours that included a view of the engine room. Soon he would be writing captions for crayon illustrations of what would become the first rough draft of a book he would revise over and over between the wars.
Lord missed meeting Jessop by a matter of only a few months, during which time she stayed ashore before transferring to the Red Star Line. It did not seem to matter. Eventually, their two paths seemed almost bound to converge. They were both in love with the same ship, drawn forever into its mystique.
In 2006, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, of the famous Shadow Divers unit, arrived at the Britannic with a few new team members: systems engineer Parks Stephenson, Ballard expedition veteran Bill Lange, and deep-ocean explorer Carl Spencer. Spencer and Stephenson shared an impish sense of humor, but it was always difficult to tell when Spencer was joking and when he was serious.
“There are monsters down there, John,” Spencer announced to Chatterton one morning. As though behind a mask of full seriousness, he spoke about deep-ocean explorer Ralph White’s giants of the deep. Then, with a more relaxed expression, he added, “I’m not kidding.”
An hour and a half after they arrived and a hundred meters (about 328 feet) deeper, during an attempt to follow the firefighters’ tunnel toward a comparative study of the Britannic’s failure points with the Titanic’s, Chatterton encountered what appeared to be a new variety of rusticle—dripping with hard spikes. The rusticle thorns scraped their suits and the hard plastic shells of their rebreathers as they moved, offering more resistance and seeming to have built much harder shells than Titanic’s rusticles had.
That evening, Chatterton became violently ill and started running a fever. Food poisoning was suspected—possibly even infection from a deep-sea microbe. Spencer knew that rusticle infections were not unheard of. He had formed a close friendship with microbiologists Lori Johnston and Roy Cullimore, who were always on the lookout for new and seemingly venomous sponges, fungi, and species that had been turning themselves into cave-water and deep-ocean pharmacies.
Only five years earlier, one of their colleagues had managed to infect his mouth with rusticles from the Titanic. An entire iron-metabolizing consortium seemed to have gained entry through a microcrack in a tooth filling—which rested above metal posts that descended all the way down through a root canal. Two years later, the filling collapsed, releasing an odor that the oral surgeon assigned to the case had never smelled before. The bacteria and fungi appeared to have expressed little “interest” in the tooth itself; they had converted the iron within the tooth (and most of the material immediately adjacent to the iron), into what the oral surgeon described as “cheese.”
“I need a sample of that!” the scientist with the infected mouth had said. “I have to get a sample to Roy and Lori.”
“You can forget that idea,” the surgeon said. “I autoclaved [sterilized with superheated steam under high pressure] the damned thing. You’re lucky I don’t call the CDC. What were you thinking, walking around with the thing that ate the Titanic in your mouth?”
Unlike that scientist, Chatterton developed no new forms of tooth decay. The ship’s surgeon simply confined him to forty-eight hours of rest and rehydration and made him cancel his next dive.
In 2008, Carl Spencer was working with Cullimore and Johnston on further miniaturizing their microbiology monitoring and tracking systems for robotic Mars missions. Spencer had recently been short-listed for a slot in the European Space Agency’s Mars exploration program.
Five years earlier, Cullimore and Johnston had begun placing test racks on and near the Titanic and the Britannic. The platforms bore plates of steel with various amounts of sulfur and—to simulate microcrack-generating bends in the Titanic’s steel—both twisted and untwisted plates.