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by Michael Dessner

I am sitting in an incongruent brown leather club chair that has somehow made its way aboard the Jean Charcot, semi-stunned by the fact that this wondrous chair is here.  I’ve settled in with my coffee and camera on the bench next to me, wedging my elbows inside the arms of this chair (that I would so love to own) so that I may perch my laptop precariously on my knees and freestyle while watching the last ROV dive of the expedition.  I’m sitting directly behind Evan and Billy.  Looming in front of them are the screens, glowing a deep midnight blue and speckled with the particulate matter that has been ever present during our time out here.  It’s clear from the chatter in the room that the current is pushing everything around, the ROV, the tether, the ship. Navs on the left and the recording suite on my right, we’re all holding our breath, waiting for the first glimpse.  Oh yeah man.  Titanic.  Got your juices flowing?  If not, it should.  I have not spent a lot of time in this room but, I hazard a guess that it never gets routine in here.  You gotta stay frosty to keep your gear alive, get your shot, keep the flow.  And these guys want to squeeze every last minute out of it.

The bottom is just now coming into view, the random pure white crazy little spider crabs, the occasional tracks in the muck left by previous expeditions. Over twenty five years people have been coming here with cutting edge technologies and we can read their sign as if it were yesterday.  Billy tells me that there are few indications of erosion; that the edges of the impact crater from the ships sinking are nearly as crisp and clear as they were the day they happened nearly 100 years ago. This has been evidenced in our high res sonar records and I say again unto thee, the high res sonar stuff is tripping fantastic.  Currents scour the site in a few places where the abyssal floor resembles the contours you might note on the beach or desert as the wind blows around a rock but by and large, the bottom remains as it has for hundreds of years, perhaps longer.  I’m told that the sediment is a thin layer over blocky clay, a sporadic veneer resembling frost here and dust or snow there, but much remains uncovered.

And now the Grand Old Dame herself. Titanic looms in the screen.  We’re looking over the port rail across the front deck to the bow.  The railings stand virtually undamaged in places, in others one or more of the four rails are torn out and protrude horizontally toward the camera, a streamer of destruction; testament to something tearing through as she heeled causing personnel and property to careen down the decks just before she went down by the head.  Huge chains lay across the deck, ripped cables, tangled steel and everything is covered by what look to be rust icicles.  It seems like she’s been in a howling ice storm but these are not crystalline water, Ballard named them well. The bollards and winches look like they could be used tomorrow.  The portholes still have windows in them.  Then, as the ROV traverses, the terrible rending damage exhibits: railings ripped sideways completely off the deck, hanging over the side 10 meters.  It’s hard not to imagine what might have barreled down the decks and ripped them through, whose final moments might have been shared in that terrible millisecond of fear, cacophony and  dissolution.  I’m infinitely grateful that no remains survive these depths.  Some things you cannot forget and there is enough information here without the mortal reminders.

Now we slide down the side of the ship where an anchor hangs.  Everything is coated in rusticle, thick red vines, odd crazed bulbous fungi, metallic stalactites.  They are peculiar, weird and omnipresent, like the growth over a Mayan temple yet these do not hide the massif.  This cathedral remains for us to inspect.

Remora pulls back and up preparing to push back in yet again.  Again the current and scope of the tether change the tempo of this intricate dance of man and machine in the ballroom of the deep.  The anchor winch hangs like a gallows above the deck, fading in and out of the blue shadow, an eerie remnant of the cold blue-white hangman who once worked this garret.  This is muse and I bear witness.   This great monument to mankind’s engineering skill and hubris is once again host to technology that is the pinnacle of our achievement.  We are here with the best man has to offer visiting the skeleton of the precedent centennial iteration.

These images are such a part of our current consciousness, so well known since the films and photos, an icon of our understanding of that time and the ocean and ships in general.  Like visiting New York City for the first time, it is familiar, like coming back to something you have not yet seen, this alien place, unknown despite its familiarity. Certainly only a handful of people in the world understand everything they see here and to a person every one of them wants to bring it to you.  We’re all here to carry this back to mankind, to yield our awe.

The chatter in the room is telling.  Evan guides the ROV pilots to help capture the dramatic framing while also cognizant of the difficulty of their task holding position in the gale of current.  Remora peers under a deck and into the one below and again the fungal growth of the rusticles exhibits.  Chemically metallic suspended sacs of oxidized history.  Billy, who has been out more than most, laments that the best of our days was similar to the worst of his previous.  These are artists.  Brilliant minds that create sensational technology yet bear the hearts of poets.  I feel wonderment.

The windows reflect Remora’s eyes, a mirror of our intrusion into a tomb.  Now and then life presents, an urchin, a small miniature monstrous fish flits past.  As we peer deeper into the wreck you can see yet another reflection from an inner surface spider webbed by the hanging strands of melted metal.  It’s almost frightening as we look onto the Promenade deck and see the reflections from the windows on the interior.  Someone’s home and it is us.  The technology is stupendous, the depth of field, the clarity all boggle the mind.  The detail is such that you can see the splices on the eyelets of lines lying on deck.  And again, Remora rises off the wreck to stare into the infinite azure of the abyss.  I feel that words fail to describe this.  The minutia is stunning: rivets, bolts, and brass, fasteners left long after wood has been eaten away. Fine filaments of unfathomable lifeforms.  We can see 25 feet across the deck, like we are standing where those long past cavorted, ignorant of the icy terror looming in their future.

In places the rusticles are so thick they resemble huge teak or mahogany trees, long muscular ripples of trunk like growth.  Back up to the deck the chasm represented by the tearing apart of the expansion joint again speaks to the forces at play as the ship tumbled through the water column and augured into the bottom.  We peer into the crack and there, resting upright and encrusted, a bath tub, porcelain sharing a hue with the invertebrates, a ghost left undamaged by forces that literally ripped the ship in half around it and then pushed it together like a massive pie crust indented by planetary forces.  How does something like that survive when everything around it is distorted and shredded, windows at crazed angles and canted by the geometry of destruction?  It boggles.

And again back up into the smoke of the ocean around us, miniature crustacean clouds spotted with the occasional pelagic alien flittering past the camera.  Back down to the deck and there, standing in the outboard position, extending over the side, empty of its charge, is a lifeboat davit.  The last time a human hand touched it was 98 years ago as it was steadfastly employed to save lives.  It occurs to me that Lightoller may have stood where I am currently transported, stern in his charge, “women and children first”.  I am chilled by this realization, struck by the poignancy of it.  Another angle and the lifeboat davit turns into the spire of some ancient beast, lone rib of something lost. It’s wonderful and terrible at once to be here and do this amazing work yet to also recall what we see represents real loss and horror.

The moldy looking growths on the sides of the ship look almost like red rock outcrops with the slightest dusting of snow.  Looking over the superstructure and seeing the rise of spires in the background, it’s not enough to say that it’s surreal.  Its hyper real.  Ultra real.  Again I feel at a loss for the grandeur of being able to see this, that we have the ability to witness on this level.

We come up and over the first electric crane ever used on a ship, an encrusted obelisk, a remnant of a first in ocean liners that has been transformed into an artifact by time, seeming so removed from us yet here in the room with us as well.  The last of the first in its final resting place.

Frankly after two hours in here I am wrung out, emptied and exhausted by putting into words feelings which form in my mind at the speed of sound in water as the images rise on the screen.  Awe, amazement, somber recognition, and no small sense of loss and sadness for what befell this great beauty of a ship and those aboard her, they all assail me.  No sea going person could look upon this and not feel for those who rode this behemoth across the Atlantic and then for those who continued aboard on their final journey.  It’s a fear of my own, going down with a ship. To look at this and know that hundreds did just that in this very place, it chills me.

We see the outline of where the bridge once stood, the pedestal of the steering wheel protruding off the deck, strangely untouched yet minus the wheel, it is: that which remains.  A hundred years ago a captain stood here where a room once existed and came to the realization that his charge would not survive the night.  It’s haunting and I feel his sense of dread and loss.  Just behind the steering wheel lies a row of plaques placed by previous expeditions.  They remind me of the artifacts man left on the moon, these not much easier to place.  More memorials, arrayed on one of the most recognized such on earth, a massive sea going mausoleum that has been seen by so few yet shared with so many.  I count myself lucky to be among them, honored to be included. And so I leave this, my plaque inscribed with these written words, dedicated to those whose perished here, and to you, who I hope have enjoyed the trip with me.

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