Shadow Divers Titanically Out of Their Depth
“It hit an iceberg, and it sank. Get over it.”
– Robert Ballard
One of the best books I have read recently was Shadow Divers: The True Adventures of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II. The book, a non-fiction story that combined deep-sea adventure, history and two divers caught up in a suspenseful search for the identity of a German U-boat they found sunk off the eastern coast of the United States, completely captured my imagination.
So I was pretty excited to see that John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, the two Shadow Divers, were partners in a new book, Titanic’s Last Secrets. My enthusiasm abated rather quickly as the book’s only secret is that it’s a cheap knock-off that does nothing more than fulfill a contract.
Titanic’s Last Secrets, written by Brad Matsen, wants to make us believe that the great ship actually sank because of faulty design and workmanship. We are supposed to believe this because Chatterton and Kohler, who became bigger fish in diving circles after the success of Shadow Divers and even had their own underwater television adventure show, decided to ride one of the submersibles down to the Titanic because an earlier traveler convinced them he saw part of the shattered hull.
After spending $150,000, the divers don’t find what they went down for, but on a subsequent dive, they discover two hull pieces. After a subsequent twenty-minute dive to Titanic’s sister ship, Brittanic, which sunk off the coast of Africa, and a search of the historic record, they conclude that Titanic was designed poorly and destined to fail.
Much of the joy of reading Shadow Divers was the way the evidence unfolded over several years of diving and research. Several times Chatterton and Kohler follow leads that, though promising enough to believe, wind up wrong, which makes the final identification that much more satisfying.
But there is no suspense in Titanic’s Last Secrets. The first sixty pages do a good job describing the process that led Chatterton and Kohler to the Titanic. Then, with no explanation, Matsen begins telling the story of Titanic’s last voyage, using historical accounts, with lots of innuendo about Bruce Ismay and the other owners of the giant ships. This interminable section takes up more than half of the book’s length before the story finally shifts back to Chatterton and Kohler and describes their theory that the ship didn’t sink as Robert Ballard or the James Cameron film version showed. To say their argument is unconvincing would be an understatement.
“They found a fragment, big deal. Am I surprised? No. When you go down there, there’s stuff all over the place.”
– Robert Ballard
Feb. 25, 2009
3 comments
It would be helpful if this need of amateurs to discover something, anything, was not allowed to detract from history. I run across this all the time in the American West issues I pursue, and in virtually anything involving the British or American military or navy. These theories are all straw dogs to divert attention from blaming personnel.
The Titanic was never called ‘unsinkable’ by anyone in power. Supersticious seamen didn’t tweak fate like that.
The worst case scenario was – supposedly, with no proof Andrews thought this – a direct collision at the junction of two bulkheads, which in the history of sea collisions (much less all sea disasters) was exceedingly rare. Rather, the sort of long scrape from rocks, reef, or subsurface detritus was more dangerous and common, or a harbor collision of the sort nearly achieved when Captain Smith took her out.
The inferior metal was not the key issue, although it was reflective of British manufacture right through the Great War, where its naval shells would break apart rather than explode on contact.
Nor was the fact it was on fire. Nor was Ismay, who had the misfortune to survive, the worst of the worst.
The Titanic sank because Captain Smith was incompetent.
Nobody outranked him including Ismay – whom Smith could legally have shot or forcibly divorced and married to a laundress – on the open seas. True, if he’d dropped the speed to non-idiotic levels it may have threatened his pension given it was Smith’s final voyage, but that was his job and he failed to do it. It’s difficult to believe Ismay would be willing to dice with death if Smith had made him aware. Bad for business.
Smith had been warned about the long ice field, he turned no lights forward to reflect off of ice, he had insufficient watch going and was travelling too fast. When the ship struck, and the sort of damage was suspected, no attempt was made to plug it to slow down sea intake with canvas or anything about, to be held against the hull by pressure of the water as sail ships did. No sails aboard, but surely something could be tried. Lot of people standing about. Lots of big mail bags, rope.
There was a coal fire aboard, possibly due to the coal strike, but spontaneous combustion wasn’t unusual back then. The ship was launched seven years after the Dreadnought, which had turbines. Titanic had reciprocating engines and too small a rudder, and could neither turn nor slow itself fast enough. At the speed they were going – Smith’s fault alone – there was nothing to be done when the burg was sighted.
The British executed the same deceptions and false stories after Jutland, when Admiral Beatty lost three battlecruisers due to his incompetence, not ship flaws, although they were present. He, like Smith, was popular and an icon and not be blamed, so detailed investigations vectored in on fake issues.
The History Channel features this sort of crap so much it’s a joke.
And teenagers…..so smug and up to no good………
Interesting comment:
“The Titanic sank because Captain Smith was incompetent.”
Blaming or not blaming personnel is certainly common but
the real problem is the self-interest behind blame and to
say that Captain Smith is the sole cause could be
interpreted by some to be “detracting from history”.
Forensics is like science in general — you never really
find “truth” and you only get better approximations or
more secure convictions of what’s going on. It’s usually
not possible to prove anything or even test new angles in
historical forensics.
The other aspect of forensics, particularly in major
disasters, is that there is rarely a single cause without
which everything else was superfluous. Virtually all of
them are a multiplicity of factors that intersect in ways
that couldn’t be predicted, had never happened before, or
were chance related. It only seems obvious in
retrospective reasoning. The bulkhead thing the Shadow
Divers found is not the lone cause nor is Captain Smith.
It’s better to try to approach it from the angle of what
really happened rather than who or what is to blame. Even
the “lessons to be learned” are open to question — the
lifeboats being a good example. Of course that doesn’t
sell a new book on the Titanic or win money in a lawsuit
or help politicians get or stay elected.
That any other feature came into consideration, much less play, for cause of the disaster was entirely the fault of Captain Smith. He is the sole cause, both of the collision by poor decisions made, and after the decision by attempting precisely nothing to slow the water intake, delaying decisions. He’d been drinking at dinner, which nobody chats up. Most of the crew did.
The Titanic, like all Victorian and Edwardian and Georgian disasters, had the ‘narrative’ for which the public had been trained by Dickens and poets, on the one hand, and JP Morgan’s flunkies and insurers on the other. People would sue more than they did if Smith were found culpable, so he became the heroic Casiabon on deck of the doomed ship.
“Forensics” implies legal concern, which here is criminal incompetence.
An elderly man who’d had a beer plows his yacht with passengers into a rock. It sinks with deaths. The survivors will, yes, sue everyone including the whoever set the bathroom tissue to pay out from the wrong side, but focus on whoever made the yacht. BUT they’d first sue the owner and captain for his incompetence. Exactly what is different here? The rocks moved, but he’d been informed and had ample time and ample resources to handle it all.
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