Down into the Deep
By Jamie Murphy
After resting on the ocean floor, split asunder and rusting, for nearly three- quarters of a century, a great ship seemed to come alive again. The saga of the White Star liner Titanic, which struck an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage in 1912, carrying more than 1,500 passengers to their deaths, has been celebrated in print and on film, in poetry and song. But last week what had been legendary suddenly became real. As they viewed videotapes and photographs of the sunken leviathan, millions of people around the world could sense her mass, her eerie quiet and the ruined splendor of a lost age.
Watching on television, they vicariously joined the undersea craft Alvin and Jason Jr. ("J.J.") as they toured the wreckage of the luxury liner, wandering across the decks past corroded bollards, peering into the officers' quarters and through rust-curtained portholes. Views of the railings where doomed passengers and crew members stood evoked images of the moonless night 74 years ago when the great ship slipped beneath the waves.
The two-minute videotape and nine photographs, all in color and shot 12,500 ft. under the North Atlantic, were a tiny sample of the 60 hours of video and 60,000 stills garnered during the twelve-day exploration. They were released at a Washington press conference conducted by Marine Geologist Robert Ballard, 44, who led the teams from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution that found the Titanic last September and revisited it this July.
Recounting the highlights of what has already become the most celebrated feat of underwater exploration, Ballard revealed some startling new information. His deep-diving craft failed to find the 300-ft. gash that, according to legend, was torn in the Titanic's hull when the ship plowed into the iceberg. Instead, he suggested, the collision had buckled the ship's plates, allowing water to pour in. He also brought back evidence that the ship broke apart not when she hit bottom, as he had thought when viewing the first Titanic images last September, but as she sank: the stern, which settled on the bottom almost 1,800 ft. from the bow, had swiveled 180 degrees on its way down.
Between the pictures shot by cameras aboard the submersible Alvin, the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) J.J. and the towed sled Angus, Ballard said, "there is not a square inch of the Titanic that has not been photographed in beautiful detail." Woods Hole scientists plan to create a photomosaic of the entire ship, a project that will take several months. But Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, whose department financed the expedition, had already seen enough. Delighted with the spectacular outcome, he declared Ballard the Navy's "Bottom Gun" and presented him with a duly inscribed navy blue baseball cap.
While the exploration of the legendary Titanic captured the imagination of the world, it was but one of many undersea forays now in progress. Even as J.J. roamed the corridors of the great ship, diving teams from Cape Cod, Mass., to the South Seas, wearing scuba tanks, masks and flippers, were peering at decaying wrecks on the sea floor. At depths ranging from dozens to hundreds of feet, they probed and photographed the remnants of rotting hulls and carefully marked the location of scattered debris like cannonballs, silver bars or shattered pottery. Returning to the surface, they often brought with them priceless artifacts of ancient civilizations.
Armed with sophisticated equipment that enables them to locate and descend to long-lost shipwrecks, explorers are providing fascinating insights to the past. "We are opening up an enormous new era in archaeology," says Navy Secretary Lehman. "We now have time capsules in the deep oceans."
The incentives for undersea exploration extend beyond the historical and archaeological benefits. High-tech fortune hunters are locating sunken treasure ships and recovering their precious cargo. New remote-controlled vehicles are prowling the ocean depths, some dropping listening devices and scouting out potential hiding places for missile-firing submarines. Others are seeking mineral deposits and clues to the movement of the earth's tectonic plates, and charting the two-thirds of the earth's surface that until recently has been largely inaccessible to man.
Still, for all the worldwide activity in the deep, last week nothing could compete for attention with the trove of photographs, videotape and lore accumulated during the Titanic mission. Each of Alvin's 100-ft.-per-minute descents from the mother ship Atlantis II required 2 1/2 hours, during which Ballard tried to relax by listening to the recorded music of Edvard Grieg. On the first dive, the submersible, carrying J.J. down with it, approached the Titanic's 60-ft.-high starboard midsection. "That was the first thing we came in on," recalls Ballard. "We were putting our nose right up against this massive wall." Later, viewing the mangled remnants of the severed stern through Alvin's Plexiglas porthole, he was shaken. "You really felt it when you were there, the sheer carnage," he says. "It looked violent and destructive. The bow is majestic. It still has some nobility. But the stern . . . "
Between the two sections of the ship, the Woods Hole scientists found a large debris field littered with artifacts: a copper kettle polished by sand particles in the deep-sea currents; three of the ship's safes; a porcelain doll's head; a patent-leather shoe. Most of the ship's woodwork had been devoured by marine creatures. Amid the debris were at least four of the Titanic's huge boilers; an unbroken porcelain coffee cup rested on one of them. Says Ballard: "It must have fluttered down like a leaf and settled on the boiler, which had come crashing down."
It was one of these boilers that had led to the Titanic's discovery last year. For 22 days, the French vessel Le Suroit had "mowed the lawn," roaming over a 150-sq.-mi. target area with a sonar device that provides high- resolution maps of the seabed. After surveying 80% of the expanse, Le Suroit had found no trace of the wreck. Then Ballard's crew, joined by three French $ scientists aboard the U.S. Navy research vessel Knorr, began combing the remaining 20% with a sonar-and-video platform called Argo, which they towed behind the ship at a depth of 12,500 ft.
Early in the morning of Sept. 1, about an hour after Ballard had quit his post at the control center, the Knorr's cook awakened him, saying, "The guys in the van think you should come down." Ballard pulled on a jump suit over his pajamas and hurried to the control center. Seeing the video image of the boiler on the sea floor, he shouted, "That's it!" Once they spotted the boiler, the crew was able to locate the main section of the wreck with Knorr's echo sounder, a device similar to ones found on deep-sea fishing boats the world over. They then determined the Titanic's exact latitude and longitude with a satellite navigation system accurate to within 100 ft.; it was to these coordinates that Ballard and his team returned in July.
Even as Woods Hole scientists were studying their hoard of images, another, far more ancient ship was gradually giving up its secrets. Half a mile off the rocky cape of Ulu Burun, near the town of Kas, Turkey, three scuba divers from the research vessel Virazon splashed into the Mediterranean. The two Turks and an American are part of a team headed by George Bass, 53, of the Texas A & M-based Institute of Nautical Archaeology. For the past two years, a joint INA-Turkish team has been exploring one of the oldest ships ever found, a wooden craft that sank 3,400 years ago. It was not seen again until 1982, when a Turkish sponge diver spotted some of its cargo on the sea floor.
Aided by 24-lb. weights hanging at their waists, the divers needed only a few minutes to reach the sloping seabed where the fragmented keel rests, one end at a depth of 145 ft., the other at 170 ft. In between lie the remnants of the ship's cargo, embedded in rock and partly covered with sand.
Time was precious. At that depth, the divers had only about 15 minutes to work before beginning their return to the surface. Remaining below any longer would result in nitrogen narcosis; in the high-pressure environment of the deep, the blood and tissues absorb a larger than normal amount of nitrogen, causing a kind of tipsiness that dulls a diver's reactions. Explains Bass: "It's as if you had just tossed down three martinis."
While one diver, armed with a hammer and chisel, began chipping away around a copper ingot, trying to loosen it from concreted sediment, another culled the bottom, scooping sand with one hand and drawing it into a suction tube held in the other. Suddenly, something metallic flashed in the dim light filtering through the water. It was a piece of gold jewelry that had remained hidden from sight for 34 centuries. In the next several minutes, the team members uncovered more jewelry, a quartz bead, broken arrowheads and pottery shards, which they stored in a red-and-white plastic container. To mark the precise spot of each discovery, they poked bicycle spokes into the sand, then measured the distance between the spokes and fixed reference points. Knowing the exact location of each item will enable the archaeologists to map the site accurately.
Glancing at his watch, the leader signaled to the others, and the trio, using their flippers to rise, promptly began their ascent by following a cable that led up to the Virazon. Reaching a white marker cylinder at the 20-ft. depth, they stopped, treading water for three minutes, before rising again to a second marker, at the 10-ft. level. There they waited for eleven minutes, passing the time by penciling messages to each other on a roughened Plexiglas tablet. The scheduled pauses were decompression stops that allowed the excess dissolved nitrogen to leave their bodies gradually; in a faster ascent, the nitrogen would have come out of solution too rapidly, forming gas bubbles in the tissues or blood vessels, a painful and sometimes fatal consequence known as the "bends."
Back on deck, everyone crowded around as Bass and one of the divers opened the plastic container and examined a gold pendant bearing the image of a fanciful star with long wavy rays. "That's Canaanite," said Bass. "No question about it." On a smaller gold pendant was the figure of a woman with a tall headdress, wide skirt and both feet pointed to one side. "The figure's so Egyptian!" exclaimed Bass. "We've had three or four pendants like this on the expedition."
And much more. The ancient ship, whose origin Bass has not disclosed, was crammed with bronze, tin, glass, gold, quartz, weapons and dozens of amphoras (pottery jugs) containing goods ranging from frankincense to fruit seeds. "It was like a floating supermarket," says Yasar Yildiz, the deputy director of Turkey's Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology, which is giving vital support to the INA expedition. "This wreck is more than we could hope for," says Archaeologist Cemal Pulak, Bass's assistant. "It is giving us all % kinds of new information about people's lives in this area in 1400 B.C., what goods they traded and where these goods were coming from." The discovery of glass ingots, for example, established conclusively that artisans were blowing glass in that region far earlier than had previously been thought. The ancient vessel itself has been a rich source of information. Says Bass: "It extends our knowledge of ship technology back a thousand years."
Halfway around the world from Turkey, other nautical archaeologists were at work last April off Vanikoro, a 300-sq.-mi. island in the southwestern Pacific's Solomon chain. The setting was pure Indiana Jones: mosquito-infested jungles; rivers teeming with crocodiles; heavy, brooding clouds hovering over an inhospitable landscape.
Two miles offshore and 15 ft. to 140 ft. down the steeply sloping bottom lie the remains, partly enveloped in coral, of the Boussole and the Astrolabe, the flagship and companion frigate of one of France's greatest 18th century navigators, Count Jean Francois de la Perouse. Louis XVI had dispatched the aristocrat to the Pacific in 1785, hoping that his discoveries would rival those of British Explorer Captain James Cook. As Louis was led to the guillotine eight years later, he supposedly inquired, "Has there been any news of La Perouse?" Each morning 20 divers from a multinational team, led by researchers from the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia, and historians from Noumea, New Caledonia, left three chartered boats anchored in Vanikoro's lagoon and sped in inflatable outboards to the wreck site. In the afternoons, they returned laden with artifacts that included part of a shoe, Chinese ceramics, a dragoon's brass helmet and thousands of glass necklace beads probably intended as items of barter for Pacific tribal chieftains.
A highlight of the mission for Chief Archaeologist Scott Sledge, 38, was the discovery of a brass regimental facing plate, a shieldlike ornament from a soldier's bearskin cap, with the word royal clearly distinguishable. After gingerly brushing away some silt, Sledge recalls, "I came across something shiny right underneath." It was embedded in the surrounding coral, which he had to chip away carefully. Just as he was about to give up for the day and return to the surface, the plate loosened, and he was able to slide it out of the coral in perfect condition. Says Sledge: "That, to me, was extremely exciting and of more value to an archaeologist than a chest full of diamonds and gold."
Fortune Hunter Mel Fisher might argue about that appraisal. Some 30 miles out from Key West in the Gulf of Mexico, his four salvage tugs lay at anchor last week 60 ft. above the remains of the Spanish galleon Atocha. The square-rigged vessel sank in a hurricane in 1622, carrying 260 crew members and passengers, and a priceless cargo, to the bottom. From the tugs, divers employed by Fisher's Treasure Salvors, Inc., have brought to the surface a fortune in emeralds, gold and silver bars, coins, bags of gold dust and lengths of golden chains.
Fisher, 64, has earned his reward the hard way. He first read about the wrecked Spanish treasure galleons Nuestra Senora de Atocha and her sister ship Santa Margarita in 1960 in the Treasure Hunter's Guide, which included references to the two ships sinking off the "Keys of Matecumbe" in a 1622 hurricane. Several years later Fisher met Eugene Lyon, who was beginning research for a doctoral dissertation on the history of the Spanish conquest of Florida. Lyon was about to leave for Seville to study Spanish archives, and Fisher enlisted his aid in the search for the galleons. The researcher eventually wrote from Spain that he had good evidence Matecumbe was a general term for the Florida Keys. He suggested that the treasure lay off what are now known as the Marquesas.
Fisher, who had already had some success salvaging treasure from wrecks off Vero Beach, promptly moved to Key West. In 1970 he launched a 16-year, high- tech search for the Spanish ships.
His team painstakingly swept 120,000 linear miles of ocean with magnetometers, devices that detect irregularities in the earth's magnetic field--anomalies caused by, among other things, iron cannons, armor or anchors. They used side-scan and sub-bottom sonar and even commissioned an aerial survey, but the search did not yield a verifiable Atocha remnant. Says Fay Feild, an engineer and consultant to Treasure Salvors, who designed a special magnetometer for Fisher: "With a magnetometer, even in a limited area, only one in 100 'hits' has anything to do with a wreck. With a side- scanner, it's one in a million."
Fisher's team found the first certifiable remains of the Atocha in 1973, matching the identifying number on a recovered silver bar with one listed in the ship's manifest in the Seville archives. But because the cargo was scattered over nine linear miles, it took Fisher until 1985--and a total of 6,500 magnetometer hits--to identify what he calls the "mother lode," the ; main body of the ship's cargo. Even then, retrieving the treasure was difficult. The deeper waters off the Florida Keys are murky, the bottom heavily silted. Again, technology provided the solution. Several years earlier, Feild had devised a huge pair of fittings that resemble and are called mailboxes, and placed them over the propellers of one of Fisher's tugs, in effect directing the ship's backwash straight down and forming a clear vertical column of water extending to the sea floor. The mailboxes not only improved visibility below but washed away silt and sand. Fisher's divers have been further equipped with an air lift, a long plastic tube that clears sand away with a blast of compressed air. Still, the search was arduous--and costly to Fisher, both financially and emotionally; in 1975 his oldest son, his daughter-in-law and a crew member were drowned when a tug used in the quest capsized during a storm.
Fisher's 1,200 or so stockholders and investors are due for a handsome return. The booty that divers have raised includes 3,200 emeralds, one-third of which are top-quality stones, 150,000 silver coins, and more than 1,000 silver bars that average 85 lbs. each. They have also recovered other kinds of treasure: bronze cannons, potsherds, navigational instruments and kitchen utensils. Total estimated value of the find: more than $400 million.
Professional Salvor Barry Clifford, 41, is running Fisher a close second in treasure hunting. Some 30 ft. down and only 1,200 ft. out from the sunbathers on Cape Cod's Marconi Beach, Clifford is salvaging booty from the Whydah, a 100-ft.-long pirate galley that foundered on a sandbank in 1717. "Everyone grew up knowing the story," recalls Clifford, who first heard the tale of sunken treasure from his crusty, Cape Cod-born uncle. "She was part of our lore."
Clifford began his search for the Whydah in 1982. Armed with an exclusive permit from the state of Massachusetts, he concentrated on a 2-sq.-mi. area, using a magnetometer and side-scan sonar. In the summer of 1983 divers found a clay pipestem, brass nails and some rudder strapping. But try as he might, Clifford could not convince everyone that the artifacts were from the Whydah and not from any of the countless other ships that have been wrecked off the Cape. Even the 1984 discovery of three cannons failed to satisfy Clifford's critics. But last fall, while surveying the underwater site, Rob McClung, a former Aspen, Colo., police chief, caught his finger on the rounded rim of a large object. It proved to be a 200-lb. concreted ship's bell, which, when cleaned of some of its heavy crust, revealed the words THE WHYDAH GALLY--1716. Says Clifford: "There's a lot of crow being served out in copious portions."
And copious treasure too. Aided by mailboxes, divers labored continuously last week, bringing up more of the Whydah's riches. "There's a lot of work, a lot of hours," says Diver Todd Murphy, 28. "No weekends. No holidays."
But the payoff is well worth the trouble. The divers have retrieved more than $15 million in silver coins, gold dust, and artifacts; the Whydah's bell alone has been appraised at $5 million. Clifford, who has meticulously studied the manifests and other records of the 50-odd ships plundered by the Whydah's captain before his ship sank, estimates that the loot still in the sand is worth $380 million more. It includes 500,000 to 750,000 silver coins, 10,000 lbs. of gold dust, a casket of "hen's-egg-size East Indian jewels" and some African ivory.
The world became aware that a new era under the sea was dawning in 1954, when National Geographic published an article titled "Fish Men Discover a 2,200-year-old Greek Ship." The author was a Frenchman named Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who in 1943 had helped to invent the Aqualung--the precursor of self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (scuba)--and used it to excavate a vessel at the bottom of the Mediterranean near the island of Grand Congloue. "That opened the door to underwater exploration for the modern day," says Wilbur Garrett, editor of National Geographic, the venerable publication of the National Geographic Society, which has since financed many undersea missions by Cousteau and others. In 1959 Cousteau invented the first small submersible, a battery-powered diving saucer propelled by jets of water that could safely carry a two-person crew to a depth of 1,000 ft.
A disaster, not exploration, spurred development of more versatile undersea vessels like Alvin and J.J. In 1963 the Navy's brand-new nuclear-powered submarine Thresher lost power and sank 220 miles east of Cape Cod with 129 on board. It took 1 1/2 years before a Navy search team, aboard the bathyscaphe Trieste II, finally located the sub resting 8,400 ft. down.
While Trieste II could reach great depths, it was little more than a spherical cabin suspended from a buoyant hull and capable of withstanding great pressures. But it was unable to rescue submariners or salvage vessels. What was needed, the Navy decided, was submersibles and ROVs able to maneuver at depths far in excess of 750 ft.
By 1964 the Navy had launched the first, and still most famous, of the new submersibles, Alvin. Operated by Woods Hole, the 23-ft.-long craft could carry three people to a depth of 6,000 ft., pick up objects with an arm and claw, and roam the sea floor at a speed of one knot (Alvin has since been lengthened to 25 ft. and given a second arm-claw, as well as a new pressure hull that enables it to operate as far down as 13,120 ft.). The stellar performance of the tiny sub during the second Titanic mission was only the latest in a long list of accomplishments. Among the more remarkable of Alvin's 1,716 deep-sea missions: locating and helping to recover (from a depth of 2,850 ft.) an H- bomb that fell into the Mediterranean after a B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanker collided over Spain in 1966; discovering peculiar new life-forms, including tube worms 10 ft. long, while probing hot-water vents in the ocean floor 8,000 ft. below the surface of the Pacific.
Over the years, Alvin has been joined in the seas by dozens of other manned submersibles, most of them American or French. The deepest operational diver of them all is the U.S. Navy's 31 1/2-ft., 58,000-lb., three-man Sea Cliff, which can safely carry its crew to a depth of 20,000 ft. Its manipulator arms can operate a variety of underwater tools, including a drill, a cable cutter, scissors, and plier-like jaws that can grasp sunken torpedoes, as well as attach cable slings to raise heavier objects such as downed aircraft.
This month Sea Cliff will embark on a mission for the U.S. Geological Survey in the Gorda Ridge off the coast of California and Oregon. Descending to 13,000 ft., it will enable scientists to get a close-up look at nodules of manganese and other metals that build up near geologically active breaks in the earth's crust. In the future, even more versatile undersea craft will be used to mine these minerals and bring them to the surface.
J.J.'s performance on the Titanic mission drew attention to the potential of remotely operated vehicles, which are not only supplementing the work of manned submersibles but in many cases replacing them. ROVs became popular during the 1973 oil crisis, when companies were forced to search for new petroleum reserves beneath the sea. Most are self-propelled. They are connected to the mother ship by a cable, through which they receive electricity and commands from their human pilot and transmit pictures and data. It was an advanced ROV, the Gemini, that played a key role in the recovery of wreckage from the space shuttle Challenger. Designed to operate at depths as great as 5,000 ft., the 7,000-lb. ungainly craft uses hydraulic thrusters to maneuver like an underwater helicopter. It has two mechanical arms and is loaded with high-tech equipment. Its three cameras and two sonar systems give controllers on the surface a sweeping view of the depths.
Last year two other sophisticated U.S. ROVs, Scarab 1 and Scarab 2, reached the wreckage of Air-India Flight 182, which plunged into the North Atlantic 110 miles southwest of Ireland on June 23. Scarab 1 located and retrieved the 747's voice and flight-data recorders from a spot 6,700 ft. deep, while Scarab 2 mapped and photographed the wreckage, some of which was later retrieved. Their achievements enabled experts to determine that the jet's forward baggage hold had been ripped apart in the air, almost certainly by a bomb.
More advanced craft are on the way. The Navy's National Ocean Systems Center in San Diego is developing ROVs that operate free of a tether. These AUVs--autonomous underwater vehicles--will be programmed for missions before they are dropped overboard. "The next step," says Howard Talkington, head of NOSC's engineering and computer science department, "is to do away with the umbilical cord and operate the ROV completely in a robotic manner."
ROVs and other high-tech underwater equipment are no longer the exclusive province of oil companies and the military. Hydro Products of San Diego markets for only $35,995 a 56-lb. model equipped with a panning and tilting color- TV camera and capable of diving to 330 ft. Says Hydro Products Executive Bob McKee: "You can just throw it into the back of your pickup, run out to the site and throw it into the water." Prices are also dropping for such devices as side-scan sonar, which generates high-resolution images of the ocean bottom, and sub-bottom sonar, which can distinguish the shape of buried objects.
Treasure hunters are delighted by the trend, which has made many previously unreachable or unknown offshore wrecks accessible to enterprising amateurs. But scientists are becoming agitated. "This technology is out of control," Ballard told a congressional hearing last year. Says Helen Hooper, a consultant for the Society for Archaeology: "There's a mini-gold rush going on right now, and it's endangering some of the more important sites. We're afraid that if there isn't some slowing down of this treasure hunting, there won't be anything left."
George Bass and other archaeologists worry not only about the looting of rare artifacts but about the damage done by treasure hunters, most of whom care little about the remnants of the sunken ships. The scientists, accustomed to removing artifacts gingerly, carefully digging with spoons and even their fingers, are particularly horrified by the use of mailboxes, which can blow 3- ft. to 6-ft. holes in the sand, scattering artifacts.
The barrage of criticism has had its effect on big-time treasure hunters; even Fisher now includes archaeologists in his crew. At the Atocha site, Archaeologist Duncan Mathewson is carefully noting the position of each artifact and labeling each find. He has marked the site with grids, using yellow tape and pipes, and pinpointed each piece of the ancient hull.
Archaeologists are particularly concerned about the buried remains of wooden hulls, the part of the ship that has sunk into the seabed or been covered by drifting sand or silt and thus preserved. These remnants, which deteriorate rapidly when exposed to the open sea, provide a wealth of information to scientists. Says Richard Steffy, an INA ship reconstructor: "Ships were the most complex structures made by these societies. When you look at the remains of a ship, you're looking at a very high degree of technology within that period." Working with a crew of assistants and archaeologists, Steffy sketches the shape of each surviving plank fragment, frame and other timbers as soon as possible after it is raised, then makes scaled-down copies of the pieces and fits them together. He has made a hypothetical reproduction of a ship's hull from 10% of the surviving timbers.
In Britain, a group of marine archaeologists has more to work with. When they located the 16th century warship Mary Rose (which sank in 45 ft. of water off Portsmouth in 1545) and raised it in 1982, half of the hull had been buried under protective silt for centuries. The waterlogged structure, part of which had the consistency of wet cardboard, was moved into dry dock at the Portsmouth Naval Base, and has since been sprayed constantly with a cold-water mist to keep the wood from disintegrating in the air. This treatment will continue for another three years, after which polyethylene glycol, a waxy preserving agent, will be included in the mist in gradually increasing amounts. When the spray is finally turned off in the year 2001, the historic hull should be able to stand on its own.
For all the excavation and salvaging now under way, thousands of sunken ships remain undiscovered and many others unexplored. A few rank particularly high on the wish lists of marine archaeologists and treasure hunters. For four years an INA team led by Archaeologist Roger Smith has been scouring Jamaica's St. Ann's Bay for two of Columbus' caravels thought to have been intentionally run aground in 1503. "The caravels that Columbus sailed to the New World were the Mercury space capsules of their day," he says. "And somewhere beneath the soft sediments of this bay there are not one but two of those ships."
Queensland Museum archaeologists are planning an expedition this fall to the Pandora, an 18th century British navy frigate that lies 75 miles east of Australia's Cape York Peninsula. When Pandora sank in 1791, it is thought to have carried to the bottom four captured mutineers from H.M.S. Bounty shackled in irons. Since the wreck was discovered nine years ago, it has yielded some 800 well-preserved artifacts. But a shortage of funds cut off exploration two years ago. "If the funding continues," says Peter Gesner, the museum's assistant curator of maritime archaeology, "we can expect to end up with tens of thousands of artifacts."
Barry Clifford's new goal is to salvage H.M.S. Hussar, a British pay ship that sank in 80 ft. of water in the East River off Manhattan in 1780 laden with a cargo of gold that some experts estimate to be worth $500 million. Clifford has been granted an initial exploration permit for the Hussar by New York State, and expects to begin probing the river's treacherous five-knot currents and polluted water this week.
Now that Robert Ballard has proved that artifacts from the Titanic can be salvaged ("It would have been easy to retrieve those things," he said last week), the great ship may become a target for treasure hunters. Texas Oil Baron Jack Grimm, who between 1980 and 1983 spent a total of $2 million on three failed missions to find the Titanic, announced last week that he plans to use a submersible next summer to retrieve Titanic relics. "The selling of them I'm not particularly interested in," he says. "I'll probably donate them to different museums or put them on display around the country for mankind to view and remember the tragic events that occurred on that night."
Ballard, who has pleaded with would-be salvagers to leave the wreck undisturbed, prefers a different form of remembrance. On his seventh dive in Alvin, he placed a commemorative plaque donated by the Titanic Historical Society on the vessel's stern section. The inscription reads in part: "In memory of those souls who perished with the Titanic, April 14/15, 1912."
With reporting by Joelle Attinger/Woods Hole, Marcia Gauger/ Key West and Mehmet Ali Kislali/Kas