Dan Snow's History Hit - The Titanic Wreck

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

In 1912 Titanic departed on her first and last voyage from Southampton, sinking over 2 miles to the bottom of the dark North Atlantic Ocean, around 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. It has captured the imaginations of adults and children alike for over a century since the wreck was discovered- broken in two, but largely intact by explorer Bob Ballard in 1985. Since then, people from all over the world have been desperate to see the slowly degrading wreck on the ocean floor, some paying in the hundreds of thousands to make the trip down.Currently, the world watches as organisations and countries work together to try and locate a submersible carrying tourists that disappeared in the early hours of an expedition on Sunday. Titanic expert Tim Maltin joins Dan to talk about Titanic tourism, what the perilous journey down to it is like, the state of the wreck and its role as a gravesite for those who perished in the sinking. He also describes the astonishing things Bob Ballard saw when he laid eyes on the wreck for the first time - the swinging chandeliers and the telephone set from which the final distress calls were made compared with what people might see today.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsely, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!You can take part in our listener survey here.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm looking out the sparkling colours of Southampton water.

The stretch of ocean that leads up to Britain's maritime city, the city of Southampton, a city from where, in 1912, the Titanic departed on her first and last passenger-carrying voyage. The Titanic is back in the news at the moment, as a submersible carrying tourists down, explorers to look at the wreck, has disappeared. There are five people on board. There's understood to be a four-day supply of oxygen which would have started being used on Sunday morning so time is running out. Various ships have arrived over the site of the wreck, some with pretty advanced underwater

vehicle capabilities and so hope is not lost. In this episode of the podcast I want to talk to Tim Moulton, expert in all things Titanic. He's done this podcast several times and he's been on History Hit TV with his documentary about the sinking of Titanic. I wanted to ask him about Titanic tourism, how it's possible to get down there, what people might see, and also the latest update on the state of the wreck after that big scan that was released earlier this year? Is the Titanic slowly degrading into the seabed? Tim knows all the answers, and he tells me how what people are seeing today might be different from what Bob Ballard, the discoverer,

saw decades ago for the first time. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

Tim Moulton, good to have you back on the pod. Pleasure. Absolute pleasure. Good to see you, Dan. I think lots of us were surprised at how common it is for people to go down there. It must have been extraordinary. Tell me what is involved. If you want to go and look at Titanic today, what's involved? What's involved is you have to fly to Newfoundland where you board a research vessel. It takes you a couple of days to get out to the wreck site. You've got to go through all your safety drills. The sub drops like a stone very slowly though for two and a half hours to get to the seabed. It gets dark very quickly. It's obviously

freezing cold down there. You've then got four hours to scramble around and find the biggest ship in the world in the dark, even though you're only about 500 yards away from it. And then if you're lucky enough to glimpse it through a porthole for enough time to take a picture, you then have to release ballast and drop that like a hot air balloon on the mud on the seabed and then it takes two and a half hours to gradually come to the surface and then you get picked up hopefully by your rescue vessel and we should say the dropping ballast that's a weight isn't it and they have been dropping people have been dropping ballast through the hull of the ship which is just devastating isn't it absolutely right i mean i would guess there have been dropping ballast through the hull of the ship, which is just devastating, isn't it? Absolutely right. I mean, I would guess there have been over 100 trips down to the Titanic since she was found by my friend Bob Ballard in, in fact, 1985.

And it can be anything from rocks to steel pipes that are used for ballast. And as you say, they are just jettisoned at the end of it. And of course, they have to be at least the weight of the sub and the buoyancy of the air. So we're talking quite a lot of ballast that gets dropped all the time. And it makes these kind of craters in the wreck site. And of course, in the debris field. So the wreck itself, it's off Newfoundland. Is it 500 miles off Newfoundland? I think just less than that, 400 and something off Newfoundland. Absolutely right. It's in the middle of nowhere, Dan. It's in the middle of nowhere, sort of south of Greenland off Newfoundland.

Who owns the Titanic, Tim? She sank in international waters. There is an international treaty between France and Britain and the US. I'm not sure what other signatories there are to it, but there's not a whole amount one can do because to sort of police the wreck on the seabed could obviously be expensive and possibly impractical. There's subs from all over the world could actually go down there as tourists and visit the wreck. You mentioned you can take a sort of picture out of a porthole. You've seen, I'm sure, most of those pictures. What's it like down there?

How deep is it? Because obviously on the endurance mission, we were at 3,000 metres. The seabed was very flat and featureless, but there were some previously undiscovered or certainly unattested sea creatures down on the wreck itself. But it was super clear. What are conditions like and how deep is Titanic? She's two and a half miles deep. I think she's over 4,000 metres, four and a half thousand metres, something like that. Extremely deep. She's not the deepest point in the ocean,

that's the Marianas Trench, but she is extremely deep. It's very calm down there. There are, in fact, some currents, some ocean currents. The fish down there, from what I've seen, seem white because there's no light getting down there at all. So it's kind of a calm world. It's like landing on the moon or something. What is visibility like? It's hard to know because we're so used to seeing sort of CGI enhanced images of those pictures. But what might the visibility be? If you've got a big powerful torch, how far can you see underwater there?

I think with a powerful lamp, you could probably see about 100 feet, something like that. But in fact, you couldn't see your hand in front of your face out there. That is how pitch black it is.

So without electricity to keep the air purification going and without electricity to keep the air purification going, and without electricity to keep some heating going, you will suffocate and freeze. Tim, we've had some new data released on the state of the wreck. You and I have talked about this a lot before. What is Titanic looking like at the moment? Well, she is rusting away at a rate of knots, as it were. So in another hundred years, she'll probably just be a kind of rust stain on the floor of the Atlantic. But at the moment, she's sitting up, at least her bow is, on the seabed. Her stern is a different story. Her stern is about 500 meters away from

the bow, and it's very twisted. It literally looks like a bomb's gone off. It looks like a scrap metal yard. But the bow is looking very recognisable. Those iconic photographs of Titanic leaving Southampton on her maiden voyage, that's kind of what her bow looks like. And it almost looks like it's cutting through the mud majestically. So when Bob Ballard first went down there, he must have seen even more wonderful things than we would see if we went now. Because it was decades ago, there was less corrosion and decay.

Were there clothes and jewellery, boots? I mean, what kind of things was he seeing down there? These are very good questions, Dan. And funnily enough, I think Bob Ballard really envisaged that Titanic would be preserved rather like in a freezer or something and really surprised and disappointed. Unfortunately, all the wood had already been completely eaten away by microbes when he got down there. So actually, the sort of naked wreck, if you like, that Ballard found is

very much the wreck that we have today. The changes now is the small rusticles, as they're called, which are kind of stalactites, which hang down, which are actually made by these microbes that are actually eating the iron and steel of the Titanic. So it's very much as Ballard found it, but obviously with an accelerated level of decay. Have we been trying to look for the Titanic ever since it sank? Or was he the first person who had a realistic chance because of technology? He was the first person to successfully do it. And he was rather brilliant. I mean, he is a rather brilliant man. This is known now, so I'm not giving away any secrets. He was paid by the US to find a Navy submarine.

And he said, look, if I can find the Navy submarine, could I use the rest of my expedition window to take all the kit and the budget and try and find the Titanic, which is my kind of hobby horse? And they said, sure, Bob, you can find the submarine really quickly. You can spend all the extra time finding the Titanic. And that's what he did. And that's what happened. So previous to Bob, no one had a realistic chance. I mean, the technology simply wasn't there. That's right. And Bob did something very clever. Instead of looking for the Titanic, which is the proverbial needle in a haystack, he knew from other wrecks that he'd experienced that there was this debris field. As a ship kites down to the

seabed, there is all sorts of tins and pots and pans and knives and forks and even boilers that fall out of the ship. And what he did is instead of trying to find the hull, which is only 800 feet long, which in the Atlantic is very hard to find, what he decided he was looking for is a kind of rooster tail that was more than a mile long. That was all this debris. And he found the debris field, rather like the streak behind a comet, and followed that through. You listen to Dan Snow's History.

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you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. And when you're in one of these subs, can you go quite close? Dare I ask, can you kind of even go inside parts of the wreck or is it just purely looking at it from the outside? Some subs have landed within a few yards of the actual wall of steel.

But what Ballard did when he found it was he had a manned submersible that he was in, but then he had little Jason, which was a tethered little mini robot. And of course that was able to go in. Ballard described it as dancing in the ballroom. But that was the sub that captured the iconic photographs of the sort of chandeliers swaying on Titanic's wreck. And the new scan that was just released earlier this year,

is the implication that there's been a certain part has collapsed? I understand the captain's bathroom, for example, is no longer visible. What's going on there? We don't know to what extent that is the weakening of the metal that's caused that subsidence, or to what extent someone was trying to have a peek into Captain Smith's bath or even take it away. And that's why there has been in the past some debate about bringing the wreck back to Belfast, actually, to preserve at least the bow section. When you say people taking things away, are there kind of missions of tomb robbers that go down there and just grab things that we don't even hear about? Tomb robbers is very, very emotive because there's no bodily material down there anymore and hasn't been for decades.

But certainly it is a very important spot as a memorial site. But yes, there have been situations where, for example, the radio set from the Titanic, I believe, has been raised. It was certainly planned to raise it. Things like the telephone was there from her bridge, the iconic telephone where they would have rung through the warning. But that's gone now. There was one company called RMS Titanic Inc. that was actually allowed to bring up artifacts and preserve them and display them. They weren't allowed to sell them, but they were allowed to recover them. Now let's talk about raising it. Is this just a complete pipe dream

or have you got a plan, Tim? Well, Newcastle is a centre for this kind of subsea research because they do a lot of work on oil rigs and things like that. And in fact, we do have today the technology to be able to burrow in the mud under Titanic and to eventually pull cables through underneath it.

And we do have the capability to very slowly raise the vessel. But it would cost as much to raise her as to make the next Hollywood Titanic blockbuster dam. Yeah, but Tim, to visit Titanic in the dry dock in which she was built, that would be the best investment Northern Ireland ever made. I think it's a no-brainer. And what I would do is I'd leave the stern where it is, on the seabed, untouched as a memorial to all those who died. But I'd get the bow up as quickly as we can to, A, stop it disintegrating so we can preserve it Mary Rose-like. We can preserve it,

but also it will stop people being tempted to risk their lives in the fashion that we're worried about at the moment. Do you think this episode will lead to greater regulation of the site? I do. I do. And I can't say whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, but I do think it will lead to more regulation. I think it will be a good thing. It saves lives. But the thing is, you can't have these kind of thrills at the edge of technology and at the edge of the world without risks that come with it. And of course, Dan, you and I have chatted about Captain Scott in the past. And of course, the Challenger disaster. Every time you try and get tourists into space or people to go to places that haven't been to before, you do get these enormous risks.

Since we've got you here, take us through the sinking itself. What is our latest thinking about why this mighty ship sank that night in 1912? Well, I mean, everyone knows that obviously she hit an iceberg, but perhaps what people don't know so well, there was in fact an ice field, which was three miles wide and 75 miles long. So it might interest your listeners to be reminded of the fact that there was no way through to New York. Had Titanic had searchlights, she'd probably have seen that there was ice entirely blocking her track. Had she arrived in daylight, she just simply circumnavigated it to the south. But unfortunately, she arrived at night and there was a little bit of what sailors call

refraction on the horizon down. And it just delayed them seeing the Berg a little bit later than they would normally do. And do you know what? Those seconds were absolutely vital. Titanic nearly missed the berg. She missed the berg that she could see above the surface, but she actually rolled over a spur that was projecting out from the berg underneath the water. And Titanic had a flat bottom and a double hull, by the way. But I'm afraid so much damage was done to the first five compartments that she simply wasn't designed to float with that much damage. So the iceberg she missed it if she'd smashed straight into it with her bow section she might have survived just because it scraped all down the side is it? She would definitely have survived had she crashed head

on into the iceberg it would have flattened her bow by 80 feet. And it may have killed up to 80 firemen who were off duty at the time in the bow, but it wouldn't even have thrown the passengers out of their beds because Titanic was doing 22 knots. And if you slow down in about 100 feet from 22 knots, you're not even going to get the kind of forces that would tip passengers out of their beds. And so there's a terrible gouge down the side. She was not designed to float with that many of her compartments flooded. Why so few lifeboats, Tim?

Remind us. Well, because the Board of Trade, this is a brilliant one, the Board of Trade didn't want to reward ships for being unsafe if they had lots and lots of lifeboats. But what the Board of Trade did not want is a nightmare situation where you had leaky vessels without proper subdivision

piled high with lifeboats, which, by the way, made them what sailors call tender, which means that they don't really balance very well on the water. So, no, what the Board of Trade wanted was really well subdivided, very safe ships where they only had lifeboats on board required to actually ferry them from the stricken vessel to a nearby safety vessel. And let's remember, Dan, that in 1912, it wasn't a free for all on the North Atlantic. There were two lines, like an upline and a downline on a railway.

And basically, they were only 60 miles apart. Every ship going east was on the one line to the north, and every ship going south was on the other line going the north and every ship going south was on the other line going west so it was only a matter of time before another ship came along or it was only 60 miles to go to the other track and so i'm afraid that titanic's lifeboats were designed for the very purpose they could have been used for that night which was ferrying passengers to a nearby rescue ship but unfortunately because of those atmospheric conditions that you and I have touched upon here, unfortunately, the Californian did not turn up. Yes, the passing ship, the Californian,

which was very close by and could easily have come and helped her. Ten miles away in that night, because it was such a clear night, such a calm night, she appeared to be only five miles away. And that led to all sorts of problems with them thinking it wasn't the Titanic and thinking that she didn't have radio because she wasn't big enough and far enough away to beat the Titanic, which had radio. So they started to morselamp signal to the Titanic. The problem is that when they thought they were five miles away, they could morselamp easily. Actually, they were about 12 statute miles away, about 10 nautical miles away. And I'm afraid that the morselamp signals were scrambled tragically

between the two vessels. Extraordinarily bad luck. Why, Tim? Why are we so fast? Why do people risk their lives to go and look at that wreck? Why are we talking about it? Why is that the most famous ship that ever set sail? Human beings are drawn to this thing called tragedy that the ancient Greek invented and so we had Sophocles and all that back in the day and people loved a good tragedy which showed the sort of weakness of people compared to the awesome power of nature and all that back in the day. And people loved a good tragedy, which showed the sort of weakness of people compared to the awesome power of nature in the universe, which in those days was known as the gods. And I think we don't have that anymore.

We've lost that tradition of tragedy. But what Titanic does is the people on the ship are people kind, trying their best with technology to do their best. And then the awesome power of the universe is really reflected in this giant iceberg that comes out of the darkness and spells them on their maiden voyage. Thank you very much, Tim. That was, as ever, an absolute tour de force. We'll have to wait and see how this plays out. In the meantime, we're all obviously hoping for the best. Thanks, Tim. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks so much. Take care. built the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.