Titanic: Ship of Dreams - 13. Raise the Titanic

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

Seven decades on, an American oceanographer finally locates the Titanic wreck site. As artefacts are brought up from the depths, a fierce battle begins over who they belong to. Our experts and Titanic descendants weigh the legacy, and ponder the future, of the most infamous ship in history. And in the summer of 1996, filming begins on the biggest motion picture ever made… A Noiser podcast production. Narrated by Paul McGann. Featuring Stephanie Barczewski, James Delgado, Julian Fellowes, Tim Maltin, Pablo O’Hana, James Penca, Claes-Göran Wetterholm. Special thanks to Southampton Archives, Culture and Tourism for the use of the Eva Hart archive. Visit SeaCity Museum for an interactive experience of the Titanic story (seacitymuseum.co.uk) Written by Duncan Barrett | Produced by Miriam Baines and Duncan Barrett | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design & audio editing by Miri Latham | Assembly editing by Dorry Macaulay, Anisha Deva | Compositions by Oliver Baines and Dorry Macaulay | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw | Recording engineer: Joseph McGann | Nautical consultant: Aaron Todd. Thanks for listening to Titanic: Ship of Dreams. Head to noiser.com, home of the Noiser podcast network, to discover your next immersive history podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's September the 1st, 1985. The early hours of Sunday morning. We're 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. In his cabin on the research vessel Connaught, oceanographer Robert Ballard is trying to get some rest. He's been searching for the wreck of RMS Titanic for more than a week now, carefully combing the seabed 4,000 meters below using sonar and state-of-the-art cameras. His dream of finding Titanic has been a decade in the making.

And on this trip, he's brought some friends along. Ballard has teamed up with France's oceanographic agency, IFRAMA. Their sonar equipment is second to none, as well as the US Navy, who've agreed he can piggyback his search onto some military reconnaissance he's doing for them. He's been mapping the wrecks of two nuclear submarines, using his new Argo submersible to capture and transmit images and video up to the research vessel. This Navy mission has given him a new idea when it comes to locating Titanic. Both the submarines that he's been looking at imploded as they sank to the bottom of the ocean. Ballard expected to find them surrounded by a halo of debris. In fact, the debris fields stretched out from the wrecks, like the tail of a comet.

Previous attempts to find Titanic have focused on spotting the wreck itself, but that's no easy task. She might have been the biggest ship in the world in her day, but four kilometers beneath the surface, she's a needle in a haystack. Her debris field, on the other hand, could stretch for a good mile. A trail of breadcrumbs leading to the wreck. Around 1am, there's a knock on the door of Ballard's cabin. It's an unlikely messenger. The ship's cook. The guys think you should come down to the van, he tells Ballard. The boss knows what that means. His men have spotted something. And they can't even tear their eyes away from their screams long enough to come and tell him themselves. Ballard leaps out of bed, throws on a jumpsuit, and races out of the cabin. He flies down the stairwell, his feet barely touching the steps.

Turning a corner, he approaches the entrance to the control van. Inside, his eyes are drawn immediately to the three screens showing the feed from the Argos cameras. Grainy, indistinct images from the seabed. He can see what looks like debris. Definitely man-made. One of his men, Stu Harris, tells him they think they just spotted a ship's boiler. He rewinds the video feed.

Ballard stares at the frozen image on the screen. It's a round metal object, a good fifteen feet across. The doors where the coals once shoveled in are clearly visible. It's a boiler, all right. God damn, Balad exclaims. God damn, Ballard exclaims. God damn. After more than seven decades lost at the bottom of the ocean, a piece of Titanic's wreckage has been found,

and with it, a clear line to the ship itself. Ballard's French colleagues congratulate him. They signed up for this collaboration, hoping to pip the Americans to the post, to find Titanic while Ballard was busy with the nuclear submarines. And they very nearly succeeded. One of their sonar scans missed the wreck by less than 300 yards. Merde, exclaims team leader Jean-Louis Michel when he realizes how close he came. But right now, nothing can dent the good mood on the Cano. The oceanographers crack open a bottle of Portuguese wine to toast their success. It's approaching 2 AM now, around the time the Titanic sank.

Suddenly Ballard is hit by a realization. This is the very spot where it all happened. Right here, 73 years earlier, 2,000 people were fighting for their lives. And for most of them, it was a fight they couldn't win. Balad tells his colleagues he's going out on deck for a moment. Most of the others follow him outside. In the dead of night they stand together, looking out to sea, grappling with the magnitude of their discovery. From the Noisa Podcast Network, this is the final part of Titanic Ship of Dreams. One day suddenly, there it was. Titanic was found.

Marine archaeologist James Delgado. I remember going to those very first press conferences, the one at National Geographic, when Bob Ballard talked about what had happened with those very blue images of Titanic in the depths. And with that came this growing awareness that would only continue through the years that this heralded a new frontier in terms of what we as humanity could do to reach that which had previously been inaccessible, but also a sense that society had never really quite let go of. But now, the physical entity of Titanic itself was going to now be the focus of that societal obsession. The discovery of Titanic's wreck makes waves around the world,

catapulting Bob Ballard to the ranks of the 20th century's top oceanographers. But it also answers a number of questions that have lingered for over 70 years. At the official Titanic inquiries, Second Officer Charles Lightoller was adamant that the ship had not split in two before going down, as other survivors had claimed. Now, though, Lightoller's position is conclusively disproved. Tim Moulton. Until the wreck was discovered in 1985, most people believed, Lightoller and others,

that the Titanic sank intact. It was a matter of pride for the White Star Line that this British ship hadn't actually been ripped in half by the water. It was only when Bob Ballard discovered the wreck that we then knew for certain that the few people who had noticed her ripping in half actually were telling the truth. There were people even in 1912 who knew darn well it had broken. Later, it was only, I think, wishful thinking that the ship had not completely broken apart.

With the bow and stern discovered 800 meters apart on the seabed, there's no longer any room for doubt. Professor Stephanie Baczewski. The front two-thirds of the ship are in one big chunk, and then the stern is in another chunk some distance away from that, and then there's a large kind of field of debris in between. The bow still looks pretty much like the Titanic, but the stern is just a mess. It's just a tangled mess of metal and cables,

and it's hardly recognizable at all. And you get a sense of the violence of the last moments of the ship from seeing that. Julian Fellows. I remember very well when the wreck was found, that these two bits had split early enough to land in completely different places on the ocean floor. That was a real surprise to all of us. And in those days, there were still one or two survivors who'd got off and were now, you know, fairly old people.

Eva Hart was just seven years old when she witnessed Titanic's final moments. I didn't close my eyes at all. I saw that ship sink. And I saw that ship break in half. And for so many years, people have argued with me about that. But now at last, it has been proved beyond all doubt that she did break in half. I know she did. I saw her.

Dr. Delgado was one of only around 250 people who've witnessed Titanic's wreck on the ocean floor. Titanic sits on the seabed two and a half miles down, 12,436 feet. The bow is separate and dug into the seabed at an angle, pushed in, flexed a bit and broken, leaving the open faces of the various boilers still in position. The superstructure is there, portions of it have started to collapse and areas have opened up, but you can see that this is unmistakably titanic. Moving several hundred yards off and away from it is the stern section. In the stern section, badly crushed and deformed and with part of the deck peeled back, with the engine

still standing tall, you know, four stories high, remain in place. In between those two pieces of Titanic is a vast field of scattered and separated pieces from chunks of the hull to boilers to some of the machinery, but also things like the outlines of the dome of one of the grand staircases, most likely from the aft grand staircase. But small pieces, luggage, shoes, I mean, plates and dishes, coal, you name it. Everything that dumped out of Titanic when it tore in two lies in that vast field of artifacts in between. It really is powerful evidence that this is not just a ship.

This was a small community of thousands that basically died together on that early morning. This episode is brought to you by DAZN. For the first time ever, the 32 best soccer clubs from across the world are coming together to decide who the undisputed champions of the world are in the FIFA Club World Cup. The world's best players, Messi, Haaland, Kane, and more are all taking part.

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And what they didn't understand was that they had originally been worn by passengers, but as their bodies were consumed by the sea, what was left was the pair of shoes. I mean, I don't want to get too grisly about it. Human bodies basically can't withstand the pressure down there. Klausio and Wetterholm. At a certain depth, the bones grinded together more or less. So the bodies are gone. And if there were bodies, there are lots of fish and mussels and crabs and all sorts of living creatures down there who have taken the rest.

There's no skeletons, there's no bodies. It's evidence of people, there's personal effects. And there are likely people still inside the wreck. And by that, when I say people inside the wreck, there would be traces of them, forensic traces of them. Regardless of what's actually visibly there, everybody who goes there understands this is a site that is treated sensitively and carefully. You don't need skeletons on the deck to understand that this is a very special, if

not sacred, place. It's also a place that's gradually reverting to nature. Titanic's hull is being consumed by tiny microorganisms. To the scientists who study them, they're known as Halomonas titanicae. But the long brown stalactites they produce as they work through the ship's metal have a catchier name, courtesy of Robert Ballard. Rusticles.

I think one of the greatest shocks for Ballard was, I think he hoped that the cold water and the dark depths that she was in might have preserved the ship a little bit better. Certainly Ballard himself was shocked by the devastation that the years and these little microbes had wrought on Titanic. Nothing lasts forever. I mean, you go back to that ashes to ashes, dust to dust type of philosophy. All things change. What we are learning from Titanic is not only how best to engage when the time comes to step away from something,

but also that the complexities of life, the survival of life, and that's the most amazing thing, is to find this bacteria that lives in the metal and eats the metal and excretes the byproduct that we see as the russicles. That's fascinating. It's a different aspect of life that we didn't know existed, and now we do. In 1985, the discovery of Titanic is a major international news event. Bob Ballard and his team have closed the lid on a 73-year-old mystery. But in doing so, they've also opened a massive can of worms.

What followed then was, as I once said to Bob, the unintended consequences of discovery. Titanic sank 400 miles southeast of Cape Wraith, and that's international waters, which means that technically no one owns Titanic, which means that legally it's kind of a free-for-all. This is an interesting question. Who owns the Titanic and its artifacts? She was written off from the insurance company back in 1912 because they said she's not reachable. So she was lost to the world and whoever found her would have the right to her.

The US and French and British and a couple of other countries actually got together and agreed that they would protect the wreck. But of course, there are countries that haven't signed up to that treaty. There are no laws for international waters. If, for example, the Chinese construct robots or whatever, or the Russians, or whoever hasn't signed this document that only a few countries have signed. If they do this, they go out with their equipment. No one can stop them. Nobody. In 1994, a federal court in the United States grants a private company, RMS Titanic Inc., the exclusive rights to salvage artifacts from the wreck site. There is a judge in Norfolk in Virginia who has decided that this company, RMS Titanic, has the right to recover the artifacts and they are the sole owner of these rights. It has never been questioned.

In 1996, RMS Titanic Inc. begins a monumental salvage operation, raising thousands of objects from the seabed. But it's a controversial move, and one of the company's staunchest critics is the man who found the ship, Bob Ballard. Bob's desire, I think affected emotionally by what he saw, was nothing should come up. It's a graveyard. His view is it shouldn't be disturbed. And I can understand that because he would slightly feel responsible for the fact that it was disturbed. He feels that he kind of opened Pandora's box when he found it

and he kind of wanted to put the lid back on it again and just sort of leave it there, perfect. At the time, for Titanic's remaining survivors, emotions run high. The Titanic, as far as I'm concerned, is a grave. Go down, dig into my father's grave, bring things up and sell them. I think it's disgusting. I feel very strongly about it.

And I resent it very much when people think otherwise. In an interview with Naval History magazine, Ballard describes RMS Titanic Inc's salvage operation as a carnival, one that perpetuates the tragedy of the sinking. I am so glad Dr. Ballard agrees to me. I said to him once, surely we can't learn anything from bringing bits up from the Titanic. And he agreed with me. We can't learn anything from her. Then leave her alone. Leave her alone. Even today, more than a century after the disaster, it's a hot topic.

One man's salvage is another's grave robbing. And RMS Titanic Inc. has a checkered history, to say the least. They are, in my opinion, less than wholesome, let's just say. Pablo Ohana is a former guide at Titanic Belfast and an outspoken critic of RMST. RMST Titanic Inc. is a subsidiary of something called Premier Exhibitions, and they are a company that run a number of exhibitions and museums around the world. So some people might have seen the Bodies exhibition. They do things like Cleopatra and Extreme Dinosaurs, things like that. But their most famous one, the one that most people will know, will be Titanic, the Artifact Exhibition, which is

based in Las Vegas, but tours all around the world. They've had something like 30 million visitors. One of the founders of rms titanic inc was somebody called joe marsh and i've never forgotten this quote that he said i'm going to read it just to make sure that i don't misquote him but he said we all know there are billions of dollars down there under the water it's like sitting on a gold mine this is a private company remember so they've got shareholders who are pressuring them to be more aggressive to go down pull up more stuff. They're not actually that interested in telling the story of Titanic.

It's about making as much money as possible. James Penker is host of the Witness Titanic podcast and creative director of Titanic, Honor and Glory. Until recently, he worked as a researcher and spokesperson for RMS Titanic Inc., even traveling to the wreck as part of their 2024 expedition. I worked for them for two years and went on an expedition with them. And I understood when I accepted the job that I was going to see how the sausage gets made. Everyone in the Titanic community knows RMST. You may even say they have a bad reputation. And I knew

I might be seeing that. I might leave this expedition hating Titanic. But it was kind of scary. Is somebody going to steal an artifact and tell me to keep my mouth shut? I don't know. And I'm so happy to report the respect

matched the respect I would want Titanic to see and exceeded it. All I can speak for is RMS Titanic Incorporated as they stand today. I think they're doing a great job. Yes, there is a past that I know very little about, but all I can speak for is the presence of RMS-T, which I'm content with. As an archaeologist and as a museum director, I've been a critic of RMS Titanic through the years, but my criticism is focused on the approach they took early on, the sense that things might be sold, the fact that certain items were set aside and reserved for sale initially. I think a big part of it is the wreck was discovered

while survivors were still alive, and they could weigh in. And while a big talking point will be that survivors said to leave it alone, there were other survivors saying, no, you know, my father died that night, and I'd love to know if his pocket watch could be recovered. You know, there's a survivor whose father died and RMST recovered his pocket watch and she was able to keep it for the rest of her life.

Like that's a really magical thing. In December 1993, at a hotel in Southampton, 97-year-old Edith Heisman is presented with the watch her father was wearing the night he died. It was her father's watch and the last time she saw him he took it out and looked at it before he said goodbye to her forever. And there's very few of us who actually knew people who had been on that deck. The power of having this old woman say to me the last time she saw her father was when he put her into the boat. And you're talking to this person who remembers this and you see it on their face. And he kissed her, asked her to be good, and then stepped away.

And that was the last she ever saw of him. And so that's a pretty powerful connection. Edith Heisman was just 15 when her father perished. For her, his pocket watch carries enormous sentimental value. But getting it back eight decades later isn't as simple as it sounds. They offered to sell it to her initially, and then ultimately gave it to her in her life as long as she was alive. But at that stage, the courts had already intervened, and there was no allowance of sale of individual artifacts. There was a ruling that they had to keep the two largest collections together forever.

For public benefit, for research, they were not allowed to break them up. And that was kind of the first step to trying to provide some sort of oversight to RMST. When Edith Heisman dies in 1997, her father's pocket watch reverts to RMS Titanic Inc. Today, it's on display as part of their exhibition in Las Vegas. I mean, not to go on a tangent, but what is the connection of Titanic to Las Vegas? Why is that where RMST's biggest experience is? Whether in Vegas or on tour, the artifacts on display in RMST's exhibitions

represent a fraction of the total number of items collected over the years. Exactly how many remain behind closed doors is a matter of contention. We don't know because there's no public record, there's no document. We just have to trust this private company. There is apparently a warehouse down in Atlanta, in Georgia, which just has thousands of artifacts sitting there. So about 5,500 artifacts, I want to say, have been recovered. There's quite a few hundred,

maybe a thousand of them are on display. The rest of the artifacts are in Atlanta where they are stored. But the ones that are in storage are in storage because they can't be on display for the most part. I mean, there are pieces of paper that are an artifact that we could never even pull out into the light because a light source would start to bathe the image. You know, a photograph, for example. And as for the mysterious warehouse where thousands of these artifacts are held, its location is top secret. Not surprising given the value of what's inside. But it's not exactly the sinister Hangar 51 from the Indiana Jones movies. I think RMST makes the mistake of saying the word warehouse because it does kind of

suggest that they're just on a shelf somewhere. I've been to that warehouse. It is a lab. It's a climate-controlled, high-security lab that is inside a warehouse. They store the artifacts in various rooms. You know, there's a room for textiles, and there's a room for metals. It's a very interesting place, and the big room where most of the artifacts are,

it's really something to stand there and feel a part of history. In 2004, RMS Titanic Inc. allowed a team from the BBC inside the Atlanta facility. Journalists were shown tiny files of perfume that still retain their sweet smell, and an open bottle of champagne, and a delicate handwritten note carried by third-class passenger Marion Meanwell. Marion Meanwell has a letter in her bag from her landlord saying that she's a good tenant, so when she gets to New York, she can find a place.

We know very little about her, aside from this letter. If we did not recover that, we would know even less about her. As an archaeologist, what do I study? I don't study things, I study people. I'll always come back to Franz Polbaum's declaration of intent to become a United States citizen. He did not make it. But his bag, when found, had basically his life packed in it. So it had his work clothes, it had his tools. It had his German-English dictionary.

It had a bundle of postcards of the various places that he'd grown up and around. And at the top of it was that declaration, still preserved, that paper preserved inside that leather trunk. And with that, Brandt's pull-down and away came to life again. This is our connection to history. You see these things, they are the real things. You can identify with them. You get drawn into the story of the Titanic, this history.

And if you can feel it in your heart, then you can really take it to your soul, so to speak. These items are going to decay at the bottom of the ocean. They will one day just disappear and we'll never see them again. So even though I speak extremely critically of RMST, I myself am completely torn on the fundamental debate of do we raise or not? There is no doubt that seeing those items is a completely compelling and moving and educational and insightful experience. One of the first kind of interactions I had with Titanic was when RMST brought their Titanic exhibition to my hometown,

Manchester in the UK, and I was completely compelled by it. Titanic is a very emotional thing aside from what happened that night, people are incredibly attached to it and people feel very passionately on both sides of the debate. The word gravesite, I think, is a very emotional phrase. You know, when does grave robbing become archaeology,

I guess is the question. Referring to someone like me who has, you know, literally given my whole life to this one topic, you know, to given my whole life to this one topic, you know, to refer to me as a grave robber, there are literally no graves there. There are no graves. There are no human remains there. There haven't been human remains there if there ever was for at least a century. You know, I've been there myself. It feels less like a grave site and more

like a scrapyard in the middle of the Sahara Desert. In 2012, Titanic's centenary, UNESCO designates the wreck a World Heritage Site. Four years later, RMS Titanic Inc. files for bankruptcy. For the first time, a district court in Virginia authorizes the company to sell its stock. So this is where, for me personally, I have a difficult relationship, let's say, with RMST, because at this point, the National Geographic Society, Titanic Belfast, the National Maritime Museums and National Museums of Northern Ireland supported by Dr Robert Ballard put together to try and basically buy Premier Exhibition and RMST so that they would then

bring those artifacts back to Belfast and they'd be on permanent display in Tagtet Belfast. They were actually rejected from entering this auction and on the 11th of October 2018 thousands of those artifacts were sold to private bidders and we haven't seen the majority of them since and the thing that has always got me since then is that RMST miraculously survived bankruptcy. In regards to the bankruptcy thing, I really don't know the legal ins and outs of RMST, and I really don't want to speak for them. But yes, I am aware that there's some drama in the past. Whether it's a family member, friend, or furry companion joining your summer road trip, enjoy the peace of mind that comes with Volvo's legendary safety. During Volvo Discover Days, enjoy limited time savings as you make plans to cruise through Muskoka or down Toronto's bustling streets.

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In 1985, Bob Ballard's mission cost the US Navy and IFRAMA an undisclosed eight-figure sum. But it's another, even more expensive project that will come to redefine the Titanic story. In 1912, RMS Titanic was the largest movable object ever built. 85 years later, James Cameron's Titanic is the most expensive movie ever made, with a budget of $200 million. Even adjusted for inflation, that's almost twice what White Star spent on the original ship. And unlike the actual Titanic, this one will turn a tidy profit, a record-breaking box office gross of $1.8 billion.

James Cameron's Titanic changed everything. I think it's very rare that you get a film that achieves the kind of public consciousness cut-through that Titanic had. very rare that you get a film that achieved the kind of public consciousness cut through that Titanic had. Titanic the film introduced Titanic to a lot of us, myself included. My parents took me to see the 1997 movie when it was in theaters and I was six years old, probably a little too young to see that movie, but I really liked it. We went back and saw it a second time. I'm a super fan like that. I saw it 30 times in the cinema. That is not an exaggeration.

People really want to hate it. I actually went through a phase of wanting to hate it. When I was a teenager in college, I was being like really adamant that I didn't like the film and that it was too commercial and it was too like romance-y and it was cliche and all this sort of stuff. And then ultimately I was like, who am I kidding? Like, it's a great film. It does a great job at telling this sort of stuff. And then ultimately I was like, who am I kidding? Like, it's a great film.

It does a great job at telling the story of Titanic. I'm completely obsessed with it. It's my all-time favorite film, in case that hadn't come across. Titanic's story has been depicted on screen before, most famously in the 1958 film A Night to Remember, which helped launch an entire genre, the disaster movie. In 1980, five years before Ballard discovered the wreck, Cold War thriller Raise the Titanic featured a secret mission to plunder the ship for rare minerals, before the Russians get to them first. Then, the filmmakers had to imagine Titanic's wreck site.

17 years later, James Cameron can show the audiences the real one. All of that stuff is completely groundbreaking. James Cameron's Titanic was the first time anyone had ever got images that clear of the wreck, but any images at all of the inside. At the 1997 Oscars, it sweeps the board with 11 wins. Even among the notoriously picky community of Titanic obsessives, or titaniacs, it's rare to find someone who doesn't love it. The attention to detail is forensic.

Less accurate, perhaps, is its central love story, between socialite Rose DeWitt Buketa and impoverished artist Jack Dawson. While many of the supporting characters in the film are real people, Captain Smith, Bruce Ismay, Thomas Andrews, Molly Brown. These star-crossed lovers are very much a work of fiction. I mean, of course, I'm always delighted when anyone makes a big film, and I'm always delighted when it's a big success. But it slightly annoyed me that, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio was able to pop on someone else's white tie

and just jog into first class for dinner. This was not the world of the Titanic. These barriers were absolute. And I'm sure Mr. Cameron is not terribly interested in my comment. I understand why James Cameron created fictional characters. It's much easier. You can put them wherever you want them. You don't have to ask any family's permission for this and that but there are equally dramatic stories from titanic that

would exceed the drama and the romance of the movie that actually happened really dramatic and at times romantic heroic villainous things tit Titanic is already the greatest story of all time. You don't need to create a fictional person. James Cameron knows Titanic better than anyone. He probably knows it better than Captain Smith, and he certainly spent more time on it than Captain Smith has. He's a brilliant guy, and I think the film in many ways reflects how he's processed it.

And that process has been not only responding to the human side of it, but also, I think, a pretty innate understanding of the ship itself. One unexpected consequence of the success of Cameron's movie is the rise of a whole new industry. Titanic had now opened up to tourism. And with that, the whole question was, is this the right thing to do? Is this the responsible thing to do? I was sent out to basically audit this and to report back to all of my colleagues in the archaeological field to take a good hard look and honestly report back on what I saw.

In August 2000, James Delgado makes his first dive to the Titanic wreck in a Russian-owned Mir submersible. The cramped cabin has room for just three people. A voyage into inner space is not unlike a voyage into outer space. In the mirrors, you're on a six-foot diameter nickel steel sphere. You're breathing pure oxygen. And as anybody who knows the Apollo 1 disaster, a spark is fatal. So you're not bringing metal in with you. But you're also wearing a Nomex flight suit that's just burn resistant.

You don't eat beforehand. You fast a bit. You're not going to pee. You don't want to do anything else than pee. And if you have to pee, you're the most unpopular person. Because now the entire sub smells like a gas station washroom. You're bouncing on the surface. It doesn't take much to start to drop. Flood the ballast chamber, and down you go.

And you just watch the instruments tick off the depth as you go down. It was about a two and a half hour drop. You just fall. And what you realize ultimately is that you're spiraling down, like water down a drain. You don't feel anything other than the change of the temperatures. We dropped on down and sat down quietly, just onto the seabed, when you could see the bow of Titanic in the sonar. So then we lifted off and we moved towards it, and you're going through the darkness. And all of a sudden, your brain senses it before your eyes actually see it. And then there it was.

We were alongside the port bow, the hull stretching up above us. So it's bubbling with the excreta of the bacteria and the brilliant oranges and yellows and the reds. You have left the world behind and you're now in another space and place where your own fragility is very much there, front and present in your mind. And you get it. I've seen the iceberg damage. I've been hovering over the bridge where Robert Hitchens would spin that wheel,

where Captain Smith would likely end his time, but also where he got the news, where Thomas Andrews would come up and forecast how long they had. To the davits swung out, to bits of rope and blocks still in place, to that space where Isidore Strauss stood by as his wife got out because she would not leave him alone and would die with him to the stern where they were all at the end I said to my wife when I got back it's just a story and then you're there it ceases to be a story it's real it was the first and not the last time that I would cry on Titanic. Never cried looking at it through a screen,

but hovering through it in a submarine and down there surrounded by the cold and the dark. Yeah. In the four decades since Robert Ballard first discovered the wreck, around 250 people have made the trip to see Titanic, trusting their lives to a tiny craft, barely big enough to sit up in, and paying a cool $250,000 for the privilege. I wouldn't do it in a million years. On Sunday, June the, 2023, five people climb inside the tiny Titan submersible and begin

the two-and-a-half-hour journey to the seabed. The youngest of them, Suleiman Dawood, is just nineteen years old. His mother, Christine, had given up her seat so that Suleiman can share the experience with his Titanic-obsessed father. At 9.18 that morning, the Titan begins its descent. One hour and 33 minutes later, the sub's radio signal cuts out. I think these days, after decades of going back down and prodding at Titanic, perhaps we now have a sense that, oh, this is simple. It's not. You know, we're talking about Titanic, so of course, technology fails, right?

People fail. People make mistakes. That being said, there's ways to manage your risk as best you can. The disappearance of the Titan leads to a media frenzy. A four-day search, broadcast around the globe in real time. The world was gripped beyond belief. I mean, the BBC News in the UK launched its own online Titan channel. There was 170,000 people on that page watching literally nothing. There was no update. There was nothing happening.

It was just the same news being repeated until they got new news. The tension of the Titan story comes from the horrifying idea that the passengers on the sub may still be alive, gradually running out of air at the bottom of the ocean. In fact, as most experts know full well, that's extremely unlikely. It's probable that the five men died instantly on Sunday morning. As the media storm continues, questions begin to be raised about the safety record of OceanGate, the company operating the sub,

and the fact that the Titan is piloted using a wireless video game controller. There's a fascination too with the identities of the sub's wealthy passengers, British Pakistani businessman Shehzad Udaywood and his son Suleiman, billionaire Hamish Harding, Ocean Gate chief executive Stockton Rush, and RMS Titanic Inc.'s director of underwater research, Paul-Henri Najoulé, known to his friends as Mr. Titanic. On Thursday, June the 22nd, debris from the Titan is discovered on the seafloor, confirming what experts already suspected. The submarine imploded on Sunday morning, most likely thanks to a tiny, pinhole-sized leak, which, combined with the pressure down below, turned the Titan into a deathtrap.

Ocean Gate expresses its sympathy. RMS Titanic Inc. puts plans for further artifact recovery on hold. James Cameron leads the tributes to his friend, Paul-Henri Najoulé. But among the wider public, some of the sympathy for the dead is qualified. When the Titan imploded, I think it created some of the same tensions about how we value certain lives more than others, right, that the Titanic story itself creates. So as we all know on board the titanic what class you were in very much determined your chances of survival so first-class passengers survived

in much greater numbers than steerage passengers did just four days before the titan disappeared from ocean gates radar screens a migrant vessel carrying hundreds of people sinks off the coast of Greece. 82 bodies are recovered, but the UN estimates the true number of the dead may be as many as 500. We were very compelled by these wealthy people on War of the Titans Submersible. We want to know who they were. We want to know all about them, right? We're very compelled by them in a way that I think we weren't by the same people who were dying on the migrant bones at the same time. And I think it raised a lot of questions about the kinds of things that very wealthy people now do, right? They launch themselves into space and they launch themselves, you know, a mile down in the Atlantic Ocean.

There was this massive international effort to rescue these people. And I think we were torn, right? I mean, I think, and I was torn, right? Some of us said, well, these people, like, they paid a lot of money. They knew what risks they were getting into. Why are American taxpayers putting the bill to go rescue these rich people? On social media, not all responses to the disaster are sympathetic. Many Twitter users seem to revel in the bleak fate suffered by the ultra-wealthy Titanic tourists. We put a ludicrous importance onto money,

and we want it so much that we actually hate people who've got it. Not because they've done anything bad at all. Just because they're rich. I am extremely sorry for the people who went down in that machine. And I'm very sorry, particularly for the young man whose father took it when it was, in a way, his father's dream and not his own. I couldn't bear it for the mother. Things come full circle, right? The Washington Post had a cartoon.

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See participating stores for details. 113 years on from the Titanic disaster, the questions it raises are as pertinent as ever. And so too is the fierce debate over what to do with the ship's remains. We might know more than ever about Titanic's past, but no two experts entirely agree on her future. You know, we visit the pyramids, right? I mean, we visit tombs of other things. But on the other hand, there is a kind of commercial aspect to it that disturbs me a little bit. And there's a kind of macabre aspect to it that disturbs me a little bit that people want to see this scene of tragedy. There's a

little bit of me that feels like maybe we should just leave it alone. We visit battlefields. We visit archaeological sites. People go to places where great tragedies have happened. People visit concentration campsites. So to go to a place that has had a great loss of life is not something that should be shied away from. I think we need to confront sites like this because everybody who goes there in their own way is changed by the experience of being there personally. If I was to develop a plan as an archaeologist for what I would wish to recover from Titanic, it would be the luggage. In some cases, everything they had that they could take with them

that represented their life as it was and the life they thought they'd have was in those bags. We're honestly running out of time. You know, the Titanic is deteriorating faster and faster. The artifacts will soon be non-recoverable. They'll just be mush and they'll be lost. And that's fine. Titanic's returning to nature. It's kind of a beautiful thing in a way. It started with the iceberg and it's going to finish with the organisms on the ocean floor. The Titanic is an event that has happened. And one day it will dissolve into the ocean.

And then the Titanic will just be a story. But I feel we should leave it there. And we should allow ourselves to move on. And there will be other tragedies and other blessings and other triumphs and other disasters. And that's part of being alive. I'm sure it will still be with us 100 years from now. I think we're going to continue to search for meaning from it and understanding of it. Even when we don't have the human survivors or the physical remains of Titanic, I think the story is going to live on. It's the thing that I get asked to talk about, you know, more than probably anything else that I've ever written about, because people just have this kind of enduring fascination with it. And I can always

tell when I start to talk about it that people actually listen, right? People never listen to anything that historians say. They're not very interested most of the time. But the Titanic, it just really compels people. I mean, it still is a very powerful story. It never goes away. But not everyone is ready to let go of Titanic just yet. Maybe, just maybe, there could be one more voyage ahead for the ship of dreams.

It will be just a rust stain on the sea floor in, you know, 100, 200 years time. So while it's really quite well preserved, I would leave the stern where it is as a permanent memorial to the disaster that happened. But actually, the bow of Titanic could quite easily be raised. When I say quite easily be raised, it would cost less than the next blockbuster movie about the Titanic. And oil rig companies absolutely have the technology to be able to get horses around the bow and lift it up. And it would reveal a great deal to history

that we don't know now. And it would make Titanic accessible to the whole world in a way that she just is not at the moment. where would i put it i would put it on the slipway where she was built in belfast it would be a fantastic tourist attraction for the whole world it would be great for the economy of northern ireland and it also is its rightful place because it was built there she started her there, and I think she should come to rest there. Thanks for listening to Titanic Ship of Dreams. Now you've finished, you can find your next immersive history podcast at Noisa.com,

home of the Noisa Podcast Network. Choose from a range of shows, including Real Dictators and D-Day The Tide Turns, both hosted by me, Paul McGann. That's Noisa.com.