SEPTEMBER 6, 2001
The new questions seemed endless. We always knew that opal, like amber, was an organic gemstone. Some of the finest opals were actually found on, in, or even as fossils. They usually formed in bacterially generated fossil beds. Some of the rusticles from the boat 8 davit bitt had formed thin layers of interior opal, absorbing silica either from seawater or from slowly dissolving pieces of the Titanic’s glass, or from some combination of both.
Inside the bow section, our robots were revealing that much more wood survived than anyone had anticipated—especially in the wake of Robert Ballard’s fifteen-year-old theory that the same wood-boring mollusks and bacterial mats that were responsible for the disappearance of the Titanic’s deck wood had also devoured the entire grand stairway. But the decorative carved wood of the reception areas surrounding the stairway was still standing—a little eroded and in need of repair, but otherwise remarkably intact. The oak arches were still there, and furniture—broken but still identifiable—lay everywhere, half buried in rusticle dust.
The delicate wood trim above the D-deck passenger-entrance gangways looked almost new, and so did the stacks of plates in a fractured sideboard that had crashed to the floor near an entrance vestibule.
Although wooden doors and ornate vestibules that once bracketed the grand stairway were intact, the stairway itself—which once descended from the boat deck all the way down to where Violet Jessop had last seen her friend Stan—had disappeared without leaving behind any trace of its brass and iron railings. Had the wood been eaten, the railings should have been piled at the bottom of the landing, nearly a full deck high. The eaten stairway scenario was also contradicted by the discovery of a great many structures surrounding the stairwell and made from the same type of oak, which had somehow escaped uneaten.
Instead of being piled at the bottom of the great hole where the grand stairway and the crystal dome had once stood, the brass and wrought-iron stairway railings appeared to have started their journey to the bottom, up to a third of a mile behind the bow section’s final landing place. Fixtures consistent with the heavy stairway decorations were found scattered throughout the field of debris that surrounded the severed stern’s crash site. It looked as though the multideck tower of solid oak had broken free and floated out through the crystal dome, pulling apart as the bow section disappeared beneath it, dropping bits of railing the way a melting and crumbling iceberg drops pebbles and boulders.
Inside the bow section, the bot probes continued to find surviving wooden structures from the periphery of the stairwell all the way forward to Edith Russell’s stateroom, where wood still framed her unbroken mirror. Walter Lord had said that his friend Edith kept filling her water glass with whiskey before she left her room for the last time. As the room filled with water, Russell’s drinking glass never floated out of the little rack to the right of her mirror. The glass was undoubtedly weighted down with its last fill-up of whiskey. In the end, though, according to Russell’s diary, she had proceeded to pack most of her belongings neatly into the closets and drawers before she abandoned ship (just as they can be seen today). Something must have compelled her to give up this activity and to hurry away so abruptly that she left her last drink forgotten.
In the direction that Russell fled, the mahogany of the first-class reception room was now home to a snakelike white and lavender “worm” with phosphorescent “portholes” along its sides. Worm hardly describes the mysterious beast. It had dug a complex network of burrows, weaving in and out of mahogany flowerpot frames and decorative mahogany baseboards and up the main supports of the stained-glass windows. Vinogradov saw features that reminded us both of echinoderms (sea cucumbers), yet the “worms” were at the same time unlike an echinoderm. We could not even fit the animal into a phylum; we did not know of a creature that somehow made its home in mahogany, a substance that until April 1912 did not even exist in the deep-ocean environment in which it had evolved.
Perplexed, Vinogradov and I began calling D deck’s stained-glass reception area “the lair of the white worm.”
10
Points of Departure
Two decades after the Titanic fell to the bed of the Atlantic, Second Officer Charles Lightoller would still be trying to explain away everything that went wrong that night with the standard lament of “Here again we were up against it.”
If nothing else, confusion was certainly against the ship, and confusion continued to hold dominion over virtually every aspect of the night. Fifth Officer Harold Lowe being left asleep in his quarters was not the only example of a person being forgotten while the senior officers came to terms with the unthinkable. After the two men in the crow’s nest called out their warning to the bridge, they remained in their perch, several stories up along the foremast. They remained even after the Titanic stopped, moved forward at six knots, stopped again, hissed venting steam from its idle boilers, and began to sag into the sea by the bow. At midnight, when their two regularly scheduled replacements for the midnight to 2 a.m. shift—George Hogg and Alfred Evans—climbed up to relieve Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee, the sea had already swallowed all of G deck in the first four compartments.
Sometime between 12:20 a.m. and the launch of the first distress rocket, as water reached the ceiling of the racquetball court and all of the third-class quarters on the forward part of F deck disappeared, Hogg pulled back the light-blocking tarps from the rear of the crow’s nest. He saw lifeboats swung out on both sides of the bridge and people swarming about with life jackets tied over their coats. The lookout lifted the phone and called the bridge, but no one was answering. Clearly, there was no further point in standing watch for icebergs on a ship that was no longer moving and did not seem likely to move again.
Hogg and Evans climbed down a ladder inside the foremast and walked back along the forecastle roof, which at that moment was within less than an hour of becoming an island, isolated by the coming flood on the well deck.
Hogg arrived at boat 6 just as Lightoller’s team was preparing it for launch and not very long before Celiney Yasbeck would be wrestled to the floor to prevent her from rejoining her husband on the deck. A boatswain ordered Hogg to bring out a Jacob’s ladder from the supply room; when he returned with the ladder, expecting to be told that it should be unfurled over the side of the ship, he was instead told by the boatswain merely to drop it on the deck. Evidently, a plan to lower a ladder from the boat deck so boat 6 could pick up more passengers had changed while Hogg went in search of the ladder. By then, boat 6 had been lowered more than fifty feet to the water and was rowing away.
The lookout never did learn the boatswain’s name, and he never saw him again. It is almost certain that no one did. Within the time frame of Hogg’s search for the Jacob’s ladder, Lightoller was deciding that instead of lowering a ladder from the frightening height of the boat deck, he would send a boatswain and six assistants down to the gangway doors. They were specifically assigned to lower Jacob’s ladders and pilot ladders from points nearer the water’s surface, through the side doors, but instead the men simply disappeared into history.