I recalled Mahala Douglass’s account of having watched, from this very same place eighty-nine years earlier, in boat 2, the aurora borealis rising over the Titanic’s grave as a backdrop for meteors—more meteors than she had recalled ever seeing before. She thought about a myth told to her by her mother: every time a shooting star appears, it signals the return of a soul to heaven.
There should have been thousands that night, but I’d been awake nearly four days straight, and I was not about to start keeping count of falling stars.
17
Movements of Fire and Ice
SEPTEMBER 12, 2001
RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH
Past is prologue, or so the poets say—prologue to the future.
I remember being astonished by row after row of unbroken stained- and frosted-glass windows inside the Titanic—astonished to the point of sometimes becoming misty-eyed. Ken Marschall and I both remarked that it looked like a chapel in there—driving home to us (as if we needed to learn it again and again) the lesson of hallowed ground, and perhaps too the growing awareness that we really did have a faith to keep with those who could no longer speak for themselves.
William Murdoch was among the most heartbreaking examples of this. From the first moments of impact, the first officer must surely have wished he had taken the same initiative that had resulted in his temporary demotion from the Arabic to the Celtic in 1903.
The race through ice that so mystified Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton during the British inquiry had its origins in a policy called “cracking on”—which had its own origins in profit margins arising from the intense competition among White Star, Hamburg-America, and the other shipping lines. Ships were to run at full speed, “cracking on” and keeping to or ahead of schedule, even in darkness, mist, and ice.
The very clarity of the moonless, glass-smooth sea had set the stage for a lethal “cracking on,” requiring only the convergence of one final event—which, however improbable, was sooner or later bound to occur, if enough ships played dice with the Labrador current. The greater probability was that the first iceberg sighted would be a tiny “growler” illuminated by the ship’s lights and passing by on the port or starboard side (with the result that the ship would be slowed down). Even more probable, a tall, star-eclipsing shadow should have appeared on the port or starboard side (and again, the ship would be slowed down). The most improbable scenario of all was for the first sighting to be directly ahead and for the berg to be no taller than the boat deck—the perfect height at which to remain invisible from the crow’s nest and the bridge until any response from the helm was reduced to near irrelevance.
Again and again, our thoughts returned to that moment, about 10 p.m., when Murdoch told lamp trimmer Samuel Hemming to shut out the last traces of light from the lamps in the forecastle so that he could more clearly see every star along the horizon from the bridge. He had specifically mentioned that the Titanic was heading into the vicinity of ice.
The day after we traveled over Hemming’s hatch and landed just behind Murdoch’s post at the starboard wing bridge, the events of September 11—and more than a decade of repercussions—were upon us. Here aboard the Keldysh, most of the American crew reflected on all of the warning signs around the world that had been ignored, each pointing toward the fires of September, like the warnings that had led up to the Titanic’s disaster. There had been one Marconigram after another, right up to the last message from wireless operator Cyril Evans, at 11 p.m. on Sunday night, April 14, 1912, warning that his ship, the Californian, had been stopped and surrounded by ice. People could be heard making the inevitable analogy, over and over: the 9/11 attacks were the first bump against the iceberg at 11:40 p.m., and we were now on a path into a downward spiral that could not be stopped. Jim Cameron, the Marines (John-David Cameron and Rich Robles), and I did not agree.
“Is it really 11:40 p.m.?” Jim asked. “Or is it a minute earlier?
“Is it 11:40, or 11:39?” he repeated, then answered, “We are all Murdoch now.”
Murdoch was at the wing-bridge, and the iceberg was a minute away; the final alarm had not yet rung out from the crow’s nest. The iceberg was looming ahead in the dark, cold and uncaring and still unseen—and massive.
“We can [as a civilization] drive straight toward it,” Jim said. “We can try to [steer] around it. But the important thing to know is that we still have time. We can slam into reverse and still be sunk. We can ram head-on and sink, turn and sink. It may be that no matter what we do, we sink. But we’ve got [a little bit of breathing space], and we haven’t really run up against our doom yet. We’ve got to try everything we can think of while there is still time to consider the alternative outcomes.”
We had arrived during the Week of the Dead in the Chinese calendar, seeking only to probe history and science. At first, I viewed the Titanic as a revelatory microcosm from the past. Now I was beginning to see that what human beings did on and around the Titanic that night was as much about where we were going as how we had gotten here.
18
Frailty
Sooner or later it was bound to happen: the convergence of improbable events compounded by a series of improbable errors. Almost without exception, no single improbable error or event causes complex systems to fail, and that is the frightening part.
In 1995 a U.S. exploratory satellite, launched into the aurora borealis over the North Pole, dropped booster stages and probes of just the right size and in just the right sequence to give Russian radar the precise impression that a first-strike high-altitude missile had dropped multiple intercontinental reentry vehicles (resembling hydrogen bomb capsules), including the inevitable EMP (electromagnetic pulse) precursor weapon, which is meant to knock out Russian electronics. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had notified the Russian space agency far in advance of the launch, but no one had passed the word along from the space agency to the Russian military, and no one at NASA had requested confirmation that the word had been passed along.
Russian military analysts, watching what appeared to be the signature of an American MIRV, knew that their country might be crippled in a matter of minutes and then incinerated if they did not act quickly. Russian president Boris Yeltsin was informed and was shown the tracking data. He declined to order a counter nuclear strike. Yeltsin had been around long enough to know that complex systems, and especially chains of communication, failed. During this latter part of civilization’s nuclear adolescence, an iceberg for all humanity was seen in a perfectly aligned trajectory, the deuterium-tipped weapons in the earth were the worst approximations of open portholes and shell doors, and a civilization’s last bulkhead was primed for collapse. But the iceberg was seen and avoided—that time.
Practically the very last chance the Titanic had was a warning from the Californian, almost directly ahead and surrounded by ice. Wireless operator Jack Phillips had cut the Californian’s Marconi operator off, and he neither took the message nor passed it along to the bridge. The Californian’s Marconi operator—near exhaustion in the first place and obeying the Titanic’s order to “shut up” in the second place—shut down his wireless apparatus, went to sleep, and missed the distress calls that shortly followed.