“George Rheims was also said to have escaped in a woman’s clothes,” Patterson-Knight added. “When I was at the Mariners’ museum at Norfolk, Virginia, in an area devoted to the Titanic, [I found that there] is a newspaper, listing among those saved, ‘Mrs.’ George Rheims. It could have been a typographical error, though my family refused to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“What a fascinating letter,” Lord replied. “I can understand your grandparents’ bitterness but feel they were perhaps unjust toward Mr. Rheims—anyhow, as far as the Titanic was concerned. Many male survivors were labeled ‘the man who got off [into a lifeboat] dressed as a woman,’ but the appellation seems especially unfair in the case of George Rheims. He really had a harrowing time, and his account can be supported by several different sources. I have even found a man who remembered him in his underwear in boat A!
“This is not to complain,” Lord continued. “It makes your letter and your background information all the more fascinating—(and intriguing, almost eerie)—and I am truly grateful to you.”
By the early twenty-first century, a dozen theatrical and television films had been made about the Titanic. Jim Cameron’s would be the first film to use the actual location of the ship on the seabed as a set. However, Bill MacQuitty’s 1958 depiction of that cold April night, though filmed in black-and-white, was the first and last version to be produced by a man who, as a child, had stood with his father on the pier and watched the Titanic depart on her maiden voyage—and who grew up to sink it a second time on film.
A Night to Remember became the film that, as though by religious sacrament, was required viewing at the Titanic site during Cameron’s 2001 expedition. It was also the last film to be made when scores of survivors were still alive and able to contribute details. This was also one of the best films that almost never got made. Bruce Ismay’s family had attempted to stop production in every way legally imaginable, calling Lord and MacQuitty liars.
When Joseph Boxhall saw the first edits of the film, he clearly had tears in his eyes. The main thing MacQuitty wanted to know from him was, “Did we get it right?”
“Terribly right,” Boxhall said, sobbing.
From the moment Edith Russell stepped onto MacQuitty’s reconstruction of the Titanic’s boat deck, she was suddenly no longer her usual talkative self. With the exception of her occasional naps on his couch after Christmas dinner with the obligatory shot of dessert brandy, Russell would never again be known by the producer to go silent for so long.
“I can’t believe it,” Russell said at last, looking ahead with an expression like a war veteran’s thousand-mile stare. “It was here that I stood.”
25
Sleeping in Light
SEPTEMBER 24, 2001
RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH
EXPEDITION TITANIC XIII
The stern turned out to be even more compressed between the reciprocating engines and the region above the propeller shafts than we knew. We had searched for ways inside, but Jake would never be able to fit between any two decks. Even if we could squeeze through, there was probably nothing to see. Almost everything inside appeared to have been squirted outside all those years ago. Along the starboard side, the contents of the hospital went straight out to starboard; so did pantry items and, two decks farther down, workmen’s tools and a huge condenser from the turbine engine room. They were all ejected together.
The turbine room itself was clearly visible—not by way of robotic penetration into the stern but by nature of the decks having been compressed down upon that single engine with such violence that the tallest shape in the center of the stern is the engine’s impression sticking up through multiple sheets of pressed (and steadily disintegrating) steel.
Jim Cameron’s brother Mike said the twisted metal of the stern reminded him of the Bikini Island atomic test results. “It felt like death down there,” he said. “All those people. Horrible, horrible death.”
SEPTEMBER 25, 2001
The last Mir was on its way up from the expedition’s last journey to 1912. The weather held off just long enough to give us four days straight of diving during a typically impossible time of the year for these waters.
The air pressure had been dropping steadily, and our meteorologist, Viola—who had an uncanny ability to feel and listen to the air after looking at the satellite printout and then provide a completely accurate weather forecast—said of the approaching storm, “Hurricane . . . is beautiful.” We would have to leave soon.
Mike Cameron said that there were moments when it really did feel as though the Mir had the power to carry one’s mind back to that horrible April night. He felt this especially at the stern, the presence of the people. He had felt a deep, instinctive part of himself looking out upon the violently misshapen metal of the stern and said to himself, “You don’t belong here.” Cameron interpreted this as an actual presence that projected itself toward him with a reassurance that no one would be hurt, but if the explorers stayed near the stern, it would be uncomfortable for them.
I did not believe in the motility of consciousness. I did not believe that some lingering resonance—a “soul,” call it what you will—survives us and echoes downward along the stream of time.
Mike believed that some events were so large that they could not help but echo. Certain religions, he explained, seemed to be based on such echoes. Cameron’s two brothers, Jim and John-David, held out some small possibility that the quantum universe allowed such echoes. It seemed to me that up to a third of the people with whom we were sailing believed in ghosts. I was a doubting Thomas, though, and I would probably have doubts even about the proof, if such proof existed.
“Still,” I said to Lori Johnston, “I would love to encounter something I absolutely could not explain.”
“There’s an old saying about being very careful what you wish for,” she warned, “because you just might get it.”
SEPTEMBER 26, 2001
Even as we laid a wreath and left an approaching hurricane behind, the Titanic continued to bombard us with odd coincidences and haunting images.
Jim Cameron had told me of the white rainbow in 1995, and I had written about it in the supplemental log of the Ocean Voyager expedition: “The 1995 [Cameron] expedition ended, for Jim, with an apparition the color of pearl. ‘A white rainbow,’ he had called it, as ominous and peaceful as it was mournfully beautiful. He was acutely aware that it had materialized during the final moments leading up to his departure, over the very part of the sea on which fifteen hundred people died—materialized amid white mist and sudden dead calm, as if someone were trying to bid him adieu.” Six years later, it happened again.
Ken Marschall, Don Lynch, and I were below the decks, reviewing Jake footage in mission control when I glanced to the left, through a glass partition, and saw the television screens at producer Ed Marsh’s workstation, each displaying the stern of the Keldysh and a white arch spanning the eastern horizon.
“I’ve never actually seen that footage,” I called out to Marsh, then asked, “but why are we reviewing footage from 1995?”