The reaching of a critical limit in boiler room numbers 5 and 6 was highlighted during the testimony of Edward Wilding to the British Inquiry, June 7, 1912, pp. 528–529, 736. Fred Barrett described his attempt to close off the flooding in coal bunker number 10: British Inquiry, May 8, 1912, p. 71. The attempt was doomed to failure: Barrett, American Inquiry, May 25, 1912, p. 1141. He also provided key details about the eventual collapse of the dam between the two front boiler rooms: British Inquiry, May 7, 1912, pp. 60–61.
Barrett mentioned stopping the water in the number 10 coal bunker very early in the sinking: British Inquiry, May 7, 1912, p. 59. The water was entering through a small round hole about the size of a deck hose, and stalling the flow was as easy as closing the steel door on the empty coal bunker. The flood Barrett saw about 12:45 a.m. was much more significant than a mere release of water retained in the coal bunker. If the thinner steel of the coal bunker had been the only rupture at this time, once the accumulated water was released, there should have been nothing further to feed the flood or even to endanger John (“Jack”) Shepherd and Herbert Harvey than the hose-size wound just behind the fire-damaged bulkhead.
The embrittled bulkhead itself most likely gave way along its base, specifically because of the sudden shift of water out of the coal bunker and away from the boiler room number 5 side of the dam. During the minutes leading up to the burst, engineer Shepherd fell into one of the keel’s forty-four watertight compartments: Edward Wilding, British Inquiry, June 7, 1912, p. 521. Further details regarding Shepherd’s injury and death were provided in a George Kemish letter to Walter Lord, June 19, 1955, p. 4, L/P file, pp. 543–560.
In 2005, one of James Cameron’s robots finally provided insight into the evacuation of the two front boiler rooms, as discussed by Parks Stephenson, “Titanic Wreck Observations, 2005,” http://www.marconigraph.com, 2006, p. 4. An open hatch at the top of boiler room number 5 would not, at this point, have contributed significantly to an increase in the rate of sinking. Water advancing from the front regions exerted a far greater impact than any overflow through the casing hatch that capped boiler room number 5.
On the effect of many tons of coal being removed from the the burning number 10 bunker: Fred Barrett, British Inquiry, May 8, 1912, p. 71. Lawrence Beesley appeared to have noticed this effect, resulting from the effort to completely empty a starboard bunker in boiler room number 5. He wrote of puzzlement over how, as the voyage progressed, the Titanic developed a significant list toward the port side.
“The purser remarked,” Beesley reported, “that probably coal had been used mostly from the starboard side…. In view of the fact that the Titanic was cut open on the starboard side and before she sank listed so much to port that there was quite a chasm between her and the swinging [port side] lifeboats… the previous listing to port may be of interest”: Beesley, in Jack Winocour, ed., The Story of the Titanic as Told by Its Survivors (New York: Dover, 1960), 20.
6. OF NATURE, NOT ABOVE IT
Bill Paxton, Big Lew Abernathy, and the early lessons of our exploration are recorded in Charles Pellegrino, written log and video log, Expedition Titanic XIII, Aug. 20–24, 2001. Paxton’s response to Abernathy’s question was a personal communication. Before his own first dive, Abernathy left a note for us on his desk. It read simply, “No regrets.”
Artist-historian Ken Marschall managed to put a deeper sense of trepidation into Paxton, with his new “fingernail perspective” on the Titanic: Charles Pellegrino, written log, Expedition Titanic XIII, Aug. 21, 2001, pp. 16, 18. “I had always referred to the depth of water… Ten World Trade Center twin tower lengths”: Charles Pellegrino, Her Name, Titanic (New York: Avon-Morrow, 1988), 92.
The acceleration of rusticle growth and the ominous population surges near the Titanic have been reported, beginning with the 1986–1996 comparisons: Charles Pellegrino and Roy Cullimore, “Rebirth of RMS Titanic: A Study of the Bioarchaeology of a Physically Disrupted Sunken Vessel,” Voyage, Winter 1997, pp. 39–46; Henrietta Mann, “A Close-Up Look at Titanic’s Rusticles,” Voyage, Winter 1997, pp. 47–48; Roy Cullimore, Charles Pellegrino, and Lori Johnston, “RMS Titanic and the Emergence of New Concepts on the Consortial Nature of Microbial Events,” Review of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 173 (2002): 117–141.
The same accelerated growth phenomenon has been recorded in the data and publications of the Keldysh’s Russian biologists: Charles Pellegrino, written log, Expedition Titanic XIII, Aug. 2001, p. 38. Regarding the unusually high biomass region into which the Titanic felclass="underline" Georgyj Vinogradov, in Pellegrino, written log, Expedition Titanic XIII, Aug. 2001, p. 38. Regarding the transformation of biological desert into jungle since the 1980s: Vinogradov, in Pellegrino, video log and written log, Expedition Titanic XIII, Aug. 2001, p. 26. The organisms (including the mysterious nests of rocks bound together in “silk”), sampled out to a three-kilometer radius (almost two miles) from the Titanic, are documented in the video log.
The evidence (including the doubling of rusticle growth rate during the prior seven cycles) indicates an increased nutrient throughput to the deep ocean: Lori Johnston and Charles Pellegrino, written log, Expedition Titanic XIII, pp. 38B–45. Georgyj Vinogradov agreed that the Titanic’s rusticles (and other organisms including Gorgonarians) seemed to have begun growing at an explosive rate, p. 26. This was memorialized by a study of Vinogradov’s (point-bow) “gorgon” through the years: Pellegrino, written log, Expedition Titanic XIII, pp. 36–38; Georgyj M. Vinogradov, “Growth Rate of the Colony of a Deep-Water Gorgonarian Chrysogoria agassisi: In situ Observations,” Ophelia 53 (Nov. 2000), pp. 101–103, expedition log, pp. 36–38A.
The discovery of bedposts and great quantities of intact wood inside the Titanic’s bow section is recorded in Charles Pellegrino, video log, Expedition Titanic XIII, Aug. 2001. “Rat-tailed fish patrolled the boilers… like the sentries to hell”: Bill Paxton, in Pellegrino, written log, Expedition Titanic XIII, Aug. 2001, p. 22.
7. THE CASCADE POINT
Twelve forty-five a.m. marked a critical turning point in the Titanic’s sinking, characterized by a loss of what had, up to that moment, been a tenuous equilibrium. This was addressed, reluctantly, by Edward Wilding at the British Inquiry, June 7, 1912, p. 509. Equilibrium phases during the sinking were also discussed by electrical engineer and historian Paul J. Quinn, Dusk to Dawn (Hollis, NH: Fantail Press, 1999), 126. Quinn pointed out a credible alternative to Fred Barrett’s perception that the 12:45 a.m. surge of water originated with a bulkhead failure. Quinn noted that the exhaust pipes and air intakes from boiler room numbers 5 and 6 converged upward toward the first smokestack, in the manner of a wishbone, just above E deck. This area of convergence (the exhaust chamber) could, according to Quinn, have “allowed the rising water in boiler room six to simply overflow into number five just like the analogy of an ice tray” (with water spilling from one compartment into another).