“We were launched from a crane at the back of a bespoke vessel designed for the submersible. Then you just drop, for an hour and a half, until you get to the seabed. Most of the time you are floating through complete darkness, with a few fluorescent things in the water.
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“Then at the bottom they switch on the lights, and here you are in this surreal world. There is this mythical ship that you’ve heard so much about, and there it actually is. There’s not much life down there. It’s a peaceful place.”
Among those on board with Kentley was the veteran French submarine explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet. “He fell completely under the spell of the Titanic, as so many people do,” Kentley says. “You fall in love with this bizarre story.”
But love affairs can sour.
Nargolet is thought to be one of those on board Titan, with the British billionaire Hamish Harding, father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, and OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush. Now the thought of their tiny craft, sitting as it may be in total darkness, at the bottom of the ocean, alone, arouses horror not wonder.
More than any other onlooker perhaps, Gareth Russell, a Northern Irish historian and author of The Ship of Dreams, a book about the Titanic, has weighed the worth of such risk. “I was offered a place on that submarine a couple of years ago,” he says.
An artist’s rendering of the Titanic on the ocean floor.
“I did really consider it, because I wondered how I could justify being the historian who turned down the chance to see the Titanic.” More than that, he felt personally connected to the ship, because his great-grandfather had seen the ship in Belfast.
But in the end he said no.
“I’m not great with enclosed spaces, and this was my worst nightmare. It’s a treacherous dive.” Repeated successful trips may have dulled the peril, he suggests.
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“So many have happened that people have got to the stage where they think the risk isn’t as great.”
He says he can understand why people want to see the wreckage, even though no other ship has been more comprehensively documented.
“Part of it is the same rationale, to some degree, behind pilgrimages, and this idea that there is a link between physical and emotional proximity. Some people want to say ‘I saw the Titanic’, rather than seeing it in photographs or on screen.”
No wonder then that the missing sub, as well as OceanGate and the US Coastguard’s co-ordinated efforts to find it, have cemented the extraordinary grip the world’s most famous wreck retains on the worldwide imagination.
Now, 111 years after the sinking, the Titanic is a global industry, with enthusiasts travelling the world and paying a fortune for their interest.
As with going into space or climbing Mount Everest, these visitors to the bottom of the sea face a hefty price – $US250,000 ($368,000), in this case – for privileged access to a place few on Earth will ever see.
The Titanic leaves Southampton, England, on her maiden voyage in 1912.
Such dives to the depths lie at the elite end of a Titanic industry that encompasses seven permanent museums worldwide, including ones in Belfast, Cobh, Southampton, Missouri and Tennessee, as well as sundry books, documentaries and exhibitions.
It spawned the then-highest-grossing feature film of all time, which has made more than $US2.26 billion. The Wallace Hartley violin, famously played by the ship’s bandleader as it sank, sold at auction for £1.1 million.
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A hand-drawn plan of the ship, used during the enquiry into the sinking, sold for £195,000. A Facebook group, RMS Titanic Official, has more than 65,000 members, with a stated aim to “keep its history unsinkable”.
The reasons for this popularity are elusive. Other peacetime shipwrecks have had more casualties than the 1517 who went down with the Titanic. The MV Dona Paz, a passenger ferry, sank in 1987 with the loss of an estimated 4385 souls.
When the SS Sultana exploded on the Mississippi in 1865, it was with around 1800 lives.
Nor was the Titanic the most politically significant disaster: the sinking of the Lusitania changed the course of the 20th century by bringing the US into the First World War. Evidently something about the Titanic chimes with audiences worldwide.
Perhaps it is down to the circumstances of its sinking.
“It took two hours and 40 minutes to sink, which is long compared to most other wrecks,” says Russell.
“That time enabled people onboard to go through the process of dealing with death. You start with life, then there’s the assumption everything will be fine, then there’s the moment when everyone has to decide how they’ll respond to the challenge of dying. It plays out like a morality play, and gives people the opportunity to wonder how they would behave in similar circumstances.”
The Titanic Belfast museum agrees.
“The Titanic story continues to touch hearts and minds across the world 111 years after her tragic sinking,” it says in a statement.
“Having welcomed over seven million visitors to Titanic Belfast since opening in 2012, an enduring appeal of RMS Titanic is the human stories of those connected to the ship.”
Kentley adds that the sinking of the Titanic was an early global media event, after the invention of the radio.
Map showing where the Titanic sank in the northern Atlantic Ocean.Credit: Wikipedia
“The news of it was picked up by an amateur in New York, and quickly went around the world,” he says. “It was the media that pushed the story. Places like Southampton were devastated by it.”
There are obvious echoes with the unfolding crisis, which is being watched around the world while the five men trapped inside grapple with their fate.
Whatever has befallen the little submarine and its passengers, tourists will think twice about spending $US250,000 on visiting the wreck after this. One thing seems certain, whether they are rescued or not: the myth of the Titanic will grow.
Telegraph, London
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