THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 16, 1996 TAG: 9610160001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: GLENN ALLEN SCOTT
LENGTH: 84 lines
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
- From ``The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the Titanic)'' by Thomas Hardy.
The sinking of the RMS (Royal Mail Service) Titanic in the North Atlantic on the night of April 14-15, 1912, was the catastrophe that was never supposed to happen. Artifacts from the sunken vessel and the technology and the personnel mobilized to retrieve them and explore the wreckage are the focus of Titanic: The Expedition, which Nauticus, The National Maritime Center in Norfolk, is presenting from Nov. 27 through March 31.
Titanic - 882 feet 9 inches long and weighing 46,328 gross tons - was the greatest ship the world had ever seen. Built by Harland & Wolff shipyard in England for the White Star Line, Titanic was billed as ``unsinkable,'' the safest vessel afloat.
But sink she did, on her maiden ocean voyage, after colliding with an iceberg. Not head on - an accident she might well have survived, but in a fateful sideswiping of the drifting mountain of ice resulting from the helmsman's attempt to avoid a crash. The ice ripped a fatal gash in Titanic's brittle steel hull. Two and a half hours later, the majestic passenger liner slid bow first into the cold waters, settling on the seabed 2.5 miles below the waves. Of 1,320 passengers and 908 crew members, survivors numbered 705. The headline-making event and its aftermath shocked millions on two continents and elsewhere.
Writer Walter Lord titled his 1950s best-selling book about Titanic and her doomed voyage A Night to Remember. The movie derived from Lord's work bore the same title.
Aptly. The disaster is etched deeply in the collective memory of the West. More than 300 books and thousands of articles and stories relate the Titanic story. Novelist, critic, poet John Updike's review of a new nonfiction work, Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster by Steven Biel, and two novels involving the liner appears in the Oct. 14 New Yorker magazine.
Titanic's grip on the popular imagination was strengthened over the years by at least seven major motion pictures and numerous documentary films, with more to come. A new blockbuster movie, ``Titanic,'' is projected for release next summer. A play titled ``Titanic'' is scheduled for Broadway.
The Discovery channel Sunday night telecast a documentary about the RMS Titanic Inc.'s recently failed effort to recover an 15-ton, 20-by-24-foot portion of Titanic's hull with lifting balloons filled with diesel fuel. A full-size rendition of the section will be part of the Nauticus display. The section was brought to within 210 feet of the ocean's surface before slipping back to the bottom.
That was a bitter disappointment to RMS Titanic, Inc., which in 1994 was granted salvor-in-possession rights to the Titanic wreck by the U.S. District Court in Norfolk. Not disappointed are the many people who believe that Titanic, broken in two, should be left in peace, as a memorial to the more than 2,300 human beings who perished.
No remains of the dead passengers and crew exist; the sea consumed them long ago, bones and all. But artifacts abound. RMS Titanic, Inc.'s submersible Nautile recovered about 4,000 of them at the wreck site during three research and recovery expeditions, in 1987, 1993 and 1994. Displayed for a year at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, Titanic objects drew a record-breaking 750,000 visitors.
The 1996 RMS Titanic Inc., expedition, even more than the Titanic artifacts, will be spotlighted by the Nauticus presentation. Norfolk City Hall looks to the exhibit to boost the science and technology center's attendance, which continue to be below original projections. Nauticus' numbers surely will go up.
Meanwhile, Nauticus is turning out to be more than a unique maritime education//recreation complex containing 150 interactive exhibits related to the seas, the Academy Award-nominee ``Living Sea'' documentary, aquaria and the free-to-all Hampton Roads Naval Museum. The first of what is expected to be many cruise ships recently tied up at Nauticus' pier, where Navy and Coast Guard ships, open to the public, also park. Nauticus also is the setting for more and more festive, civic and community events.
After a sluggish start, activity at Nauticus is accelerating and the institution is gaining status as an enriching component of the waterfront. Titanic: The Expedition promises to further enhance Nauticus' appeal and value.
MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot. by CNB