Sinkable Read online

  Also by Daniel Stone

  The Food Explorer

  DUTTON

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2022 by Daniel Stone

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  DUTTON and the D colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Illustrations by Matthew Twombly

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  has been applied for.

  ISBN 9780593329375 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780593329399 (ebook)

  Cover design by Sarah Oberrender; Cover image by The Titanic Collection / UIG / Bridgeman Images

  book design by Laura K. Corless, adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed

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  For my grandparents, and theirs, too, who took ships over seas so that I can fly across them

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  1 Shipfall

  2 The Death and Birth of Great Ships

  3 The Movement from Order to Chaos

  4 Merely a Matter of Magnets

  5 Lungs the Size of Acorns

  6 I Regard the Titanic as Mine

  7 Bathtub Experiments

  8 Take All the Bodies and Treat Them with Respect

  9 People Think Sinking Ships Is Easy

  10 A Heifer Corralled in a Box Canyon

  11 All These Moths Drawn to the Same Flame

  12 Man Is Never Lost at Sea

  13 A Reddish Stain in the Mud

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Marine salvage: A science of vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive experiments and performed with instruments of problematic accuracy by persons of doubtful reliability and questionable mentality.

  —Captain Charles A. Bartholomew, U.S. Navy

  Author’s Note

  If I asked you to guess, a shot in the dark, how many shipwrecks sit at the bottom of the oceans as relics of accidents past, what would you say? I have some advantage in asking this question because for several years I have asked almost everyone I’ve met. All of human history, all of earth’s water, how many shipwrecks?

  Guesses range widely from very tiny to very big. But what they all have in common is that they are all too small. They are most underestimated by kids, who can’t be blamed; their education of early human sea travel begins with the relatively recent eras of Magellan, the Spanish Armada, the Nina and the Pinta and the still-missing Santa Maria. Maybe they’ve heard of the Titanic, but likely through the lens of Leonardo DiCaprio or, more likely, Celine Dion. Adults are wrong too, but they’re wrong by less. Most adults think of ships in the modern sense, such as the USS Arizona they saw in Pearl Harbor while on vacation or the Costa Concordia from the news a few years ago. Looking backward, our historic understanding of ships clings to a few historical nuclei: Captain Cook, Columbus, the Maine, Ernest Shackleton, the Lusitania, or, again, the Titanic.

  “Maybe a quarter million” was the highest estimate I ever heard, from a friend who is a U.S. marine and the kind of guy who spends a lot of time in naval museums. It wasn’t a bad guess, but when you account for all of human history and our planet’s mostly aquiferous surface, the number is substantially higher. According to a UNESCO estimate, the number of ships that sit in underwater graves, wasting away year after year, is an incredible three million.

  When the Titanic sank in 1912, it plunged an astounding two and a half miles and hit the seafloor at more than thirty miles per hour. Its ocean grave was so remote that its location remained a mystery until 1985, when a team that had the benefit of government-developed submarines and deepwater crafts was able to take some blurry snapshots. It took seventy-three years, almost an entire human life-span, to find the most illustrious and fascinating shipwreck of all time.

  This is the story of what happened after the night the ship sank—how the Titanic changed the world and how the world longed desperately to piece it back together.

  Shipwrecks have a habit of attracting colorful and unusual characters. Those characters tend to be overwhelmingly male and most often white—a reflection of a historically macho industry that runs on expensive machinery and huge sums of money. Many will tell you that they work in the most punishing environment on earth (true) and also that working in the deep sea is harder than working on Mars (possibly true). Yet just as many are armchair enthusiasts, amateurs, and white belts, whose sole credential is their obsession. They get drawn into races, fights, and elaborate lawsuits. The odd quirk that ships are typically female is a holdover from times when vessels and their wrecks could—and still can—stand in as full-blooded companions.

  In the process of writing, I interviewed dozens of historians, salvage professionals, wreck experts, and lawyers, people who earn their livelihoods drilling for oil, hunting for treasure, investigating accidents, and filming documentaries. There’s a common characteristic I noticed they share, perhaps best described as a polite but profound impatience for your crap. They have work to do, and they’ve seen more otherworldly stuff than you ever will. They’re usually under pressure from rich investors and impatient scientists, and they carry an enormous amount of risk managing equipment, timelines, and people’s lives.

  But every single one will eventually soften up and readily dish about the granddaddy of them all. In cultural lore, the Titanic is the wreck around which all others orbit. The same way a pop musician can’t escape the influence of the Beatles or Michael Jackson, shipwreckers can’t bypass the brightest star. In scientific terms, the Titanic embodies the waves of technological growth, failure, and advancement during its life-span above water, and relentless obsession and elaborate deep-sea engineering below.

  This is not, in the words of Walter Lord, who wrote A Night to Remember, the seminal volume on the Titanic’s final night, “another book about the Titanic.” This is a look at our oceans and the junk we’ve left in them. It is a yarn about the oddballs and misfits who devote their lives to wayward ships. And it is a deep dive into the waters of our planet and what lurks, in every sense, just below the surface.

  DANIEL STONE

  Santa Barbara, California

  April 2021

  Prologue

  When snow falls, the properties of water perform a delicate dance. Snowflakes fall like dominoes fall. A piece of dust forms a crystal, and the appearance of that crystal attracts more crystals until they form long dendrites around the speck of dust like ants around a piece of chocolate. As long as the growing snowflake remains lighter than air, it will float. But as soon as one extra crystal crosses the tipping point, the structure will succumb to gravity and fall.

  Snow tends to fall in places where other snow has already fallen. And even though every snowflake is different, they’re not as unique as we’ve been to
ld. They start as spheres and form tendrils to diffuse heat. Cold temperatures produce flakes that look like bullets or needles. Extra-cold weather is when you find the classic shape of a six-sided prism, or the fernlike crystal with six radiating branches. For some reason, there are always six.

  It was probably this form of fernlike snow that fell one day, fifteen thousand years ago, on the frozen ice sheets of Greenland. The landmass was already covered in ice two miles thick. With time, the fresh flakes descended into the ice, hidden from daylight and compressed by pressure to a third of their original size.

  Fitting with geology, thousands of years passed and nothing happened. Snow that started as flakes was transformed to dense glacial ice as it moved quickly, about four miles per year, toward the west coast of Greenland. Ice weakens as it nears the coast, because every day, particularly in the summer, enormous walls of ice flake off the glacier and fall into the ocean.

  This is how ocean icebergs form. But it was one particular iceberg that fell in the summer of 1909 that would drift toward infamy. Around too briefly to have a name, this iceberg was more than two miles wide and one hundred feet tall at its birth, big enough to dwarf the Colosseum in Rome and all the pyramids put together, at least before it started melting. It would tower over the largest steamship ever conceived, which was also formed in that summer of 1909.

  At the time, humans knew little about the behavior of icebergs, except that most melted somewhere in the Arctic Circle. John Thomas Towson, a scientist devoted to ship navigation who wrote a book called Practical Information on the Deviation of the Compass, observed in 1857 that icebergs were no different—and no softer—than rocks formed over millennia by time and pressure. Towson knew that icebergs posed an existential danger to the wooden hulls of nineteenth-century ships. Steel hulls were invincible, he said, but that was based on assumption, not experience. Such an extreme number of icebergs traveled south through the east strait of the Grand Banks in eastern Newfoundland that in 1912 the U.S. Coast Guard nicknamed the area “iceberg alley.”

  For three years the icy mass bobbed and weaved in Arctic waters. At one point, it traveled north and spent the summer of 1910 farther toward the north pole. Then it caught the Labrador current, which carries freezing water south. Most icebergs melt within their first year. A few last two. Only a handful last three because, eventually, the Labrador current meets the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, which acts as an oceanic microwave. Only 1 percent of northern hemisphere icebergs survive this desert zone, and finally, only one in several thousand would make it to 41 degrees north, the same latitude as New York City and directly in the path of transatlantic ships.

  Icebergs had struck ships as long as there had been ships to strike, but few icebergs had been as lucky as the one that felled the largest passenger liner ever built, particularly because, on April 14, 1912, that iceberg was nearly gone. After three years adrift, the icy mass likely had one week to live, two at most. As icebergs melt from the bottom, they grow top-heavy and flip, followed by more erosion and more flipping, until eventually, when they’ve been reduced to the size of a basketball, they’re constantly flipping until there’s nothing left.

  Any other week and a ship nobody believed could sink would complete its maiden voyage and turn around for its ho-hum second one. Any other day and the iceberg would’ve been a mere fraction of its dangerous size. Any other hour and it would’ve been hundreds of feet away. But the ship waited for nothing, and the ice knew nothing to wait for, and the ingenuity of humans at the dawn of modern invention succumbed, rather incredibly, to the force of several crushed-up snowflakes as hard as rock.

  Chapter 1

  SHIPFALL

  When Ok-Khun Chamnan, a diplomat from Siam on his way to Portugal, saw seawater filling the hull of the ship he was traveling on, he knew he and his fellow passengers were done for. In April of 1686, the ship, its name lost to history, sailed too close to the rocky shallows of Cape Agulhas off southern Africa. Ocean waves lifted the ship and slammed it on the rocks. The hull cracked on all sides as it was raised up and again plunked down hard. Chamnan watched the crew cut down the masts and throw the guns overboard, the resignation of a lost cause. But it was too late.

  “The water [was] entering in abundance,” recalled another survivor. Water filled the first deck, followed by the gunner’s room, to the captain’s cabin, and finally to the upper decks. “Our ship at last sunk quite down into the Sea,” the survivor wrote. “It would be a hard task to represent the astonishment, terror and consternation that seiz’d upon every Heart in the Ship. Nothing now was heard but cries, sighs and groans.”

  Many passengers aboard the ship died. But several lived, including Chamnan, who for the rest of his life told an embellished tale of the experience to every willing audience. Crawling over rocks and fierce seas, he would say, the survivors made it to shore, where, wet and naked, they found nothing but more rocks and rain. Wild animals nipped at their heels. They wandered for over a month, eating lizards, running from lions, and drinking from puddles. Eventually, they made it to the Dutch trading station at the Cape of Good Hope and were rescued.

  This tale, one of the earliest first-person accounts of a shipwreck, was preserved for centuries because it was written down. But there’s little about this story that makes it unique. To be battered and beaten at sea on a sinking ship is a condition not special to any era. Boarding an oceangoing vessel in the seventeenth century brought the risk of danger and death, the same as it did in the century before and every one to follow. What all ships have in common, from a three-hundred-year-old merchant ship to the most modern aircraft carrier, is that, eventually, they fail.

  Flooding is the most common reason ships sink. Ships float because they’re lighter than the weight of the water they displace. But violent waves and a flooded deck can shift the balance, even slightly, and make a ship that was once lighter than water suddenly heavier. Every year, as many as thirty large ships go missing at the hands of large waves, some as tall as sixty feet, to say little of the uncounted sailboats, yachts, and leisure pontoons that sink every day. Nearly all escape even a passing mention in the news. “Imagine the headlines if even a single 747 slipped off the map with all its passengers and was never heard from again,” writes Susan Casey, a chronicler of the world’s largest waves, which, to this day, still swallow the most advanced steel vessels.

  After flooding, sinkings are the frequent result of ground strikes, or, less often, collisions with other ships. For a long time, this was intentional. A ship’s design—oblong with pointed ends—was for it not only to swiftly cut through the water but also to ram other ships at their weak center. Before cannons, guns, or even catapults that were reliably accurate, naval battles were decided by the strategy of who could more quickly position their ship in an offensive position and row like hell.

  For every ship that hits an iceberg or strikes another vessel, there are thousands more that run into rocks or get moored irreversibly in mud. Some reef systems are especially punishing, like the Seven Stones Reef off the west coast of England, or the Kenn Reefs east of Australia, or the rocky straits of Lombok and Makassar in Southeast Asia. Each has claimed thousands of ships, and because they sit in shallow reef systems, they’re especially popular among wreck divers.

  The damage can be mutual. Trying to measure how many ships scrape the ocean bottom is like asking how many cars tap bumpers while parallel parking. Unless the damage is severe, the only witnesses are fish and whales, who must have their own feelings about ship strikes. Usually it’s not the well-known reefs that are the most dangerous but the rocky outcrops in unassuming waters that prey on unsuspecting ships. In the span of eight days in August of 2010, a cargo vessel and two container ships all ran aground in the coastal waters of India, causing two hundred containers to fall into the sea and creating an oil spill visible for miles. Even a ship with a delicate name like Belle Rose can be ruthless. In 2016, an error blamed on the cr
ew caused the destruction of seven acres of coral reef off Malapascua Island in the central Philippines, the world’s top habitat for thresher sharks.

  Then there are the wrecks caused by imbalance, a dull demise but still deeply frightening because of its suddenness. All floating objects have what’s known as a metacenter, which can be pictured as a vertical line drawn upward through the center of the ship. The metacenter indicates a ship’s center of gravity, which shifts with every wave. Container ships have to factor imbalance into how they’re loaded and how they move. Stacking containers too high increases a ship’s side profile, a measure known as its windage, which can be like driving a semitruck through a windy canyon. Pushed too far by a monstrous swell or a gust, the ship topples over. Accidents of imbalance can be embarrassing for captains because they’re often caused by poor loading or shoddy engineering. It took Sweden more than three hundred years to laugh about its most famous wreck, the Vasa. The ship was so asymmetrically designed that a gust of wind during its maiden voyage in 1628 caused a list to one side, which filled the lower gunports with water, which was all it took to sink the Vasa.

  One of the most bizarre phenomena is when an ordinary-looking ship sinks for no reason. This is sometimes the result of liquefaction, a process that occurs when solid cargo turns to liquid due to the vibration of the engine. You might imagine carrying a bucket of mud that jiggles as water rises up, and how you’d be knocked off-balance by the sloshing. Landlubber truckers are familiar with this principle. Carrying solids is easy, but if they break suddenly while moving a dozen tons of oil or glue, it’ll slosh forward and yank the truck back. It’s worse for ships, which get pulled in all directions. In May of 2005, the Hui Long, a midsize cargo vessel in benign conditions off the coast of Sumatra, was carrying fine-grained minerals and began to list without warning as the cargo began to shift. Within thirty minutes, the list was so steep the captain gave orders to abandon ship.