Sinkable by Daniel Stone

Author:Daniel Stone [Stone, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

PEOPLE THINK SINKING SHIPS IS EASY

In late 1978, John Grattan, the senior Royal Navy diving expert, was the odds-on favorite for the man who would find the Titanic. His detailed theories about the ship’s status on the seafloor conveyed an advanced understanding of the complexities of the wreck. Grattan believed the Titanic was exactly twenty-two miles from the location given as its final coordinates. The precision of his declaration suggested immense confidence, and without anyone able to present compelling counterevidence, Grattan’s speculation was as good as fact.

Grattan also had a track record of success. Several years prior, he commanded the HMS Reclaim, a British salvage ship that combed the Irish Sea to recover the wreckage of a crashed Aer Lingus plane. Not long after, he recovered a downed helicopter in the northern waters off Norway. Both operations used sonar crafts and underwater cameras, which earned him technical credentials.

He also had experience searching for one of the most elusive and horrifying shipwrecks of all time. The cargo vessel General Grant had been sailing from Melbourne to London in 1866 when it hit cliffs in the notoriously perilous waters south of New Zealand. Most of the eighty-three passengers died, but the story of the General Grant grew darker in its aftermath. Thirteen passengers fought fierce waters and made it to a remote island, where they lived as castaways and survived on potatoes and seals for a year and a half in some of the most punishing weather on earth. Eighteen months later, only ten remained when a sealing brig passing by saw their frantic signals and took them to New Zealand.

The General Grant was worth salvaging not because of the toll of human lives but because it was rumored to be holding at least twenty-seven hundred ounces of gold, worth, in today’s currency, more than $5 million. Search and salvage attempts began just two months after the survivors were rescued in 1868 and continued until 1916, when scavengers stopped trying. After more than a dozen ships had visited the site and divers swam more than forty nautical miles around the area and returned empty-handed, treasure hunters mostly gave up.

Half a century later, Grattan gave it another shot, and in 1975, he actually found it—or at least he found something. He returned to England with pieces of mid-nineteenth-century wood, bent metal, and what seemed like shards of glass that he believed to be from the General Grant. Notably, he found no gold. Later surveys revealed that Grattan’s claim of the General Grant was actually a French ship called the Anjou, which wrecked in 1905, likely while looking for the General Grant as well. To this day, the wreck and its gold are still waiting to be found.

Several years later, Grattan’s résumé and his interest in the Titanic caught the attention of a millionaire pharmaceutical tycoon named James Goldsmith, who, upon meeting Grattan, agreed to finance an underwater survey at the exact site Grattan believed he would find the Titanic. Goldsmith’s interest was partly for the sake of scientific inquiry, but mostly as an investment in media and marketing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.