Sinkable, p.3
Sinkable, page 3
Help arrived on account of telegraph messages that grew increasingly frantic as the waterline rose. The first call was “CQD,” which had evolved from the earlier radio call CQ to precede messages to everyone in range. But in the early years of the century, the British code CQD conflicted with the American distress code of NC and the German code of SOE. The Italians, meanwhile, used SSSDDD. None of these letters meant anything or were acronyms for longer phrases. And neither did the eventual international replacement, which had been decided at the urgent 1906 International Radio Telegraphic Conference that agreed a standard was needed. From then on, ships in distress would use SOS, chosen for its distinct mix of short and long bursts, and not to mean “save our ship,” “save our souls,” or any other convenient phrases retroactively attributed to the call.
The death toll would have been higher if not for the telegraph. The technology had its limits—just three hundred miles in daylight and a little more than double at night thanks to radiation changes in the atmosphere—but to anyone who had started their life in the previous century, this was no less exciting than teleporting one’s own body to a faraway ship. Prior to this, the best way two ships could communicate was by colored flags or bursts of light, but even the clearest visual cues were quickly obscured by the curvature of the earth. The giddiness over the telegraph led it to be quickly trivialized. The way the system worked, with a telegraph blast from one ship received by all passing boats, was most useful for matters of safety and navigation. But for the rest of the time, first-class passengers were permitted to use the system to send greetings to all passing boats, and they did so with messages as simple as “Hello!” and “Good day!” No one had yet figured out a separation of channels that might divide superficial small talk from operational guidance.
In the days after the disaster, more limits were put on the telegraph based on how it performed in a crisis. The breaking-news announcement that would wash over the entire world started as a ship-to-ship game of telephone that was predictably distorted by the time word arrived in New York. The Carpathia, traveling from New York to modern-day Croatia before rerouting to the wreck site, had sent the first reports of the Titanic in danger before its officers knew just how devastating its predicament was. The message was picked up by radio operators on ships as far as five hundred miles away, who had no idea in the early hours of April 15 whether the Titanic sustained minor damage and was being towed to port, as Carpathia had initially reported, or if something much worse had happened.
Meanwhile, the stunted telegraph messages began to build a wave that would crest over the entire world. In the Associated Press offices in New York, a city editor named Charles Crane sat with his feet on his desk reading a novel by H. G. Wells when a colleague bolted into the newsroom waving a wire message that read, “Reported Titanic struck iceberg.” That was correct, but almost everything that came next wasn’t. Almost all newspapers reported an erroneous account of the event, from word that the ship had survived and was on its way to Halifax to reports that everyone on board was presumed dead.
Like any breaking-news story, the coverage followed a well-worn formula. First, there was the pinning down of details of what happened, who was affected, and when. Then there were the human-interest stories about the lives lost and the final moments of those swallowed by the sea. And then, predictably, the finger-pointing.
No one—not the reporters covering the story, not the White Star Line executives who would soon be answering for their mistakes, and not the survivors on the Carpathia or the crowds of rubberneckers and looky-loos who met them in New York—could imagine the oversize, century-long legacy awaiting the Titanic. The coal workers, department store managers, and housewives who read about all of it in the newspapers never realized that the events of that moment and their place in the story would reverberate for decades.
Lost in the fervor of the human element of the story, however, was the central character in the whole tragedy. In those early days when the ship was settling into its underwater tomb, the mangled mess of steel and wood creaked with the current and shuffled until it became snagged on something and was sucked into the mud. Resigned to its fate, the Titanic released the final bubbles of air still locked inside. And when the last one rose up and popped on the surface, the ship was dead and its spirit lay dormant, waiting for the day it’d be seized by a new generation.
* * *
He’s probably still alive,” my wife said one sunny day in the fall of 2019. She had grown tired of me talking about Doug Woolley and his endless contradictions. He was a man savvy but unsuccessful, widely known but with no credentials, full of promise but with little to show for it. He was also an anomaly to track down: everywhere in old clippings and yet nowhere to be found. If he had disappeared, even evidence of his disappearance had vanished, leaving me lying awake at night wondering if Woolley ever existed at all.
I knew he had. I assumed that Woolley had met the fate of almost every other wreck hunter from the early era of wreck hunting, the mid-twentieth century, when bursts in technology and the end of World War II opened the oceans to those hungry to explore. Many didn’t even need to leave home, just to revel in the rush of headlines announcing that someone on a boat somewhere had found something. A new species of whale, a new undersea volcano, or, best of all, an old ship from the Romans, the Vikings, or a Spanish galleon filled with gold. And, of course, any news about the most famous wreck of all. Obsession has been known to eat a man alive, so having seen no trace of Woolley for the past decade, I came to the natural conclusion that if he didn’t finish his quest, then his quest finished him.
And then I caught a lead. While digging one day through a newspaper archive, I found an old article from 1998 that announced Woolley had written a short autobiography called One Man’s Dream. Like everything in his life, Woolley produced, edited, and marketed the book himself with hardly any help and no experience in book publishing. And like everything else I knew about Woolley, he had better luck than one would expect. At the bottom of the article, he asked the newspaper to include his home address and urged readers to send him a check for £10 if they wanted a copy. That was the only way he marketed the book.
I looked up the address and saw there was a store next door that sold auto parts. I called the store and asked a thoroughly confused British auto mechanic if an old man named Doug Woolley still lived nearby.
“You mean the ship guy?” he said in a thick accent.
I was quiet a moment and said I’d been trying to get in touch with him and could he deliver a message?
“Call me back tomorrow,” he said.
When I did, I got another guy on the phone, and he offered to go to Woolley’s apartment and knock on the door. He had some success locating Woolley because he told me to call another guy, who told me to call another guy. Five people later I was texting with a guy named Gary, who identified himself as Woolley’s “associate.” Going through so many layers seemed like what you’d expect if you wanted to speak to the pope. It reminded me of an old trick a friend of mine once used to secure a dinner reservation: he called a restaurant pretending to be his own assistant.
“We’ve looked into you,” Gary told me the first time we talked. “Doug wants to meet you. Can you come to London?”
As a reporter, I had interviewed politicians and actors. I had investigated sensitive criminal cases and once even met a source in a garage. But something about this made me feel nervous, even intimidated. Doug Woolley had gatekeepers, many layers of them, and I was invited behind the curtain. Was this the seasoned technique of a man building mystery and intrigue with sleight of hand and perceived exclusivity? Or were all these people the infrastructure of an older person who needed extra help?
I booked a flight to the UK. Weeks later, I would realize that my timing had been extremely lucky, both in the trajectory of Woolley’s long and roundabout life and amid the world heading into a public health crisis. Even stranger, I would discover that not only was I looking for Woolley, but in a way, he was looking for me, too.
Chapter 2
THE DEATH AND BIRTH OF GREAT SHIPS
Even in the world of shipwrecks, where there is no shortage of buffs, obsessives, and wackadoodles, Doug Woolley was in a class of his own.
Few things mattered deeply to Woolley, who, as a boy, received repeated lessons that there was nothing notable about the world or even his place in it. One summer when he was a boy, Woolley spent weeks making a model of a double-decker bus out of ice cream lids to be displayed at a nearby festival. On the day of the festival, Woolley came down with a case of pneumonia and was in the hospital. The bus won several awards and appeared in the newspaper, but Woolley had been erased as the maker of it. His mother, uninterested in consolation prizes or encouragement, told Woolley that his luck was consistently and irreparably bad. “At this rate, you’ll never get your name in the newspaper,” she told him. She saw her son as a boy of eccentric demeanor and interests, destined for a life in obscurity.
A parent’s lack of belief in one’s potential would be debilitating for most children. But for Woolley, it pushed him into an elaborate inner world where he pulled the strings and no one could convince him he was wrong. The way young girls played with dolls, Woolley fiddled with figurines of soldiers and ships, staging elaborate battles that progressed with intricate dialogue of long-held relationships and grudges. “The characters I created were my best friends,” Woolley later said, content with his central place in his own imagination.
A bleak turn of events was a stroke of luck for Woolley. As Britain fought in World War II, Doug’s mother was sent to work in a munitions factory, which left Woolley to live with his grandfather, George Woolley. George, also known as Pops, was magic, Doug told people, part mad scientist and part magician who knew the formula to enchant a child. Stuck inside for much of the war that threatened the buildings around Shropshire, where they lived, he listened as George told him tales of Rumpelstiltskin and Cock of the North. One story especially moved Doug. Most people had heard of the Titanic, but George lit Doug’s imagination aflame by divulging that two of George’s sisters, Woolley’s great-aunts Sally and Ellen Woolley, had bought tickets to sail on the ship bound for New York. Before Doug could wonder about the fate of his relatives, his grandfather snapped his fingers as if to say, “But wait!” The night before they were set to leave, both aunts had the same dream about disaster striking the ship, and based on their premonition alone, they decided to skip the sailing.
In a final flourish, George said their last-minute change of mind came too late to retrieve their trunks, which were already loaded in the ship’s hold. The women escaped with their lives, but nearly all of their earthly belongings, including their valuable jewelry, now sat on the floor of the Atlantic. How they recovered and where they went next never came up, and so Doug never knew.
By the time Woolley turned twelve, this boyhood fascination with the Titanic had extended to all ships, old and new. The stories could wind Woolley into a frenzy so deep he might’ve drowned in it. By 1955, his passion for sunken ships was so strong that any nautical document, photograph, book, or captain’s hat that he could get his hands on, he kept as though they were part of a grand web of conspiracy. He was engrossed not with the routine fact that ships sank but with how they sank and what happened to them in the endless abyss of Davy Jones’s locker, the mythological spirit of the deep believed to preside over the remains of sunken ships and dead sailors.
Woolley had trouble shaking the details of the event. Here was an irrefutable link that infused his own blood into one of the great seismic events of history. In the autopsy of how a lifelong obsession begins, he was hooked early. He may have been born two decades too late to witness what he considered the defining moment of the twentieth century, but he would witness everything about it still to come, because much of it he would engineer himself.
* * *
The scramble for lifeboats is one of the main focal points of the Titanic story. Those who survived could tell their own tales of desperation, heroics, and searing cold. But those who died gave birth to an early question mark of the incident. There was general mayhem, several survivors reported, and a scramble in the water that grew quieter with time. But beyond that, it was sensitive not to probe any further.
The question of how people behave when faced with existential crisis on a sinking ship was such a mystery that, in 1963, a young British scientist named William Keatinge decided that the best way to find out would simply be to ask. Keatinge was a research fellow at Pembroke College in Oxford and was obsessed with how quickly victims of a shipwreck died when they were stranded in the open ocean. It was a hard thing to study in simulation or to observe in real time, but the perfect opportunity arose two days before Christmas that year when a ship called the TSMS Lakonia sank about five hundred miles off the coast of Portugal.
During World War II, the Dutch government used the ship to shuttle Allied soldiers, and afterward sold it to a Greek company that converted the military cabins into luxury staterooms for cruising up and down the eastern Atlantic from England to the Canary Islands near Morocco. Approaching the end of its working life, the Lakonia was carrying more than one thousand passengers and crew on its unexpectedly final voyage, a Christmas cruise in 1963. A fire broke out in the hair salon at about ten o’clock in the evening. Most people escaped in lifeboats, but the remaining emergency rafts were damaged by the flames, which left about one hundred fifty people with no choice but to help themselves to a drink at the ship’s unattended bar and then jump into the Atlantic.
It was the jumpers who interested Keatinge. Most succumbed to hypothermia, the clinical state when one’s body loses heat faster than it can produce it, like a punctured rowboat taking on more water than can be bailed out. Hypothermia happens twenty-five times faster in water than in air, and in cold water it has been known to occur in as little as fifteen minutes.
But miraculously, about two dozen jumpers maintained sufficient body heat for several hours until help arrived. Wasting no time, Keatinge sent questionnaires to the survivors’ homes and hospital rooms. He asked them to overlook the insensitive timing of his request for the sake of science and fed their egos by asking for “advice” that they could pass along to future shipwreck victims. The survivors who responded said they swam around in circles to keep warm. Some decided to put on extra clothing before jumping. One man reported he took his pants off but kept his coat on.
Keatinge concluded that those who fared best wore heavy clothes and swam vigorously enough to keep warm but not so much as to exhaust themselves. But beyond these small measures, the ultimate determinant of the fate of the Lakonia’s victims (and most shipwreck victims) was not their own ingenuity but the speed of their rescuers. A body will become hypothermic even in warm water given enough time.
Luckily, four ships arrived within five hours to pluck people out of the water. A group of American C-54s flew low over the smoky wreck site and dropped flares, rafts, and food to victims who were spread over several miles. Eventually the lifeboats were picked up and the floating corpses were collected. The last person to be rescued was the Lakonia’s captain, who was still clinging to a smoky piece of debris moments before it finally went down.
* * *
Among all the diversity of shipwrecks on earth, there are several broad categories. The reference point for most wrecks is their sinking date, such as the British merchant ship British Army and the Chinese Tek Sing, which sank on opposite sides of the planet on the same day: February 6, 1822. Others are separated by purpose. Warships are different from cargo ships, even though, in the case of the Brazilian battleship Aquidabã and one of the earliest refrigerated ocean liners, the RMS Magdalena, they sit on the same stretch of seabed off the coast of Brazil.
People who study shipwrecks tend to sort them most often by geography. The lion’s share of World War I wrecks are in the Atlantic, while World War II wrecks are split between the Atlantic and the Pacific. But you don’t have to go far or deep to find one. Most people on earth are at any moment less than one hundred miles from at least one wreck. There are wrecks in every ocean and every lake. There are abandoned wrecks lying in the desert of Namibia and under cornfields in Kansas. The streets of San Francisco are built upon hundreds of wrecks that carried gold prospectors to California and were promptly abandoned. There’s even a wreck in the middle of New York City. After the Twin Towers fell on September 11, investigators found under the rubble a shipwreck of mysterious origin. They dated the ship to 1773 by studying the rings in its wood planks and surmised it was probably an old merchant vessel carried on land and turned into fill.
Not all wrecks are worth such forensics. Most aren’t. For every mysterious Spanish empire wreck carrying valuables like gold or teakwood, there are thousands of humdrum cargo vessels and old schooners from unsung explorers now appreciated only by fish. Not far from where I live in California, the Santa Barbara Channel has claimed hundreds of exploration ships, cargo vessels, and fishing boats that got stuck on rocks or were jostled by waves or caught fire and sank. Virtually all of them are more interesting as wrecks than they ever were afloat.
