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The questions without hard answers still persist.
Could the Californian have responded in time and saved the poor souls of Titanic? Or was she too distant to reach the stricken liner before she sank? The controversy rages. There are revisionists who believe the lights seen by Titanic’s officers during the sinking came from a sailing ship, called Samson, that was engaged in illegal seal-fishing. Mistaking the flares for a government patrol boat out of Halifax, the crew of Samson fled the scene out of fear of being arrested. They didn’t find out about their part in the tragedy until almost a month later.
What became of Carpathia and Californian, the two ships forever linked together in one of the sea’s great disasters? Were they scrapped at the end of their shipping careers? Or do they lie in solitude beneath the sea?
In a strange historical coincidence, they were both torpedoed by German U-boats in World War I. One lies in the Mediterranean, the other in the Atlantic, but exactly where?
To find keys to their final resting places, I went directly to the most knowledgeable source, Ed Kamuda of the Titanic Historical Society in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts. Ed sent me not only charts showing the approximate positions of the wrecks but also reports of the sinkings.
The S.S. Californian was torpedoed on November 11, 1915, off Cape Matapan in the Mediterranean Sea, thirty miles from the coast of Greece. She slipped under the sea at 7:45 in the morning while on a voyage from Saloniki to Marseilles. She had been sailing as a troopship, but fortunately she was empty when she was struck by a single torpedo. Most of the crew escaped, and a French patrol boat took her under tow. But later in the afternoon, the persistent captain of the U-boat threw another torpedo at her, and she sank in thirteen thousand feet of water.
I scratched Californian off my wish list. The reported position of the sinking given by the ship’s officers, the patrol boat, and the U-boat captain was not a good match. The site was quite vague. This is understandable, though. It’s hard to take a sun sighting with a sextant — these were the days before LORAN and GPS — while a disaster is going on around you. You can’t operate on luck alone, however, and searching the seafloor for a shipwreck lying over two and a half miles deep within a two-hundred-mile search grid, and operating strictly on guesswork, is certain folly.
So I left the Californian, along with her legacy of what-might-have-been, alone in the depths.
The Carpathia was a different story. Here we stood a fighting chance of finding her. That’s all I ever ask. If the odds are a hundred or fifty to one, forget it. But I’m a sucker for a ten-toone bet. Perhaps that’s why the red carpet is always out for Cussler in Las Vegas and at Indian casinos. I simply give my money to the croupier and dealer, then walk away. Why waste time suffering the agony of losing? It’s much simpler doing it my way.
I learned that Carpathia had been torpedoed by U-55 on the morning of July 17, 1918, while sailing as part of a convoy carrying 225 military passengers and crew. The U-boat pumped two torpedoes into her, instantly killing five men in the engine room. Amazingly, Carpathia remained afloat. Captain William Prothero gave the order to abandon ship and lower the lifeboats. Impatient to finish the job, the U-boat’s commander sent a third torpedo into the battered liner. Ten minutes later, she went down. Interestingly, Lusitania sank in eighteen minutes after a single torpedo strike and lies just forty miles west of Carpathia.
Again we were confronted with conflicting position reports of the Carpathia’s sinking. The H.M.S. Snowdrop, the ship that rescued the 225 survivors, gave one position while the officer from Carpathia gave another one 4 miles away. The U-boat’s commander put the sinking 6 miles north of the others. Admiralty charts showed a wreck in the general vicinity, about 4 miles from Carpathia’s last visual sighting, but it failed to coincide with the other sightings. The search grid now worked out to a lengthy area 12 miles by 12 miles, or a box covering 144 square miles.
The dilemma never ends. This wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought.
About this time, Keith Jessup contacted me. He is the legendary British diver who found and directed the salvage operations of the H.M.S. Edinburgh, the British cruiser sunk in the Baltic Sea during World War II with millions in Russian gold aboard. More than ninety percent of the gold was brought up by divers living in a decompression tank eight hundred feet deep.
During our conversation, I asked Keith if he knew anybody with a boat that I might charter to search for Carpathia. He replied that his son Graham was in the shipwreck survey business and would be delighted to join in and oversee the search. Graham and I hit it off, and plans were under way to form an expedition, funded by me and directed by Graham through his company, Argosy International. I would have given my left arm to lead it myself, but I was buried in work, my wife Barbara was suffering serious health problems, and negotiations were under way to sell my books to Hollywood. As much as I would have enjoyed participating, there was simply too much hanging over my head to leave the homestead in search of an old shipwreck.
Graham chartered a survey boat called Ocean Venture, skippered by an experienced seaman named Gary Goodyear. After loading the remote operating vehicle (ROV) on board to take underwater video and photos, the ship and crew cast off during the middle of April from Penzance, England, the town made famous by Gilbert and Sullivan.
The weather was not kind, and it was a rough trip to the search area in the North Atlantic off southern Ireland. Once on-site, they began to run survey lines in a box between the positions given by Carpathia, Snowdrop, and U-55, using a forward-seeking sonar that sent out sweeping arcs ahead of the ship and a sidescan sonar that threw out signals to both sides of the boat to detect any objects rising from the seafloor. The sonar units were backed up with a magnetometer to detect magnetic anomalies.
On the second day, the forward sonar turned up a target. They had a wreck with the approximate dimensions of Carpathia located almost seven miles from her last reported position. The sidescan sonar showed a sunken vessel that appeared to be lying upside down with scattered debris along her hull, a common situation with ships that invert on the way down.
With great anticipation and excitement, the crew prepared to explore the wreck. At 550 feet, the depth was too great for divers, so the crew prepared to deploy the ROV and its cameras to examine the wrecks. There were high hopes that it was indeed Carpathia. The weather was choppy and the waves high for such an operation. With the forecast calling for storms, they rushed to shoot the video and head for harbor before the seas turned uglier.
Captain Goodyear positioned Ocean Venture over the wreck site. To minimize the length of cable between the ship and the ROV and to reduce the effects of a strong current, they employed a tether management system. Along with the ROV, a cage is lowered near the wreck with a winch that reels out a shorter length of cable to prevent the vehicle from bouncing around and becoming entangled in the wreckage.
Unfortunately, at this point, Graham jumped the gun and made the a
Not so.
The video cameras revealed a large wreck similar to Carpathia lying atop her crushed superstructure, rudder and propellers rising toward the surface like grotesque fingered hands. The first tip-off came from the propellers. They were four-bladed, and Carpathia’s were known to have been three-bladed. Her length was also a hundred feet short.