Today, as you are doubtless aware, is the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic. What else could I possibly write about? I will say, the commercialization of this disaster irks me greatly, especially the re-release of the 1997 movie. But I can't be too harsh. People have been fascinated by the doomed liner since it sank in 1912. In fact, the first film about it was released less than a month after the disaster. "Saved from the Titanic" starred Dorothy Gibson, a movie star who was actually a survivor of the wreck.
I had originally planned to write about the victims or the ship itself, but I've changed my mind. Those stories are everywhere right now and I could never pick just one or two stories to tell.
Have you ever wondered who owns the Titanic?
It seems obvious, at first glance. It was built and owned originally by the White Star Line. The White Star Line is no longer in existence, because it merged with the Cunard Line in 1934. The Cunard Line later merged with the Carnival Line. So Carnival owns it, right? Nope. When White Star sold itself to Cunard, the Titanic had been lost for years and was considered unrecoverable. The deal with Cunard was quite specific, and the lost liner was not one of the ships sold.
Perhaps the insurance company and underwriters? Well, the ship was insured for £1 million by Willis Faber & Co. The underwriters (investors, essentially) were mainly seven large insurance companies who, together, owned 38% of the ship. At least 70 smaller investors own the remaining 62%. It would be impossible to trace all the descendants and determine each share.
Besides, that is only for the physical hull of the ship. What about the belongings of 2223 people on board? Some belongings were insured, some not. Thousands of artifacts have been pulled up, so it is a very tricky thing. Personal items, if insured, belong to the insurance company. If not, they belong to the heirs of the owner.
The ONLY WAY in which the wreck of the Titanic could legally become a free-for-all is if anyone connected with the ship had made a statement of abandonment. But no one ever did.
Admiralty law (followed by the US and Britain) is extremely complicated, but one of my passions. Ships lost in international waters are basically fair game.
This led to the formation of a US company, RMS Titanic Inc (RMST). They dived on the wreck after its initial discovery, brought up artifacts, took them to court in the US, and won the right to be salvor-in-possession. This means they have sole salvage rights of the vessel.
HOWEVER, this judgement only applies to US citizens. Someone from any other country can retrieve whatever they like from the wreck. The only way they can be prosecuted is if they take those artifacts onto US soil.
Willis Faber & Co sued RMST for violating their salvage rights. The two groups settled out of court in 2007 for an undisclosed sum. That same year, a group called Premier Exhibitions (the large corporation that owns RMST) announced that they were now owners of any personal effects pulled from the wreck. How that is legal I still don't know.
Of course, anyone can dive the wreck. Well, provided you have the $300,000 needed per day to finance such a voyage. And that figure doesn't factor in the cost of little things, a submarine, for instance. RMST, greedy bastards that they are, tried to sue James Cameron to prevent him from diving the wreck. He never took anything, that was never his intention. He just wanted to look and research for his film. RMST lost the suit.
Premier Exhibitions, parent company of RMST, just auctioned off over 5500 artifacts pulled from the wreck, in collusion with Guernsey's Auctioneers. Most of the items are personal items, though part of the famous Grand Staircase was also sold.
I am glad the sellers had the integrity to sell the entire collection as one lot, though since bidding opened at $200 million, I feel that decision was also motivated by profit. Even items with proven provenance and whose owners were known, were sold. People familiar with the wreck say it has been picked clean and littered with well-meaning but tacky memorial wreaths.
I know that the ethics of archaeology are ambiguous. Archaeologists, historians, and curators are often at odds with each other over the best and most moral course of action.
Personally, I have no problems with retrieving some artifacts from the wreck in the interest of preservation. The ocean is not kind to artifacts, and without a tangible connection to the story, interest will wane. Besides, the Titanic was a microcosm of Edwardian society, and much can be learned culturally. I certainly have no qualms with diving the wreck and documenting it. The ocean is not kind to ships. Eventually, weathering and decay will erase every last trace of the doomed liner from the seafloor. Photographic evidence can preserve that legacy indefinitely, give us clues as to what exactly happened that night, and help us make our own ships safer.
That said, I think the work of Premier Exhibitions and RMST is despicable. First of all, of the 2223 people aboard the Titanic, 1517 died, and of those deaths, only 337 bodies were ever found. Of those bodies found, only 246 were identified. The wreck of the RMS Titanic is the final resting place of over 1000 people. More people than died on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor (1177). The Arizona is a designated war grave, so the situation is different. But human life is human life, and I think the cavalier attitude taken by so many toward the dead of the Titanic is shameful.
Besides, there is an enormous double-standard in treatment of land sites and underwater sites. Say a company bought a parcel of land containing a cemetery from around 1912. Say they then proceed to dig up every grave in the place and sell any grave goods found for a tidy profit. How exploitative would that be? It's just wrong, especially since the graves are so recent. Besides, RMST doesn't own the seafloor, just the physical wreck, and even that claim is tenuous at best. If they treated a land site like this, it would be considered looting. That's a felony.
I love cemeteries, and I would jump at the chance to excavate one someday. But I'd never dream of excavating a site under 150 years old. It seems so disrespectful, to give the dead so brief a chance to rest in peace.
For more information about the Titanic and those on board, I cannot recommend the following sites highly enough:
Encyclopedia-Titanica and Demographics of the Titanic.
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