Rivet #339: Survival Gets It Wrong: January 25, 2007
In which things were not as bad as you imagine.
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Xavier Maniguet’s Survival has long been one of my favorite non-fiction books — seriously, I’ve been poring over this thing since I was about eight years old. Not only does it have good, detailed info on how to survive in almost any climate or situation, but it’s peppered with gripping stories of survival… and non-survival. I picked it up again the other night to read during my bath (I like to turn on the cold water and read about sharks and open-water survival) and found it just as interesting as ever. But then I came across this little gem of a survival story under the heading “True Stories of Panic”, which is worth quoting in its entirety*:
Summer 1983
A French and American team is searching for the wreck of the Titanic which, 70 years after its sinking has lost none of its attraction. The search is a long shot: Many people believe it will be impossible to find a wreck at a depth of 13,120 feet (4,000 meters), particularly since only an approximate location of the disaster is known. Moreover, while the liner was sinking into the abyss, it could have continued to move along a relatively horizontal trajectory and thus could be several miles farther on.But suddenly the sensational news flashes round the world: The Titanic has been found! A few unremarkable photos of the wreck are brought back, but the divers do not venture too deep for fear of snagging a propeller in the cables. National Geographic publishes the first photos of a wreck that has become very fragile. A second exploratory expedition undertakes a more thorough search of the two parts of the wreck which are separated by more than 2,624 feet (800 meters). The ship is split one-third of the way between the bow and the stern and displays its entrails to the fascinated aquanauts. What they discover is both extraordinary and appaling. They will never talk about it and, above all, no picture will ever be published in conformance with a well-established tradition. The site is classified as a “memorial” by the Americans, although the wreck is outside America’s territorial waters.
Around the wreck, and particularly inside of it, hundreds of corpses are frozen in place, transfixed by the enormous pressure and the total absence of currents at this depth. The ghastly flesh is slightly withered and the clothing has disappeared, but it is possible to distinguish between the young and the old, between women with long hair and women with short hair. The exceptional state of preservation is unexpected, even in these waters where the temperature is below 32°F (0°C). It also proves that no carnivore ever troubles these glacial depths.
But this is not the most shocking discovery. It is natural that there would be at least skeletons in the wreck that caused 1,513 deaths. What is shocking is that the vast majority of the corpses are found on the lower decks and practically none on the upper decks. Seventy years later, the most outrageous allegations become reality, the most questionable witnesses become credible. Apparently, during the hours when the ship was sinking, the exits from the lower decks to the upper decks had been sealed. In a fit of panic, mothers, respectable gentlemen and responsible crew members grabbed for themselves the only chance to survive — the few lifeboats available.
Where oh where do I begin? That whole story starts out wrong and just gets worse. For one thing, the Titanic was discovered in 1985, not 1983. The original copyright for this book is printed as 1988; it’s certainly possible that there were still unverified Titanic rumors floating around at that time, and that the author heard one such rumor from an otherwise trustworthy source and simply printed it as fact. By the time of the 1994 translation, however, you’d hope that there’d be a few fact-checkers for the new edition. Sad thing is, though, a lot of people still think it’s true — that if you go down to the wreck site, you’ll see a bunch of frozen corpses lying on the seafloor. Just for the record: there has never been a corpse found at the wreck site. It was actually expected that there would be some human remains at that depth, but the divers discovered that, between the highly acidic soil and the presence of bacteria and small fish, everything organic had long since disappeared. And that thing about the corpses piled up on the lower decks? I’d laugh, if it wasn’t so sad. While the steerage passengers certainly didn’t have the survival odds of the folks in First Class, there’s never been any evidence of a systematic plan on the part of the crew to keep the lower classes locked downstairs. If anything, Third Class was mostly ignored; nobody thought to lock them downstairs or bring them upstairs. That accusation casts quite a slur on the crew, who generally did their jobs with skill and dedication and paid for it with a terribly high death toll.
It doesn’t make me mad, exactly. It’s just… sad. Somewhere there’s a fact-checker who needs a job, and here’s this book and its four-paragraph pratfall; can’t someone bring them together?
* Xavier Maniguet, Survival: How To Prevail In Hostile Environments. Translation © 1994 Facts on File, Inc.
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