Titanic struggle for control

One of the problems of setting things up so far in advance is that posts get a bit samey. I thought I’d break up the antiscience posts with another problem. I’ve been reading an issue of Popular Science, which I rarely see over here, and there’s an argument over what should happen with the Titanic. In one corner is RMS Titanic Inc, who have the salvage rights. They want to raise as much of the material as possible and conserve it. In the other is Robert Ballard, the guy who discovered the wreck. He was to fit the wreck with rails for remote cameras to move along. That way people could see that actual site without visiting it.

Titanic hits an iceberg. Photo by Les2001

I’d be giving away my opinion if I pointed out there’s a conflict of interest in preserving a site if the company in charge makes money if it rips wreck apart, but it really isn’t as simplistic a right /wrong answer as that would suggest.

Robert Ballard is firmly in favour of preservation in situ. As far as he’s concerned the Titanic is a historical monument like any other. The fact it’s two miles underwater is a nuisance, but it doesn’t justify grabbing artefacts from the site and placing them out of context in a museum somewhere. He accepts that there is public interest in the site and he thinks it’s possible to set up Remotely Operated Vehicles which can take cameras around the site. The cost is $10 million and it would take ten years to build. A serious difficulty is that, at two miles down, the pressure is so great that you need specialist subs to get there. No-one has ever built anything like this before and that would suggest that there may need to be a lot more money and time for the project.

Arnie Geller, the President of RMS Titanic, raises another issue which gets lost. There’s the matter of respect for the dead. He likens the site of ROVs moving around the ship to a videogame. There are around 5000 artefacts from the Titanic recovered, so I don’t know exactly what his position on grave robbing might be. If the demand for Titanic artefacts is there is it better to have it licenced and controlled or open to all to plunder? When does a disaster become an archaeological site?

The smug answer would be that rather like history, archaeology is anything which isn’t now. Once we discard something it becomes archaeology. That might be accurate but it’s not practical. People would have something to say if, as they buried Granny, they saw a crowd of archaeologists arriving with mattocks. This doesn’t happen. There are in the UK strict rules for excavating bodies. Screens have to be put up so bystanders can’t gawp as the body is unearthed, though bizarrely there’s no rule against transmitting the excavation on live TV as it happens. There is an assumption that human remains are to be treated with respect and people get upset if bodies are exhumed for personal curiosity or for the sheer fun of seeing bones.

My concern is that the Titanic is no longer a disaster site, but a source of entertainment. It’s as if over two thousand people died to produce a franchise for films and cheap tat. At Slate it’s a genre referred to as Disaster Porn. Below is another example of the modern image of the Titanic. If there weren’t several photos of the slide below on Flickr then I’d assume that it was a joke by Chris Morris satirising the public’s appetite for disaster.

Titanic slide. Photo by Marbles.

While I wouldn’t embrace the view all ancestors are sacred, a casual contempt for death disturbs something within me. Possibly because disrepect for human death also suggests a similar disrespect for living people. Whichever solution is adopted hopefully the exhibitors can do more than satisfy a prurient urge to gawp at skeletons.
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