Titanic victim finally gets memorial on her grave
An Irish woman who died when the Titanic sank 98 years ago is finally getting a memorial stone on her Boston grave.
Catherine Buckley was just 22 when the ship went down on its maiden voyage after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912. More than 1,500 people died.
The third-class passenger was emigrating from County Cork to Boston to live with her sister, Margaret.
Her body was pulled from the water by the cable ship Mackey-Bennett and sent to Boston at her sister's request.
She was buried in St. Joseph's Cemetery in Boston's West Roxbury neighborhood, but without a memorial marker.
The Titanic International Society is holding a dedication ceremony on Saturday afternoon in conjunction with its annual convention in Boston.
RICHMOND, Va. - A team of scientists will launch an expedition to the Titanic next month to assess the deteriorating condition of the world's most famous shipwreck and create a detailed three-dimensional map that will "virtually raise the Titanic" for the public.
The expedition to the site 2 miles 1/2 miles (four kilometres) beneath the North Atlantic is billed as the most advanced scientific mission to the Titanic wreck since its discovery 25 years ago.
The 20-day expedition is to leave St. John's, Newfoundland, on Aug. 18 under a partnership between RMS Titanic Inc., which has exclusive salvage rights to the wreck, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The expedition will not collect artifacts but will probe a 2-by-3 mile (3-by-5 kilometre) debris field where hundreds of thousands of artifacts remain scattered.
Some of the world's most frequent visitors to the site will be part of the expedition along with a who's who of underwater scientists and organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Organizers say the new scientific data and images will ultimately will be accessible to the public.
"For the first time, we're really going to treat it as an archaeological site with two things in mind," David Gallo, an expedition leader and Woods Hole scientist, told The Associated Press on Monday. "One is to preserve the legacy of the ship by enhancing the story of the Titanic itself. The second part is to really understand what the state of the ship is."
The Titanic struck ice and sank on its maiden voyage in international waters on April 15, 1912, leaving 1,522 people dead.
Since oceanographer Robert Ballard and an international team discovered the Titanic in 1985, most of the expeditions have either been to photograph the wreck or gather thousands of artifacts, like fine china, shoes and ship fittings. "Titanic" director James Cameron has also led teams to the wreck to record the bow and the stern, which separated during the sinking and now lie one-third of a mile apart.
RMS Titanic made the last expedition to site in 2004. The company, a subsidiary of Premier Exhibitions Inc. of Atlanta, conducts travelling displays of the Titanic artifacts, which the company says have been viewed by tens of millions of people worldwide.
"We believe there's still a number of really exciting mysteries to be discovered at the wreck site," said Chris Davino, president of and CEO of Premier Exhibitions and RMS Titanic. "It's our contention that substantial portions of the wreck site have never really been properly studied."
RMS Titanic is bankrolling the expedition. Davino declined to state the cost of the exploration other than to say it will be millions of dollars.
The "dream team" of archaeologists, oceanographers and other scientists want to get the best assessment yet on the two main sections of the ship, which have been subjected to fierce deep-ocean currents, salt water and intense pressure.
Gallo said while the rate of Titanic's deterioration is not known, the expedition approaches the mission with a sense of urgency.
"We see places where it looks like the upper decks are getting thin, the walls are thin, the ceilings may be collapsing a bit," he said. "We hear all these anecdotal things about the ship is rusting away, it's collapsing on itself. No one really knows."
The expedition will use imaging technology and sonar devices that never have been used before on the Titanic wreck and to probe nearly a century of sediment in the debris field to seek a full inventory of the ship's artifacts.
"We're actually treating it like a crime scene," Gallo said. "We want to know what's out there in that debris field, what the stern and the bow are looking like."
The expedition will be based on the RV Jean Charcot, a 250-foot (76-meter) research vessel with a crew of 20. Three submersibles and the latest sonar, acoustic and filming technology will also be part of the expedition.
"Never before have we had the scientific and technological means to discover so much of an expedition to Titanic," said P.H. Nargeolet, who is co-leading the expedition. He has made more than 30 dives to the wreck.
Bill Lange, a Woods Hole scientist who will lead the optical survey and will be one of the first to visit the wreck, said a key analysis will be comparing images from the first expedition 25 years ago and new images to measure decay and erosion.
"We're going to see things we haven't seen before. That's a given," he said. "The technology has really evolved in the last 25 years."
Davino said he anticipates future salvage expeditions to the wreck, and Gallo said he doesn't expect the science will end with one trip.
"I'm sure there will be future expeditions because this is the just the beginning of a whole new era of these kind of expeditions to Titanic — serious, archaeological mapping expeditions," Gallo said.
RMS Titanic is still awaiting a judge's ruling in Norfolk, Virginia. on the 5,500 artifacts it has in its possession.
The company is seeking limited ownership of the artifacts as compensation for its salvage efforts. In its court filing for a salvage award, the company put the fair market value of the collection at $110.9 million.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith, a maritime jurist who is presiding over the hearings, has called the wreck an "international treasure."
Sunday August 22, 2010
A team of scientists setting sail from St. John's harbour hopes their expedition to the world's most famous shipwreck will help in the search of a more recent tragedy in the Atlantic Ocean — that of the Air France Flight 447 crash last year.
The crew of 30 is expected to depart Monday night and will be at sea for 20 days. They will spend most of their time hovering above the site where RMS Titanic went down almost 100 years ago.
Unlike previous trips to the wreck for the sake of adventure or exploration, this voyage is being carried out for scientific purposes.
This time, the entire debris field around what remains of the ocean liner — up to half of which has never been examined — will be scoured by a pair of robots, which co-expedition leader Dave Gallo called "the great-great-grandchildren" of the equipment that first explored the Titanic in 1985.
Gallo and expedition leader Paul-Henry Nargeolet have previously worked with the robots, which are controlled from the surface "like a Game Boy," Nargeolet said.
The robots were used in the search for Air France Flight 447, which plummeted into the Atlantic off Brazil in June 2009, killing all 228 people on board.
Nargeolet said lessons learned on that mission may help the upcoming Titanic expedition, and vice-versa if they resume the search for the remains of the Air France plane. Key components like the black box flight recorders have still not been recovered.
"If we find (the plane), we would treat the debris field like we treat the debris field of the Titanic," he said.
Gallo said the Titanic expedition could also lead to discoveries that would inform future shipwreck excursions.
"In the past, we would commit the souls and the ship for eternity to the deep, and that's a lovely way of looking at it," he said. "But in some cases we need to understand — for the sake of the families, for the shipbuilders, for the other people involved — what happened to that ship and their loved ones."
Since the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912, taking 1,522 lives with it, it has been a constant cultural and scientific fascination. But Gallo says much remains unknown about the state of the wreck.
"We just don't know what the state of the hull really is," he explained. "We hear it's a little bit thinner here, the walls are a little bit thinner ... but we don't know, really."
The expedition was supposed to depart Sunday but a posting on the group's Facebook page said officials decided "to conduct some final equipment tests in St. John's versus doing them during transit at sea."
A spokeswoman for the expedition confirmed late Sunday that the ship will now leave St. John's at 8 p.m. Monday local time.
The crew's equipment is expected to create the most detailed images of the Titanic to date and provide clues about exactly how and why it sank, as well as how badly it has deteriorated since.
The ship has been under intense water pressure for nearly a century. On top of that, it's being eaten. Colonies of microbes are constantly munching away at the Titanic's hull and speeding up the deterioration.
Gallo added that while there isn't much animal life at that depth, some creatures have made a home of the wreckage — another element that will be explored during the upcoming expedition.
The team hopes to create a "virtual map" of the debris field, which will eventually be available to the public.
The Titanic may hold a great deal of romantic and iconic appeal, but Gallo says it has also become "a testing ground ... about how to work deepwater wrecks in a forensic way."
A minor fire broke out Tuesday in the cargo hold of the 76-metre Jean Charcot, the research vessel heading for the Titanic. But a spokeswoman for the expedition said it is scheduled to go ahead as planned.
August 28 2010
TORONTO - An expedition that surveying the wreck of the Titanic is showing off some crisp images of the doomed ocean liner.
It has used a pair of robots to take thousands of photographs and hours of video of the wreck, which lies roughly four kilometres below the surface.
The hi-resolution images include shots of the ship bow, clearing showing the railing and anchors.
An expedition spokesman says they're the first images of the ship taken in over five years.
The expedition left St. John's, NL earlier this month to the spot in the Atlantic where the ship struck an iceberg in 1912 and sank.
A total of 1,522 passengers and crew perished in the disaster, which has generated a cult-like following in the decades since.
Members of the expedition have described the robots being used as the "the great-great-grandchildren'' of the equipment that first explored the Titanic in 1985.
They're being used to explore the entire debris field around the wreck, up to half of which has never been examined.
Nearly 100 years after the great ship Titanic went down in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic, a descendant of a crew member is claiming to know the truth about what really caused the disaster.
Louise Patten, the granddaughter of Titanic's second officer, Charles Herbert Lightoller, alleges that the ship's collision with an iceberg was caused by human error rather than bad luck.
She asserts that the man steering the ship when the iceberg was spotted, Robert Hitchins, panicked and turned the wheel in the wrong direction. Titanic's steering required the helmsman to turn the wheel in the direction opposite to which he wished the ship to go. So when Hitchens was told to turn the ship to the left he cranked the wheel to the left, causing the boat to move right, the direction of the iceberg. The mistake was an easy one to make, as many new steamships had steering systems which moved the boat in the same direction as the wheel.
By the time the blunder was noticed, it was too late to avoid the impact. Patten claims her grandfather and other surviving crew members covered up the error to avoid tarnishing their reputations and to prevent the financial ruin of the White Star Line and the loss of jobs that would come with it.
Patten's revelations coincide with the publication of her new novel 'Good as Gold,' into which she weaves her account of events.
The helmsman's mistake is not the only error Patten is seeking to expose. She also claims that the chairman of White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay, insisted the ship continue sailing after the impact, causing Titanic to sink hours faster than was necessary. Patten says those extra hours could have prevented the deaths of more than 1,500 passengers.
Watch the video below for more details about Patten's shocking claims.
Note : the information here has been taken from newspaper clippings,