|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
|
 |
|||
|
Reports written by Susan
Wels
|
Images produced by Matt Tulloch | |||
 |
||||
|
Sunday, August 16, 1998
"The•o•ry: an assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture."
|
||||
 |
Today we’re setting the record straight. We were wrong about where the Big Piece came from. We offer no excuses—just an explanation of how Titanic experts have reached changing conclusions about the cabin numbers behind the Big Piece portholes.  First,
the facts as we now know them: the portholes came from C-Deck, but they
did not come from cabins C-82, C-84, C-86, C-88, and part of C-90 on the
Titanic’s port side, as we had earlier reported.Instead, they came from cabins C-79 and C-81 on the starboard side. Though these two cabins were unoccupied, they were next to the stateroom of New York theatrical producer Henry B. Harris and his wife, and they were near the cabin of W.T. Stead, the most famous journalist in England. Henry Harris and W.T. Stead both lost their lives in the disaster. Why the confusion about the cabins? In part, because of the lack of strong physical evidence, which the recovery of the Big Piece has finally provided. In 1996, when the Titanic expedition team first examined the Big Piece, lying flat on the ocean floor with its interior framing hidden, marine architects and historians initially determined that the hull section came from the two starboard cabins, C-79 and C-81. |
|||
 "We
came to that conclusion by looking for window arrangements in the Titanic’s
plans that matched the placement of the Big Piece portholes," recalls
David Livingstone, a marine architect with Belfast’s Harland and
Wolff. "In 1996, we were confident that C-79 and C-81 were the correct
cabins. But we still hadn’t been able to see the interior framing
of the Big Piece, and we needed to see those structural details to be
certain."When the 1998 expedition arrived on the Titanic site 12 days ago, the experts hadn’t seen the Big Piece for two years. In the meantime, they had begun considering the possibility that the hull section could have come from cabins on the Titanic’s port side. By August 12, several members of the expedition team had been persuaded that the Big Piece had, in fact, come from the port-side cabins. We reported that information. "But that was before we had closely examined the underside of the Big Piece," Livingstone explains. When they did take a long, careful look at its interior surface, they saw structural features that could only place the hull section on the starboard side of the Titanic, at cabins C-79 and C-81. |
||||
 "All
the main metal structures are still attached to that piece of the hull—the
shell plating, doublers, channel bars, web frames, strings, triple plates
and pieces of deck," Livingstone says. By matching those structures
against the ship’s construction drawings, they finally had firm, physical
proof that the Big Piece came from the two cabins on the Titanic’s
starboard side. In the end, the actual cabin locations may not matter as
much as the experience of the C-Deck passengers, which was terrifying
on both sides of the ship.
Understanding the complex wreck of the Titanic, Livingstone
adds, is not an easy task. "It’s a bit like pushing a car out
of an airplane at 35,000 feet, then looking at it on the ground and trying
to figure out what happened." Surprisingly, in this case, he concludes,
"our very first assessment was correct." |
||||
 |
 |
 |
||
