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Reports written by Susan
Wels
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Images produced by Matt Tulloch | |||
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Saturday, August 22, 1998
42 cases wines, 1 case auto, 5 cases drug sundries, 4 bales straw, 1 case electric cords, 2 cases lace collars, 3 cases furniture...
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Every object recovered from the Titanic’s wreck site—from the 25-foot-wide, 13-foot-high Big Piece to the fist-sized electrical switch from the Titanic’s Marconi room—presents a unique challenge for the conservation experts on the 1998 Titanic Expedition.  "Artifacts
vary enormously in size, composition and state of preservation, and we take
all those factors into consideration before we treat them," says Olivier
Berger, one of two conservation experts aboard the Nadir.
The Big Piece, for example, is made not just of steel plates but also glass, pieces of textile, bits of mineralized wood, lead pipes, copper-alloy porthole fittings, and rubber gaskets for the windows. There is even a fragment of a gold-rimmed porcelain plate that somehow became cemented to the hull section’s outer wall. Now that the Big Piece has arrived in Boston, conservators Stephane Pennec and Martine Plantec of France’s LP3 Conservation will determine the best treatment given its complex composition. The first thing they’ll do, however, will be to keep it in a wet environment to stabilize it while they plan further measures. Stabilization is essential before any conservation treatment, and it begins the moment the artifacts are brought up from the sea. "Our job on this ship," adds the Nadir’s second conservator, Marielle Boucharat , "is to document the objects and keep them stabilized for travel to the lab." |
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 That
means, most importantly, keeping the artifacts moist. If they dry out, their
inner layers could pull apart, potentially destroying the objects.
Many recovered artifacts are small enough to be easily immersed in fresh-water baths in the Nadir’s conservation lab. Because of its enormous size, the Big Piece, however, required some creative thinking. Initially, once the Big Piece had been winched aboard the Abeille Supporter, Olivier tried hosing down the huge metal hull plate, but the wind started drying areas almost immediately after they’d been moistened. Next, he tried covering the Big Piece with a plastic tarp to protect it from the wind, but the weight of the plastic threatened to compress the rusticles on the metal plate. Finally, he came up with an improvised sprinkler system that kept the Big Piece moist until it got to port. "It took a few tries," he said, "but we finally got it right." |
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 Documentation
is the other responsibility of the Nadir’s conservation team.
All TItanic artifacts—even tiny pieces of metal that fell from
the Big Piece—are thoroughly inventoried, measured, numbered, photographed
and described as soon as they’re in the conservators’ hands, and
the written records are entered into a computer database.
Olivier and Marielle also record the number of the submarine dive during which the artifact was retrieved, so that scientists and historians will be able to identify the area of the wreck site that it came from. And they take special note of any related objects that were recovered. "The Titanic is not like an ordinary archaeological site,"
Olivier says. "We know what happened to the ship. But we are very
careful with the artifacts so that we can add to that knowledge and help
the world remember. |
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