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Reports written by Susan
Wels
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Images produced by Matt Tulloch | |||
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Friday, August 28, 1998
"Left and right stretched a wall of steel that towered high above the roof of the station...we could see the second class passengers crossing the gangway to their portion of the ship."
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This afternoon, another piece of the Titanic rose out of the sea. It is the port-side gangway door from the Titanic’s D-Deck—well-built and well-preserved, despite 86 years on the ocean bottom. |
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At 3:10 p.m. today, a lift bag filled with lighter-than-water diesel fuel floated it up from the seabed, where it had been lying close by the bow section of the wreck. It was then carefully winched onto the Nadir’s fantail and placed in a protective bath until it can be brought for treatment to the conservation lab in France. It is a beautiful door, watertight and strongly built. Its eight brass locking mechanisms still shine, and a white rubber gasket still rims its inner surface. Two elegant windows, which can be raised and lowered, are still remarkably intact. The door was probably designed to be a first-class entranceway, since it opened onto the first-class reception area on D-Deck. |
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 During
the TItanic’s brief life, though, the door was never used for
that intended purpose. First-class passengers in Southampton boarded through
a gangway door on B-Deck, and those in Cherbourg and Queenstown came aboard
on the Titanic’s starboard side.Nevertheless, it may be that crew members or passengers did attempt to use this D-Deck door—pitiably, not as an entrance, but as an exit, as the ship was sinking on the night of April 15, 1912. If so, this port-side door may be linked to the last brave acts of seven deck hands on the night that the Titanic sank. Here is the story. Shortly after midnight on April 15, 1912, as the ship was going down, the Titanic’s Second Officer, Charles Lightoller, was helping passengers into lifeboats on the Titanic’s port side, and he had a plan. "My idea," he recounted later, "was that I would lower the boats with a few people in each and when safely in the water fill them up from the gangway doors on the lower decks, and transfer them to the other ship.... "I told the Bosun’s Mate to take six hands and open the port lower-deck gangway door....He took his men and proceeded to carry out the order, but neither he or the men were ever seen again. One can only suppose that they gave their lives endeavouring to carry out this order..." According to Titanic historian Charles Haas, the port-side gangway door that Lightoller mentioned would probably have been the entranceway on E-Deck, not on D-Deck. Nevertheless, he says, it may be that the E-Deck door was impossible to reach because of flooding. In that case, the men might well have gone to the D-Deck door instead. We do know one thing, though. If the men did go to this D-Deck gangway door, they succeeded in carrying out Lightoller’s orders before they lost their lives. |
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 Because
when P.H. Nargeolet first saw the door in 1993, it was still in place on
the Titanic’s hull—and the door was open."The door had to have been opened from inside the ship before the Titanic sank, because the locking mechanisms are all intact and strong," P.H. asserts. "Somebody had to have opened it that night, at sea, before the ship went down." It may be that seven Titanic crew members died in the attempt, but we will never know. Back to top Back to the Expedition Calendar |
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