Before he shot Titanic, Jim Cameron needed to experience it himself.
__ So he rented two Russian submersibles, built special cameras, and organized a 12,000-foot dive. He almost didn't come back.
Excerpts from his private journal.
__
Also: Contents Under Pressure
Long before torn ticket stubs littered theater floors, when Titanic conjured historical tragedy, not Hollywood spectacle, writer/director James Cameron had a dream. With the help of otherworldly technology, he would dive to the bottom of the ocean to see for himself what catastrophe and the brutal elements had wrought.
Cameron's mission was complicated by the fact that he wanted to shoot motion-picture film at the ship's wreckage, two and a half miles below the ocean's surface. And, as those who know him well have come to expect, he wanted to do it his way, which is to say in a way that had never been done before and in a way that would bring viewers viscerally into the moment when, on her maiden voyage, the Titanic's own state-of-the-art technology abandoned her.
The first step was to procure the transportation: deep-diving submersibles. There are only five such subs in the world, and the Russian research vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh is home to two of them. In the summer of 1992, Cameron and a friend, underwater cameraman Al Giddings, went to Russia to try to win friends and favor for their project. It was no small feat to convince the imposing Shirshov Institute to allow one of its premier scientific assets to be used for something as frivolous as a feature film, but Cameron and Giddings prevailed. It would be more than two years before they actually made the journey, however - setting out for the high seas, 700 miles east of Nova Scotia, Canada, and about 300 miles south of Newfoundland, to dive to the wreckage of the Titanic in September 1995.
Several documentary teams had visited the wreck since it was discovered in 1985. But Cameron would be the first feature director to film on location, equipped with a specially designed 35-mm movie camera encased in titanium to withstand the crushing deep-sea pressures, a customized pan-and-tilt system, and an array of lights.
Cameron's team and their Russian support crew spent 25 days at sea, completing 12 double dives (using two subs at once) to the wreck site. In addition to the images the director caught from behind his camera, he procured haunting shots of the Titanic's interior using a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, housing a video camera.
Every day brought a new technological crisis - an irony not lost on Cameron and his team: here, at the close of the century, their marvelous equipment - much of it untested in actual conditions - was pushed to the limit as they struggled to get ever closer to the century's first and perhaps most spectacular emblem of technological hubris. "We were like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory," says Cameron with a laugh. "We were figuring stuff out during the mission. We wound up out there with a lot of stuff that wasn't working. The first half of the mission was just getting the gear to work, and the second half was getting usable photography, some of which you see in the movie."
Cameron gave some of his Titanic footage to special-effects house Digital Domain, which used it as reference material in reproducing detailed models of the wreck. Other footage inspired his art department's underwater sets of the ship's interiors. In the end, a 775-foot-long re-creation of the ship built specifically for the movie was the setting for most of the action. But Cameron is adamant that it was the deep dives that set the tone for Titanic, his most ambitious film to date. "I wanted to create a kind of living history of the event," he says. "I thought, 'We have to shoot it for real.'"
The private dive journal that Cameron kept documents his realization that exploring the Titanic was much more than a wild fling with unimaginable dangers. There could have been no adequate preparation for what he experienced: stunned by the overwhelming power of the wreck, he became more determined than ever to bring the events of that night in 1912 back to life. It was real. He was there. Eventually, he would take us there. And no one would come back unchanged.
__ September 7, 1995 __
The Russian research vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh navigates itself into position over the wreckage of the Titanic at 2:30 p.m., confirming its position on the ship's global positioning system. Cameron's team drops four transponders, establishing an electronic grid on the bottom of the ocean that the subs will use to navigate at that depth. The swath of sea at 41 degrees, 44 minutes north, 49 degrees, 56 minutes west does not look unusual. Though icebergs are a common sight in spring - when warm weather causes the polar ice caps to calve, sending shards of glacial rock floating south - none are sighted today.
The Titanic struck a glacier along her starboard side, an impact that the passengers barely felt. The ice beat a delicate tattoo along the flank, "dit, dit, dit, like Morse code," Cameron describes it in his script. The 46,000-ton ship split down to her keel and sank two hours and forty minutes later.
The sinking of the ship, which snapped in half on the way down, has determined the architecture of the wreckage, which lies on the ocean floor, its two sections roughly a half mile apart. The bow parachuted down, planing gracefully into the mud. The more hydrodynamic stern traveled about three times as fast, plowing into the bottom at roughly 35 miles an hour. It was crushed upon impact and essentially scattered into a junk heap by the huge jet stream of water that swept up behind it, a phenomenon known as the downblast effect. It is the roughly 400-foot-long bow section that captured Cameron's imagination; that and the algebra of the ship's class structure: according to his research, "a lady in first class stood close to a 100 percent chance of survival; a male in third class stood about a one-in-eight chance." Cameron is already reimagining the disaster from the perspective of a love story between a young woman in first class and a young man in third class.
__ September 8 __
Mir 1 launches at 11:25 a.m., carrying Cameron and his Russian pilot, Dr. Anatoly Sagalevitch, plus a Russian engineer. It carries the film camera that Cameron will operate himself. Mir 2, which will launch after a 45-minute buffer period, carries the ROV and 19 hydrargyrum medium arc (HMI) lights. On the way down, Cameron's excitement is tempered by concern about the ROV and the attached light towers, which the Keldysh's technical crew has been tinkering with for the last 24 hours.
He is able to operate the remote camera's pan-tilt motors, but the lights, after working perfectly in shallow water, went dead in a deep-water test yesterday. In the frenetic seven-month research-and-development period that has preceded this expedition, no one has actually pressure-tested the ROV, which appears to have buoyancy problems in both deep and shallow water.
Cameron is also unhappy with the tether-management system, a separate but complementary piece of engineering that controls the ROV's 85-foot umbilical leash. (Cameron, who designed the ROV's look himself, has dubbed the rover Snoop Dog.) The director doesn't like the tether's drum action, which relies on the ROV's forward thrust to unspool. The idea was to get the ROV neutrally buoyant so it would neither sink nor float. Given severe power restrictions, they can't afford to waste valuable thrust getting Snoop Dog to hold position. It has to achieve static equilibrium, where the forces of gravity balance the forces of pressure. The magic zone.
By 12:10 p.m., Mir 1 is descending at a rate of 90 feet per minute, a freight elevator to the ocean floor. The temperature inside cools with the fall, bottoming out at about 35 degrees Fahrenheit. With 300 meters to go, the pilot begins counting down in Russian.
In the green glow of the quartz floodlight, the ocean floor appears - flat, gray, muddy. It looks not unlike the lunar landscape. They are 416 atmospheres below Earth's surface: 12,580 feet below sea level, or the "interface," as diving veterans refer to the surface of the sea. The pressure here is 6,000 pounds per square inch, which translates to 9 million pounds of pressure closing in on the camera housing alone, and hundreds of millions of pounds of pressure on each Mir. The air is 99 percent recirculated, using a system known as closed-circuit breathing. It is kept breathable via a CO2 scrubber mechanism, the same technology that astronauts use; a blower circulates the air through a lithium-bromide canister that scrubs out the CO2, while a small bottle bleeds in additional oxygen over a period of hours. Cameron has worn similar oxygen rebreather tanks on scuba expeditions. Since they don't emit bubbles, they're especially useful when studying animal life.
Despite her size, it is no easy matter finding the Titanic. The four transponders they've dropped to form an electronic net around the ship will become useful only after the subs have located the wreck and dialed in its position relative to the place markers.
The Russians have updated their sonar for the high-paying Hollywood charter, installing a state-of-the-art Canadian side-scan system manufactured by Mezotech. But it's quickly apparent that the pilots don't know how to use it. After a few attempts, they revert to their circa-1960s Furuno bottom-scan sonar, which is designed to take readings straight down, not sideways. It's no surprise that two and a half hours later, they still haven't located the Titanic.
Impatient, Cameron decides to master Mezotech himself and starts reading the manual. "I'm peeved because it's my equivalent of burning daylight. I'm burning bottom time. I start practicing right then, on objects like boulders, deciphering what they are on the sonar and then looking out the window."
Cameron's first brush with the Titanic comes without warning: "Somehow, we manage to come up to the area of the ship and get silted out. Anatoly parks us on the bottom. I look out my port, which is small and canted slightly to the side, and six feet ahead there's a big steel wall with rivets on it. I know it's not the hull, because it's got a jagged edge on it. The wall's just plunged there into the bottom. I don't even have time to react because we're drifting sideways, and we're about to hit it. One of the light booms is out on that side, and I'm afraid we're going to break it off, so I'm telling Anatoly, 'It's on the right! It's on the right! Just go left!' And he's looking out his window, but his window is aimed straight forward and he can't see it."
Seconds later, Mir 1 crashes full-on into the 15-foot slab. The pilot slams on the thrusters, once again stirring up a cloud of silt. As it clears, they suddenly see before them a massive wall of riveted metal - the Titanic. Mir 1 sails over the ship's forward deck, barely clearing the tangled metal railing. With a thud, they land on an expanse of wooden planking.
"I go from not seeing it, not seeing it, not seeing it, to seeing a wall of rivets, to pure adrenaline, being out of control, and slamming down on the deck," Cameron writes.
Cameron pans the video camera 180 degrees, looking behind them on the monitor. He looks out of the left and right portals. Cameron has memorized every detail of the Titanic from an 18-foot model he has had constructed for use in planning his shots. He can see a faint outline of wood on the deck, laid at an angle. Only one place on the ship had planking laid this way: the forecastle deck. He draws a diagram for Sagalevitch, who argues that Cameron is mistaken.
"Trust me," Cameron instructs, taking a compass bearing. "Raise the sub a meter and a half, reverse the heading, go forward 15 feet, and we'll see the No. 1 hatch." Sagalevitch follows the instructions and there's the hatch, marking the forward section of the deck. Cameron takes command: "Now we're going to go over the forward windlasses, we're going to go over the anchor crane."
They rendezvous with Mir 2, which has had better luck navigating the depths and has been parked on the ocean floor, near the bow tip, for the past 45 minutes. Cameron shoots his first roll of film. "Trying to position the two subs at the wreck, with the transverse current, and trying to light the wreck - it was a mess," he writes. "A complete flail. But I actually managed to occasionally get the sub and the ship in the shot at the same time. We did manage to shoot the entire roll."
Each 16-hour trip will reap at most about 15 minutes of footage.
Mir 1 sighs to the surface at 1:45 a.m. Onboard Keldysh, scientists are trying to account for the strength of the current at the ocean floor; currents don't usually reach below 1,500 meters. They estimate that the turbidity of the ocean is about 1,000 times normal and speculate that the cause may be an unusually active Gulf Stream, whipped into a frenzy by a heavy hurricane season.
Cameron confronts another dilemma. He is less than impressed with Sagalevitch's piloting and ponders a replacement at the helm of Mir 1. "I can't figure out a way to confront my friend of three years with the idea that he shouldn't pilot his own sub," he writes in his dive diary before going to sleep.
__ September 10 __
Descent begins at 8:30 a.m. Cameron, assuming the role of navigator, very nearly lands Mir 1 on top of the wreck, which spooks the Russians. A hard landing on the Titanic could be disastrous, as the sub could easily get hopelessly wedged into one of the many crevices lurking within the tangle of metal.
Drifting backward over the boat deck, Cameron sees a large crack spanning the width of the ship: "I tell Anatoly to take evasive action before we run into the No. 1 boat davit. He rises to clear it, and I realize I'm in the ironic position of being the onboard expert on the wreck, based solely on my memorization of the model. I feel like I'm in a familiar place, even though I've never seen any of this before."
At 3:30 p.m., they run out of film. The Keldysh radios that Hurricane Luis is arriving ahead of schedule. Mir 1 pumps ballast and shoots to the surface like a rocket, bobbing there for more than an hour in 25-foot swells before being picked up. "We're rocking around in 40-knot winds, getting pounded. We've cut it too close."
With the subs safely docked at last, the Keldysh tries to outrun the storm, lighting out for a low-pressure zone about 80 miles east. Cameron is inwardly seething, but he realizes that the expedition is beyond anyone's control, even his. "I actually had this illusion that the Russians knew the wreck, which they didn't. And that when you came to it you could see it, which you couldn't. And that driving the submersibles would be a logical, intelligent thing, which it wasn't. It is a complete and utter circus."
After a vodka and a sauna with his Russian divemates, Cameron retreats to his cabin. The first few dives have drained him physically and mentally. "I just sat there, and I just started to cry, thinking about the dive and everything I'd seen," he will later recall. "That's the moment my technical guard got let down and I got kind of overwhelmed by it.
"Then I made myself a promise to always take the time on every dive to be there. Because otherwise I might as well have been sitting up on the ship driving an ROV. There was no reason for me to be physically down there if I wasn't going to appreciate it."
From that point on, he insists they park the subs on the Titanic's boat deck to have lunch. "We'd have some tea and stare out the portholes and think about all the events that had happened. I had already written the treatment, so I already knew who did what to who and what happened where and what boats were where, what dramas had played out exactly where we were sitting. At that point, I realized I was approaching it wrong, and that the important thing, maybe even more important than getting the footage, was capturing the emotional significance of the ship and what happened to it, and what happened to the people on it."
__ September 14 __
Dive three produces the first shots Cameron feels he can actually use in the movie. In one particularly dramatic sequence, he films Mir 2 hovering over the grand staircase while the ROV is sent down to B deck and inside the ship. The ROV makes it all the way to D deck, four stories down. In the evening, Cameron holds an impromptu screening of the tape. "It was spooky," John Bruno, a veteran effects supervisor, comments later. "We realized it had been 83 years since anyone had looked down these corridors." The tape shows glimpses of wood paneling; a column here that is virtually intact; a chair there, sitting in the gloom. Fainter images hover tantalizingly just outside the range of the lights.
__ September 17 __
The dives themselves are beginning to seem routine, the three-hour drop to the bottom just another commute, "like taking the subway to work." But today's dive is aborted minutes before Mir 2 reaches the bottom due to total failure of the hydraulic propulsion steering on Mir 1. The subs are pulled out of the water in rough seas as a second hurricane, Marilyn, makes its way through the Grand Banks.
__ September 19 __
There is an eerie look to the ocean this morning - glassy under an ethereal haze. About 1,000 feet from the bottom, Cameron and crew notice something is amiss. The Mezotech sonar in Mir 1 is going crazy. When they hit bottom, visibility is the worst it has ever been. "Small sponges run across the bottom like tumbleweeds, and I'm reminded of a sandstorm in the desert. We observe that the Mir tracks of a few days ago are being rounded off, blurred, and filled in by the current. I remember that on my first dive I could see footprints from the previous Mir expedition four years ago as clearly as if they were made yesterday."
They decide to creep along the port side of the ship on the assumption that the hull will provide shelter from the current. Within seconds they are in trouble. A vortex caused by the current flowing over and around the ship sucks them toward the port hull. Mir 1 slams against the hull and is pinned there by the force of the current. "We fight our way back and painstakingly work our way up the forecastle deck toward the bridge, keeping the nose of the sub into the current and crabbing along on the back-and-forth movements of the stern thruster. It takes us 15 minutes of hard work to go the 100 feet to the well deck. I get a brief glimpse of Mir 2 hunkered down at the hatch on the starboard side of the deck. And then suddenly we are broadsided by turbulence and swept off the wreck and lose all visual and sonar reference." Tumbling in the void.
It is safer to move in the direction you know the ship is not, then turn around, reacquire it on the sonar, and reapproach, rather than to drift in a random search. The Titanic is dangerous, possibly lethal, a fact easy to overlook from the toylike confines of the subs. Still, the Russians have nicknamed the camera system mounted on Mir 1 "the cannon" because they know that if the glass fails, the titanium shell is a piece of heavy artillery aimed right at the heart of their submarine. The 91/2-inch-diameter span of silica supports 1.1 million pounds of pressure. The merest wisp of a fracture would send an explosion of water back through the 2-foot titanium cylinder to the sub's outer shell at hypersonic speed.
Cameron's brother Mike, who designed the camera, has warned him repeatedly, "When you're maneuvering and you don't need to be filming, always keep the camera positioned transversely so if the end cap blows off, it just blows into the water." But in practice the lens is almost always aimed away from the sub, pointing at something. "Which means that the back of it is pointed at us. It is like walking around with a shotgun taped to your temple for about 16 hours, and just telling people, 'Don't touch the trigger!'"
As they reapproach the ship, Cameron calls out the range on the sonar. "I was telling Anatoly, 'You'd better start slowing down. We're going to be able to see it really soon.' We were down to like six meters or something like that. And I heard him do the reverse thrust, yet we kept heading toward the hull. I could see it clearly on the sonar, but we couldn't see it visually, and I thought there was something wrong with the sonar, or maybe he didn't understand, so I told him again, 'Slow down! We're heading right for the ship!' And at the last second I looked out my portal and saw that the camera was aimed straight forward.
"Of course the one thing that we were supposed to never do was slam the glass housing dome into the Titanic. And at exactly the moment I looked forward I saw a wall of rivets appear out of the darkness." The camera is set up with a gain control on the pan and tilt wheels. It turns fastest on the high gain setting, but if you happen to turn the wheel a little too fast it will stall, immobilizing the camera. "The trick is, if you want the camera to slew rapidly, you set it on the high gain setting and turn the wheel very slowly." Cameron doesn't know what gain setting he is on and he doesn't have time to check. "I grab the wheel and just start turning, trying to move the camera - and nothing happens! It's freewheeling in my hand. The wall is coming straight at us. I stop, wait a quarter of a beat for the encoder to settle down, and turn the wheel very, very slowly. It is probably the hardest thing I've ever done. And the camera starts to turn away.
"There is a crunching noise and we are thrown forward. Through the right port I see the entire pan-tilt assembly wobble and disappear in a cloud of dust. I tense for the thunderclap of an implosion of the housing. It has been repeatedly pointed out to me that the implodable volume of the housing is so large that the shockwave from it failing could be enough to puncture the mansphere of the sub. Lights out in two ten-thousandths of a second. There is no loud bang."
The housing is at a 45-degree angle on impact. The majority of the force of the blow is absorbed by a polycarbonate matte box shielding the dome port, and the remainder is soaked up by Sagalevitch, whose unfortunate proximity to Cameron makes him a target of the director's wrath.
Cameron immediately aborts the dive and orders a return to the surface. Mir 2 ascends rapidly. Sagalevitch notices that they're dangerously low on power - the intense thrust required to vector through the heavy currents has drained Mir 1's batteries. When he tries to turn on the ballast pump to "take them light" for the ascent, nothing happens. The inverter fails to kick in. A complete stall at 12,640 feet below sea level.
Though theoretically they still have radio contact with Keldysh, the first thing they do is shut everything off - camera, sonar, lights, voice communication link.
"We're stuck there and we've already sent Mir 2 back. We're on our own."
They finally get the inverter to come on intermittently. They pump some ballast, but not enough. They keep unsticking from the bottom, rising about 100 feet and then sinking back down. Half an hour passes this way.
"Now I'm starting to get nervous, because I think, 'Well, maybe there's a pinhole leak in the ballast system' - that we're pumping and it's coming back in."
They sit in darkness, hoping the batteries will rebound. The pump is able to sputter out another couple of kilos, only to repeat the pattern - up, then down. Conversation is at a minimum. "I thought we were really screwed."
Finally, coaxing a few more feeble cycles from the pump, they start to rise and this time keep going. But it's at such a slow rate that, based on Cameron's calculations, it will take six or seven hours to reach the surface.
"I wonder why Anatoly doesn't drop the nickel-shot emergency ballast to speed us up, and conclude that it is either too expensive and he doesn't want to incur the cost, or it is a macho sub-pilot thing, an admission of failure to come back on the ship with no power and dropshot used up. Finally he mildly asks if we'd like to go faster. Is this a trick question? We are already freezing, having hardly used the HMI lights, which keep the sub warm during the working phase of the dive. We say go for it, and Anatoly mutters something about testing the system, the excuse that he needs. He drops a miserly 50 kilos of shot from each emergency ballast system - 100 kilos positive - and the sub accelerates to 18 meters per second of rise. The ascent will take just under four hours."
__ September 25 __
After 20 days at sea, nerves are beginning to fray. Weariness has soaked in, displacing excitement. Ten double dives to the Titanic - 20 trips in 17 days - is unprecedented in the many previous explorations of the wreck. The expedition has been successful thus far, but will their luck hold out? In a way, the technology makes it all seem too simple. The subs foster a low-key atmosphere of near effortlessness, masking the reality that human lives hang in the balance with each descent and that a detail left unattended can provoke catastrophe. This, and exhaustion, have worked to drain the collective spirit of the crew.
"Here we are, a bunch of Hollywood assholes driving around the Titanic like she's a theme-park attraction, bumping into things and generally ogling at the scope and scale of this disaster, creating our own reality of the events," John Bruno records in his notes. "We're voyeurs, staring at the hulk of this great ship as though she was a creature in a zoo. The Mirs have made all this as easy as a Sunday drive in the park. But we must remember that the Titanic is a dangerous wreck in a dangerous location. I think she's wearying of our antics."
As if to drive home the point, no sooner does Mir 2 descend than she gets entangled in one of the many cables threaded across the ship's midsection. Sagalevitch snaps free with a burst of the thrusters, but the 6-foot-long tail shroud that covers the sub's main propeller shears off and drops to the deck. The dive is aborted.
__ September 27 __
Launch is set for 7 p.m., the quickest they can possibly ready the submarines. The sub group meeting begins at 2 p.m. and Cameron declares that this will be the last dive, brightening the spirits of the crew considerably. "We're down to our last tail shroud," he says with a laugh. "It's enough. Titanic would like us to leave."
Cameron descends today in Mir 2 in order to work with Snoop Dog. "We've gotten pretty good at deploying and recovering the ROV. The technical difficulties of the earlier dives have been worked out, thanks in large part to the Russians, who hand-filed some machine components for us." He is determined to make another pass at the ship's interior. Alighting at hatch No. 2, Cameron tries to snake the ROV down to G deck, where a Renault touring car was known to have been parked during passage. But Snoop Dog nearly gets stuck in a section of planking, and Cameron quickly assesses the situation as high risk, low return. He moves on to the grand staircase, the architectural centerpiece of the Titanic's interior. Now a gaping hole, it was once crowned by a luminous dome with an intricate glass-and-wrought-iron ceiling, lit with torchères and chandeliers for the first-class passengers' descent to dinner.
The ROV begins in the reception area of the dining salon. "On dive five, the ROV's lights played around in there and we actually saw the D deck reception area. We hadn't been able to see into it, but we could see it looked accessible." Now, the ROV's headlights cut through the dense, blue atmosphere of the room. "We see octagonal brass light fixtures hanging down from the ceiling by their wires" - the remains of the chandeliers, now swaying gently near the floor. The furniture has been swept into a corner near the dining room. A coat rack lies on the floor. Touring the room's perimeter, the camera picks up sections of wood paneling and several ornately carved columns. The ROV noses up against a door, still on its hinges, and the lights illuminate a bronze latticework that once held panes of glass.
"I make a mental note that if we have time we'll come back to this later. We pull out and take another route back in. There, in front of us, is an almost perfectly preserved oak column. I can see little white lines that I think are the lights kicking off some kind of varnish on the wood, but later we realize these are residual traces of white paint."
Pulling back out to the main stairwell, Cameron sends Snoop Dog to B deck in search of sitting room B-51, the J. P. Morgan suite, also known as "the millionaire's suite." He plans to set a good deal of the movie's action in a reproduction of this suite. On a previous attempt, a ceiling beam collapsed, trapping the ROV and making for a lengthy recovery. "We know there's a cross current here, so what we do is aim where we want to go, pick up off the bottom, and just hit full thrust and go like a sonofabitch, and, when we get to where we want to be, sit down and study the situation. We shoot forward like hell, full thrust, run down the hallway, 10, 15 feet, and slam it down on the bottom.
"After the current washes the silt away, we spin the camera around and see that our tether is in good shape. We spin the camera around the other way, and we are right up against the corridor wall. We can see all the wooden understructure of the paneling on the corridor wall, worm-eaten and deteriorated but relatively intact. We realize that the inner wall of the corridor, which was a wooden wall, not a steel wall, is gone - had been eaten away or been blown in catastrophically by the force of currents when the ship hit the bottom - and we are staring right into the B-51 sitting room.
"Jeff Ledda, the ROV pilot, his eyes are just big as saucers. He calls this the ultimate ROV sport dive. It is amazing, like being on another planet. We are high from the discovery, but proceed very methodically, careful not to let our emotions get in the way. We go in, moving cautiously. We come up to the doorway. We can see through the doorway to the private promenade deck. I have reference photographs of how it originally looked right there with me. We see the wooden trim around the windows, the brass window frames still in place with their little cranks, a bronze wall sconce.
"There is a piece of furniture jammed into the corner, probably the remains of a settee. I know there was a fireplace in the room, so we spin around to the left and go over, and, sure enough, there is the fireplace, and the brass firebox, sitting there looking exactly like it was brand-new."
Ahead is the B deck stateroom. The corridor to it beckons, with wood paneling that's intact and softly gleaming on both sides. If he can reach the stateroom, Cameron feels certain he will see an even better-preserved environment, perhaps the best one there is.
But the ROV is straining at its leash. Despite its sophistication - and the technological magnificence of the subs themselves - the ROV is still at the mercy of its humble tether. As with everything else, Cameron wanted more, and so at his urging the leash has already been extended from 60 to 98 feet. That's the maximum the Keldysh mechanical crew feels the rig can sustain, and now every inch of it is entirely played out. James Cameron is at the end of his rope.
