NEARLY A century after the Titanicsank on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic, the ocean liner will be the subject of four days of court hearings in Norfolk, Virginia, this week.
The US company RMS Titanic, Inc, which has recovered thousands of items from the wreck, has told the court it wants to be declared the legal owner of these artefacts in order to recover some of the costs of salvage. RMS Titanic is a subdivision of Premier Exhibitions of Atlanta, Georgia, which shows nearly 6,000 pieces of china and personal objects from the liner in an exhibition that travels the world.
The items, which are valued at more than $110 million (€73.6 million), have been removed in six expeditions, the last in 2004. RMS Titanic, Inc plans a seventh expedition next year.
The Titanicsank 430 miles southeast of Newfoundland on April 15th, 1912, after hitting an iceberg. She lies under 2½ miles of water, outside all territorial waters. 1,522 people died in the disaster. On October 24th, the ashes of the last survivor, Millvina Dean, were scattered in Southampton.
Douglas Faulkner Woolley, an Englishman who holds a rival claim to the wreck, yesterday criticised RMS Titanic, Inc. “All they’re in it for’s the money they can make,” he said in a phone interview from Essex.
The US district court in Norfolk will reportedly consider Woolley’s claim, but the Englishman said he refuses to recognise the US court’s jurisdiction over a British ship. “When the Titantic went down, all shares passed back to a company in Liverpool,” Woolley said. “She went down a 100 per cent British ship.”
Woolley pointed out that the name "The Honorable Rebecca Beach Smith" figures on RMS Titanic, Inc's website as one of many people who "are now a permanent part of the Titaniclegacy". It seems inappropriate, he said, for the judge deciding on the company's claim to be thanked on the company's website.
Last July 15th, Woolley said, RMS Titanic, Inc sent him a letter asking him to relinquish his claim.
Woolley (73) is an example of the fascination the Titanicexerts over people. His grandfather's two sisters booked passage, loaded their belongings on the ship in Southampton, but then refused to sail because of a premonition it was doomed. "The legend inspired me to want to raise the Titanicwhen I was still a child," he said.
Woolley says he discovered the wreck in 1977, eight years before the US oceanographer Robert Ballard, who is widely credited with the discovery. Woolley filed a claim under the British Sea Merchant Act of 1894. Because of his age and lack of funding, he has asked a maritime lawyer to auction his claim in a London hotel, to enable him to pursue the less ambitious dream of raising the Queen Elizabeth I in Hong Kong Harbour.
Dwight Coleman, an oceanographer and associate of Ballard, said Ballard made no claim to the Titanic: "He would have had to recover an object from the site, and he never did. He supports leaving the site alone, not to touch it.
“Historians and archeologists cannot learn anything more; there is no scientific reason to recover anything. A lot of people would much rather see objects in a museum than respect a graveyard.”
Neither RMS Titanic, Inc nor its lawyer returned phone calls.