Patrick Lahey has spent much of his life building and advocating for submersibles. But when he learned that a dear friend planned to visit the wreck of RMS Titanic in a craft suspected to be dangerous, he was horrified. “We had many conversations about it,” Lahey recalls, a year on, “and I couldn't have been more vocal about it.”
The friend was Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a Frenchman who had been part of dozens of previous expeditions to the famous shipwreck. Over the years, Nargeolet had worked with the French Research Institute for the Exploitation of the Sea to assist with the recovery of more than 6,000 artefacts, from a section of hull to a leather bag containing sheet music and love letters.
Despite Lahey's warnings, the 77-year-old was seduced by the idea of one more trip to the wreck that had led to him being nicknamed “Mr Titanic”. “It was appealing enough,” Lahey says glumly, “that he was willing to put aside any concerns he had about his own safety, I guess. I don't know. I'll never know. And it'll trouble me, I'm sure, for the rest of my days.”
On 18 June 2023, Titan set off on its first expedition of the year. It was manufactured by the company OceanGate, whose CEO, Stockton Rush, was on board with Nargeolet and three tourists: the British businessman Hamish Harding, the Pakistani-British entrepreneur Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman. One hour and 45 minutes into its mission, the submersible's mothership, Polar Prince, lost contact with the craft and its crew.
Lahey first learned that something had gone wrong with Titan when he was on vacation in Sardinia. “My phone blew up, my computer blew up… Naturally, I was very concerned.”
For four days the world waited. Titan had 96 hours’ worth of oxygen aboard. Could its five passengers be alive, stranded at the bottom of the ocean? The discovery of debris, however, confirmedwhatobservers fearedandwhatexperts privately believed to be the overwhelmingly likely outcome. Before reaching the shipwreck, Titan had imploded under water pressure equivalent to the weight of the Eiffel Tower, resulting in the instantaneous deaths of all five people aboard.
The four days of ambiguity gave the disaster, as it turned out to be, an unseemly virality. , briefly, became the focus of worldwide fixation. When
