As I begin my slow ascent to the surface, stopping to decompress, I think about Somers and the stories locked in her decaying timbers. Powerful events played out on those decks and changed the course of a navy. Our team never loses sight of that tragedy over the next few days as we continue our inspection, complete our chart and finally bid the wreck goodbye.

After our departure from Veracruz, the Armada de Mexico closes the site to all divers and vows to keep a close watch on the site. A return visit by the National Park Service a few years ago found Somers looking much as we had left her, but with more evidence of unauthorized visitors who have taken souvenirs. With the exception of these few illegal divers, Somers rests alone in the eternal darkness. If that broken hull could speak, I’d like to think that, just like Billy Budd, she would ask to be left in the solitude of the sea.

It’s 6:00 a.m., and the first hints of light on the horizon reveal scattered clouds in a gray sky and the flecks of whitecaps on the ocean’s dark surface. I’m aboard the Russian research vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh. We’re slowly steaming in a wide circle, barely making headway in the rolling sea. For the last week, we’ve kept the same course, 368 miles southeast of St. John’s, Newfoundland, constantly retracing our wake on this patch of ocean, far from sight of land.

Featureless it may be, but this area of ocean is famous because of what happened here on the late evening and early morning hours of April 14 and 15, 1912. Two and a quarter miles below us, at the bottom of the sea, lies the wreck of Titanic. And in a few hours, I will slowly descend to the ocean floor, sealed in a small deep-sea submersible, to visit the wreck in the freezing, pitch-black, crushing depths.

Ever since Titanic’s shattered hulk was discovered in 1985, only about a hundred people have made the risky dive into the abyss to visit it. That’s far fewer than the number of humans who have flown into space.

The name itself says it all: Titanic. The second of three enormous steamships designed and built to be the world’s largest, Titanic was the epitome of an age of confidence and achievement. The ship was 882 feet, 9 inches long, with a beam or width of 92 feet, 6 inches. From her keel to the top of her funnels, Titanic towered 175 feet, and the distance from the waterline to the boat deck was the same as a six-story building. The hull displaced or weighed 66,000 tons. Each steel plate that went into the hull was 30 feet long, 6 feet wide and an inch thick.

The wreck itself, deep down in the eternal darkness of the bottom of the North Atlantic, has continued, as author Susan Wels points out, “to fire and torment the public’s imagination.” “The location of her sinking,” said Wels, “an imprecisely known patch of the Atlantic, vacant and menacing… became part of the world’s geography. Unknown and unreachable, her abyssal grave and her fatal voyage obsessed dreamers and adventurers for more than seven decades.”

When the news of finding Titanic, by the joint French-U.S. team of Jean-Louis Michel and Robert Ballard, was announced in the early morning hours of September 1, 1985, the world’s press provided, at first in brief snippets, and then in more detail, images and information from the bottom of the Atlantic. From a few simple views of the bow and a single boiler to dozens of images of empty decks, empty lifeboat davits and scattered debris, the eerie scenes gave immediacy to what was, for a new generation, a distant and abstract tragedy. Robert Ballard himself felt it, just hours after his euphoria over finding the wreck faded. “It was one thing to have won — to have found the ship. It was another thing to be there. That was the spooky part. I could see the Titanic as she slipped nose first into the glassy water. Around me were the ghostly shapes of the lifeboats and the piercing shouts and screams of people freezing to death in the water.”

The wreck of Titanic, in all its twisted, rusting splendor, like many other historic sites — Pompeii, Tutankhamen’s tomb or other shipwrecks — gives people a “temporal touchstone.” In this case, it is a time machine that provides a physical link to the “night to remember.” I’ve joined other viewers of many television specials, the IMAX film Titanica and James Cameron’s movie Titanic to watch as submersibles and cameras pass various spots mentioned in the history books and survivors’ accounts. The crow’s nest where lookout Frederick Fleet picked up the telephone and gave warning of an iceberg. The boat deck with its empty lifeboat davits. The remains of the bridge, where Captain Edward John Smith was last seen. But being an archeologist who has spent two decades exploring the seabed and lost shipwrecks, I wanted to see this wreck for myself. Zegrahm DeepSea Voyages, a subsidiary of Zegrahm Expeditions in Seattle, Washington, has offered adventurers the opportunity to participate in Russian scientific dives to the wreck of Titanic since 1998. The price—$35,500 in 1999—was out of my range, but Zegrahm offered me the chance of a lifetime. As a lecturing archeologist and “team leader,” I could join the year 2000 scientific expedition and get a dive, if I would share my experiences and observations with my fellow passengers.

At the heart of the research vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh’s operations are two extraordinary submersibles, Mir 1 and Mir 2. “Mother ship” to the two subs, and a floating workshop and scientific platform, Keldysh is the center of Russia’s deep-sea program. The participation of Mir 1 and Mir 2 in the IMAX film and Cameron’s Titanic made both submersibles famous, as well as Keldysh and her crew. Their star status notwithstanding, the men and women of Keldysh are excellent scientists and technicians whose work has advanced the frontiers of science. The ocean covers two-thirds of the planet, yet during the last century of oceanographic research, humans have gained detailed knowledge of only 5 per cent of its depths.

In the nineteenth century, scientists dropped dredges and nets to grab samples from the deep, while divers wearing heavy helmets, thick rubberized canvas suits and lead-weighted boots walked the shallower depths. In 1930, the first submersible to go deep, William Beebe’s round steel bathysphere, made a 3,280-foot dive off Bermuda, suspended on a steel cable from a surface ship. It was followed in the late 1940s and 1950s by bathyscaphes — self-propelled undersea vehicles with tanks for buoyancy and ballast. In the 1960s, the Cold War with Russia inspired the development and construction of deep submersibles, as the ocean depths became a strategic frontier. The famous Alvin, as well as France’s Nautile, both deep-ocean submersibles developed during the Cold War, were involved in the earliest dives on Titanic. Back home, at my own Vancouver Maritime Museum, is another Cold War-era submersible, built in 1968: Ben Franklin is capable of diving to 3,280 feet and staying down for thirty days, the largest deep-diving submersible ever built.

Mir 1 and Mir 2 were built in Finland in 1985–87 at a cost of $25 million each, for Russia’s Shirshov Institute of Oceanology. The builder, Rauma-Repola, was awarded the contract after the United States pressured the Canadian government to block the sale of Vancouver-built Pisces submersibles to the Soviets. Each 18.6-ton Mir is an engineering marvel capable of diving to (and returning from) depths of up to 4 miles. The heart of each sub is a 6-foot diameter nickel-steel pressure sphere 1½ inches thick. Inside that small sphere, three persons — a pilot and two observers, as well as life-support equipment, sonars and the sub’s controls — have to fit. It is a tight, cramped workspace.