An instant bestseller. From the national bestselling author of The Food Explorer comes a fascinating and rollicking plunge into the story of the world’s most famous shipwreck, the RMS Titanic
 
On a frigid April night in 1912, the world’s largest—and soon most famous—ocean liner struck an iceberg and slipped beneath the waves. She had scarcely disappeared before her new journey began, a seemingly limitless odyssey through the world’s fixation with her every tragic detail. Plans to find and raise the Titanic began almost immediately. Yet seven decades passed before it was found. Why? And of some three million shipwrecks that litter the ocean floor, why is the world still so fascinated with this one?

In Sinkable, Daniel Stone spins a fascinating tale of history, science, and obsession, uncovering the untold story of the Titanic not as a ship but as a shipwreck. He explores generations of eccentrics, like American Charles Smith, whose 1914 recovery plan using a synchronized armada of ships bearing electromagnets was complex, convincing, and utterly impossible; Jack Grimm, a Texas oil magnate who fruitlessly dropped a fortune to find the wreck after failing to find Noah’s Ark; and the British Doug Woolley, a former pantyhose factory worker who has claimed, since the 1960s, to be the true owner of the Titanic wreckage.

Along the way, Sinkable takes readers through the two miles of ocean water in which the Titanic sank, showing how the ship broke apart and why, and delves into the odd history of our understanding of such depths. Author Daniel Stone studies the landscape of the seabed, which in the Titanic’s day was thought to be as smooth and featureless as a bathtub. He interviews scientists to understand the decades of rust and decomposition that are slowly but surely consuming the ship. (She’s expected to disappear entirely within a few decades!) He even journeys over the Atlantic, during a global pandemic, to track down the elusive Doug Woolley. And Stone turns inward, looking at his own dark obsession with both the Titanic and shipwrecks in general, and why he spends hours watching ships sink on YouTube.

Brimming with humor, curiosity and wit, Sinkable follows in the tradition of Susan Orlean and Bill Bryson, offering up a page-turning work of personal journalism and an immensely entertaining romp through the deep sea and the nature of obsession.

An excerpt from SINKABLE…

In 1990, Mearns’s first find was his biggest. His discovery also helped solve a crime. The Lucona was a Panama‐registered freighter that sank in the Indian Ocean in 1977. An Austrian businessman named Udo Proksch owned the cargo and said the ship had been carrying “expensive uranium mining equipment” and filed a hefty insurance claim for $20 million. With little available proof, the insurance company paid the claim, but thirteen years later, when Mearns found the Lucona in almost fourteen thousand feet of water, he not only couldn’t find the  mining equipment, but he also noticed the remnants of a time‐release bomb, suggesting Proksch faked the accident at considerable cost, including the lives of the six men who died in the sinking. A handful of Austrian government officials were discovered to have been in on the plot, signing off on the fake cargo and obstructing an investigation into the incident. Proksch escaped to the Philippines in 1988 but returned to Austria a year later, when he was recognized in a disguise and arrested. Evidence from Mearns’s discovery of the Lucona landed Proksch a prison sentence of twenty years.

Mearns could hang his hat on the Lacona alone, dining out and giving speeches about how he dug through historical records and plotted points on maps. But he felt drawn toward bigger mysteries and deeper wrecks. In 1994, Mearns found the MV Derbyshire, the biggest British ship ever lost at sea. It was nearly three times the displacement weight and sat at almost the exact same depth as the Titanic. Several years later, he found the British two‐mile‐deep battle cruiser the HMS Hood, which had been sunk by a German battleship in 1941. Like the Titanic, the Hood had also been a symbol of invincibility that fueled decades of enthusiasm and fascination. For Mearns, every expedition seemed to bring the announcement of a new discovery: in 2008, the Australian battlecruiser the HMAS Sydney; in 2015, the Japanese battleship Musashi; and of course the Guinness World Record for the deepest shipwreck ever found, the German runner Rio Grande, waterlogged under three and a half miles of water.

I finally got ahold of Mearns one morning. Slim with gray hair and a goatee, he looked more like a mid‐level accountant than a grizzled ocean veteran. What was his secret, I wondered, that allowed him to turn up dozens of wrecks that other people—many of them extremely smart, experienced, and well‐funded—had tried and failed to find, and to make it look almost effortless?

“You’d be surprised how much you can learn in books and old newspapers,” he said. “But the most important part are eyewitness accounts.”

“Like accounts from survivors?” I asked.

“Yeah, and people on other ships in the area.”

He explained that he found details about the weather and the water current. Was there wind that night? More than once he tracked down descendants of survivors—people who weren’t even alive when the ship sank—and they said something like, “My dad used to say it was a full moon that night,” which led Mearns to a new breakthrough. Often, even harder than finding the ship’s location was raising the money for each expedition. Investors weren’t interested in old battleship radios or navigation computers. They wanted flashy finds like gold or diamonds. He often partnered with TV companies or foreign governments with a media or historical interest. Occasionally, philanthropists got involved, but only if a big anniversary of a battle was coming up, thereby guaranteeing free media and public credit that, naturally, could be monetized.

Mearns was good at what he did, but even for the best hunters, there were still ships out of reach. For a long time, the one that haunted him was the Endurance, the ship Ernest Shackleton took in 1914 to Antarctica, where it was sandwiched by converging ice floes and spawned one of the greatest survival stories in the history of exploration. In 2003, Mearns met Shackleton’s daughter, who gave her family’s blessing for him to go find the Endurance and recover its artifacts. The only problem was that the Endurance was almost two miles deep at the bottom of the ice-covered Weddell Sea, an area almost as dangerous to ships today as it was in Shackleton’s era.

I understood the challenge facing Mearns or anyone who looked for the Endurance. But then, as this book was heading to the printer, the darndest thing happened: someone found it. A team led by the polar geographer John Shears and the maritime archaeologist Mensun Bound—a man sometimes called the “Indiana Jones of the deep”—used battery-powered drones to comb 150 square miles of Antarctic seabed 10,000 feet deep. The drones worked for two weeks until they returned with high-definition photos of the Endurance’s bow and its helm. In the wreckhead community, this was enormous news, a discovery almost as seismic as finding King Tut’s tomb or landing on the moon. But for the biggest fans, the news also seemed to have an undercurrent of disappointment. During its century-long absence, the mystery of the Endurance had become more interesting than the Endurance itself. Now that it was revealed to be exactly where everyone thought it might be looking exactly like everyone hoped it would, there wasn’t any mystery left.

“How come you never went after the Titanic?” I asked Mearns.

The timing was off, he said. He didn’t start searching for wrecks until the late eighties, when the wreck had already been found. If it was still undiscovered by the mid‐nineties, he might have been the one to find it. And he would have had little trouble assembling investors after his early success with the Lucona. I knew that in 1992, seven years after the Titanic discovery, Mearns and his company, Blue Water Recoveries, were hired by investors to salvage objects from the Titanic’s debris field. But I didn’t know that one of those investors was Jack Grimm, who, in the years after someone else beat him to the wreck, had turned to collecting artifacts at the site that could be sold, licensed, or profitably put on display. As it happened, Grimm’s hairline had nowhere left to recede on September 30, 1992, when a federal judge in Norfolk, Virginia, ordered Grimm and Mearns—whose boats were idling at the Titanic wreck site at a cost of $1,000 per hour—to keep their hands off the debris until the judge could sort out who the artifacts actually belonged to. This took months, and the men eventually had to go home.

To this day, Mearns still blames the judge for screwing them up. But he also learned an important lesson: with shipwrecks, the only thing more valuable than a good wreck, is a good lawyer. ◼