Titanic exhibition opens in shadow of explorer’s submarine disaster

PARIS: A major exhibition dedicated to the Titanic opened in Paris on Tuesday, with many of the objects on display brought up from the ship’s wreck by a French deep-sea explorer who died in a submersible disaster last month.

Henri-Paul Nargeolet, who was nicknamed “Mr Titanic”, was one of five people onboard the Titan tourist sub when it lost contact with the surface after plunging down to visit the wreck in mid-June.

An attempted rescue operation in the North Atlantic briefly captivated the world before it found evidence that the vessel had imploded underwater, killing all on board.

The Titanic exhibition which opened in the French capital was “largely the result of the work, ingenuity and passion of Henri-Paul Nargeolet,” the event’s producer Pascal Bernardin said.

Nargeolet, 77, had been expected to attend the exhibition’s opening.

The explorer helped bring up many of the 260 objects on display — which include navigation instruments and hooks from the ship as well as watches and jewellery from its passengers — from the wreck.

The exhibition, which runs from July 18 to Sept 10, starts off with a more than four-metre-long model of the mythic ship.

Visitors are then taken on a journey from the night the Titanic departed England for New York in April 1912, through the sinking of what was the world’s largest cruise ship after its hull was ruptured by an iceberg.

The exhibition features recreations of the ship’s cabins, grand staircase and even the oppressive atmosphere of its engine room. A joint French-American expedition discovered the Titanic’s wreck nearly four kilometres underwater off the coast of Newfoundland in 1985.

Nargeolet directed or participated in six of the eight exploration missions to the wreck between 1987 and 2010, which brought back more than 5,000 objects to the surface. The vessels used for those missions were quite different to the Titan.

Previously voiced concerns about the sub’s safety came to light after its implosion.

Titan’s US-based operator OceanGate, whose CEO Stockton Rush was among those killed onboard Titan, has suspended all its activities indefinitely.

It had charged $250,000 a seat on the submersible, which was about the size of an SUV car. The US Coast Guard and Canadian authorities have launched probes into the cause of the tragedy.

Published in Dawn, July 19th, 2023