Treasures Reclaimed from the Deep

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

"All around us there was this twisted mass of wreckage and tons of coal spread around. And then there was this lady's shoe. It was incredible, just haunting." That was the way Doug Llewelyn, an executive producer for Los Angeles-based Westgate Productions, described what it was like to view the sunken wreck of the ocean liner Titanic at first hand. Recalls Yann Keranflech, a member of the $2.5 million French expedition that last summer salvaged some 800 artifacts from the wreck: "You think about the victims. If you find a pair of shoes or a suitcase, you ask yourself if the person managed to survive."

On these pages, TIME presents exclusive photographs of the salvage operation, the Titanic itself and some of the recovered treasures. Among the objects brought up by French divers: a bronze teapot and coffeepot, a leather valise, a rococo vase, a statue of a cherub from the Titanic's first-class grand staircase and a ship's safe, which may contain a fortune in jewelry.

Indeed, this week television audiences around the world will be able to see footage of the awesome wreck, as well as objects from the Titanic that have not been seen since the "unsinkable" liner foundered on its maiden voyage in 1912, at a cost of 1,500 lives. The program's climax: the opening of the safe, a stunt that will inevitably be compared with TV Correspondent Geraldo Rivera's much ridiculed 1986 on-camera opening of Al Capone's empty "vault" in Chicago (a show also produced by Westgate). After filing unsuccessfully to block the broadcast, Florida Investor Michael Harris and four coplaintiffs are suing Westgate and other investors for $300 million, claiming they were cheated out of a share of the profits.

For years after the Titanic disaster, the exact location of the ship was unknown. It was not until 1985 that an expedition mounted by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the French Institute for Research and Development of the Sea (IFREMER) found it broken into two pieces in the North Atlantic, about 350 miles southeast of Newfoundland, in 12,500 ft. of water. The following year, Woods Hole Marine Geologist Robert Ballard returned to probe inside the rusting hull and take photographs. But Ballard's crew left the ship and its artifacts undisturbed and urged others to do the same as a memorial to those who had died in the tragedy.

Their French colleagues disagreed. Last July an IFREMER ship arrived at the site, and over the next 54 days researchers, filmmakers and financial backers made 32 dives in the submersible Nautile. The salvagers used two remote manipulator arms to pluck objects from the ocean floor and place them in a collecting basket. There were, notes Keranflech, "strange anomalies -- a silver plate still as bright as if it had just been polished. Crystal glasses, beautiful porcelain plates and cups. When we brought them to the surface, ; everyone rushed up to see. We wanted to expose them to the air as little as possible, but it would have been criminal not to let the crew see them." Recalls Robert Chappaz, who helped secure financing for the mission: "We opened a leather case and saw that it was filled with jewels. We closed it immediately. The wreck was not our private toy."

From the outset, Woods Hole's Ballard has been sharply critical of the French expedition. "By what right did they take a piece of human history and destroy it?" he asks. But to say that the salvage operation exploited the Titanic, recently wrote William F. Buckley Jr., who visited the Titanic site last summer as a guest of the French, is like "saying that Gauguin exploited Tahiti."

Chappaz and his French colleagues feel the same way. "These objects would eventually have been destroyed by the sea," he says. "Why should we simply abandon them?" He adds, "I won't get rich from the Titanic." Indeed, the objects are scheduled to go on a world-wide tour next summer and eventually be lent to various museums for public display.

With reporting by Joelle Attinger/Boston and William Dowell/Paris