On April 14, 1912, at 11:40 p.m., at 41° 46′ N and 50° 14′ W, a latitude close to that of Bordeaux, about 700 kilometers from Newfoundland, the Titanic hit an iceberg. Three hours later, the proud giant they said “virtually unsinkable” disappeared into the black waters of the Atlantic. Despite much research, this is only the 1is September 1985 that the wreckage was spotted and photographed by a robot directed from the surface by Robert Ballard’s team. The reason: it was not where we were looking for it, but 25 kilometers from the place of impact, carried away by the currents.
Two years later, on July 25, 1987, at 12:22 p.m., the three occupants of the Nautile, a small submarine but strong enough to withstand the enormous pressure exerted at this depth (380 bars), discover the bow of the most famous wreck in history, in the light of the searchlights which pierce the night abysmal. While the team had not stopped exchanging for an hour and forty, the time of the descent, there, in front of this unreal spectacle, a long silence is made. At the controls of the submersible, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, whom everyone calls “PH”, says to himself: “That’s it, we made it! » A sentence that he can repeat during the next 34 dives, “never the same”which made him one of the greatest specialists in Titanic and the privileged witness of the evolution of its wreck for thirty-five years.
Its presence at a depth of 3,843 meters owes nothing to chance or luck. Commander of the French Navy, he spent his twenty-two-year career in mine clearance and underwater intervention. This is why it is to him that the French Research Institute for the Exploitation of the Sea (Ifremer) turned in 1986 to direct future expeditions to the wreck of the Titanic and take care of the intervention machines. For him, “No question of letting an opportunity like this pass” ! This is how he found himself at the head of a project led jointly by the French institute and the American company RMS Titanic Inc., which today holds the exclusive rights to the wreck and of which he is became the director of the underwater research program.
From that moment on, the mythical wreck will never be far from his thoughts, even when he carries out missions under other waters, in the China Sea, in Japan, in the West Indies, in the South Atlantic… and off the coast of Ireland, on what remains of the Carpathiansthe ship that saved the 705 survivors of the Titanic and which, ironically, was torpedoed six years later by a German submarine. Funny fate for the one who was born in 1946 in… Chamonix.
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