De profundis

As an exercise in reckless hubris the ill-fated descent of the Titan submersible, carrying tourists to see the wreck of the SS Titanic, must rank alongside the building of the Tower of Babel or the flight of Daedalus and Icarus.

Sadly, in the case of the Titan, this disastrous enterprise was not mythical but only too real. The warning from history, though, should have been clear: tempting fate can have fatal consequences. In ignoring the risks (flagrantly, even boastfully) the expedition leader and OceanGate company CEO, Stockton Rush, was not only jeopardising his own life but also the lives of his paying passengers. His own life was his to gamble with but what of his duty of care to his clients who entrusted their welfare to him?

He and his four companions (one of whom was aged only 19) paid the ultimate price for his insouciance as the vessel imploded and sank to the Atlantic floor, four kilometres down at a pressure of four hundred atmospheres. Now, the wreck of the Titan lies on the seabed alongside that of the Titanic as a terrible warning of the consequences of unbridled vanity. But will that warning be heeded? 

I daresay there will be an inquiry, as a result of which some lessons will be drawn and regulations possibly tightened-up but risk, as Rush himself observed, is the very stuff of exploration. Early sea voyagers and global circumnavigators, cross-continental explorers, medical experimenters, balloonists, aviators and astronauts all faced mortal danger and many brave, or foolhardy, pioneers did indeed die expanding the boundaries of human knowledge. Humankind's relentless pursuit of scientific discoveries, mastery of nature and an understanding of the Cosmos has been gained at a terrible cost in lives and reputations.

However, there is something different, I think, about the loss of the Titan. This is probably to do with the totemic status of the object of its fateful voyage: the Titanic itself. Relatives of some of the nearly fifteen hundred passengers and crew who lost their lives in the Titanic disaster have called for a stop to be put to any further descents to the site and I understand why. There is something ghoulish and disrespectful about such trips that one recoils from, although it is difficult to explain precisely why. The commercialisation of a monumental human tragedy may be inherently distasteful (the Titanic wreck is, after all, a mass grave) and yet we don't scruple to visit historic graveyards, catacombs and tombs or gawp at unwrapped Egyptian mummies in museum cases or plaster casts of Roman corpses in Pompei.

Is it, perhaps, the sheer scale of the human tragedy involved in the loss of the Titanic that makes its position unique, and uniquely appalling. The wreck's awesome and gloomy inaccessibility, so far removed from the surface and the living human world, was supposed to act as its eternal protection from crass intrusion. Unfortunately, that was compromised in 1985 with its eventual location and subsequent exploration. And, of course, the opulence and glamour of the ship itself, as well as the poignancy of its sinking on its maiden voyage, makes it endlessly fascinating for us more than a century after its tragic loss.

But there is, arguably, an uncomfortable truth about human nature concealed in the dual cases of the Titanic and the Titan. When one ship carrying migrants from Libya to Europe sinks in the Mediterranean with a loss of human life almost half that of the Titanic it warrants barely a week's newsworthiness and certainly not an international search and rescue operation on the scale of that scrambled for the five men on the Titan. 

The victims in the Mediterranean were not passengers on a luxury liner or able to pay $200,000 for a daytrip in a submersible. They were victims of war, famine, corruption and ecological destruction desperately seeking safe refuge in Europe. They are mostly nameless; no ship's manifest exists for them; no-one will ever pay to descend to the seabed to visit the wreckage of their hopes and dreams. Their bodies are even now being caught up in the nets of Tunisian fishermen and buried in namelss graves far from home. 

In that respect maybe their fate is analagous to that of the third-class passengers penned below decks on the Titanic whose life savings had been spent in a desperate attempt to escape misery and build a new life. They, too, were seen as steerage; expendable, replaceable, negligible.

In death, as in life, we are not equal.

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