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| A Diver Feared the Titan Sub, but Couldn’t Resist the Titanic | A Diver Feared the Titan Sub, but Couldn’t Resist the Titanic |
| (32 minutes later) | |
| A riddle haunts the Titan disaster. It’s the presence on the doomed craft of Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77. The Frenchman was one of the world’s great submariners. So why was he, of all people, diving repeatedly to the Titanic on a submersible that many experts saw as a catastrophe waiting to happen? | A riddle haunts the Titan disaster. It’s the presence on the doomed craft of Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77. The Frenchman was one of the world’s great submariners. So why was he, of all people, diving repeatedly to the Titanic on a submersible that many experts saw as a catastrophe waiting to happen? |
| “It’s a source of great puzzlement,” said Victor L. Vescovo, a sea explorer who hired Mr. Nargeolet to oversee a series of unusually deep dives. | “It’s a source of great puzzlement,” said Victor L. Vescovo, a sea explorer who hired Mr. Nargeolet to oversee a series of unusually deep dives. |
| Weeks before the loss of the Titan and its crew in June, Alfred S. McLaren, president emeritus of the Explorers Club, was hosting a dinner party at the Harvard Club of New York City for Mr. Nargeolet and eight other guests when he learned of his friend’s repeated dives aboard the experimental craft. | Weeks before the loss of the Titan and its crew in June, Alfred S. McLaren, president emeritus of the Explorers Club, was hosting a dinner party at the Harvard Club of New York City for Mr. Nargeolet and eight other guests when he learned of his friend’s repeated dives aboard the experimental craft. |
| “I was speechless,” Dr. McLaren, a retired Navy submariner, recalled. “I wanted to say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’” | “I was speechless,” Dr. McLaren, a retired Navy submariner, recalled. “I wanted to say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’” |
| Since the June 18 disaster, no single answer to that question has emerged. One theory holds that Mr. Nargeolet believed that his undersea skills would let him manage Titan’s obvious design flaws. Another sees his love for the storied 1912 shipwreck — he was known as “Mr. Titanic” — as blinding him to the danger. But Mr. Nargeolet may have had other motivations as well. | |
| For decades, the submariner was locked in a feud with Robert D. Ballard, an American oceanographer often credited with the wreck’s 1985 discovery. The two men represented different sides of a broader dispute involving governments in opposition across the Atlantic Ocean as well as competing philosophies on shipwrecks, a fray that Washington rejoined in recent days. Both sought the moral high ground. Their conflict centered on whether the ship’s artifacts should be retrieved. |