The story of the most famous of maritime tragedies, the sinking of the Titanic on its maiden voyage, may be forced to undergo a rewrite because of a recent discovery.
Undersea explorers said Monday that the discovery of more wreckage from the Titanic suggests that the luxury liner broke into three sections — not two, as commonly thought — and thus sank faster than previously believed.
”The breakup and sinking of the Titanic has never been accurately depicted,” Parks Stephenson, a Titanic historian, said at a conference.
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Undersea explorer Robert Ballard located the bulk of the wreck in 1985, at a depth of 13,000 feet. He declared that the ship had broken into two major sections, and that is the way the sinking was portrayed in the 1997 movie.
However, the latest expedition, sponsored by the History Channel, found two hull pieces lying about a third of a mile from the rest of the wreck. The explorers said the location of the wreckage indicates that the bottom came off the ship intact — constituting a third major piece — and later broke in two.
Ballard responded to the challenge to his twenty-year-old theory with the cool sense of objectivity that would make any historian or explorer proud.
”They found a fragment, big deal,” Ballard said. ”Am I surprised? No. When you go down there, there’s stuff all over the place. It hit an iceberg and it sank. Get over it.”
Perhaps, if this new theory holds water (sorry ’bout that, y’all), we can get a re-edit of James Cameron’s Titanic. This should certainly cut off a healthy chunk of the bloated 194 minutes of run time.