British Court Clears Way to Raise Titanic

A High Court ruling on a 14th-Century king’s maritime law cleared the way Friday for a British-led effort to raise the Titanic.

The liner has rested 13,000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface off Newfoundland since it sank 73 years ago.

The court’s ruling actually dealt with the American liner Lusitania, sunk by German U-boats off Ireland in 1915. The court said the British government has no right to the remains of ships in international waters, only British territorial waters.

Salvage engineer John Pierce, who explored the Lusitania wreck, said the judgment opens the way for his more ambitious plan to raise the Titanic by using giant air-bags, now that there is no danger it will be seized by the government.

“I’m astonished,” said Pierce, who was close to tears. “The Titanic is coming up. It will be about 18 months before we can mount the operation technically, but there is nothing that can stop us now.”

Pierce said he will go “absolutely flat out” to form an international team to bring the ship up. Called unsinkable, the luxury liner hit an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage, with the loss of 1,513 lives.

However, 80-year-old Eva Hart, a survivor of the 1912 sinking, said the project would be like “digging up a skeleton.”

“I’m terribly revolted, and so are the rest of the survivors and God knows there are few of us left,” she said.

She said Pierce had telephoned her Friday morning to tell her of his salvage plan.

“I told him exactly the same, and I think he thought I was quite crazy,” she said. “I’m not a sentimental person about graves, but this is something quite different. If they bring up artifacts, it will be tantamount to opening graves and stealing somebody’s rings.”

Friday’s judgment allowed Pierce and his backers to keep $3.4-million worth of treasures--including a ship’s bell, cargo and 8,000 silver spoons--that they recovered from the Lusitania.

1324 Act Examined

The court case involved an examination of salvage law going back to an act of Edward II in 1324, which said: “The king shall have all wreck of the sea, whales and great sturgeons.”

Sir Barry Sheen, sitting in the Admiralty Court, ruled that the government’s rights were limited only to wrecks in British territorial waters and did not extend to international recoveries.

The judge said no one had a better right to the Lusitania items than Pierce, two American businessmen who claim to own the ship’s hull and two salvage firms that took part in the 1982 operation.

The wreck of the Titanic was found about 375 miles south of Newfoundland in September by an American-French expedition.

The exact location has been kept secret by the expedition, which wants to lobby the United Nations to leave the wreck undisturbed. Many salvagers have said it will be impossible to raise the hull.

Pierce said he can raise the Titanic with the same type of giant air bags he used to refloat the Greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior after it was sabotaged and sunk this summer in the harbor at Auckland, New Zealand.

Under his plan, two specialized underwater craft will fix tear-shaped bags along the length of the Titanic’s hull. They will be inflated to give the wreck sufficient buoyancy to lift it to the surface.

He said he plans to return the Titanic to the Belfast shipyard where it was built 73 years ago and refurbish it as a tourist attraction.

Not everyone is as confident the ship can--or should--be raised.

American scientist Robert Ballard, who was part of the team that found the Titanic, said at the time that any attempt at salvage would be “ridiculous.”

Marine expert Robert Spindel of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts has called Pierce’s plan “nonsense.”