As it’s 17 July, it must be… yes, of course: 43rd anniversary of Texan millionaire Jack Grimm’s first expedition to discover the location of the wreck of the Titanic. He did not succeed, but then one of the methods he considered was a monkey trained to point at a map.
Jack had, apparently, used dynamite at the age of 11 to uncover hidden treasure, and had found
a few arrowheads and a frying pan … This pattern of chasing legends using extravagant excess would prove to be a metaphor for his entire life.
20 years later, he was a millionaire, having spent years in poverty while he drilled 25 holes which didn’t have oil at the bottom of them. When the 26th did, it could mean only one thing: time to start looking for Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and Noah’s Ark.
He tried twice to find the Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey, and didn’t. So, he took to carrying around
a piece of hand-carved timber he said was retrieved from Mount Ararat … This is the Ark,” he said. “That’s my story, and I’m going to stick to it”.
Mind you, it was spiritually important to him to find the thing, as he once explained to the Washington Post:
![“It had always bothered me that communism was a godless society,” Grimm told the [Washington] Post in 1981. “I thought if you could prove that there was a flood, an Ark and eight survivors then you would have to accept the Bible.”](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*HGe1YgKPIcWzsxU-BddGEA.png)
Aerial shots of Loch Ness, and offering $500,000 for an authentic photo of Bigfoot, yielded similar fruits, so when an opportunity to look for a ship with an actual recorded history presented itself, Jack was in — to the tune of $250,000.
According to Walter Lord in The Night Lives On, they set out from Florida on this day in 1983 in a research vessel called H. J. W. Fay, reached the search area on 29th, “and for the next three weeks plodded back and forth with no really promising results”.
Undeterred, they took the sonar equipment (which Grimm had shelled out $330,000 for) back the following year on a different ship, the Gyre. There were also two oceanographers: William Ryan and Fred Spiess, who had…certain reservations about one member of the team.
That’s from Beyond Reach: the search for the Titanic, co-written by William Hoffman and Jack Grimm, which goes on to say that “saner heads prevailed”. They set off for nine days, finding nothing except what Grimm — unlike everyone else on board — was sure was a propellor.
They went out again in 1983, on the Fay, and again didn’t find it. So Jack said they had — or at least heavily implied it:
Spiess and Ryan were not only dogged by bad weather and equipment problems, but also by Grimm’s public relations pronouncements on shore. At one point, he actually led the press to believe that the Titanic had been found. When those on board the Fay heard the news report, there was laughter and incredulity. Naturally, when they sailed into Boston on August 21, Grimm wanted the scientists to back up his claim. After the Fay docked, there was something of a confrontation in the ship’s lab. Grimm wanted the scientists to say that they’d found the ship- that one of those 14 sonar targets was the Titanic. As careful professionals Spiess and Ryan were having none of this. There was a long, tense argument, at the end of which the wording of a noncommittal press communiqué was agreed to. All Grimm had to show for his money were some questionable maybes.
When Robert Ballard’s expedition two years later (organised by the US Navy to find two Cold War-era sunken nuclear submarines) found the Titanic, Grimm tried to persuade him that, while Ballard had found the bow, he’d found the stern. Ballard was unmoved by this argument
Still, according to The Night Lives On, Grimm’s ideas about the doomed liner are not the oddest ever conceived. There is, for example, Douglas Woolley, who first planned to raise the Titanic from the seabed in 1966.
Then he found two inventors who claimed they could lift the ship by means of plastic bags filled (in one week) with “85,000 cubic yards of hydrogen produced by electrolysis of the seawater”. Unfortunately, a chemistry professor showed that it would in fact take ten years.
Mind you, someone else suggested filling the wreck with 180,000 tons of molten wax, which would harden, “become buoyant and lift the Titanic to the surface. Another plan would work the same way, but with Vaseline”.
Douglas Woolley never gave up on the ship, and as recently as 2009 got in his local paper looking a bit cross about that fact that RMS Titanic Inc. had its filthy hands on a wreck which was rightfully his.
And Jack Grimm proved remarkably resilient, too. After he’d finally given up on the Titanic, he announced he was going to find the lost city of Atlantis.
