Director of the underwater research program on the wreck of the Titanic, he was the first to bring 800 objects from the liner to the surface. He is part of the group of explorers aboard the submarine which disappeared on Sunday, confirms the Cité de la mer de Cherbourg to franceinfo on Tuesday.
“In the submarine, coming out for the first time on the wreck of the Titanic, for a moment, almost ten minutes, we did not say a word”, confided Paul-Henri Nargeolet in April 2022 to franceinfo. The 77-year-old Frenchman was the first, in 1993, to having brought to the surface 800 objects from the liner which sank after hitting an iceberg 600 kilometers off the coast of Newfoundland. Twenty years later, he boarded a small submarine on Sunday June 18 to observe the wreck of the Titanic.
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No more contact could be established with the machine less than seven meters long, named “Titan”, 1h45 after starting its descent. The company OceanGate Expedition which offers these expeditions around the titanic writes on its site that this submersible has life support for 96 hours. The passengers of this exceptional trip, a pilot and four other people, including Paul-Henri Nargeolet and the British billionaire Hamish Harding, had paid 250,000 dollars to see the mythical wreck.
Passionate about wrecks “since I was little”
Paul-Henri Nargeolet is the director of the underwater research program on the wreck of the Titanic. In April 2022, he published a book, In the depths of the Titanic, published by HarperCollins. “I say that I met two survivors the same day, one in the morning, who said to me: ‘I don’t like what you are doing because my father died on the wreck, that doesn’t don’t like it, you have to leave it all alone.’ In the afternoon of the same day, I met another survivor who said to me: ‘I like what you are doing and besides, my mom forgot her pearl necklace on the bedside table. Can you go get it?’ They are two ways of looking at things, they are different.”
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By going back to 1993, objects that had belonged to the victims, Paul-Henri Nargeolet wanted “Future generations will have a few things that come from the Titanic.
“Thanks to these objects, we find the story of people we would never have talked about. Because, what has been put forward very often? It is the celebrities of the time who were the millionaires or billionaires of the time. But the stories of emigrants who wanted to have a better life in the United States were forgotten.”
Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Titanic specialistat franceinfo
Paul-Henri Nargeolet had spent 22 years in the French Navy as an officer specializing in mine clearance, diving and deep underwater intervention. “I have always been fascinated by wrecks since I was little”he confided to franceinfo in April 2022. During his first dive on the wreck of the Titanic, “The contracts weren’t signed. We shouldn’t even have done it, but we were there. I said to myself: if ever, they don’t sign, we’re here, we must at least do a dive. And so we did the dive and in the evening, we received a telex from the management of Ifremer, saying: ‘The contract is signed, you can dive’. Then, he and his teams get a contract for 12 dives. “We did 32!”