Guardian of the ghosts of the Titanic

BOB Ballard, the oceanographer responsible for finding the final resting place of the Titanic, takes off his shoes and carefully arranges them on the floor, solemnly simulating his discovery of the watery gravesite.

As his submersible tracked along the seabed this is what he saw - the shoes of mothers and daughters and the men who died trying to save them.

If he'd brought one artefact back to the surface he would have been able to claim salvage rights to the wreck, but he was there to discover and document history, not to disturb the dead.

Now, with the value of Titanic memorabilia soaring, and with it the threat of rogue salvage operators cashing in, Ballard, 69, is styling himself as the wreck's personal bodyguard.

"There's always been tomb robbers, ever since they built a pyramid, the next day someone was trying to crack into it," he says.

But now the tomb raiders have access to Russian subs and underwater robots.

In his new documentary, Save the Titanic, he travels to a memorabilia auction in England, where a postcard sent from the ship is valued at $10,000. Keys to a first class men's lavatory go under the hammer for $53,000.

And while the film does not offer proof of black market trade, stories circulate among collectors of a rivet retrieved from the ship offered for private sale for $15,000.

Wealthy Titanic fanatics pay $91,000 to get close to the ship in small Russian submarines, some a bit too close.

The crow's nest from which the iceberg was seen before the disaster apparently was knocked off the mast by a sub and Ballard's footage shows fresh rust where vessels have landed on the deck, hastening decay.

Mainly well-intentioned visitors are, Ballard says, "loving the Titanic to death". But his greatest fear is that tourists always want souvenirs.

When he first inspected the Titanic in 1985, Ballard was amazed at its state of preservation.

"I've now been in the Black Sea and I'm finding perfectly preserved shipwrecks from 500 BC and I'm realising, my God, the ocean's a museum, but there's no lock on the door," the former US Navy officer says.

"We now have the technology to enter the greatest museum on earth and the question is, are we going to go through the doors of that deep sea museum to appreciate, or to plunder?"

The discovery of the Titanic has paid Ballard endless dividends, bringing him worldwide fame and securing him a career as a professional wreck hunter - a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, he currently is "explorer-in-residence" for National Geographic.

But there will always be a part of him that regrets making the Titanic's location public.

Two years after his find the company RMS Titanic Inc claimed salvage rights before taking thousands of objects to the surface and there is evidence unauthorised trips have been made.

Now, after a campaign by Ballard and others, an international treaty and US laws to protect the Titanic are looming.

But with the extra interest generated in the disaster by its 100th anniversary this weekend, and salvagers aware their activities soon will be illegal, time is short.

"If the Titanic is not protected and there's no guard on duty, it will get stripped," Ballard says.

"It will get stripped until all the jewels have been taken off the old lady's body."

via herldsun.com.au