Or historians? Titanic wreck of tragic liner
cutting into that ceiling you could be cutting into the remains of someone who was lying there,” says Angelica, niece by marriage of Alberto and Sebastiano Peracchio.
The two Italian brothers were waiters in the ship’s à la carte restaurant, catering for the richest of the first-class passengers.
Aged just 20 and 17, and hopeful of a new life in America, they were ordered to remain below deck in their cabins until they were needed up above.
“Maybe it is my uncle’s body lying on top of that ceiling,” Angelica says. “Maybe one of them got out and was trying to swim out and ended up coming to rest on that site.”
She has written a book about Alberto and Sebastiano’s story called Titanic The Brothers Peracchio – Two Boys and a
Dream. It was inspired by a conversation with her future father-in-law Modesto when she was 19 and saw a picture of the two boys at his dinner table. He was four when his older brothers died and grew up knowing little about them.
“It was kind of a taboo subject,” John remembers. “But as time went on my father wishes he could have more information about his brothers and exactly what happened to them.”
An increasing number of questions encircle Titanic’s ghostly hulk. The central dilemma is whether the ruin should be mined for artefacts to unlock vital secrets before it is too late – some experts estimate Titanic will disappear within the next 30 years – or be left alone entirely. Interest began to grow after oceanographer Robert Ballard discovTitanic” ered the ship in 1985, super-charged by director
James Cameron’s 1997 Hollywood blockbuster,
Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and KateWinslet.
Millvina Dean,Titanic’s last survivor, died in 2009 aged 97 and although official Titanic societies exist for descendants in Canada, the US and the UK, there are countless more enthusiasts hungry for information about the world’s most famous ship.
“With all due deference to the families, and I don’t want to sound cruel in saying this,Titanic does not belong to us, it does not belong to our generation, it has an enduring attraction among the world,” says Parks, who disagrees with the grave site designation.
He maintains he has never seen bodies down there and says he knows of no other shipwreck “given as much consideration as internationally. “We actually have a responsibility to salvage what we can for future generations when this wreck ultimately degrades back to its natural state and nature, which it’s doing now and it’s an unstoppable process,” he says.
DON Lynch, historian for the Titanic Historical Society and official historian on the 1997 Titanic movie, disagrees. He describes RMST’s earliest salvage operations as “a mess” when items were allegedly not documented properly and divers were “grabbing things”.
He adds: “It’s like the Egyptian tombs being raided by plunderers rather than by archaeologists.”
RMST’s parent company Premier Exhibitions went bankrupt four years ago and, now backed by private equity, is under new management led by Bretton Hunchak.
Susie Millar, President of the Belfast Titanic Society, believes that change is important – she had a change of heart after meeting Hunchak and his team earlier this year.
“What swung it for me is one of the divers said, ‘If we don’t go down and get these things, someone will do it who won’t have as much respect’,” she says. Her great-grandfather Thomas Millar, 33, was Titanic’s sole deck engineer, a widower who left behind two orphans aged five and 11.
Titanic tour operator Susie hopes the wireless will be loaned to Belfast’s worldfamous Titanic Museum in the future. “That is for the greater good of this city,” she says.
“I told Bretton my dream scenario is there is a piece of Titanic hull sitting on the slipways where she was built and he didn’t baulk at that.”
Perhaps a piece of Titanic could yet be reunited with the place that is truly her home.
‘It’s like Egyptian tombs being raided by plunderers rather than by archeologists’