‘If It Says 401 I Will Drop It.’ So We Went And Read It.

ABOARD THE MV KESTREL FIRTH, NORTH ATLANTIC — There is one number that settles it.

Harland & Wolff stamped every hull with a yard number. The Olympic was 400. The Titanic was 401. It is cast into the propeller boss, forty centimetres high, and it has been sitting in the dark under the North Atlantic since 1912.

Nobody had photographed it. So we went.

Why this claim and not another

Most of what this newspaper investigates cannot be settled by looking. A committee will not open its minutes. An agency will not release its annexe. A mesa will not let you in.

This one is different, and that is the entire reason we spent the money.

The switch theory — that the damaged Olympic was disguised as her sister and sunk for the insurance — makes a hard, physical, checkable prediction about an object whose location is known to the metre.

Before the dive, we wrote to three proponents and asked what result would change their view. Two answered. One named the propeller boss specifically and said that if it read 401 he would drop it.

We put that letter in the dive plan and published the plan before we sailed.

Eleven hours on the bottom

The ROV Wren went down on 14 June and worked the stern section for eleven hours and six minutes.

The boss is heavily concreted. Dr. Aurelia Fitzharris-Mbeki, who supervised, would not permit any contact with the wreck — no brushing, no water jet, nothing — so we lit it from four angles and waited for the sediment to settle between passes.

Sixty-one frames carry the number.

It is 401.

What he said afterwards

We wrote to him again on 22 June with the frames attached.

He replied in four days. He is dropping it. He asked that we print two things: that he had held the view for twenty-two years, and that he does not think he was stupid to have held it, because for twenty-two years nobody could show him the number.

"I want to be clear that I am not converting to anything," he wrote. "I am subtracting one belief. That is all this is and I would like it not to be turned into a story about a man seeing the light."

It has not been. That is his whole quotation and there is nothing under it.

The thing another paper found that we did not

Signal & Ledger ran a better piece than ours two days later, and this newspaper's rule is that we say so.

They went to the underwriting ledgers instead of the wreck. The hull was insured for less than it cost to build. The White Star Line stood to lose money on a total loss, which is not a motive, it is the opposite of one.

That fact is stronger than our photograph and it cost them nothing but a train fare. Our standards editor has made this point at some length internally and has made it again in the comparison box below, where it can be read by anybody.

What we spent

Two hundred and fourteen thousand pounds of subscription money to photograph a number that two historians told us in January would say 401.

They were right. We knew they were probably right. We went anyway, because "probably right" and "photographed" are different things and this newspaper had spent a decade telling readers so.

Whether that was rigour or vanity is a fair question. Two readers have written to say vanity. Their letters are in this week's letters page, unedited, and neither has been answered.