Claire Gilbert's List: Titanic

• Titanic china has been exhibited in museums. Video footage of the site  was part of James Cameron's blockbuster film Titanic. Even pieces of coal  from the ship have turned up for sale as commemorative keepsakes
• The team took pictures to document the ship's condition and investigate its  sinking, but recovered no artifacts. In fact, the team left a commemorative  plaque requesting that the site be left undisturbed as a memorial to the dead.
• a controversial salvage operation set up as a limited partnership retrieved  china, jewelry, and other artifacts from the luxury liner and exhibited them in  Paris. The venture was subsequently sold to a company called RMS Titanic Inc.
• sole authority over the salvage and ownership of any items recovered from the  Titanic based on a legal precept called salvor-in-possession rights.
• for exhibition
• ship's bell and whistles
• suitcases, silver, letters, and other
• personal effects

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• discouraging for Ballard, who views the site as a memorial to those who lost  their lives in the disaster
• • Good quote connecting Titanic to USS Arizona
• Can you imagine them doing this kind of thing on the U.S.S. Arizona in  Pearl Harbor
• that retrieving artifacts from the site is inappropriate because of the wreck's  significance as a memorial gravesite, especially to families of the deceased.  "We know of three Titanic survivors who have died and had their ashes  scattered on the site," he said
• not allowed to sell artifacts from the ship other than the pieces of coal, which  were sold to help cover expedition expenses
• ship is rapidly deteriorating on the ocean floor
• the process could take several hundred years
• , to be evidence not of a catastrophic structural failure about to occur in the  near future, but rather of a gradual collapse that would follow a somewhat  predictable pattern
• "We want to document, record, and share this special wreck with the world and  not just the few fortunate and privileged enough to get down there," he said.
• My vision of the future," he added, "is that Titanic will be much like  the Arizona or Gettysburg [Civil War battlefield], where people can visit  and pay their respects
• virtually visit

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• But when human beings find and covet a wreck—for its historical value, its  diving possibilities, its gold—then the question suddenly becomes rabidly  contentious.
  
• the State of Texas, which excavated the ship and has preserved and studied its  artifacts, and the government of France, which claims ownership of its famed  explorer's lost vessel.
• Such battles rage on, some working their way right up to the U.S. Supreme Court  and many remaining unresolved to this day
• who owns lost ships
• "law of finds
• (An arrest is a claim of ownership that precludes other claims until it is  resolved in court
• the insurance companies that had become the liner's owner after paying  insurance claims had made no attempt to salvage the wreck
• The law of finds pertains to abandoned shipwrecks, but for unabandoned  wrecks—those whose owners still claim ownership—the "law of salvage" has  generally applied.

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• legal battle with the company that salvaged 6,000 pieces of Titanic artifacts  worth 110 million dollars
• expected to rule that all the artifacts must remain together in a collection and  cannot be sold anywhere but to a Museum. Should the Titanic artifacts be  protected or put up for auction to the highest bidder?
• sold to the smithsonian natural history museum
• should be put in a museum
• you can't sell history
• should be put in a museum & not be sold that's  history
• The resting place of the Titanic is sacred ground where many rest. The artifacts  and the ship itself should be left alone now.
• What artifacts were brought to the surface need to be protected. They should not  be sold to anyone because, honestly....who has the right to sell any of it?!?!
• titanic artifacts need to be protected and copes of them need to be put in  muesuems so that the people can see what they were like but the originals need  to be kept by archeologists to do studys
• without being scattered around the world like the other artifacts
• It's history that should never be forgotten, who knows what will happen to them  if they're privately owned

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