Titanic. The Search for Titan. Who is Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French diver aboard the missing submarine

Paul-Henri Nargeolet first took part in an expedition to the vicinity of the Titanic in 1987, two years after the discovery of the famous shipwreck. “It was an unforgettable moment,” he recalled in an interview with Harper Collins France, the publisher of his Titanic book, quoted by The New York Times. During the conversation, he related an expedition to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. He admitted the crew of the submarine was “talkative” until the vessel reached the wreck. “There was silence in the submarine for the next ten minutes,” Nargeolet recalled.

“We didn’t know at the time that we would be back there a few more times and that I would be coming back as often as I could.” Over several decades, he dived near the wreck a total of 35 times, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing friends of the 77-year-old diver. Currently, Nargeolet directs the underwater research of RMS Titanic Inc., the company that holds the rights to the shipwreck. As part of its activities, supervised the extraction from the wreck of 5.5 thousand items, including those belonging to passengers, such as letters or binoculars.

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Nargeolet was born in Chamonix in France in 1946. In the 1960s, he joined the French Navy, where he served for the next 22 years as a deep-sea diver, a submarine pilot, and a member of the demining group, the “NYT” pointed out. In the second half of the 1980s, he joined IFREMER, a publicly funded French marine research institute, where he was responsible for submarine expeditions near the wreck of the Titanic. It was during one of the IFREMER missions that he saw the wreck of the famous ocean liner for the first time.

Jose Paulo Viera da Silva, a seaman with 30 years of experience and a friend of Nargeolet, told Sky News that the 77-year-old diver’s experience could be crucial in saving the crew of the Titan that went missing on Sunday. “I think he can work with the other people on board so that they can hope to come to the surface,” he said. He mentioned an incident in 2010, when a submarine led by Nargeolet was supposed to get stuck at the bottom of the ocean after snagging on a fragment of the Titanic wreck. “We had to maneuver a lot to get out of this situation,” pointed out Da Silva, who was then the captain of the supply ship that took Nargeolet and his crew to the site of the shipwreck. The incident “nearly cost the lives” of the submarine’s crew, Sky News reported.

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Viera da Silva stressed that the diver is “a very calm person”, so “he can help others stay calm, and it’s important to save oxygen and not make any effort.” Mathieu Johann, editor of Nargeolet at Harper Collins, was quoted by Reuters as saying the 77-year-old is one of the world’s foremost experts on the Titanic disaster and has “dived in the four corners of the world”. “He’s a superhero for us in France,” he said.

He added that the diver had to be persuaded to write a book about the Titanic, because he wants to devote as much time to diving as possible. “He wakes up in the morning and wants to go to the sea,” Johann said. People interested in one of the most famous ships in the world were inspired not only by Nargeolet’s knowledge, but also by the photos he took at the bottom of the Atlantic. When making the movie “Titanic”, director James Cameron was inspired, among others, by photos taken by a diver who, after the premiere of the Oscar-winning production, admitted that he was amazed at the quality of the reconstruction of the wreck, made for the film.

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The submarine Titan with five people on board was lost off the eastern coast Canada on Sunday. OceanGate’s vessel departed from St. John’s to visit the wreck of the Titanic, located almost 600 km off the coast of Canada at a depth of almost 3,800 meters. Less than two hours after immersion, contact with the crew of the boat broke off, and the vessel did not surface at the scheduled time. On board, apart from Nargeolet, there is a British one billionaire and traveler Hamish Hardingfrom one of Pakistan’s richest families, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, and co-founder of OceanGate Stockton Rush.

Captain Jamie Frederick of the US Coast Guard said on Wednesday that the services are currently searching for Titan in an area equal to twice the size of the state of Connecticut, i.e. about 26,000 square kilometers. He noted that this is an “extremely difficult” time for loved ones stuck in a submarine. He assured that the services remain in close contact with the families of the wanted persons.

The search is carried out in the area where the Canadian plane detected underwater noises. According to the BBC Paul-Henri Nargeolet may have been behind the signal. The diver knows the protocols that could be used to send a signal to rescuers and increase the chances of finding the missing boat, the British news service assessed.

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