For years, a tiny piece of history has resided with other memorabilia on my desk, all accrued over decades of chasing the news.
But it was not until last month’s disaster on the Titanic-bound submersible Titan that I pursued the story behind my thimble-sized Styrofoam coffee cup.
You can’t pour much java into it, but it holds a tale of great depth – to be exact, 17,646 feet of ocean depth.
That’s why it’s so small. In 1998 it deployed in a deep-sea vehicle that probed the subject of a dramatic World War II encounter: the sunken Japanese submarine I-52. The sub, loaded with strategic raw materials and also carrying two tons of gold, was bound for Nazi-occupied France to aid Hitler’s doomed Third Reich.
After decoding messages that revealed the sub’s mission, the U.S. laid alternate plans for I-52. A Navy air squadron torpedoed it to the bottom of the mid-Atlantic a few weeks after D-Day in 1944 – in waters a mile deeper than where the Titanic lies.
And yes, there’s a Rhode Island connection to I-52. Decades after the sinking, two audio recordings of its death throes were tracked down at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, even though there had been little hope they would ever be found.
Now property of the National Archives, the pilot conversations are punctuated with sounds of the attack and the last moments of the sub with 109 men aboard.
My lilliputian cup entered the story in 1998, when maritime researcher and fortune hunter Paul Tidwell, lured by all that gold and advising a National Geographic expedition to I-52, traveled to the wreckage site aboard the Russian research vessel Keldysh.
With its two submersibles, Mir 1 and 2 (Mir meaning peace), Keldysh had achieved a measure of fame the previous year with an appearance in the James Cameron movie “Titanic.”
In real life, Keldysh had previously been the support vessel for dives to the storied luxury liner that was first located in 1985 by Robert Ballard, today still a professor of oceanography at URI.
As for Rhode Island connections, there’s more: The tragedy-bound Titan submersible paid a visit to URI in 2021 and was displayed on the campus quadrangle for three days.
Turns out my cup was apparently one of many taken down during Tidwell’s seven dives on I-52. They were slid into the water for exposure to the enormous pressure of the deep, and then retrieved as keepsakes. Many researchers do the same, often embellishing the shrunken cups with inked-in details of the voyage. Mine, bearing my name, reads, “1st Dive on I-52, 22 Nov. 1998,” and makes note of the enormous depth.
That cryptic information, also including the name Mir 1, rang no bells over the years. The cup seemed only a curiosity – until the recent Titan tragedy spurred me to research my minuscule artifact.
A few unknowns remain: Despite going down himself for close looks at I-52, Tidwell never did find the gold that lies somewhere deep inside the sub.
So that’s still a mystery – as is the long-forgotten identity of who gave me this unusual keepsake, and why.
The decades will do that to memory. Nonetheless, as I work these days, I still view my small gift as just a conversation piece – but now, what a conversation!
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net) is a retired Providence Journal editor and columnist.