Photograph by Martha Williams
At first glance, the fluorescent lighting and the long metal shelves look like the interior of any storage warehouse. The white porcelain dinner plates, stacked in neat rows, could be from any restaurant—until one sees the logo stamped in red ink on their faces: White Star Line.
These plates spent decades at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Then, an underwater expedition brought them to the surface, cleaned them off, and delivered them here, to an anonymous storage facility in northern Atlanta whose exact address is kept secret. They are some of thousands of artifacts salvaged from the remains of the RMS Titanic, a steam-powered ocean liner that sank off the coast of Newfoundland after hitting an iceberg on April 14, 1912, taking with it the lives of more than 1,500 passengers and crew. The tragedy has captivated the world ever since.
Photograph by Martha Williams
Every item recovered from the Titanic, from teacups to leather shoes and hulking strips of the ship’s metal hull, was brought to land by RMS Titanic, Inc.—the only entity in the world with salvage rights to the ship. The company didn’t find the underwater site. The precise location was a mystery for decades, until a joint U.S.-French expedition led by oceanographer Robert Ballard found it in 1985. But after the RMS Titanic team brought the first artifacts to the surface in 1987, a court in France—one of four countries that share authority over the shipwreck—awarded the company rights to the objects below.
Lawsuits quickly followed from other would-be salvagers, as did pushback from critics who said the site should remain an untouched memorial. But in 1994, a U.S. maritime court granted the company the status of “exclusive salvor-in-possession.”
“We wanted the collection to stay intact, so we told the court, ‘We’ll take care of everything and keep it together,’” says Tomasina Ray, president and director of collections for RMS Titanic, which moved from New York to Atlanta in 2002, in part for the convenience of being near the city’s major airport.
The court assigned RMS Titanic salvage rights with the stipulation that it use its finds for the public benefit; none of the Titanic artifacts can be sold. Instead, in addition to research and conservation, the company runs a touring show, Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, which is currently on view in Orlando and Las Vegas, as well as several countries abroad.
Photograph by Martha Williams
Photograph by Martha Williams
“We want to be able to tell the story of the Titanic through the artifacts that were actually there,” says Ray, “so people can understand more fully how the ship went down and make the connections themselves when they see these pieces.”
The objects recovered often have powerful stories to tell. Ray and her assistant, Shannon Baker, lay out a set of tools found at the site, the metal rusted but whole: They belonged to Franz Pulbaum, a passenger in second class who perished in the disaster.
“Pulbaum was the chief mechanic for a ride at Luna Park in New York, and he did such a good job that the company sent him to Paris to open the same ride at the new Luna Park there,” explains Baker. “He did a bunch of tourist stuff while he was there, so we also found a ton of postcards in his luggage.”
“We want to be able to tell the story of the Titanic through the artifacts that were actually there, so people can understand more fully how the ship went down and make the connections themselves when they see these pieces.”
Luggage is a rare but valuable find across the Titanic debris field; it’s one of the only ways to identify the passenger to whom an object belonged. Pulbaum’s employer had awarded him a stock certificate printed with his name, which was found inside the leather valise, along with the tools and the postcards. “He also had a bottle of hair tonic, which gives a really cute picture,” Ray says, smiling. “He’s only 27 but he’s a little insecure about losing his hair already.”
When artifacts are proven to belong to certain passengers, their descendants are often interested in seeing them, Ray says, but generally want them to remain with the rest of the recovered collection. “People really want their family’s stories in the exhibition,” she says. “Even though we tell the story of the ship through these pieces, it’s the personal stories that we really want to remember, to impress upon people that these were real people who experienced a real event.”
Photograph by Martha Williams
The company has conducted nine recovery expeditions in the past 30 years, gathering more than 5,500 artifacts. Many are in astonishingly good condition. A champagne bottle, cork intact, still retains the original alcohol. “Glass did really well underwater,” Ray explains. “It’s extremely dense, so as long as it didn’t have a void in it, the pressure couldn’t crush it.”
Another find that survived decades underwater: vials of perfume, property of fragrance maker Adolphe Saalfeld, who traveled first-class and survived the wreck. Of the 65 bottles he packed for his voyage, 62 have been recovered from the ocean floor. “They still smell amazing,” says Baker.
Photograph by Martha Williams
Even well-preserved objects are at risk of deterioration, however. “Once we recover things from underwater, they’re more susceptible to corrosion,” Ray explains. Her team works closely with conservationists specializing in materials like leather and paper to protect the collection into the future.
Prior to joining RMS Titanic, most of what Ray and Baker knew about the shipwreck they’d learned the usual way: from the movie. With its star-crossed lovers and spectacular special effects, James Cameron’s 1998 Best Picture Oscar winner, Titanic, catapulted the century-old disaster back into the public imagination.
“Before this, I was like, Leonardo DiCaprio is so attractive!” says Ray, who joined the company in 2012, after a stint at the High Museum of Art. “But when I started working with these objects, learning about them, I became more invested in the people behind them and their stories.”
Though RMS Titanic stresses its diligence in caring for the artifacts it’s recovered, some critics say the shipwreck is better left alone. In 2023, the tragic implosion of the OceanGate Titan submersible reignited controversy over visits to the Titanic site. Among the five people killed was Paul-Henri “P.H.” Nargeolet, a renowned oceanographer who had served as RMS Titanic’s director of underwater research, though he was on the OceanGate trip in a separate capacity. Some critics argued after the disaster that the Titanic site should return to being an undisturbed memorial to the lives lost.
Illustration by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
And what of the retrieval of artifacts from the site? That too remains a source of controversy. Last year, the U.S. government filed a legal challenge against RMS Titanic to halt its next planned recovery expedition. The company pivoted instead to an unmanned research trip to assess the conditions of the ship and the surrounding debris field, which took place last July. “We decided this wasn’t the right time to engage with that challenge, and that we needed to prioritize understanding the wreck site,” says Ray.
It’s unclear what the future holds for the Titanic and its stories. The ship is rapidly deteriorating, as RMS Titanic’s recent research dive demonstrated, as is much of what remains on the ocean floor. “These stories are going to disappear fast,” says Ray.
As she and her colleagues see it, the artifacts retrieved from the Titanic allow them to tell more stories of the real people who experienced this extraordinary event, to give faces and names to what is often sensationalized as a mass tragedy. “We want to make sure that, if there’s a chance to preserve someone’s memory and legacy,” Ray says, “then we are able to do that.”
This article appears in our April 2025 issue.
