A woman whose great-grandfather died on Titanic when the ship sunk back in 1912 has spoken out and suggested we should leave the wreckage alone.
In a candid piece for DailyMail.com, Julie Cook explained she is the great-granddaughter of William Bessant, one of around 1,500 people who died on the iconic ship after it struck an iceberg while sailing the Atlantic.
Cook revealed that her connection to one of the victims of the tragedy previously got her an offer to appear in a documentary featuring an OceanGate expedition to the wreckage.
While the Titanic expert and author initially agreed to take the trip herself, she said the plans were shattered by the pandemic.
Now, upon hearing the news of OceanGate’s Titan sub getting trapped 12,000 feet underneath the surface, Julie realizes that the concerns about the trip she previously had were more than justified.
“I worried about the safety of the vessel. The journey, I was told, would take seven to eight hours as a round trip. There was a tiny ‘toilet’ behind a curtain, with no real privacy,” she said as she recalled her reservations about the trip to the depth of two and a half miles.
“I was anxious about feeling claustrophobic down there, nearly 4,000 meters under the sea in a 6m by 2.8m vessel with no way out, literally bolted into it from the outside.”
Cook’s biggest concern, however, lied elsewhere – in the fact that the entire wreckage was a mass gravesite and that it shouldn’t be disturbed.
“But there was another concern nagging at me — the fact that this was a grave site. Not only was it the final resting place of my great-grandfather but it was where 1,500 other souls met their end, too. Part of me wondered if this was macabre. Inappropriate. Wrong,” she added.
“The Titanic sinking was a real-life tragedy, not a film. If we stop for a minute and imagine what it was really like for those on board, we can’t help but feel a visceral kind of horror at their plight — just as we do now, while we imagine the situation faced by those inside the missing sub.”
In her candid post, Julie went on to say that she feels connected to the legendary ship and its victims like many other descendants of those who died on board.
She’s also reached a realization that she was wrong for even considering taking the trip to see the wreckage despite having ties to the ship.
While Julie expressed her sympathy for the five crew members trapped aboard Titan, she called on people to stop “Titanic tourism” and leave “the ship and her dead to rest.”
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