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🗓️ 1 September 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
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In September 1985, the wreck of the Titanic was discovered around 400 nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, during a joint American-French expedition.
It had remained undisturbed, 13,000 feet underwater in the North Atlantic Ocean, since it sank during its maiden voyage in 1912.
The team spotted a boiler using a remotely controlled deep-sea vehicle, called Argo, and a robot named Jason, which led them to the site of the wreck.
In 2010, Louise Hidalgo spoke to some of the explorers and listened to archive recordings.
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest; the disastrous D-Day rehearsal; and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.
(Photo: Titantic bow. Credit: Getty Images)
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism. |
| 0:08.9 | In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero? |
| 0:16.1 | Simply doing your job, being a decent human being. |
| 0:20.0 | A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by |
| 0:23.1 | their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism |
| 0:27.8 | with me, Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.1 | Hello and welcome to the Witness History podcast from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:42.1 | For years, there were countless efforts to find the wreck of the Great Ocean Line of the Titanic, |
| 0:47.3 | which sank on her maiden voyage. |
| 0:49.8 | But it wasn't until a joint American French expedition 40 years ago that it was discovered. |
| 0:55.5 | Louise Adalgo has been speaking to some of the explorers as well as listening to archive recordings of survivors of the tragedy. |
| 1:02.8 | It's just after midnight on the 1st of September 1985 and the North Atlantic Ocean is icy calm. |
| 1:11.2 | Research scientist Cathy Offinger has just gone to bed. |
| 1:14.7 | She's part of a French-American expedition |
| 1:16.6 | searching for the remains of the lost ship, the Titanic. |
| 1:20.7 | I could hear some commotion out in the hallway |
| 1:23.6 | and realized that something was going on and somebody came bursting into each of the cabins |
| 1:30.4 | to just call out. We found it. We found it. I don't think there was a person asleep on the ship |
| 1:36.6 | after that moment. We all tried to cram into what we call our control vans to see the live video |
| 1:43.2 | images and it was just an unforgettable moment to realize what we had just done. |
| 1:49.6 | What the expedition led by the ocean explorer Robert Ballard had found |
| 1:53.9 | was the greatest lost wreck in history, the Titanic, |
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