Historic Shipwreck
panes of glass were unbroken. Yet diving on the wreck was an
eerie experience. The Doria seemed to be alive and in pain. Crushed by her own weight, which was made heavier by draining air pockets, the hull screeched and bulkheads groaned as the wreck settled slowly into the soft sandy seabed. Nonetheless, Gimbel got his
photos. They not only appeared inside the September 17 issue of Life, but one of them graced the front cover.
Subsequent Expeditions Gimbel did not have a monopoly on the Doria. No sooner had he departed from the wreck than Frederic Dumas and Louis Malle descended into the depths, on September 13, 1956. After making a reconnaissance dive with a 35-millimeter movie camera, the weather turned bad and they were forced to proceed to port. Foul weather plagued them for a week. They managed to return to the wreck for one more dive, but the water was too dark and murky to record any images.
30 Magazine
In 1957, Gimbel organized his
third excursion to the Doria, but the weather gods were against him. He and his buddy Ramsey Parks managed to make only two dives during a week of heavy seas. Still, he managed to obtain some decent pictures for the October 28 issue of Life: his final appearance in the magazine. Seven years passed before the
Doria was visited again. This time a full-scale expedition was funded by real-estate entrepreneurs Glenn Garvin and Robert Solomon. They purchased a 125-foot (38m) Coast Guard cutter which they renamed Top Cat, after the popular cartoon character. They then hired a skipper, crew and divers. They also built a diving bell which, ultimately, turned out to be too cumbersome to use in the water. Sporadically throughout
the summer of 1964, Top Cat divers explored the wreck, took photographs and conducted one of the most audacious recovery operations ever done on scuba. After blasting through a bulkhead on the Promenade Deck, the divers
Seeing his pictures in print fueled an obsession that kept Gimbel going back to the wreck
Top left: The SS Andrea Doria sinking after being struck by the MS
Stockholm in
1956. Half of the ship’s lifeboats
are still onboard, a result of the severe list that
developed after the ship was struck. Time magazine’s
coverage of the first dives, issue
dated September 17th 1956
descended into the Ball Room where the Doria’s namesake stood on a pedestal in an alcove. Then they took turns hacksawing – by hand – the bronze statue of sixteenth- century Admiral Andrea Doria. For decades afterward, the
statue graced the banquet hall of the Sea Garden Hotel in Pompano Beach, Florida. Gimbel returned to the Doria in
1966, after a nine-year hiatus. Now his objective was more grandiose than taking simple snapshots. He intended to make a movie to mark the tenth anniversary of the liner’s sinking. This scheme went for naught, for he failed to obtain enough footage to complete the project. That same year, an Italian film
producer and director obtained much better results. His name was Bruno Vailati. He and his group of divers persevered through three
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