I am very torn when it comes to salvage. I feel for people like the late survivor Eva Hart, who always said "it was a grave of 1500 people who never should have died", and therefore should be left alone.

I have always agreed with Dr. Ballard to an extent when he said that salvaging artifacts from the Titanic would be like taking belt buckles and helmets from the U.S.S Arizona in Pearl Harbor.

I agree to an extent. What real educational value does the crows nest bell have (other than having a powerful presence of a piece of the Titanic saga). Really, we learn nothing new from it (maybe how it sounds). They have Olympic's bell at the Titanic Historical Society, so we already had an idea of what Titanic's bell was like.

I think it was Dr. Ballard who explained that Titanic was different from king Tut's tomb, in that when we excavate an Egyptian Tomb, we are learning about something thousands of years in the past where we have few records of what happened.

Titanic and her sisters (especially Olympic), were well documented-pictures, ships records, artifacts from when Olympic was scrapped, so we already know tons of what life was like and how it would have been like to be on those ships. Heck, now we have set props from the new movie to educate us.

However, with all of this said (sorry I'm rambling), I do feel that retreating the surviving paper artifacts is ok. We all love the Titanic and want to learn all we can about the passengers, so retrieving a letter from someone and finding out something about their life I believe is very useful for history as well as preserving their memory. I always dreamed of somehow finding the ship's log stuffed in a safe (wishful thinking). I think of that line from the movie that Brock said about Jack's drawing: "should this have remained unseen on the ocean floor for eternity" or something like that.

It may not make since, but I believe that a letter or postcard is very personal, but at the same time, not quite as personal as a pair of reading glasses that were on someone’s face when he or she was about to die. Therefore, take the letters and postcards, they will tell us more!