Tigro,

I agree with you that the victims can be honored by learning about them. But the problem with many of them is that there is not much known. Many passengers, especially 3rd class, packed up everything they owned on earth on the crossing.Therefore, some today have been largely forgotten by the sands of time because of this. Their surviving relatives have either died or knowledge was lost generation after generation.

I think of that scene from "Schindler's List", where the Nazi workers at the train station were confiscating the Jew's luggage and throwing their letters, postcards and thousands of family pictures into a pile to throw away. Everything about them was destroyed as the Haulocost intended to do.

In a way, the Titanic tragedy did this to many people, I mean, entire families were lost in 3rd Class. In Southampton, almost every street had a person died on the ship.

But as I stated to rip1912 and lilcandycane, I guess what I have done is try to rationalize a good aspect of salvaging, that is, honoring the memory of the forgotten or unknown (not even personal objects like pocket watches and such, just paper goods).

But in doing this, maybe we who find no objection to this are indeed putting our own selfishness of wanting to know about the lost above the respect of their grave.

Many survivors, like the late Eva Hart were against salvaging for this reason. However, survivor Edith Brown Heisman and her daughter were aparently apreciative when her father's pocket watch was salvaged, treated and preserved, and presented back to her in a display case.

Other shipwrecks have been protected but have still had salvage operations. The Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank in Lake Superior in 197--- ???, is protected from large scale salvage, but, they have salvaged the ship's bell to make into a memorial on land (they put a new bell with the crew's names on them back on the shipwreck).

I think the grave question is a problem for the Titanic, because of it's facination, and for the fact that it is not protected like the Fitzgerald, U. S. S. Arizona, or H.M. S. Royal Oak in Scapa Flow.
If we are really going to make it a "tomb" under some form of international law with all of the rights and respects thereof, then we need to stop going into the tomb every time we visit it. Out of respect for the dead, no one goes into the Arizona or Edmund Fitzgerald, no matter how many maritime or World War II buffs want to see their interiors.

As a matter of fact, the Arizona has been sturring controvercy because of her decay and the fact that when her fuel bulkheads go, she could release all of her remaining oil at once, instead of a little at a time as she does now. Some people say this is "the ships blood" and reminds us of her tragedy. Others say that the ship's fuel should be pumped so that the harbor and it's marine animals will not be harmed.