Orlando's Titanic attraction adds recovered necklace to artifact lineup
The attraction, which operates on International Drive, is featuring the newly conserved item that was taken from the debris field of Titanic in 2000. The ship, on its maiden voyage from England and bound for New York City, sank after striking an iceberg in 1912.
'We've been recovering artifacts so long, and we've had the same things on display for so long, so to be able to bring something new to the public is a very big deal for us,' Tomasina Ray, president of RMS Titanic Inc. and director of collections, said after the jewelry was revealed.
Attractions visitors will see the necklace in the 'Life Onboard' room, which showcases items that passengers would have used on the ship. The necklace is made up of black glass hearts that experts think were meant to imitate jet, a rare gemstone used in mourning jewelry.
The artifact 'is not just an object, it's a symbol,' Ray said. 'It speaks to the power of conservation and the profound loss of history that occurs if we're not able to recover these artifacts among the large wreckage of Titanic on the ocean floor.'
The piece initially was unrecognizable as sediment fused with it while resting about 2.5 miles below sea level for almost nine decades. The discovery and recovery process was meticulous, Ray said.
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'It's using little tools and little picks and just kind of pulling away the material and the layers until you find something, and then you excavate around that,' she said. 'You just keep moving through the piece until you find what you have. And this literally unwound itself, piece by piece, bead by bead.'
Officials have not tied the necklace with any of the 3,700 people aboard Titanic, Ray said.
'We always try. … We learn new things all the time because there are new resources that come online, there are new resources and information that other people discover that helps us find new things,' she said.
'This was found pretty much isolated with just fragments of little bits of paper that we can't read and little pieces of metal,' Ray said. 'We're currently going through insurance claims, but if the person didn't survive, they can't make a claim. … So it's very unlikely that we will ever know.'
The I-Drive attraction full-scale room recreations of the ship and galleries featuring first class area, a cafe and the grand staircase. It holds almost 200 artifacts that were recovered from the wreck site.
The finale including a a 2-ton section of the ship's hull dubbed 'The Little Piece.' That artifact, moved into the attraction in 2012, also has conservation underway, fending off corrosion. ('The Big Piece,' weighing 15 tons, is in the company's Las Vegas location.)
'As part of our ongoing commitment to the conservation and stewardship of these artifacts, everything that we bring up from the ocean floor, we maintain and we care for in perpetuity, so that it's here for generations to come,' Ray said.
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