He has spent his entire life linked to the sea, exploring it. When he was a child, he already followed the divers and watched them from a boat. He later made a career in the Navy. He has plunged into the depths of the sea to search for black boxes from a crashed plane and has recovered items from sunken ships. One day he left his job to pilot a submarine, the Nautile, in order to see under the sea the prow of the most famous of all: the Titanic.

At 76 years old, Paul-Henri Nargeolet is one of the greatest experts on the Titanic and holds one of the records for descents to the emblematic ship: more than thirty. Former Navy officer and director of the underwater research program for the remains of the Titanic, this Frenchman was on board the Titan submarine, the expedition device that disappeared on Sunday and who was traveling with five people who wanted to see the remains, 3,800 meters from depth.

In each incursion into the depths of the ocean liner, he rescued objects that are part of the memory of that tragedy in which 1,500 people died: he recovered at least 5,000. Director of explorations for the RMS Titanic company, Nargeolet has lived in the United States for decades, he agreed to work for the OceanGate company to continue exploring underwater but this time in a different way, accompanying rich tourists on this trip to 1912, the year of the sinking. .

This expert decided to embark on this new adventure, although he was not very convinced of it. As revealed by the French newspaper Le Figaro, he himself had told his relatives that he did not have much confidence in this new submarine, but that he intended to go anyway “because of the beauty of the expedition”.

“I was a bit skeptical of this new technology, but also intrigued by the idea of ??piloting something new, as if I were a test pilot,” Michel L’Hour, former director of the underwater and underwater archeology department at Marseilles.

Passionate about the sea, he even participated in the search for the black boxes of the Rio-Paris flight, which disappeared off the coast of Brazil after the device crashed in 2010. The aforementioned colleague says that Nargeolet was always closely linked to the ship, and even remained in contact with relatives of the survivors of the shipwreck.

The US authorities estimate that the ship, with five people on board, has oxygen reserves of a maximum of 80 hours. Work against time continues to find the five missing, including this expert in love with the Titanic.

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