Obsessive quest of the character embodied by Bill Paxton in “Titanic”, the Heart of the Ocean is a jewel of inestimable value… but fictitious. Quite the opposite of another precious stone, very real this one, which sank with the shipwreck.
We can easily imagine that you have most certainly seen and re-watched James Cameron’s Titanic, which the TF1 channel is broadcasting in a timely manner this evening; story of surfing the Avatar 2 wave soon in theaters.
Besides the tragically thwarted love story between Rose and Jack and of course the tale of the sinking of the most famous ocean liner reputed to be unsinkable, the film’s narrative also revolves around the obsessive quest of researcher / explorer Bill Paxton, alias Brock Lovett, eager to find a mythical jewel that would have sunk with the ship. The famous Heart of the Ocean, which Rose, now in her nineties, had kept preciously, before throwing it overboard at the end of the film, in front of the dumbfounded eyes of the audience.
In the film, it is said that this Heart of the Ocean is all the more priceless as it supposedly belonged to Louis XVI, before the precious stone was recut into a heart shape after the Revolution. An extraordinary jewel…and totally fictitious.
If, after the release of the film, a London jeweler by the name of Asprey & Garrard has made a replica of the jewel, composed of a 170-carat sapphire and 65 diamonds, sold at auction for 2.2 million dollars (and which will be worn by Celine Dion when she sings “My heart Will Go On” at the Oscars in 1998), it was a completely different jewel, very real this one, which sank with the liner: a large pink diamond from Tiffany’s.
Among the wealthy customers who boarded the ship was a passenger named Charlotte Drake Martinez-Cardeza. Heiress to a textile empire founded by her father, the latter lived in the most luxurious cabin of the ship, baptized “millionaire suite”; one of the two from the Titanic. Its cost? $3,300 for the crossing, which equates to over $100,000 today.
A survivor of the shipwreck, she, like other survivors, filed claims with her insurance company to be compensated for her lost property. But his claims were the most colossal of all. Amount of the slate? $177,352.75, which equates to almost $5 million today.
Besides the contents of his 14 (!!!) travel trunks, 4 leather bags and various jewels was a large pink diamond from Tiffany’s over 6 carats, estimated at $20,000, which would be equivalent to more than $608,000. Only $97,772 will be refunded to complaining passengers; that’s a little over $2.9 million today… A pittance. To put things in perspective, the ship, which had cost $7.5 million to build, was only insured up to $5 million…
WikiCommon Charlotte Drake Martinez-Cardeza
At the time, maritime law was much less codified than now. No rules governed passenger ships at sea. It was not until January 1914 that the Safety of Life At Sea (SOLAS) Convention that is signed in London; first international treaty relating to the safety of maritime navigation, precisely in the wake of the Titanic disaster.
If the very many scuba dives have been able to bring up a number of extraordinary objects from the wreck, no trace of this famous pink diamond for the moment. Even James Cameron, who dived no less than 33 times to see the wreckage, found nothing!
Still, it may not be at the bottom of the ocean that you have to look. In July 2022, a 170-carat pink diamond was reportedly found in a mine in Angola; the biggest discovery in this field for 300 years.