Ralph Bradshaw White, who documented the 1985 discovery of the sunken Titanic, then returned to the bottom of the ocean more than 30 times to film and recover artifacts from the ill-fated vessel, died Feb. 4 at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. He was 66.
White died from complications of an aortic aneurysm, said his daughter, Krista Few of Yokosuka, Japan.
The public received an up-close look at the wreckage site through images White captured. His footage appears in James Cameron's 1997 Oscar-winning film "Titanic" and in "Titanica," a documentary for IMAX released in the early 1990s.
Long before the discovery of the shipwreck, White had a lucrative career that married his love of adventure and cinematography.
As a contract cameraman for the National Geographic Society, he searched for the Loch Ness monster, filmed wild horses, whales and sharks and documented the 153-year-old wreck of the Breadalbane under the Arctic ice cap.
The former president of the Adventurers' Club of Los Angeles, he also made thousands of parachute jumps.
"I was born an adult in search of a childhood. And I've been very successful at that," White said in a 1998 article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The wreckage of the Titanic, the British luxury liner that sank April 15, 1912, in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage, was the big one, White often said, "the Mt. Everest of wrecks."
The search that led to its discovery began in 1985 with a voyage aboard the oceanographic research vessel Knorr. White was part of a French-American expedition; the American portion was headed by Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
The crew had been out on the ocean for weeks and was scheduled to return home in a few days. But in the early morning of Sept. 1, 1985, as White lay in his bunk, their plans changed.
"Someone came running down and said, 'We're starting to pick up something that could be the debris field,' " White said in a Times article later that year. "Within 30 seconds of the time I got there, we passed over the [Titanic's] boiler."
The vessel, which split in two, lay on the ocean bottom in more than 12,000 feet of water, and was covered with a light layer of sediment. For the next four days the crew explored and photographed the wreckage, before returning home to acclaim.
White returned to the Titanic so many times, he boasted that he spent more time on the Titanic than its captain had.
