People's fascination with Titanic, lost on her maiden voyage from Southampton in 1912, has never waned over the decades. Keith Hamilton looks at the latest photographs of the great liner beneath the waves...

They are the most secret of the secrets of the deep but now advanced, hi-tech cameras are peering into the dark to the shrouded world of Southampton's ill-fated liner, Titanic.

Fathoms down beneath the surface of the Atlantic the great ship has for decades silently rusted away, a grave for more than 1,000 souls, many of them crew members who once lived in the streets of terraced houses surrounding Southampton's dockland.

Specially designed high-definition cameras, now being sent down to the sea bed, are not only capturing long-lost images but they are also looking back into the past and seeing once again the glory that was Titanic.

It was on April 10, 1912 that the 46,328-ton liner, quite small compared to the giants of today's cruising industry where ships can be anything up to 150,000 tons, eased herself away from the dockside at Southampton.

On board were the rich and famous, the powerful and the great, the elite of society, all anxious to be counted among the passengers of this maiden voyage.

Life was good on board, the surroundings sumptuous, the public rooms on a grand scale and the food some of the finest served at sea.

Then, just before midnight on April 14, Titanic, the greatest ship the world had ever seen, struck an iceberg in calm conditions off Newfoundland and the ship that had been claimed to be unsinkable began slipping inexorably beneath the waves.

By 3am, the only traces left of her were the pitifully few lifeboats crammed to the gills and the struggling throng of swimmers, most of whom would not survive the icy waters.

Since then the fascination with Titanic has not abated and with the release of James Cameron's blockbusting film in 1997 interest in the White Star liner has never been stronger.

Today shipping historians and enthusiasts have gathered in Southampton for the annual convention organised by the British Titanic Society and will be fascinated by the new under-sea photographs of the ship contained in the new book Ghosts of the Abyss by Don Lynch and Ken Marschall.

The book contains never seen before images, some quite eerie but all amazing, from two-and-a-half miles below the Atlantic where Titanic has her final resting place.

It tells the story of the expedition, led by James Cameron, and using cutting-edge technology developed expressly for the dives, to see Titanic once again.

Virtually all the wreckage, inside and out, was explored and hundreds of photographs of Titanic were captured to be compared later to the archive shots of the ship's interiors taken just before she set sail from Southampton.

Ghosts of the Abyss by Don Lynch and Ken Marschall with an introduction by James Cameron is published by Hodder and Stoughton at £20.

- Originally published April 2003.