Mere minutes before midnight on April 14, 1912, a huge luxury liner, one of three manufactured and designed by the White Star Line Company, struck an iceberg south of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Less than three hours later, the great ship weighing approximately 46,000 gross tons slipped below the waters of the frigid North Atlantic and into the imagination of the public, forevermore.
The vessel has been given many different names: Ship of Dreams, the Unsinkable (despite the fact that no company official or crew member at the time ever voiced this opinion), and the worst Maritime Disaster in all of history, but that by which it was christened is sufficient to conjure up scenes of bravery, sacrifice, mayhem, and ultimate disaster: the RMS Titanic. Of the approximate 2,220 passengers aboard on that catastrophic April night, only 707 survived. Speculation regarding how the tragedy might have been avoided is virtually inexhaustible, but then the fate of the Titanic seems to overflow with "what ifs" and "if onlys."
The winter of 1912 proved to be instrumental in the destiny of the magnificent vessel. The weather had been uncharacteristically mild, resulting in an unusually large amount of ice breaking away and drifting southward into the relatively safe shipping lanes across the Atlantic Ocean. (Typically, the dangers of thick pack ice and massive icebergs were found in more northerly waters during the time of year that the Titanic set sail.) Even though ice warnings had been transmitted to the Titanic, most had gone unheeded. The wireless operator on duty who received the sixth and final notice placed it to one side where it was forgotten altogether. Being a Marconi employee and not working for White Star, his primary job was to send passengers' messages to shore rather than relay communications to the bridge. Consequently, he took care of what he had been hired to do until things had settled down in the wireless room. By then, it was too late.
At 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912, Frederick Fleet, the lookout on the bridge, spotted an iceberg dead ahead. He might have seen it earlier had he been provided with binoculars, but these were not standard issue for the patrolling crewmen. With the command given to turn hard portside and the engines full astern, an effort was made to turn the ship away from the iceberg. Consequently, her starboard side brushed against the floe. Ironically, later investigations would show that if the Titanic had maintained course and hit head-on, she probably would have stayed afloat long enough to make it to shore with no loss of life.
Much has been made over the years regarding the lack of lifeboats with which the Titanic was outfitted. However, the Board of Regulations at that time only required a ship over 10,000 tons to carry sixteen lifeboats...the Titanic carried twenty and was violating no rules. While it is true that there were insufficient lifeboats for every person on board, there was enough room in the lifeboats for half of the passengers. People panicked, however, and loaded the boats themselves, leaving them half-empty because they worried about being too crowded.
Even though another ship, the Californian, was in close proximity (less than 21 miles away) and could have embarked upon an immediate rescue mission, it did not respond to the calls because its radio operator was off duty and had gone to sleep. In any event, the Titanic's position being radioed in a desperate cry for help, which was picked up by the eventual salvation vessel, the Carpathia, was incorrect. The Titanic was actually over 13 miles southeast of the relayed position.
In fact, the entire trip and disaster almost never happened at all. The Titanic was originally scheduled to set sail for her maiden voyage on March 20 instead of April 10, but in February, her sister ship, the Olympic, underwent emergency repair, and resources were temporarily pulled from the Titanic project, delaying its sailing date by three weeks. Even then, she almost never made it out of the harbor. Upon leaving Southampton and shortly after being pulled by six tugs into the channel, she picked up speed under her own power, and the displaced water snapped the moorings of a nearby steamer. Unshackled and swept along by the wake, the New York swung within four feet of the Titanic's port side. A collision was avoided only by a very narrow margin. Ironically, a similar accident involving the Olympic had occurred almost six months before when the Olympic's speed and size had sucked the HMS Hawke off course, causing damage to both ships.
A little known fact is that the skipper of the Olympic at that time was one Edward John Smith. He would later be appointed as Captain of the ill-fated Titanic. Another member of that same Olympic crew was a Scottish violinist named John Hume. He would also later be transferred to the Titanic...one of the courageous musicians, none of whom survived, who played for the frightened passengers left behind on a listing ship.
The roster of those sailing on the Titanic's maiden voyage included immigrants and millionaires, celebrities and working class folk, thirteen couples on honeymoon, and an eight-man band. Many of those who perished came from prominent American, British, and European families. Among the dead were the noted British journalist William Thomas Stead, as well as heirs to the Straus and Astor fortunes. Not all the victims of the Titanic were people. Pet dogs of the first-class passengers also drowned, including an Airedale, an English Bulldog, and a Pekinese. Perhaps the most famous survivor was Mrs. J.J. Brown, known to her friends as "Margaret." She would eventually gain notoriety as the "Unsinkable Molly," and became something of a heroine that night, insisting that the women in her lifeboat be allowed a turn to row, thereby ensuring they kept warm. It is largely due to the efforts of Molly Brown that the list of those who survived is as complete as it is. She made a point of noting the names of as many as she could, although she freely admitted she did not gather them all.
From the moment that news of the catastrophe reached beyond the icy clutches of the Atlantic, stories of premonitions and omens of impending doom began to abound. They ranged from tales of those who had heeded their inner warnings and were now fortunate enough to say "I told you so," to those who had dismissed their suspicions and whose lips were now frozen in death and in time. One of the most emphatic premonitions on record came from Mrs. Blanche Marshall, who watched the Titanic steam past the Isle of Wight shortly after leaving Southampton. She declared to her family and friends standing with her, "That ship is going to sink before it reaches America." Unfortunately, Mrs. Marshall's predication was correct. She was also right three years later, in May 1915, when she foretold that the Lusitania would sink after being hit by a German torpedo.
Another uncanny story was told by Salvation Army Captain W. Rex Snowdon, who was stationed at Kirkcudbright in Scotland. At 11:00 p.m. on the night of April 14, 1912, he sat at the bedside of a dying orphan girl named Jessie. She predicted that a great tragedy would come to pass three and a half hours later. She saw a huge ship floundering in the water and people drowning in a freezing ocean. The captain told her it was just a bad dream, but she said, "Someone named Wally is playing a fiddle and coming to you." Shortly after that, she slipped into a coma and died. Captain Snowdon then stated he heard the sound of the latch on the bedroom door, followed by the sensation that an invisible being had entered the room. Some hours later, he learned that among those who went down with the Titanic was the bandmaster, one Wally Hartley whom Captain Snowden had known well as a boy. "I had no knowledge of his going to sea or having anything to do with any ship," the Salvation Army captain always insisted.
Some passengers believed that the Titanic was doomed from the start and the near-miss with the New York had been viewed as a bad omen to begin with. Many of the survivors spoke of a vengeful Egyptian mummy, the remains of the Princess of Amen-Ra, which had been stored in the hold and which carried a death curse. It would seem, however, that the Royal Princess did not go down with the ship because she is later reported to have been transported on the Empress of Ireland...which sank with the loss of hundreds of lives...and, later still, on the Lusitania which was torpedoed. There are no actual records which show a mummy was ever aboard any of the three mentioned ships (possibly because all documentation sank with the unfortunate vessels), and her wooden coffin lid is a popular exhibit in the British Museum. However, the interior of the sarcophagus is empty, and the whereabouts of its former regal inhabitant remains to this day something of a mystery.
Was the demise of the Titanic foreseen fourteen years before it happened? In his novel entitled Futility, published in 1898, Morgan Robertson, a retired Merchant Navy officer, penned an eerily similar tale. His British liner, the S.S. Titan, the "biggest and safest vessel in the world," puts to sea from Southampton in April on her maiden TransAtlantic voyage to New York City, carrying about 2,000 passengers. The ship is later struck by an iceberg and sinks. Robertson's description of the S.S. Titan nearly exactly matches that of the Titanic. Both were driven by three triple-screw propellers and steamed at high speed...the Titan at 25 knots, the Titanic at 23. Both were more than 800 feet long and had within their passenger lists the names of wealthy and eminent personages from two continents. Like the Titanic, the Titan was considered to be unsinkable and its lifeboats thought to be nothing but a superfluous legal requirement. In both cases, the inadequate supply of lifeboats contributed to the casualty count. Also like the hapless Titanic, the fictional Titan collided with an iceberg, sustained a hole in its starboard side, and sank with a huge loss of life. Both events took place in the same area of the ocean.
At the very least, the similarity of the two ships and their respective fates is extraordinarily coincidental, but some have seen it as more than that. The author, it has been noted, considered himself something of a psychic and once claimed that he owed his inspiration to what he called his "astral writing partner." Robertson shed no further light on the issue. He died, destitute and forgotten, in 1915, three years after the Titanic had sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic, but not before writing another book that he entitled Beyond the Spectrum. This later novel described a future war fought with aircraft that carried "sun bombs." Incredibly powerful, one bomb had the capacity to destroy an entire city, erupting in a flash of light that would blind all those who looked upon it. Robertson's war begins in a December and is started by the Japanese...with a sneak attack on Hawaii.
The Titanic was the second of three sister ships build by the White Star Line. Only the first, the Olympic, would exist long enough to eventually find its way to the scrapyard about 25 years after she was launched. During World War One, she served as a troop transport and became known as "Old Reliable." The third ship, originally named the Gigantic and changed, after the Titanic disaster, to the Britannic (possibly because it would sound more patriotic to a Britain approaching a time of war, or maybe because White Star wanted nothing more to do with grandiloquent names) shared the same unfortunate fate as her middle sister. Originally intended as a passenger liner, she was requisitioned in the spring of 1915 by the British Admiralty and outfitted as a hospital ship.
On November 21, 1916, the Britannic was steaming through the Kea Channel in the Aegean. Shortly after 8:00 a.m., she suffered a tremendous explosion and quickly began to sink by the bow. In less than an hour, Britain's largest liner was gone, the damage suffered almost identical to that sustained by the Titanic four and a half years earlier. Fortunately, only 30 people out of the 1,100 on board at the time died in the blast, most occurring when two lifeboats were launched prematurely and were sucked into the still-turning propellers. As a strange footnote to this tragedy, one of the Britannic staff members, a stewardess named Violet Jessup, had been among the Titanic crew and had also been aboard the Olympic when it collided with the HMS Hawke. The luckiest woman who ever lived, having survived the sinking of both ships...or something of a Typhoid Mary?
In 1935, on an inky April night, 23 years after the Titanic had gone to the bottom of the ocean, a British seaman stood watch on a coal ship steaming toward Canada and located in the same vicinity as the earlier calamity. The crewman, William Reeves, sensed impending disaster and yelled "Danger ahead!" only seconds before an iceberg became visible in the darkness. Swiftly taking action, Reeves narrowly averted a collision. The ship soon ran afoul of icy debris, however, which disabled her propeller, and she had to be towed to a repair yard at St. John's in Newfoundland.
The name of the coal ship was Titanian, and the sailor whose quick thinking had avoided a possible loss of life had been born on the night of April 14, 1912...as the great Titanic slid to her watery grave.
(Copyright 1999 by Novareinna - No reproduction without express permission from the author)