The Unsinkable Titanic

[Andrew Clarkson]

The notorious maritime tragedy, plus stories about researching steamship passengers.

When it struck an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic on 14 April 1912, the RMS Titanic made headlines around the world.

Now, eighty-five years after the famous nautical disaster, the Titanic is dominating the media once again. The past year saw the release of a number of Titanic-inspired offerings, including a television miniseries and two documentaries, a Broadway musical, an interactive CD-ROM which takes the user on a virtual tour of the ship, a compact-disc collection of ragtime songs that were played by the liner’s ill-fated orchestra, and a mega-budget Hollywood film. Even more numerous have been recent books about the ship, which have ranged from scholarly (Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the “Titanic” Disaster, by Steven Biel) to tasteless (Last Dinner on the Titanic: Menus and Recipes from the Great Liner). Novels set on the ship have abounded as well, among them Every Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge and Maiden Voyage by Cynthia Bass. There’s a certain irony about these novels, since it was a novel which uncannily foretold the Titanic’s watery demise: In 1898, an obscure author named Morgan Robertson wrote a novel called Futility about a magnificent, unsinkable ocean liner, carrying too few lifeboats on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic, which crashed against an iceberg on a cold April night and sank. The name of the ship in Robertson’s novel: The Titan.

“Iceberg Right Ahead!”
One of the Titanic’s lookouts, Frederick Fleet, was the first to spot the iceberg, at 11:40 p.m. He rang the crow’s nest bell three times to warn of the danger. On the bridge, First Officer William Murdoch picked up the phone and asked Fleet what he had seen. “Iceberg right ahead!” responded Fleet. With only about thirty seconds to act, Murdoch turned the ship to port and put it into reverse, but it was too late. The iceberg grazed the starboard side of the ship, creating gaps in the hull. (For decades it was popularly believed that the iceberg had cut a gash in the ship. But recent tests on steel plates retrieved from the wreck indicate that the Titanic was made of steel that was rich in sulfur, brittle, and therefore susceptible to major cracks from even a minor impact. Also, underwater photos of the wreck show no gash. It appears that the rivets fastening the brittle plates popped, the plates bent, and the seams in the hull split and leaked.)

Various passengers sensed the brush differently. One said later that it felt “as though someone had drawn a giant finger all along the side of the boat,” another that it felt as if “we went over about a thousand marbles.” Water started filling the watertight compartments, spilling over the tops of the bulkheads into succeeding compartments. Captain Edward J. Smith, informed by the Titanic’s designer, who was on board, that the ship had only an hour and a half to remain afloat, gave the order to start putting women and children in the lifeboats.

First Officer Murdoch supervised loading the lifeboats on the starboard side, Second Officer Charles Lightoller the port side. Murdoch allowed men into the boats when there were no women or children present; Lightoller, on the other hand, seemed to be following a dictum of “women and children only,” and he lowered many boats partly empty, holding back all men.

Many male first-class passengers on the starboard side managed to make it into the lifeboats. Other men from first class, such as John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim, went down in history for going down with the ship. Astor secured a place in the lifeboats for his young wife, but Lightoller prevented him from accompanying her; Guggenheim and his secretary changed into evening dress and appeared on the deck to “go down like gentlemen.”

The steerage section of the Titanic held third-class passengers, most of them part of the steady stream of immigrants coming to America. Since there had been no lifeboat drill, there was no organized system for getting passengers from steerage up to the boat decks. Most third-class passengers who survived did so by finding a way to the boat deck and managing to get into a boat, or by jumping overboard and surviving an icy swim to one of the lifeboats.

The ship sank at about 2:20 a.m. Afterward, statistics revealed that sixty percent of first-class passengers survived, forty-four percent of second-class passengers, and only twenty-five percent of third-class passengers. The death rate was higher for third-class children than for first-class men.

Astor, Guggenheim, and their cohorts on the Social Register were the luminaries of the Belle Epoque. In a time before television, film, radio, or sports stars, wealthy folk were the celebrities of the Gilded Age, and the press reported their doings to a gossip-hungry public. Thus, when news of the Titanic’s sinking was reported by the New York American, the story was devoted almost entirely to Astor; a bit at the end mentioned that over one thousand other people had also perished.

“God Himself Could Not Sink This Ship”
Both the Titanic and her nearly-identical sister ship, the Olympic, were given names that evoked the gods. An editorial writer in the Belfast Morning News of 1 June 1911 wondered why the White Star Line had named its luxurious new ship Titanic:

The Titans were a mythological race who came to believe they’d conquered nature, who thought they’d achieved power and learning greater than Zeus himself, to their ultimate ruin. He smote the strong and daring Titans with thunderbolts; and their final abiding place was in some limbo beneath the lowest depths of the Tartarus, a sunless abyss below Hades.

Indeed, the opening of the twentieth century did find people feeling confident. The western world’s progression of technological miracles was well underway, and each new marvel added to the mood of power and optimism. On New Year’s Eve of 1899, the New York Times proclaimed: We step upon the threshold of 1900, which leads to the new century, facing a still bright dawn of civilization.” This sense of invincibility is reflected in the statement made by a crew member when the ship was being boarded at Southampton, England. A passenger enquired if the Titanic was, indeed, unsinkable. Replied the deck hand, “God Himself could not sink this ship.”

Captain Smith, if he had heard this remarkable assertion, would have had no reason to refute it. His career at sea (the Titanic’s maiden voyage was to be his final one, the culmination of a glorious career) had been notably accident-free; six years before the Titanic sailed, he had commented on his trip across the Atlantic on the Adriatic: “I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.” This supreme confidence was reinforced by an incident when Smith was at the helm of the Olympic some months before captaining the Titanic. A naval cruiser struck the Olympic, leaving a twenty-foot-wide gash in the starboard side. The cruiser was badly damaged. As for the Olympic, Smith said afterward that his ship’s frame “stood the shock well. There was no panic. Many passengers did not know there had been a collision, so slight was the shock felt . . . .The watertight doors, which automatically closed, held the compartments sealed.” Smith must have thought that these marvelous new liners really were unsinkable, and that would explain why he thought nothing of driving the Titanic at top speed into an ice field that other ships had warned him about.

A Moonless Night, a Sea Like Glass
Viewed in this light, it’s easy to interpret the sinking of one of the greatest ships ever to grace the seas as divine retribution for man’s hubris. But the extraordinary role played by chance must also be considered. The circumstances which led to the loss of 1,500 souls pile one upon another, making the accident look avoidable, and that much more poignant. If there had been a moon that night, or if the ocean had not been so incredibly calm, moonlight or lapping waves might have made the iceberg more visible. If Murdoch had allowed the ship to collide with the iceberg head-on, rather than turning to avoid it, the damage would have been sustained only in the bow and the first two forward compartments, and the ship would have floated long enough for help to arrive. If the bulkheads forming the watertight compartments had extended up one more deck, the flooding could have been contained. If the lookouts in the ship’s crow’s nest had been given binoculars; if Captain Smith had paid more attention to iceberg sightings reported by neighboring ships; if the wireless operator on the Californian, only ten miles away, had not shut off his set and gone to bed just ten minutes before the Titanic hit the berg; if there had been enough lifeboats for everyone on board—the list goes on.

Goodbye to All That
The ship’s sinking signalled the end of an era. Western civilization had seen a century of prosperity, peace, and technological progress, for the most part. The launching of the Titanic, just two years before the outbreak of the First World War, was the last hurrah of Edwardian society. As scholar Jeffrey Hart says, “When the Titanic went down off the coast of Newfoundland, its lights blazing almost to the end, there would never again be such a ship, such technical and such social confidence, such magnificence and grandeur. It was as if the Belle Epoque itself, with all its glitter and promise, had gone down in that icy sea.”

The new century would bring two world wars, a major economic depression, and myriad other social, economic, and technological changes. The Titanic left behind a world which would never be quite the same.

Source: http://www.ancestrymagazine.com