“My mother had a premonition from the very word ‘GO.’ She knew there was something to be afraid of and the only thing that she felt strongly about was that to say a ship was unsinkable was flying in the face of God. Those were her words.”
Eva Hart, Titanic Survivor
This year marks 113 years since history’s most famous ship had its hull ripped open by a massive iceberg and sank into the icy waters off the coast of Newfoundland. The event still resonates even today – for me, April is forever Titanic month.
There’s something indelibly haunting about the ship that was built to the ultimate standards of Edwardian technology, that was created to be a floating lifeboat, that nothing could defeat. But White Star Line, who commissioned the ship, and Harland & Wolff, the builders in Belfast, Northern Ireland, were dreadfully wrong.
In 1912 the massive, luxurious ship set sail across the ocean with beautiful architecture, sumptuous food supplies, and spaces for the extremely wealthy to store all of the trunks of clothing for each change of outfit for the duration. It all went down into the dark depths of the ocean on the night of April 14th, only four days later, along with approximately 1,500 passengers.
I delivered a talk about the final dreadful hours of the Titanic, along with the PTSD of the survivors, at our local library for the 100th anniversary, and it was a packed house. So many people in the decades since the sinking have been emotionally touched by the disaster.
Everything that I’ve read on the subject points to a perfect storm of circumstances, the absence of any one of which might have led to a different outcome – if the binoculars for the watch hadn’t mysteriously disappeared, if an unusual amount of icebergs hadn’t drifted down through Iceberg Alley that season, if the resulting night hadn’t been so cold that ice crystals in the air obscured the spotters’ vision, if the captain had heeded the reports of all the icebergs and slowed down…
So many turning points, so many opportunities to avoid catastrophe. And all the while, the wealthy and the humble were celebrating their passage on the inaugural sailing of the famous new ship, completely unaware of what lay ahead. I believe that’s why we can’t seem to let the sinking go.
A few years ago, when my hubby and I were travelling to Ireland, I particularly wanted to visit Belfast, to stand where the great ship began her journey.
That was amazing. We even stayed in the Titanic Hotel, built as an extension to the original Harland & Wolff drafting offices. The hotel is directly across the street from the Titanic Museum and the slip yards where Titanic and her sister ship Olympic were launched into the sea. There are outlines on the pavement marking where the two ships rested, and those for Titanic have an evocative chalk-outline quality to them. Visitors can stand right where the ship entered the water. You want to yell, “Don’t go!”, as if you could talk to the launch crew across time.
The hotel is atmospheric, with a vintage nautical design. It’s surprisingly affordable, and the perfect place to centre your Titanic pilgrimage. One of the drafting offices has been turned into a bar and restaurant, and you can even gently unroll some of Harland & Wolff’s original blueprints from that era.
The Titanic Museum is wonderful, with an exterior that mimics the shape of an iceberg, and an interior filled with information about the industries in Belfast – there were many – that supplied for the ships being built, from rope-makers to linen-weavers to food purveyors; with memorabilia from the ships; and with the poignant messaging sent in desperation after the Titanic was hit.
But it was the child’s luggage on board the SS Nomadic, the last remaining tender boat (that would ferry passengers from land out to the enormous ship waiting out on the water) for the Titanic now dry-docked in Belfast, with a stuffed toy accompanying it, that really got to me. Fifty-three sets of parents had to watch their children perish in the ocean along with them.
All such tragedies are terrible, unimaginable. The citizens of Belfast in 1912 were devastated that the ship they’d helped build, in which they took great pride, had gone down. The event remains the best-studied disaster in history, with every available record pulled from around the world.
And researchers are inspired to keep trying to determine exactly what happened. I think the story speaks for itself, just a horrifying mountain of circumstances that took the great ship down, but people continue to look for more answers.
A recent study used submersible robots to map the wreck, 3,800m down on the bottom of the Atlantic, as a detailed 3-D model. What the researchers found illuminated the ship’s final hours. The replica shows the violence of the ship tearing in two as it sank: while the bow still remains upright, the stern landed 600 metres away, its metal mangled from the impact.
One of the boiler rooms visible provides evidence that the ship’s engineers worked right to the end to keep the ship’s lights on so that as many passengers as possible could escape.
A simulation of the sinking demonstrated that as the ship scraped along the iceberg, a series of relatively small punctures, each about the size of a standard sheet of copier paper, were created in a line along the hull.
The ship should have stayed afloat if four of its watertight compartments became flooded. But those holes, tiny compared to the mass of the ship, opened up six compartments to the water, and not all of them were watertight. As each one successively filled, the water cascaded over the top into a successive compartment. Eventually, there was so much water inside that it took the Titanic down to her grave.
You can find the article on the BBC website with more details.
And perhaps you’d care to commemorate the great ship and her passengers by hosting a Titanic dinner. One of my favourite Titanic-related books in my collection is Last Dinner on the Titanic, which will provide you with menus for all classes on the boat, and give you all the detail you need to create the right atmosphere. Dressed in your finest, you might raise a glass to all of the doomed souls that spent four days of gaiety before the terror set in.
