Why the Titanic Endures
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Chapter 1 Why the Titanic Endures In This Chapter ▶ Analyzing why the Titanic story still intrigues ▶ Looking at the “tempting fate” question ▶ Knowing one’s place in the Gilded Age ▶ Traveling in third class with immigrants to America ▶ Finding the Titanic wreckage ▶ Going to the movies . again and again and again veryone who is intrigued or moved by the story of the Titanic has his or Eher own reason for finding the Titanic so compelling. The Titanic sank on April 15, 1912. After a century, the fascination with the Titanic shows no sign of slowing down. James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic is the second- highest-grossing film in movie history. Hundreds of websites are devoted to the Titanic. Two dozen documentaries have been made about the ship and its fateful last voyage. As I write these words, countless events around the world are planned to commemorate the 2012 centennial anniversary of the sinking. All this begs the question: Why does the Titanic endure? Why does the ship of dreams continue to intrigue so many people? This chapter takes a stab at answering that question. ExaminingCOPYRIGHTED Why We Still MATERIAL Care The Titanic maritime disaster continues to intrigue after 100 years because the ship was famous; because the story of the Titanic, with all its twists and turns, is irresistible; and because the Titanic captured the attention of the entire world when she sank in 1912. Sea travel was never the same after the Titanic. In this section, I begin to answer the question of why the Titanic endures. 005_9781118177662-ch01.indd5_9781118177662-ch01.indd 9 112/20/112/20/11 66:42:42 PPMM 10 Part I: The Titanic: A Century of Legend Everyone knows about it The Titanic disaster did not result in the largest loss of life at sea. That sad accolade goes to the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff during World War II, a tragedy that took more than 9,300 lives. The Titanic also wasn’t the largest peacetime maritime disaster. That was the passenger ferry the Doña Paz; almost 4,400 people died when the ship col- lided with an oil tanker off the coast of the Philippines in 1987. The Titanic disaster took the lives of just over 1,500 people. Yet it is without a doubt the single most famous maritime disaster ever. It’s famous not just because rich and famous people died or because it sank on its maiden voyage (although that factor certainly contributed to the immediate and ongoing fascination with the disaster). It’s also famous because it opened eyes. It awakened people to the awesome power of nature and reminded them that no human-made edifice, no matter how strong or technologically advanced, is immune to the raw force of nature. It also made governments and the ship- building industry take a step back and ask, “Are we being as safe as we can?” And the answer, of course, was “No.” The story is irresistible As a subject of study, the Titanic is irresistible. The combination of arrogance on the part of its owners and builders and the fact that the ship sank on her maiden voyage makes it so. However, social arrogance and a cocky certitude in the excellence of a ship were not unique to the Titanic’s builders, owners, and passengers. It seems that the single unique element — the most compel- ling aspect — of the story is that the Titanic was on her maiden voyage when she went down. In thumbnail, the story seems farfetched, if not impossible: The biggest ship ever built sinks on its first voyage. If a writer pitched that idea to a movie studio, he or she might get laughed out of the room. “Its first voyage? And it’s the biggest and allegedly safest ship ever built? Who in the world is going to buy that?” But the story of the Titanic is true and, for myriad reasons, has become iconic. Editors and publishers used to say that the three most-written-about topics are Abraham Lincoln, Jesus Christ, and the Titanic. The same cannot be said about the Wilhelm Gustloff or the Doña Paz, even though those ship- wrecks were much worse than the Titanic in terms of loss of life. Only the Titanic story has endured an entire century. 005_9781118177662-ch01.indd5_9781118177662-ch01.indd 1010 112/20/112/20/11 66:42:42 PPMM Chapter 1: Why the Titanic Endures 11 The world took notice When the Mississippi River steamboat the SS Sultana sank on April 27, 1865, due to a boiler explosion and claimed 1,800 lives, newspaper attention at the time was . let’s call it “spare.” The Washington, D.C., Daily National Republican on April 28, 1865, gave the disaster two paragraphs on its front page. On May 5, 1865, the Burlington, Vermont, Burlington Free Press devoted less than 90 words to the explosion. Granted, these newspapers were preoc- cupied with other events, like Robert E. Lee’s surrender, President Lincoln’s assassination, and the hunt for John Wilkes Booth. Nonetheless, a maritime disaster simply did not warrant massive coverage, huge headlines, or wide- spread attention. That changed with the loss of the Titanic. Newspapers trumpeted the colli- sion, the sinking, and the aftermath with an intensity previously reserved for wars and the deaths of major figures on the world stage. Some examples: “Titanic Reported to Have Struck Iceberg,” Virginia Times-Dispatch, April 15, 1912 “1,302 Are Drowned or Missing,” Virginia News-Leader, April 16, 1912 “Titanic Disaster,” The London Times, April 16, 1912 “Over Fifteen Hundred Sank to Death With Giant White Star Steamer Titanic,” Norfolk, Virginia Virginian-Pilot, April 16, 1912 “Fifteen Hundred Lives Lost when Titanic Plunges Headlong into Depths of the Sea,” Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1912 “Carpathia Refuses to Give Any Details of Titanic’s Loss and as Fruitless Hours Go By, Suspense Grows More Maddening,” Richmond, Virginia Times-Dispatch, April 18, 1912 As I explore in Chapter 9, the demand for news about the Titanic was so great that newspapers sometimes reported rumors without verifying whether they were true, as in this classic New York Evening Sun headline: “ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION” The sinking of the Titanic was a seminal moment in world history. It provided a powerful reminder about man’s place in the grand scheme of the natural world: Nature always wins. 005_9781118177662-ch01.indd5_9781118177662-ch01.indd 1111 112/20/112/20/11 66:42:42 PPMM 12 Part I: The Titanic: A Century of Legend The disaster changed sea travel The sinking of the Titanic changed travel at sea for all time. Here are some of the changes that ensued: ✓ Enough lifeboats were carried onboard. As Chapters 6 and 11 explain, the Titanic didn’t carry enough lifeboats for her passengers and crew. After the Titanic, ships were required to provide one seat for every pas- senger and crew member on a lifeboat. ✓ The International Ice Patrol (IIP) was established. This organization monitors icebergs in the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans and broad- casts information about their locations. Not a single accident involving a ship and an iceberg has occurred since the establishment of the IIP. (See the sidebar in Chapter 10 for more information.) ✓ Ship designs changed. Ships’ hulls were made stronger to prevent them from being breached and flooded by objects such as icebergs. Maybe these reforms and changes to regulations would have been made if the Titanic didn’t strike the iceberg and sink on April 15, 1912. But it may well have taken the sinking of the biggest ship ever built on its maiden voyage to cause the “sea change” in ship design and ocean travel the world needed. Tempting Fate with the Word “Unsinkable” The White Star Line, the company that owned the Titanic, never used the word unsinkable to describe its biggest ship. The company did, however, put out a brochure about the Titanic and her sister ship the Olympic that read “these two wonderful vessels are designed to be unsinkable” (my emphasis added). The word unsinkable pertaining to the Titanic was first used in an article in a 1911 edition of Shipbuilder magazine. (The magazine called the Titanic “prac- tically unsinkable.”) Whether the White Star Line really thought its ship was unsinkable or gave any thought to the difference between “unsinkable” and “designed to be unsinkable,” newspapers soon took up the “unsinkable” refrain. The “unsink- able” tag got stuck to the Titanic, and after the ship sank, the White Star Line was accused of “tempting fate” by claiming its ship could not sink. I submit that a company’s actions can’t act as a challenge to the forces of nature and that nature isn’t in the business of punishing humans for arro- gance or tempting fate. It’s hard for me to believe that the Titanic’s designers and builders thought, “We’ll build the biggest ship ever; we’ll define her as unsinkable; and we won’t put enough lifeboats on the ship because icebergs, storms, and the Atlantic wouldn’t dare mess with us!” 005_9781118177662-ch01.indd5_9781118177662-ch01.indd 1212 112/20/112/20/11 66:42:42 PPMM Chapter 1: Why the Titanic Endures 13 Sea superstitions Maybe the notion that the builders of the Titanic ✓ Stepping onto a boat with your left foot is “tempted fate” is just part of the long tradition bad luck. (How many passengers on the of sea superstitions. Here are some my favorite Titanic stepped aboard with their left foot sea superstitions: and doomed the ship?) ✓ Bananas and women onboard are bad luck ✓ Priests onboard a ship are bad luck.