As you’ve likely gathered from previous historical instalments here in the Blitz, I have a lot of interest in naval military engagements as well as marine disasters. There’s something about big vessels sailing out on the open ocean that fascinates me, while also giving me a heightened sense of anxiety. Just the thought of crossing the Atlantic or Pacific on a ship scares the hell out of me, but of course there was a point in our semi-modern era that it was the only option for travellers jumping from one continent to another.
I spent a lot of time in the library as a young lad, often pulling rudimentary non-fiction works from the shelves about this or that. I remember being particularly interested in ancient history, especially Egypt and Rome, by the time I was in grades 3 and 4. Natural disasters like the volcanic apocalypse that befell the city of Pompeii really struck a chord early on, but an early obsession with the RMS Titanic was instantaneous after checking out a book about Robert Ballard first discovering the wreck in 1985. I’ll always remember the haunting photo on the cover, the ship’s broken hull appearing out of the blackness of the North Atlantic. That was it for me. I had to know more.
The Titanic was from a completely alien world to me as a youngster growing up in rural southern Ontario in the early 1990s. I remember thinking, wow, this ship sank 80 years ago and they finally just discovered it. Here we are 30 years later, and marking the 110th anniversary of the demise of what was the world’s largest ship at the time. Time flies.
The ship’s extraordinary size, the circumstances that led to her sinking on her maiden voyage, and the considerable loss of life involved is no doubt why so many hold the same fascination with the Titanic as I.
You could argue that the Titanic came to be out of a sense of competition, and that her untimely demise was a result of human arrogance. The ship was one of three ‘Olympic’-class luxury ocean liners developed by the White Star Line, one of many shipping giants of the era trying to gain every advantage over their rivals. White Star’s chief British rival was Cunard, which was hailed as having the fastest Atlantic passenger fleet in the early 1900s. First World War aficionados will no doubt be familiar with the Lusitania, one of Cunard’s flagship liners that met its end at the hands of a German U-boat torpedo in 1915. Sorry, I’ll try to stay on track here.
In 1912, White Star Line had completed two of three of its Olympic-class passenger ships (Olympic and Titanic came first, Britannic followed a couple years later) and Titanic stood alone as the world’s biggest, not to mention the most luxurious. At 882 feet, she was nearly a full 100 feet longer than the Lusitania, and also had the engine capacity to potentially make her faster than her competitor as well.
Later claims that Titanic was trying to break the trans-Atlantic speed record have been largely dismissed; but White Star did have a schedule to keep and it would not look good if the world’s largest ship showed up late to its destination of New York City on its first trip, which is one of the main reasons why Capt. Edward Smith chose to ignore multiple ice warnings issued from other ships in the area during the fourth night of Titanic’s maiden voyage.
You’d be hard pressed to find anyone not familiar with what happened next. Despite a last-ditch effort to avoid a massive iceberg, Titanic’s starboard bow was torn open after a collision at 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912. Less than three hours later she would be at the bottom of the Atlantic, taking more than 1,500 souls either down with her or from subsequent hypothermia from the frigid open ocean. It’s hard to imagine a more terrifying scene to witness for the 700 or so survivors, many of whom were later rescued by the liner Carpathia, ironically a Cunard vessel.
Many things went wrong for the Titanic, far too many to list here in my little bi-weekly commentary. There was human error, to be sure, in the sense that the ship’s senior officers failed to take the ice warnings seriously. Certainly engineering and design error, whereby the Titanic was designed to stay afloat with four of its watertight compartments flooded, but not five. Five were indeed breached by the fateful iceberg, causing seawater to subsequently spill over the top of each compartment until the ship had no chance of recovery. It’s also well documented that Titanic only had enough lifeboat space for about half the people on board.
Perhaps one of the biggest intangible contributors to Titanic’s sinking was general arrogance. The ship’s designers lauded the vessel as ‘unsinkable’ mostly due to its sheer size, which certainly played well in the press and appealed to the people who enthusiastically booked passage on her. It’s likely that the term ‘karma’ wasn’t an everyday term back in 1912, but labelling a ship ‘unsinkable’ no doubt immediately alerted the cosmos that balance had to be once again restored. It’s like dubbing a plane ‘uncrashable’ due to its exceptionally well-designed engines. If anything can go wrong, it will usually find a way to.
In the end it was Mother Nature who inflicted her devastating karma upon Titanic. And 110 years later, the ship still holds the same mystique whenever her name is spoken. Titanic is just one of those examples that forever cements itself in the pages of history and remembered by all who hear the tale not for what it accomplished above the waves, but rather how it met its disastrous end.
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you back here in a fortnight.
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This is a bi-weekly opinion column; for question or comment contact Dan McNee at dmcnee@midwesternnewspapers.com.
