by Sarah Ellis
One reason that Titanic is a household word has to do with celebrity. Now, as then, we are fascinated with the lives of the rich and famous. A movie star has a bad hair day, a singer redecorates her bathroom, a celebrity spokesmodel ditches her boyfriend and suddenly the “news” is being tweeted and blogged and published in magazines. We are hungry for details. The Titanic had, among her first-class passengers, a wide selection of the 1912 equivalents of rock stars. Some of the travellers, such as the Countess of Rothes and Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon, had titles. Some were known for their accomplishments. There was an aviator, a sculptor, an artist, a moviemaker and a best-selling writer. What really caught the public’s interest, however, was wealth. John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, George Widener — these were the super-rich, the names that everybody knew, that filled the public with that mixture of fascination and envy that celebrity creates. The combined wealth of the first-class passengers is estimated to have been $9.8 billion in today’s dollars. Their clothes, their jewels, their pets, their cars, their toys, their hanky-panky (Mr. Guggenheim was travelling with a woman who was not his wife) — buckets of newspaper ink were spilled, and continue to be spilled, on such details.
The fascination of sunken treasure is another reason we continue to wonder about the Titanic. What’s left of that magnificent liner lies 3798 metres under water. All that luxury, all that history just waiting to be discovered. Plans to raise the Titanic started very soon after the disaster. One of the goofiest ideas involved filling it with ping-pong balls in order to refloat it. The trouble with all these plans was that nobody knew where it was. Expeditions in 1980, 1981 and 1983 failed to find the wreck, but in 1985 a video camera surveying the ocean floor in the area of the disaster began to pick up a trail of debris that led to the ship. The man who first saw it, Robert Ballard, described it as “an apparently endless slab of black steel.”
Some questions were answered with the discovery. Several survivors had said that the ship broke in two as it sank, and the wreck confirmed that to be true. Some items were salvaged in later years, including bits of coal, but it is unlikely that the wreck itself will ever be raised. It remains a memorial. It keeps its secrets.
The Titanic disaster also continues to engage our imagination because it leaves so many questions and mysteries. Separating rumour from fact has been a century-long pastime. Did Captain Smith rescue a baby? Was there an Egyptian mummy on board that cursed the voyage? Did some ship’s worker paint We defy God to sink her on the stern of the ship?
The disaster also raised more serious questions. At the time people asked, How could the “unsinkable” Titanic sink in less than three hours? Why were there insufficient lifeboats? Why had there been no lifeboat drill? Why didn’t the Californian, a ship in the vicinity of the tragedy, respond to the Titanic’s signals for help? Who was responsible?
People wanted somebody to blame and they wanted there to be a meaning in the disaster. For some people that meaning was the danger and wickedness of new technology. In St. Matthew’s Church in Halifax on Sunday, April 21, 1912, the Rev. J.W. Macmillan preached: “We must fix the blame upon ourselves for the crime of a generation, reckless in its pursuit of a debauch of pleasure, and these sixteen hundred victims are hapless sufferers. Our society today is like a band of children in a storehouse of dangerous tools and explosives and playing games with gunpowder, matches, steam and electricity in a reckless and wanton fashion.”
Looking back from the perspective of our times, one of the questions that the Titanic raised was the huge moral issue of the value of a particular human life. The world of the Titanic was rigidly divided into classes, based on wealth. A first-class ticket cost an average of $480 and third-class passage cost an average of $35 — that works out to over $11,000 for a first-class ticket and about $800 for third-class, in today’s dollars. The first-class passengers had access to the Moorish-tiled Turkish baths and the third-class passengers shared two bathtubs among seven hundred people. Did anybody question these divisions? Probably not. Everyone was warm, dry, well-fed and experiencing one of the wonders of the age.
But then the Titanic struck an iceberg. There was space for 1178 people on the lifeboats and there were approximately 2200 people on board. Who gets saved? The unwritten rule was women and children first. The men who stood aside as those women and children were loaded into the lifeboats were memorialized as heroes.
Another Halifax preacher on that Sunday said, “It is a lesson of love that it is indeed self-sacrifice which is at the heart of all heroic life.” Others weren’t quite so sure. A reporter in the Halifax Morning Chronicle wrote: “John Jacob Astor, Master of millions, Chas. M. Hayes, Railway Magnate, and the rest stood aside for sabot-shod, shawl-enshrouded, illiterate and penniless peasant women of Europe.” Is the life of a captain of industry worth more than the life of an ordinary, unnamed immigrant woman? The reporter seems to have his doubts. The survival statistics tell one version of the story. Sixty-three percent of first-class passengers were eventually saved, forty-three percent of second-class passengers and twenty-five percent of third.
Who deserves to live? What decision would you have made? What would you have done on that cold, crowded and confusing boat deck?
One hundred years after the luxury liner Titanic sank to the ocean’s depths, it is still news. It was not until 2007, for example, that the identity of the “unknown child,” buried with such ceremony in Fairview Cemetery in Halifax, was revealed through DNA testing. He was Sidney Leslie Goodwin, aged nineteen months, travelling in third class. His parents, two sisters and three brothers all perished in the disaster.
The Titanic lives on because it is the best of stories. It has exotic luxury, arrogance, greed, mystery, heroism, self-sacrifice, romance, suspense, vibrant characters, the implacable forces of nature, the power and ingenuity of huge machines and, at its heart, a little empty space, a space just big enough for us. In our private Titanic story are we a baronness or a lift boy, a second officer or a penniless peasant woman of Europe? Or maybe we play in the orchestra. Maybe we are one of the stokers who stayed too long in the pub in Southampton and missed the maiden voyage. At the end, maybe we were safely packed onto a lifeboat, or we jumped into the frigid water in desperation or we sat in the first-class lounge and played cards while the ship went down. In our private story, be our theme tragedy, irony or luck, the one thing we never are is ordinary.
* * *
Dorothy and her family, in Halifax and in England, are all fictional characters. Their world, however, includes some real historical people. Mrs. Bland, who wrote under the name E. Nesbit, was a real writer and her stories are still great fun to read. Titanic passengers Momon, Lolo and their father really existed. Captain Smith was indeed the captain of the Titanic. Fred the lift boy was also a real person, Frederick Allen, age seventeen. He did not survive.
Images and Documents
Image 1. The Titanic sails from Southampton on April 10, 1912. When the Titanic was launched she was the largest man-made moving object in the world.
Image 2. The Titanic’s maiden voyage was to be Captain E.J. Smith’s last command before he retired.
Image 3. A woman tries out one of the exercise bicycles in the Titanic’s well-equipped gymnasium.
Image 4. A facsimile of the dinner menu, served in the second-class dining saloon the night the Titanic struck the iceberg, includes the delightful-sounding “American ice cream” and the not-so-delightful “pureed turnips.”
Image 5. In this artist’s recreation we see lifeboats being lowered the 22 metres (75 feet) from the boat deck to the water as other boats, already launched, pull away.
Image 6. A lifeboat carrying Titanic survivors, photographed as it approached the rescue ship Carpathia. A note on the back indicates it might have been carrying the “Nairatil” [Navratil] children. See photo next page.
Image 7. Two French brothers, Michel (4) and Edmond Navratil (2), survived the sinking of the Titanic. Their father, who was taking
them to America without his wife’s knowledge, died.
Image 8. Passengers on board the Carpathia improvised clothing for the Titanic survivors from blankets and their own clothes.
Image 9. Headlines around the world trumpeted the Titanic’s sinking. Some early editions wrongly reported that the ship did not sink and was being towed to port. The sinking of the Titanic was the greatest news story of its age.
Image 10. Coffins and hearses line the dock at Halifax, waiting for bodies to be unloaded from the cable ship Minia, which helped the Mackay-Bennett recover bodies. The Mayflower Curling Rink in Halifax served as a temporary morgue, where families of the victims could identify the bodies and recover their possessions.
Image 11. Two stewardesses from the Titanic are seen walking in Plymouth, upon their safe return after the disaster.
Image 12. The location of the Titanic, about 1600 km east of Boston and 600 km south of St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Acknowledgments
Every effort has been made to trace ownership of visual and written material used in this book. Errors and omissions will be corrected in subsequent updates or editions.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following.
Cover cameo: Detail, Young War Worker, Getty Images/Keystone, HGE:2666206.
Cover background: Detail, painting by Ken Marschall © 1982.
Image 1: Titanic, Brown Brothers PIX 428.
Image 2: Southampton City Council Arts & Heritage.
Image 3: TITANIC: GYMNASIUM, 1912. A passenger keeps fit aboard the “Titanic,” image no. 0074265, The Granger Collection, New York.
Image 4: From the Titanic’s second-class dinner menu, April 14, 1912.
Image 5: THE ‘TITANIC,’ 1912. The lowering of the lifeboats on the White Star liner “Titanic” after she had struck an iceberg in the North-Atlantic on April 14, 1912; contemporary illustration, image no. 0046019, The Granger Collection, New York.
Image 6: Photograph of a lifeboat carrying Titanic survivors, National Archives and Records Administration, ARC identifier 278338 / MRL number 383.
Image 7: TITANIC: SURVIVORS, 1912. Two French brothers, Michel (age 4) and Edmond Navratil (age 2), who survived the sinking of the RMS ‘Titanic;’ their father died in the disaster, and at the time of this photograph they had yet to be returned to their mother. Photographed April 1912, image no. 0109464, The Granger Collection, New York.
Image 8: TITANIC. Succouring the saved: Women passengers on the “Carpathia” sewing for the “Titanic” survivors and distributing clothes, image no. 0005882, The Granger Collection, New York.
Image 9: Newspaper boy, Express Newspapers, ©topham Picturepoint, Getstock.com 2225800159.
Image 10: Hearses lined up on Halifax wharf, near present jetty 4 in HMCS Dockyard to take R.M.S. Titanic victims recovered by C.S. Minia, 6 May 1912; NSARM Photograph Collection: Transportation & Communication: Ships & Shipping: R.M.S. Titanic #3, Nova Scotia Arms and Records Management.
Image 11: Southampton City Council Arts & Heritage.
Image 12: Map by Paul Heersink/Paperglyphs.
The publisher would like to thank George Behe of Encyclopedia Titanica for his expert commentary on the text, and Barbara Hehner for checking additional details.
For Carmen and Winnie
Author’s Note
When I was doing the background reading for my story of Dorothy and the Titanic I felt as though I were swimming in a sea of facts. The Titanic disaster is one of those subjects that lends itself to facts, the Guinness Book of World Records kinds of facts. There is even a word for people who become fascinated with these facts — Titaniacs, as in “maniacs.” For a time I became a Titaniac. How many ostrich plumes were in the cargo of the ship? What pieces did the orchestra play? What was the value of the diamonds on board? How tall, how big, how rich, how many, how far, how fast? My friends were patient as I regaled them with fact after Titanic fact.
As I started to write my story, however, I found that the facts were not as inspiring as the images, the stories and the might-have-beens. For example, on April 17, 1912, the cable steamer Mackay-Bennett left Halifax Harbour to search for bodies from the Titanic. (Nine-day search, 306 bodies, 116 buried at sea.) It must have been a gruesome and traumatic job for the sailors, the embalmers, the undertaker and the clergyman. The image that stayed with me came from a newspaper description of the wharf as the steamer was being prepared to leave. The reporter talks of the usual hustle and bustle of the port. At the inner end of the pier is a pile of a hundred coffins. Halfway down the pier are big blocks of ice being transferred to the ship’s hold, and at the far end of the pier is a crowd of reporters with their cameras. The ice was to preserve the bodies they found until they could return them to Halifax for identification and burial. I couldn’t include this scene in my story because Dorothy was not there to see it, but the irony of the image has haunted me: Loading ice into a ship to go out into an ice-filled sea.
The big story of the Titanic is like a collage of micro-stories. Here’s one: When survivors in the lifeboats first saw the rockets that the rescue ship Carpathia (3:30 a.m., Cunard Line, 743 passengers from New York heading for a Mediterranean cruise, travelling at top speed of 17.5 knots toward the survivors) was firing, they signalled to them by burning newspapers, personal letters and handkerchiefs. My storytelling brain wonders about this. Who takes a newspaper on board a lifeboat? More seriously, what about those letters? What letter would be so important that you would stuff it in your pocket when your ship was sinking? And what about burning it? Would you have a moment’s hesitation? Of all the things you own, what would be the one thing you would grab when the fire alarm rings out, when the flood waters are rising, when the ground begins to tremble beneath your feet?
Any story of a disaster is a story of might-have-beens, a chain of alternating fortunates and unfortunates. Twenty-two-year-old Kit Buckley had a ticket to travel from Ireland to Boston on the Cymeric, a small ship of the White Star line in the spring of 1912. Unfortunately, there was a coal miners strike and the liner could not sail. Fortunately, she was rebooked on the Titanic. Unfortunately she was a third-class passenger and perished, body number 299. Further unfortunately, her family blamed her half-sister for encouraging her to travel to the new world. This casting of blame caused a bitter family rift. Fortunately, nearly one hundred years later, the two parts of the family were finally reconciled in a ceremony in which they erected a headstone on Kit’s grave.
Our best photographs of life aboard the Titanic come from the lens of an Irish theological student, Francis M. Browne. Browne was fortunate enough to have been given a first-class ticket for an overnight passage on the Titanic from Southampton to Queenstown. Huge and impressive machinery, scenes of action, elegant people — what an opportunity for a keen photographer! He spent the afternoon of the departure day and the next morning taking pictures. How unfortunate that he was only to be on the ship for two days. Fortunately, he made friends with a millionaire couple on board who took a shine to him and offered to buy him a ticket all the way to New York and back. Unfortunately, when Father Browne cabled his superior to ask for permission for the longer trip the answer was clear: “GET OFF THAT SHIP.” Fortunately, Francis Browne obeyed the order and thus survived — only 17 percent of males in first class survived, so his chances would have been slim. His amazing photographs also survived; they are the last visual record we have of life on board the great ship.
Even more intriguing than the might-have-beens are the might-not-have-beens. Because of the Titanic, Canadian writer Linda Bailey might never have been. Her grandmother, who emigrated from Poland in 1912, was supposed to travel on the Titanic, but family plans changed at the last minute. As Linda says, “They were peasants, so we know where my grandmother would have ended up.” Next time you enjoy one of Linda’s Good Time Travel Agency books you are only two clicks away from the night when the great ship went down.
The web of connections to that fatal
night fans out across many countries, from three-year-old French Haitian Simonne Laroche to Mr. Mauritz Håkan Björnström-Steffansson, a businessman from Sweden. In third class: Mrs. Mary Sophie Halaut Abrahim from Lebanon. In second class: Mrs. Anna Hamalainen from Finland, travelling to join her husband in Detroit. In first class: Doña Fermina Oliva y Ocana, from Madrid, travelling as a personal maid. A French musician, a fireman from Hong Kong, an American governess — these were some of the survivors. How many lives did they touch in the years following the disaster?
And then there are the ghosts — “Died in the sinking. Body not recovered.” Ilia Stoytcheff, age nineteen; Alfred Peacock, age seven months; Telda Marilda Strom, age two; Houssein Mohamed Hassan Abilmona, age eleven; Jeannie LeFebvre, age eight. What would have happened to them in the new world that was their destination?
The original Titanic was built of steel (overlapping plates 3 cm thick) and rivets (three million of them) at the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast, Ireland, by over fifteen thousand workers. It took fourteen months to build. It is now located approximately 1600 km due east of Boston and 600 km southeast of St. John’s, Newfoundland, about 3798 metres below the surface.