The sinking of the Titanic was a terrible disaster, resulting in the deaths of over
1,000 people. But the story is even worse than the numbers suggest. Here's why the death
toll isn't the most disturbing part of the Titanic's sinking.
It's probably safe to say that the Titanic's designers didn't do much reading of popular
fiction. If they had, they might have picked up a little piece of literature entitled Futility,
or the Wreck of the Titan.
Although it was a work of fiction, released 14 years before the launch of the real-life
ship, Futility contains some seriously eerie similarities to the story of the Titanic.
The fictional Titan is described as
"...the largest craft afloat," "...equal to that of a first class hotel,"
and "...unsinkable."
Sounds familiar.
"So this is the ship they say is unsinkable."
"It is unsinkable. God himself could not sink this ship."
The similarities don't stop there. Like the Titanic, the fictional Titan was about 400
nautical miles away from Newfoundland on a voyage in April when, at close to midnight,
it struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic. And like the Titanic, the Titan didn't have
enough lifeboats for everyone on board. We probably don't have to point out the similarity
of the names.
It's just a bizarre coincidence, so much so that after the Titanic sank, people began
ac cusing author Morgan Robertson of being some kind of clairvoyant — which he denied.
But he did try to cash in on publicity from the disaster, with the book being republished
in 1912 with some minor changes and the new Wreck of the Titan title. We'd say "too soon,"
but apparently he came up with it first.
The Titanic wasn't the first ship in history to use the S.O.S. distress call, but in 1912,
wireless communication was still pretty new, which meant there weren't really any standards
regarding monitoring the airwaves.
That explains why no one onboard the Californian, a ship which was somewhere between 8 and 12
miles away from the Titanic, heard the sinking ship's distress calls. At the time that the
Titanic hit the iceberg, the Californian had only one wireless operator, and he'd switched
off his equipment and gone to bed.
“That's it for me. I'm shutting down."
If he hadn't, he would have known that the Titanic was in trouble within about 15 minutes
of the collision, when the first distress call was sent.
At the time that the Titanic was sinking, the Californian was surrounded by ice and
stopped for the night. If the ship had received the SOS call and left immediately, it probably
would have taken 30 minutes to get through the ice, and another 30 to 60 minutes to reach
the Titanic.
It took 2 hours and 40 minutes for the Titanic to actually sink, so the crew of the Californian
would have had more than an hour to collect passengers. They might have even been able
to save everyone.
But that's not what happened. Making things more tragic, the Californian's crew did see
the Titanic's distress rockets, but the captain dismissed them as non-emergency signals meant
for some other boat. By the time the Californian turned the radio on the next morning, there
was nothing left of the Titanic but bodies floating in the sea.
The Titanic wasn't floating blindly through the North Atlantic when it hit that giant
iceberg, so why didn't the ship just go around? One theory says the sea was too calm and the
two lookouts in the crow's nest weren't able to see waves breaking at the iceberg's base.
According to another theory, the crow's nest didn't have any binoculars. Except that one
isn't a theory; it's a really unfortunate fact.
Let's get this straight, the Titanic had rowing machines, an electric horse, a squash court,
and a heated swimming pool, but it didn't have a pair of binoculars onboard?
Well, it did, but at the time the ship struck the iceberg, they were unhelpfully locked
away in a cabinet — and no one could find the key. The key was back in England, in the
pocket of a crew member who had disembarked the ship.
"Whoopsie-daisy."
That crew member was David Blair, who served as the Titanic's second officer between the
ports of Belfast and Southampton. But before the ship's maiden voyage to New York, the
White Star Line decided to replace him at the last minute. In his rush to disembark,
he forgot to give the key to his replacement — a mistake that potentially doomed more
than 1,500 people.
Before the Titanic left, Blair sent a postcard to his sister-in-law, on which he wrote in
part,
"This is a magnificent ship, [and] I feel very disappointed I am not to make her first
voyage."
Imagine how disappointed his crewmates felt when they couldn't find that key.
Every life lost on the Titanic was a tragedy, from third-class Jack to first-class Rose,
except Rose didn't actually die and oh yeah, they're fictional. But even though all the
real-life stories are devastating, some are harder to read than others. One especially
awful story is about Ramon Artagaveytia, who survived the sinking of a ship called the
America, which sank off the coast of Uruguay in 1871. According to his own letters, Ramon
may have suffered from PTSD after his first shipwreck experience, which is pretty understandable.
But if you've already lived through one shipwreck, the worst has gotta be behind you. It couldn't
happen again… right?
"It happened again."
After years of anxiety, Ramon wrote to a cousin about his faith in the Titanic, with words
that now read as tragically ironic:
"At last I will be able to travel and above all, I will be able to sleep calm."
Ramon died in the disaster, and his body was recovered about a week after the sinking.
Once the disaster started to take hold, nobody could have really saved everyone on the Titanic.
But there were plenty of acts of heroism on that fateful night.
One under-publicized act of heroism is the sacrifice of the ship's engineers. There were
35 of them onboard the Titanic, but despite that large crew number, we have no firsthand
accounts of what they were doing during the ship's final moments. That's because they
all died.
"Go to maximum warp, push it."
"I'm giving it all she's got, Captain!"
Here's what we do know. While the ship was going down, the engineering team stayed at
their posts and kept the lights on. That's a bigger deal than it might sound like it
is — remember, this was in the middle of the North Atlantic, on a night without a full
moon. Beyond the ship's own lighting, there was just darkness and the sea. The electric
lights made it possible for the crew to load the lifeboats and keep passengers from panicking.
Power also made it possible for the radio operators to continue transmitting distress
signals. Even though their efforts didn't save the ship, their sacrifice doubtlessly
helped save many lives.
It's hard to believe that one meager iceberg could take down the biggest thing on the ocean
with just a glancing blow, and until the wreckage of the ship was discovered in 1985, people
could only speculate about the exact nature of the Titanic's vulnerability.
For a while, researchers wondered if the Titanic might have been built out of low-quality steel,
but that theory was disproven when large pieces of the ship were recovered and tested. Sonar
mapping of the side that struck the iceberg revealed only six thin tears in the hull,
which would have left roughly 12 square feet open to the sea. That by itself wouldn't have
been enough to sink a ship like the Titanic, which had 16 watertight compartments. So what
happened?
In 1998, an analysis was conducted on the rivets of the ship's wreckage, which found
that the wrought iron contained three times as much slag as modern standards allow for.
That's very interesting. But what is "slag?"
"Tell me, you slag!"
In case you're not a blacksmith, shipbuilder, or rivet-maker, "slag" is the glass-like residue
left behind by metal ore after the smelting process. According to the theory, all that
extra slag used in the rivets made them brittle in cold temperatures, so the iceberg just
sheared off the heads as it scraped along the side of the ship. When that happened,
the rivets came loose, the hull plates separated, and water came rushing in.
So basically, the Titanic's shipbuilders seem to have cut some crucial corners, leading
to dire consequences. This can happen when you rush things. When it comes to most projects,
you can do something fast, or you can do it right. The builders behind the Titanic apparently
chose the fast option — and it shows.
Four days after the disaster, the Boston Globe declared, "All drowned but 868." But there
are two inaccurate things about that headline. The first problem is the number of survivors,
which was actually closer to about 700. The second was the manner of death — while the
sinking of the Titanic claimed many victims, not everyone who lost their lives in the disaster
died by drowning.
The Titanic didn't really have that many drowning victims — at least, not as many as you would
think. Those who remained in the ship probably drowned as the Titanic sank as the ship's
breathable air was displaced, but those who jumped into the water were mostly wearing
life preservers, making them much less likely to drown. There's also the fact that the survivors
who were safely in the lifeboats later reported hearing the awful din kicked up by those in
the water, suggesting that most of the people floating around the boats weren't drowning.
Drowning is a thing that happens silently — people who are in the middle of it typically
can't call out for help.
What really worked to kill so many people was freezing. The seawater in the North Atlantic
was only 28 degrees Fahrenheit on the night of the Titanic's sinking, which is 4 degrees
below the freezing temperature of fresh water. That's more than cold enough to damage to
the human body.
It is possible that as people lost consciousness from the cold temperature, they inhaled water,
which hastened their deaths. But that's not drowning as we understand it — it's drowning
as a side effect of being incapacitated by hypothermia. If the ship crashed in the Caribbean
in some 80 degree water, lots more people may have made it back to shore alive. But
if that was the case, it probably wouldn't have hit an iceberg, either.
If anything, it would've maybe hit a Carnival cruise ship. Or, the Bermuda Triangle. Or
maybe some of these guys. Look, the seven seas can be a really crazy place.
Imagine that it's the spring of 1812, and you're still reeling from the death of a loved
one who went down with the Titanic. Maybe they were one of the people who rather grandly
played in the ship's band, providing musical comfort to doomed passengers as the ship slowly
sank. You miss your father, your brother, your son — and then you get billed for his
uniform.
"What the f---?"
This is something that actually happened. While it may not be as disturbing as some
of the other things we know about the Titanic, it's a pretty ugly footnote.
One example of this happening can be found in the story of musician John Hume, who was
booked on the Titanic through a firm called C.W. & F.N. Black. Two weeks after the sinking,
Hume's father received a bill for his son's uniform, which included items like his lapel
pin and White Star buttons. The bill amounted to 14 shillings and 7 pence — and that's
before you count the insult of even getting a bill at all.
Okay, so if you spilled mustard on your uniform because you were eating a messy burger in
your off-time, maybe you had that bill coming. But the Titanic's dead musicians weren't responsible
for the destruction of their uniforms, and the dead musicians' parents definitely weren't
responsible.
"...in a way, that's deeply capitalist."
Anyway, Hume's dad refused to pay, and sent the letter to the Amalgamated Musician's Union,
who published the outrageous demand in their newsletter. So now you know that even if you're
a victim of a Titanic-scale disaster, some companies will still try to get money from
you, literally over your dead body.
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