The sinking of the Titanic is, to this day, one of the worst catastrophes to come out
of a long chain of unfortunate and untimely events.
And that chain that would decide the cruel fate of the great Unsinkable Ship started
with… a tiny key.
It seemed like such an insignificant little thing.
So trivial that the man who’d had it with him completely forgot to hand it over to the
person who’d desperately need it at a critical moment.
That man was 37-year-old David Blair, and he was holding the key to the locked cabinet
where all the binoculars for the lookouts were stored.
And there’s nothing unusual about the keys being with this man because Blair was to be
the Titanic’s Second Officer.
He’d worked on the ship during all its test runs, and up until she was ready for departure,
he was supposed to be onboard for the voyage.
But as fate would have it, just before the biggest ship of its time was ready to depart
Southampton and head across the Atlantic to New York City, there was a last-minute change
of plans…
White Star Line, the shipping company that owned the Titanic, decided to replace David
Blair with Henry Wilde, the Chief Officer of the Titanic’s sister ship, RMS Olympic.
They saw him as a more experienced mariner with better skills of running such large ships.
Blair wrote in a postcard to relatives that he was pretty upset about being replaced.
In a hurry by the unexpected change or perhaps because of this distress, Blair forgot to
hand the key to the binocular cabinet over to Officer Wilde!
It might not seem like such a big deal, but you must remember that sonar technology wasn’t
a thing at the beginning of the 20th century.
That’s why binoculars were of vital importance because they were the only way to detect potential
dangers early while navigating.
Soon after the Titanic left the port, the crew realized they wouldn’t be able to open
the cabinet.
But it’s not that they were panicked or anything.
The lookouts had sharp eyesight, and the ship had been built and advertised to be “unsinkable”
after all!
They were confident that they could keep watch without the binoculars, perhaps a little too
confident…
Fred Fleet was the lookout on duty that tragic night the ship sailed its first and final
voyage.
Fleet would end up surviving the catastrophe and later told the investigators that if he’d
had binoculars, he would’ve noticed the iceberg earlier and the crew would’ve had
more time to steer the ship out of the way.
Now, most people would be thinking, “How on earth do you not see a giant iceberg big
enough to take down the Titanic waaay before the ship is even close to it?
Witnesses say this thing was sticking out of the water anywhere from 50 to 100 feet
in the air, and it was around 200 to 400 feet long.
That’s almost too big to be a sudden surprise, don’t you think?
Well, here’s where you get more links in that chain of unfortunate events that would
defeat the unsinkable.
Yes, the huge iceberg could’ve been noticed earlier even without binoculars, but perhaps
in different conditions.
You see, it was the middle of the night, and they were in the middle of calm ocean waters
surrounded by nothing but silence and stark blackness.
No street or city lights, and, more importantly, no moon…
When you’re sailing at night on calm waters under a moonless sky, believe it or not, it
results in the worst conditions for nautical visibility.
There were no waves crashing up against the iceberg to give an audible warning, and there
was no moonlight reflecting off the giant hunk of floating ice to make it sort of glow.
Essentially, this thing really did pop up out of nowhere, at least in the lookout’s
field of vision.
Not to mention, it’s believed that the iceberg had turned upside-down shortly before the
collision.
It had probably lost more weight on one side because of melting, which would cause it to
flip over.
This, in turn, exposed its lower part, which was full of water and much darker than the
upper one.
Once Fred Fleet finally saw it at 11:39pm on April 14, 1912 and famously reported “Iceberg!
Right ahead!” to the command bridge, it was already too late.
They only had about 30 seconds to steer the ship out of the way, and that wasn’t enough
for a vessel this size going almost top-speed.
And that’s where we run into another problem: the decision to try and steer around it.
First Officer William Murdock made the call, but it might’ve been a better idea to just
ram the iceberg head-on.
Surprisingly, the consequences could’ve been less dramatic.
The bow of the ship would’ve been crushed, and, yes, part of the crew and passengers
from the front cabins wouldn’t have survived.
But only 2 watertight compartments would’ve been flooded.
With that kind of damage, the Titanic could’ve stayed afloat long enough for other ships
to make it and save the rest of the passengers and crew.
But, they had such little time to weigh the options.
At 11:40pm, the 46,000-ton ship smashed into the iceberg in the cold waters of the North
Atlantic.
Her right side scraped 300 feet along the ice, the hull buckled, the seams broke, and
the water rushed into the damaged compartments.
Thomas Andrews, the Chief Naval Architect who’d designed the ship and was onboard
as well, confirmed that the Titanic couldn’t be saved.
The passengers had to be evacuated immediately.
Well, it was only downhill from there.
Another cruel twist of fate is that there was a desperate shortage of lifeboats, with
2,224 people on board and only enough boats to save 1,178 lives.
The ship was constructed as an unsinkable one, so nobody seriously believed that the
boats were needed at all.
On April 15, at 2:20am, the Titanic sank to the bottom of the ocean.
Only 706 people survived…
So what ever happened to David Blair and that cursed key?
Well, he realized his mistake too late.
But he continued to work as a mariner and even received a Bravery Medal from the Royal
Humane Society in 1913 for saving a crewmember of the Majestic.
Blair, who was First Officer on that ship, jumped into the water when the man fell over
the side.
Although the lifeboat sent to retrieve him reached the man first, Blair was commended
for his selfless act.
As for the notorious key, for a long time he kept it as a reminder of the tragedy he’d
miraculously avoided.
Then he passed it on to his daughter Nancy.
In 1980 she gave it to the International Sailors Society, but it’d later be sold at an auction
held by Henry Aldridge & Son.
The auctioneer said that it was one of the most valued artifacts from the ship.
And who’d argue with that?
This key could’ve completely changed history and saved the Titanic had it been onboard.
It was sold in 2007 for £78,000, which would be about $135,000 by today’s rate.
That makes this key the 7th most expensive artifact from the Titanic.
On the 100th anniversary of the sinking, they sold a letter written by 33-year-old Wallace
Henry Hartley, a violinist and the bandleader on the Titanic.
He wrote to his relatives that the ship was great, and he liked the guys from the band.
He was going to come home on Sunday – the next day after the Titanic was to arrive in
New York.
He sent the letter from Queenstown, Ireland – the last stop before the doomed ship sailed
into open ocean.
The letter was sold for £90,000 (equivalent to $125,000 today).
But the most expensive, and no doubt the most exclusive finding, is Hartley’s violin.
He and his band famously kept playing on deck while the ship was sinking to calm down the
passengers and help them overcome panic.
The brave musicians played up to the very end, and, tragically, none of them survived.
Later, newspapers wrote that the musicians of the Titanic were among the noblest people
in maritime history.
Hartley’s violin was found almost immediately after the sinking, and the instrument was
given to his fiancée.
She’d given it to him as a present before he departed.
After the tragedy, she passed it on to the British Salvation Army.
But for almost 100 years, the violin was thought to be lost until it reemerged in 2006 when
an amateur musician found it in his parents’ attic.
After that, experts spent 7 years examining it and finally announced that the instrument
was authentic.
It was sold for a jaw-dropping price of £900,000 ($1.3 million today).
Most of the people who buy these sorts of artifacts are Titanic memorabilia experts
and collectors with the goal of keeping such historical items safely preserved so that
they – and what they remind us of – are never forgotten!
So now it’s your turn: Do you think that key could’ve changed history, or were there
too many untimely coincidences that sealed the Titanic’s fate?
Let me know your thoughts down in the comments.
If you learned something new today, then give this video a like and share it with a friend.
But don’t go looking for any more missing keys just yet!
We have over 2,000 cool videos for you to check out.
All you have to do is pick the left or right video, click on it, and enjoy!
Stay on the Bright Side of life!