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
Everyone who is intrigued or moved by the story of the Titanic has his or her 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.
Examining Why We Still 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.
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 collided 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 shipbuilding 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 compelling 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 shipwrecks were much worse than the Titanic in terms of loss of life. Only the Titanic story has endured an entire century.
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 preoccupied 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 widespread attention.
That changed with the loss of the Titanic. Newspapers trumpeted the collision, 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.
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 passenger 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 broadcasts 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 “practically 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 “unsinkable” 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 arrogance 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!”
Sea superstitions
Maybe the notion that the builders of the Titanic “tempted fate” is just part of the long tradition of sea superstitions. Here are some my favorite sea superstitions:
Bananas and women onboard are bad luck unless you put a figure of a naked lady at the bow. (There were hundreds of women — and bananas — aboard the Titanic.)
Setting sail on a Friday is bad luck and will doom the voyage. (The Titanic avoided this curse by sailing on a Wednesday.)
Black suitcases and people with red hair are bad luck for seamen. (There were certainly both red-haired people and black satchels aboard the Titanic.)
Stepping onto a boat with your left foot is bad luck. (How many passengers on the Titanic stepped aboard with their left foot and doomed the ship?)
Priests onboard a ship are bad luck. (Fathers Thomas Byles and Joseph Peruschitz were on the Titanic and said Mass every day. Uh oh!)
Cutting hair or fingernails at sea is very bad and will bring bad luck. (The Titanic had a barbershop and beauty salon where, of course, hair was cut and nails were clipped.)
But this idea that the White Star Line and the Titanic builders tempted fate when they built their ship persists. It’s one of the reasons that the Titanic story is so compelling. People who search for a moral in the tragic events sometimes find one in the “tempting fate” angle. For these people, the Titanic was a modern-day Tower of Babel. It was built so big that it challenged the authority of God. It was punished accordingly with an iceberg.
Considering Social Arrogance and Class Structure
As I detail in Chapter 3, the era of the Titanic saw a very strict caste structure that was accepted willingly by all involved, from the poorest emigrating steerage passenger to the wealthiest of the wealthy in the first-class staterooms. In the pre–income tax time of the Titanic, the wealthy were rich beyond imagination. The government made money on tariffs, property taxes, and other forms of taxation, but private income was not taxed until 1913, a year after the Titanic sank.
One intriguing side story of the Titanic is the picture it paints of the differences among the social classes in 1912. The wealthy on the Titanic were rolling in it (dough, that is). They had an attitude of entitled superiority that everyone accepted, including newspaper reporters. After the Titanic sank, newspapers were full of stories about the stoic heroism of the upper classes. Newspaper reporters often painted a picture of the wealthy sacrificing themselves to save others, whether or not everyone would agree with such a depiction. The wealthy were ostensibly not only materially rich, but also morally and ethically rich — this is what would today be called a meme (an idea passed from one to another via media and/or the Internet). Oftentimes, memes are misleading, inaccurate, or exaggerated.
However, it is often too easy to assign motive and define attitude in hindsight. We are quick to define the über-wealthy of the Titanic era as “arrogant,” yet were they? I think a more accurate description of the cultural sensibility of the rich was that they carried a sense of entitlement with them, and such entitlement was accepted by people of all strata of society.
An interesting aspect of the “rich dying on the Titanic” story is just how many of the wealthy died, in one place, at the same time. Think of it like this: How extraordinary would it be if the ten richest people in America were all on the same plane and that specific plane crashed with few survivors? That is how amazing it was to have so many of the wealthy on the Titanic and to lose so many of them in one accident.
Coming to America: The Immigrant Story
Sometimes in the haste to dwell on the luxury and opulence of the Titanic, the third-class passengers in steerage get lost or forgotten. These passengers, who died in far greater numbers than the first- and second-class passengers on the upper decks, were part of the great migration from Europe to America that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century. They pegged their hopes and dreams on getting to the United States, the Promised Land.
The immigrants wanted to participate in the American dream, a term coined by writer and historian James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book The Epic of America. He wrote:
It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
The idea of the American dream was alive and well among the hopeful emigrating steerage passengers. Leaving their homelands with essentially everything they owned and the clothes on their back was the biggest decision of their lives. Many scrimped, saved, and borrowed to buy their third-class tickets on the Titanic. (As I note in Chapter 4, a third-class ticket cost $15–$40, the equivalent of $350–$900 today.)
Immigrants in third class included about 113 Swedes, 120 Irish, 59 Finns, 27 Russians, 81 Syrians, and 8 Chinese. These immigrants to the United States carried all their worldly possessions with them — and managed to cram these possessions into their narrow third-class berths.
If the Titanic had arrived on schedule in New York on April 17, 1912, her immigrant third-class passengers, like immigrants before them, would have marveled at the sight of the Statue of Liberty. They would have been taken to New York Harbor’s immigrant inspection station on Ellis Island. If they were fortunate, they would have been admitted to the United States and become Americans.
The Titanic story is not just the story of the ship of dreams sinking to the bottom of the North Atlantic. It is also part of an older and ongoing story: the epic journey of people coming to the United States to live the American dream.
Discovering the Titanic Wreck in 1985
“Wreckage.” That was the word first spoken when Dr. Robert Ballard and his team of researchers, along with IFREMER (the French Research Institute for Exploration of the Sea), found the wreck of the Titanic on September 1, 1985. One of the Titanic’s boilers, which had not been seen by human eyes for more than seven decades, was suddenly illuminated and visible on a TV screen. The Titanic could hide no more. (Chapter 15 describes the discovery in detail.)
Between 1985 and the present, more people have viewed the Titanic on TV at the bottom of the ocean than viewed her during her entire three-year existence, including the building stage and her maiden voyage.
A lot has happened with the wreck since its discovery in 1985. The question of who owns the wreck and the artifacts in the Titanic debris field has been a bone of contention, as well as a subject for myriad court cases and court rulings.
Ultimately, ownership of the wreck and the artifacts was awarded to the company RMS Titanic, Inc., the latest incarnation of a company originally formed by the late George Tulloch. This company is the salvor-in-possession, the company that the courts recognize as the owner. To remain the salvor-in possession, or salvor for short, RMS Titanic, Inc., must remain “in possession” of the wreck. In other words, it must visit the wreck on a regular basis to salvage artifacts or take photographs and video.
As of this writing, RMS Titanic, Inc.’s most recent expedition to the Titanic did not salvage any artifacts, but it did come back with something equally spectacular as a piece of the Titanic or a passenger’s wallet. The expedition, cosponsored by RMS Titanic, Inc., and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, took high-definition photos, video, and 3D video. The plan is to release the footage in a documentary. The imagery is stunning and unlike anything the world has seen before. Vivid, clear, brilliantly lighted photos and film footage show the Titanic in all its salvaged glory. For Titanic buffs, this new imagery is a thrill beyond measure. Long after her demise, the Titanic endures as an object of study and undersea fascination.
Watching Titanic, the Movie
Interest in the Titanic got a shot in the arm in 1997 when James Cameron released his Titanic, the movie. The movie was the talk of the town well before its release, primarily because of the rumored scope of, and problems with, the film. The movie became a legend before there was a movie to call a legend.
The rumors were legion: Cameron was going to build the Titanic. It was going to be the most expensive movie ever made. He was going to reproduce the sinking in ways no one had ever seen before. He was going to yell and scream and be the most difficult director anyone had ever worked with. And the best part about all this rattle and hum is that for the most part, it was true.
Aside from the prerelease talk, there was also ceaseless speculation as to whether anyone would want to go to the movie. After all, the sinking of the Titanic can be a depressing subject, and everybody knows exactly how the story ends. Would box-office and DVD sales be adequate for the movie to not only earn out, but also turn a profit?
The smart money, for the most part, was on Cameron. He was, after all, Mr. Terminator, Mr. Aliens, Mr. True Lies, and Mr. Abyss. He knew how to make blockbusters, and he knew how to make money. All his previous efforts had been great successes, so the thinking was that if anyone could build and sink the Titanic and make money while doing it, it was James Cameron.
But Titanic was different on two fronts: cost and production. Rebuild and sink the Titanic, no matter what it costs? Seriously? The answer was yes, and that was essentially James Cameron’s mission statement. One of the few compromises he made was settling for building the ship at 90 percent of the original. (And knowing Cameron’s penchant for accuracy, even that compromise probably annoyed the heck out of him.)
One of the elements that contributed to Titanic’s blockbuster success was repeat viewings. The typical repeat viewer rate for all successful movies is 5 percent. In other words, for every 100 people who see a hit movie, 5 will go back and see it again (and, of course, pay again). The repeat viewer rate for Titanic was an unprecedented 20 percent. Many believe the high repeat viewer rate was due to the romance angle of the screenplay and, for teenage girls, the presence of heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio. Some experts claim that 30 to 40 percent of the movie’s overall gross sales came from teenage girls. Some girls reported going back to see the movie a dozen or more times. Sony Classical did a study and determined that girls under the age of 14 were the dominant buyers of the film’s soundtrack. (That “My Heart Will Go On” sure did the trick, didn’t it?)
A Garry Trudeau Doonesbury cartoon from 1998 speaks to this phenomenon. A teenage girl comes home crying from what she said was her 500th screening of Titanic. She says to her friend, “Kim, can I ask you a personal question? Have you ever lost a lover to hypothermia?”
Ken Marschall, one of the world’s most knowledgeable authorities on the Titanic and a painter of meticulously accurate artworks of the ship and the wreck, said he was spellbound as he walked the essentially identical re-creations of the Titanic’s staterooms, decks, and other locations on the ship. Cameron was adamant that the ship seen in his movie look exactly like the real Titanic. The carpeting was made by the company that made the carpeting for the Titanic. So were the lifeboat davits. All the furniture, dishware, cutlery, wall hangings, plumbing fixtures, and other elements of the ship were all reproduced precisely and with the White Star Line logo on them. Cameron’s goal was to take viewers back in time and put them on the Titanic.
This philosophy and goal also applied to the sinking scene. Cameron reportedly was never satisfied with the sinking scenes in other Titanic movies (which I discuss in Chapter 17). Most sinking scenes utilize miniatures, and no matter how they’re shot, the results tend to look a bit fake. In large part, the problem occurs because miniaturized ships on real-size water don’t work visually, and there is no way to miniaturize water. Cameron solved that problem by, for the most part, not using real water for the “ship at sea” scenes. Much of the water in Titanic was digital, which allowed him to scale it down to whatever size looked the most realistic.
Movie budgets were never the same after Titanic. Producers and directors wanting more money for their movies could point to Titanic and ask, “See what can happen?”
Special effects have never been the same either. Books and entire issues of magazines have been devoted to analyzing and deconstructing the special effects in the movie.