THE TITANIC ENIGMA

The Titanic steaming down Southampton Water on the afternoon of Wednesday, April 10th 1912. Taken by the renowned Frank Beken of Cowes, this is probably the most famous of all the photos taken of the ship

The image alone is powerful enough to generate appalled fascination, even after more than a century. The huge ocean liner, ablaze with light from bow to stern, racing across the calm, starlit ocean towards her chilling rendezvous near midnight. Her quartet of black and buff smokestacks standing like the ramparts of some castle, blotting out the very stars themselves in places. The strains of The Blue Danube floating out across the ocean, punctuated by the random popping of champagne corks and sudden, swelling bursts of laughter from on board.

These last, living images of RMS Titanic are only part of the reason that her story refuses to sink. She sails on in our minds’ eye to this day; a sort of 21st century Flying Dutchman, with interiors by Cesar Ritz. Fuelled by a mixture of horror, fascination and sheer, fatal glamour, she charges heedlessly onward, sailing in search of an absolution that she can never, ever be gifted. Even now, humanity is still too deeply in her thrall to ever allow her to be truly at peace.

Her story is simply too fantastic and incredulous to take fully on board. The combined talents of Stephen King, Jules Verne, Gene Roddenberry and Hans Christian Andersen could never have concocted a fable so stark and unbelievable as the actual truth of what happened aboard the Titanic on that freezing April night in mid-Atlantic. It remains without equal in it’s scale; a ghastly black comedy played out to an audience of cold, pitiless stars.

It almost seems as if there are two ships called Titanic. There is the  real ship, the one that ripped her hull open on a capsized iceberg, and then succumbed to a fatal ingress of water, and then there is the Titanic of myth and legend; the ‘Floating Ritz’ that sails on to this day. Sometimes it is hard to know just where one ends, and the other truly begins.

Some of the myths are actually pretty easy to debunk. Far from being some unique, luxurious freak ship, Titanic was actually the second of a trio that were intended to be world beaters. Her almost identical sister ship- the Olympic- had already been in service for a full ten months. And, just thirteen months after her loss, Germany’s Hamburg America Line introduced the even larger Imperator. Had she survived her maiden voyage, Titanic would thus have been the world’s largest ship for little over a year.

No, it was not so much the ship herself alone that created the myth, though she was certainly spectacular enough. In first class at least, the Titanic was staffed- and ran- like the Ritz. The opulence was as full blown as could be; a true Hollywood movie set on the ocean, created years before the ‘talkies’ were even invented.

That luxurious glut, when coupled to her platinum chip, first class passenger list, accounts for a huge part of her legendary lore. Many of those first class passengers were household names the world over. Bankers and railroad owners. Famous socialites, writers and politicians. World renowned sports stars and sirens of the silent screen. And many of them would go to the bottom with the ship; unwitting bit part players in the most glittering and tragic curtain call in maritime history.

Everything about the Titanic was extreme, from her monumental dimensions right down to her mind blowing, spectacular demise. She became a stage upon which heroes were created, and where villains exited stage left to a conga line chorus of boos, hissing and catcalls. Even now, the lines between the two are as finely drawn as those original architect’s blueprints of the ship herself.

Of course, we have the ship’s band, sawing gamely away at dance music as their own, slim chances of survival receded further with each fading note. There’s Phillips and Bride in the wireless room, sending their increasingly desperate distress calls spluttering vainly through the ether. And the engineers, toiling manfully far below on the ominously sloping decks, trying to keep the lights and wireless operating for as long as humanly possible. There are so many more, and too many of them that will remain forever unsung, their selfless deeds cloaked in the darkness of the ship that carried them to their deaths.

And there are the villains, too. Step forward, J. Bruce Ismay, the fastidious control freak who was chairman of the White Star Line. He left the Titanic in one of the very last lifeboats while his officers, together with hundreds of other men, stood back, grim faced and ashen as they fought to keep their self control in the face of the obvious, encroaching catastrophe that would soon overwhelm them.

He’s an easy target, is Bruce Ismay; even more so, when you consider that it was he who vetoed the idea of scores of extra lifeboats for the Titanic in the first place. Whether those same, imaginary boats could even have been safely loaded, and then lowered into the water given the short amount of time the iceberg gifted to the Titanic, is strangely academical.

I mean, compare Ismay’s cartoon villain chicanery to the gallant Captain Edward Smith, who of course went down with his ship. The fact that Captain Smith was no more effective in evacuating Titanic than the hapless Francesco Schettino would be in the same position aboard the Costa Concordia almost exactly a century later- that gets overlooked. Because, of course, that’s the kind of thing that we expect from a hero. We expect them to die manfully, with a dash of tight lipped, stoic serenity where possible. We don’t want inconvenient facts getting in the way of that kind of posthumous, elevated effigy worship. If there are villains, then there must be heroes, too. It’s the same in any Greek tragedy.

And that, in a nutshell, is it. We all want answers to questions that can never be definitively resolved, because those with the ability to provide resolution mostly died with the ship, while those survivors with the ability to at least partly do so- certainly Bruce Ismay and, quite likely, Second Office Lightoller- stayed tight lipped until their eventual deaths.

In the case of Ismay, this reluctance to elaborate is at least understandable, but what was Lightoller’s play in all this? Again, in the absence of definitive information, we can but speculate.

Charles Lightoller was the senior surviving officer of the Titanic. He had been at the heart of everything that night. As well as being in charge of loading and lowering the port side lifeboats, he had also been on watch on the bridge just a few hours earlier, before handing the watch over to First Officer Bill Murdoch.

Lightoller- as well as Murdoch-toiled manfully to get those boats away that night. But Lightoller interpreted Captain Smith’s order of ‘women and children first’ as ‘women and children only’ whereas Murdoch, in charge of the starboard side boats, allowed men into the boats when no more women and children were in sight.

Thus, what happened on one side of the ship did not transpire on the other when the botched evacuation finally swung into full, frantic gear. Of the 705 survivors of the Titanic, a full seventy-five per cent left in boats lowered under Murdoch’s auspices.

Lightoller- as brave a man as ever there was on the ship that night- intended to stay with the White Star Line. He had hopes of eventually becoming a ship’s captain himself and, just prior to the disaster, he almost certainly would have done in the normal scheme of things. But, after the Titanic, nothing would ever be normal again.

At the subsequent inquiries into the disaster held in both Washington and London, Charles Lightoller played a tight batting game; adroitly side stepping questions when needed, and taking full advantage of the questioning attorneys’ relative ignorance of maritime affairs. With his professional future well and truly in the cross hairs, Lightoller fought manfully to absolve the White Star Line of any responsibility for the loss of the Titanic. And the heroic, totally credible Second Officer made for the kind of witness that no-one truly wanted to pressure, let alone contradict. In terms of defending his employers, Charles Lightoller played an absolute blinder.

Lightoller was also resolute in defending the posthumous memory of Captain Smith, whom he had almost idolized as a skipper. But his dedication to both causes served him ill.

For the White Star Line wanted to whitewash the Titanic from memory, and that meant a stealthy, utterly ruthless removal of anyone even remotely connected with her. Bruce Ismay was forced to resign as chairman within eighteen months and Lightoller, fine sailor that he was, never, ever got a command of his own. Indeed, none of her four senior, surviving officers ever did.

But that loss of lives undoubtedly haunted Lightoller. In May of 1940, when the British Army found itself with its back to the sea in the port of Dunkirk, Charles Lightoller was one of hundreds of retired seaman who answered his country’s call in its ‘darkest hour’.

He took is own launch, Sundowner, over the channel to the beach at Dunkirk. Despite frequent bombing and terrifying machine gun attacks, Lightoller and his makeshift crew worked like Trojans to rescue as many of the sodden, demoralised survivors of the BEF as possible. That his actions saved many lives is beyond doubt, as is the fact that he put himself in great peril by so doing.

Of course, Charles Lightoller would have simply dismissed such heroics as ‘doing his duty’ like hundreds of his fellow sailors did.

But you have to at least concede that his actions were probably influenced by a desire to try and make up for those lost in the botched evacuation of the Titanic, some twenty-eight years earlier. Survivor’s guilt is a proven syndrome of maritime catastrophes, and no-one was more acutely aware of all those empty places in the port side Titanic lifeboats than Charles Lightoller.

So. Titanic. Everyone’s a genius and, of course, hindsight is the greatest gift to humanity since radar. We’re all so, so certain that we know just what happened; just as certain as those officers on the bridge of the Titanic themselves were on that cold April night in mid Atlantic, all those years ago.

In the absence of certainty then, we have an enigma. An elegant, deathless enigma that continues to astound, appal and amaze all those who come aboard for the voyage.

It’s an endless voyage across an otherwise empty, mostly ethereal ocean of memories and mystery, aboard a ship of the dead that never truly learned how to sail, or even how to really die, for that matter.

 

THE CHI-TANIC; A WORK IN PROGRESS

The original area showing the lifts opposite the Grand Staircase on the Titanic’s sister ship, Olympic, and the same area as it is currently taking shape on the replica Titanic in China

Work on Romandseas’s spine tingling, almost totally land locked, full size replica of the ill fated Titanic is now expected to be completed by early 2019.

Work is proceeding at a stately rate of knots as the hull continues to grow at Sichuan, site of the vast Chinese theme park in which the recreated ocean liner will form a dazzling centrepiece once completed.

The replica of the ill fated White Star liner will feature some three hundred hotel rooms, based on the original first class cabins that were such a striking selling point of the original ship.

But, while much of the luxe and the high style of the ‘Floating Ritz’ will  feature heavily in the recreation, it’s also heartening to know that some of the vessel’s original, gargantuan sinews will feature, plus several of the more intimate areas known to students of the disaster. In addition, some of the much less ostentatious second and third class areas of the ship will be recreated in painstaking detail.

Among these will be the bridge, complete with it’s wheelhouse and chart room. An officer’s cabin and a recreated Marconi wireless room will draw sometimes pitiless scrutiny from die hard purists.

In terms of second and third class, there will be recreations of cabins from both classes.

Mechanics may well be awed by the recreation of the giant reciprocating engines, as well as the forward, Number One boiler room of the Titanic.

The liner’s elaborate, highly ornate Turkish Baths down on G Deck will be featured in the recreation, as well as the first class gymnasium up on the boat deck. Here, John Jacob Astor famously whiled away time with his wife as the original ship sank, cutting open a life jacket with his pen knife to show her the contents.

For lovers of all that doomed, gilded luxury, recreations of the lavish, first class dining room, plus one of the sumptuous, B Deck parlour suites, as well as the monolithic Grand Staircase with its trio of lifts, will be more than enough to appeal to the inner Jack and Rose of almost anybody out there.

COMING SOON- THE CHI-TANIC

Under way- construction on the ‘new’ Titanic replica is well advanced

Like some fantastic, improbable sea monster rising from the depths of a deathless legend, a familiar shape is fast assuming solid form in a Chinese shipyard. A name at once suffused with horror, fascination and sheer, fatal glamour.

Titanic.

Now firmly under way in a part of China’s Sichuan province, construction of the static, full scale replica of the ill fated juggernaut is expected to be completed by 2019. And, unlike the bombast fuelled hype that surrounded Australian business man Clive Palmer’s moribund attempt at recreating the ship, this Titanic is very much in the realms of the here, the now, and the oh-so-real.

While all Palmer managed to achieve was laying down dinner plates in restaurants at a series of very fancy press launches, the actual keel plates of the ‘Floating Ritz’ are rising again, day by day, in China. The latest illustrations show construction cracking on at a rate of knots perhaps unseen since the fateful night of April 14th, 1912, as the original ship surged towards her nemesis.

While the replica Titanic will be the centre attraction of a massive, man made theme park, the owners have been very astute in securing the services of a world renowned team of Titanic experts to give the project both credibility, depth and expertise; something that Clive Palmer singularly failed to do.

The current project cost has been estimated at around £105 million, and will include the recreation of three hundred first class cabins, to be sold as hotel rooms. The original lavish, opulent interiors will reappear, in the exact scale and stance as those of 1912. There is talk that at least one boiler room will be recreated down in the bowels of the hull, and also possibly the engine room.

There will inevitably be those who cry indignation at any attempt to recreate the central component of such a notorious event as the Titanic disaster. But this ship will not be making any attempt to sail. And yet, paradoxically, this land locked colossus will, indeed, take people on a voyage of discovery back into the past.

For, in terms of interest and fascination, the genie has long been out of the bottle in connection with the Titanic and her story. You only have to look at the phenomenal success of the Titanic quarter in her former builder’s yard at Belfast, to realise just what awe, fascination and sheer sense of wonder are carried by those seven, simple letters. Those who decry the Chinese project are entitled to their point of view, but they are very much swimming against the tide of human curiosity.

In truth, the fateful voyage of Titanic has never actually ended. She has always continued to sail in the minds of men, racing heedlessly across the calm, starlit Atlantic towards her chilling rendezvous near midnight. It was- and still is- a story so staggering and implausible that not even the combined talents of Gene Rodenberry, Steven King and Jules Verne could have conjured up anything so fantastic as the real life events of April 14th-15th, 1912.

It seems to me that this actual, physical reincarnation of the Titanic could act as a kind of emotional lightning rod for those who continue to be fascinated by the ship, one that complements the stellar achievements still being rolled out at Titanic Belfast. And yes, I would have preferred to see the replica displayed in state at the place of her birth, but that’s not how the dice has rolled.

So I expect this now rapidly looming replica to arouse awe, appalled horror, and outright admiration in different people, according to their temperaments. But the point is that the original Titanic herself aroused exactly the same sentiments in many, and some of those even long before her eventual, aborted maiden voyage.

I continue to watch this project with fascination, and I know that I am far from alone.

TITANIC ‘SANK BY MUTANT, HAIRY BREAD ROLL’ THEORY SURFACES

The Titanic; heading for a doomed appointment with a mutant, hairy bread roll?

In the wake of yet another conga line of conspiracy theories, word reaches me that the ill fated White Star liner Titanic may actually have been sunk by a mutant, hairy bread roll that had been adrift in the Atlantic since 1588. This monster- nicknamed the ‘Beast of Bizerte’- can trace it’s origins back to the time of the Second Crusade.

It was a Gtangan priest who first discovered the recipe for a kind of mutant dough that possessed both incredible strength and buoyancy around the 9th Century BC. This recipe was then rediscovered among a sheath of Thomas Cromwell’s papers and presented by Sir Walter Raleigh to his Queen, Elizabeth I.

The canny Elizabeth created a massive batch of the dough, which was then shaped, hammered and beaten into several thousand lethal cannon balls. In July of 1588, the Spanish Armada of the Duke of Medina Sidona was decimated by a combination of terrible weather and an endless hail of hairy bread rolls.

The tale should have ended there, but in 1943, Nazi rocket scientists somehow discovered the same formula. The third and most terrible of all Hitler’s V-weapons- the V3- was to have been armed with a payload of mutant bread rolls that were intended to devastate New York. Only the Allied ground advance across Europe thwarted these evil designs.

Later, international airlines bought this same formula, and many still use it for their in flight bread rolls to this day, despite a clear ban on such horrors by the UN Security Council. And this is where the Titanic link comes in.

In April 1912, the Titanic left on its first cruise to New York, crammed full of terrified civilians fleeing a Walpurgis Night concert scheduled for Berlin. It is alleged that Mariah Carey, Celine Dion and The Krankies were on the bill that awful evening.

Five days into her maiden voyage, the liner hit a hulking, mutant bread roll just before midnight. The ship’s plating crumpled like rice paper on contact with the waterlogged brute. The rest, as they say, is history.

The airlines, unwilling to admit that one of these monstrous, morally indefensible creations might somehow have slipped out of one of their galleys to drop into the path of the most famous shipwreck in history, simply banded together and used their huge media influence to concoct a story concerning an iceberg. Obviously, these could hardly speak up to defend themselves. Hence the Titanic was on the bottom, and the airlines were off the hook. Very convenient, to be sure.

But there is another, even more sinister take doing the rounds.

What if one of those original feral beasts, hurled from the mouths of Drake’s cannon way back in 1588, had actually survived for centures to float, silent and menacing, on the surface of the Atlantic until that fateful night in 1912? If icebergs can be carried south on the Labrador current, then why not mutant, hairy bread rolls, too?

Did Titanic actually hit one of these? Or is the international airline industry actually guilty of a corrupt cover up on a scale unseen in modern history.

Yes, it all sounds more than a bit daft, fanciful and far fetched. But it’s not the most stupid conspiracy theory to surface this year by a long way….

CAPTAIN SMITH’S DILEMMA; TITANIC IN EXTREMIS

Death of a dream; the Titanic sagging helplessly into the calm, starlit Atlantic on the night of April 14-15th, 1912

Bearing in mind that today marks the anniversary of the Titanic disaster, I’ve been giving some thought to putting together this post.

It mainly concerns Captain Smith, and his situation once the ship had already hit the iceberg.

This is not a condemnation, nor yet another of those attempts to rationalise the events and omissions that led up to the actual accident itself. It is simply an attempt to put the man in context at the most extreme and momentous point of his life.

By midnight on April 14th/15th, the situation of his command can be summed up as follows:

The Titanic was sinking, without any hope of salvation. At best estimates, she had less than three hours to live. The nearest responsive rescue ship- the Cunard liner Carpathia- was a minimum four hours’ steaming time distant.

In the meantime, he had 2,200 plus passengers and crew on board under his charge, and lifeboats with a maximum capacity of 1,180, assuming every boat was correctly loaded to capacity and lowered safely.

Even then, under those optimum conditions, that left over a thousand people with nowhere to go, other than into a freezing ocean where they would almost certainly expire within minutes.

And Smith- as the sole master, under God, for the duration of the voyage- would ultimately be held to blame for their loss, as he very well knew.

Under those circumstances- the sure and certain knowledge that responsibility for at least a thousand deaths would be laid at your door forever- that would be enough to break any man.

So, for those wondering at Smith’s almost complete lack of involvement in the botched evacuation of his ship, there largely lies the explanation. Captain Smith imploded mentally under the sheer strain, the awful enormity of it all simply overwhelmed his normal rational thought processes.

In terms of the actual evacuation, almost everything was left to a handful of increasingly desperate deck officers, literally working against both time and tide, who were constantly having to improvise in a situation that worsened every minute. And all without any overall sense of direction.

This is why Smith’s initial ‘women and children first’ order was interpreted differently on opposite sides of the ship. Separated by just ninety-four feet, Lightoller and Murdoch each formed his own interpretation of the order.

In that situation, Lightoller- loading the port side boats- allowed ‘women and children only’ into the boats. No men at all.

Slaving away on the starboard side, Murdoch allowed men in the boats if no more women and children were in evident sight.

Smith, of course, never clarified the order either one way or the other. He ruled in favour of neither of his officers. But was he ever asked for a clarification? We’ll never know, of course.

But that fateful lack of co-ordination was largely responsible for the needless loss of at least another four hundred plus lives over the night of April 14th-15th, 1912.

Other than joining the officers for the issuing of firearms at about 1.30 in the morning, exact information on Smith’s whereabouts during those final, desperate hours is scant indeed. As with the luckless Murdoch, there are numerous theories on his final fate, but no really substantive evidence.

I think it extremely unlikely that the emotionally shattered Smith would even have contemplated trying to survive the loss of his command. The sinking of the Titanic also marked the wrecking of his mainly superlative, glittering thirty eight year career. As his great command sagged helplessly into the freezing ocean underneath his feet, Edward John Smith would have known that, too.

No, the evacuation of the Titanic was not a ‘text book’ situation, but there is no such thing as a ‘text book disaster’, either. It is easy to be critical of the individuals involved, and the decisions that they made. Indeed, for the sake of posterity, some rational attempt at analysis is absolutely vital.

But, once the full, ghastly horror of the situation became clear to them, both the captain and his deck officers were placed in an appalling conundrum, one that got more acute with every passing minute. If the sheer scale and horror of what they faced almost overwhelmed then, it is hardly to be wondered at.

Placed in such a horrifying predicament, I sometimes wonder how any of us might have fared. And that is why, today of all days, I retain more than just a little sympathy for that handful of embattled men and their stunned, effectively neutered captain.