Daily Event for April 14, 2012

2340 hours, April 14, 1912, one hundred years ago today the White Star liner Titanic scrapped an iceberg in the north Atlantic, soon after the collision her designer, Thomas Andrews, her master, Captain Edward J. Smith and her owner, J. Bruce Ismay knew that the ship in which they were in would not survive. Everyone who was alive at the time and everyone born since that April night knows the name Titanic, we know of the terrible disaster called by some at the time and since the "Greatest shipwreck in history", but was it really.

There have been many shipwrecks which involved a greater loss of life before and since the Titanic, but it is Titanic that captures the imagination of generations, the question is why. It has all of the elements of a great story, the largest most splendid ship in the world on her maiden voyage, some of the most wealthy people in the world as her passengers, and the hopes and dreams of hundreds of others just trying to get to the new world. But this had happened before, even to a White Star ship, although the loss of life was not as great (aprox. 372) this ship has faded from memory.

The greatest disaster at sea was of course a war loss, the Wilhelm Gustloff, when she was torpedoed and sunk over 9,000 perished, about five times as many as lost in Titanic, but these were Germans at the end of a vicious and brutal war and not many people in the world had much sympathy for Germans at that time. Another great disaster was the destruction by fire of the river steamer Sultana on April 27, 1865, almost exactly forty-seven years earlier, this disaster took the lives of at least 1,547 mostly Union soldiers that had just been released from Confederate prison camps including the notorious camp at Andersonville, Georgia. This disaster also happened after a long and bitter war and according to some the public were tired of stories of death and destruction and therefore her story received little ink in the press.

Titanic of course was different in that she was a passenger ship in peacetime and it was not a torpedo or fire that sent her to the bottom, but an iceberg. There is also the fact that she did not have enough lifeboats for those on board and that perhaps captain Smith was attempting to set a speed record and ignored ice warnings. The public was convinced that the ship was unsinkable, not from anything that the White Star Line had said, but the "unsinkable" label had been put on her and they of course did not discourage it. The difference in the sinkings does not totally explain why there is still such a fascination with this ship.

In 1912 radio was still some time away so the way people received the news was from the papers, there were no movie stars, no rock stars, no endless stream of brainless reality shows there was just the newspapers. In the papers of the day two subjects were in big demand, the society pages and the shipping pages. The wealthy were the movie stars of the day, the gossip, the parties, the weddings, everything the wealthy did made the papers. Ships...well ships were the rock stars of their time and the big liners were the superstars. Every passage was watched, would they break a record? The Blue Riband was an invention of the press and this was closely followed by the public in the press. Every coming and going of almost every ship was published as were the names of notable people who were taking passage. These facts made the Titanic the perfect story for her time and all time to come.

Of course many books and films have been made about the ship and after her discovery in 1982 by Dr. Robert Ballard Titanic fever hit again. Her memory has never been far from the public mind, here name is almost a verb in the lexicon. Titanic will never be forgotten even after the sea consumes her and she is no more. The Night to Remember is no longer a memory in the mind of someone who was there that night, every living soul who ever set foot on Titanic is gone. However on this anniversary we remember those who were lost in this tragedy and we remember the survivors whose lives were forever changed when the great ship went down.
© 2012 Michael W. Pocock
MaritimeQuest.com




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