Originally printed in:

Editorial Section, Gangtok edition, 19 April 2012 Thursday, p. 4.


The Sinking of the Unsinkable: Remembering R.M.S. Titanic

On 14-15 April 2012, the world commemorated the centenary of the sinking of one of the world’s more luxurious and larger passenger ships, R.M.S. Titanic, in northern Atlantic Ocean on her maiden voyage from the United Kingdom (Southampton) to the United States of America (New York). The centenary remembrances were observed in India too. Though none of the one thousand five hundred and fourteen people killed in the maritime disaster was Indian, the fabulous amenities of the ship, the financial expenditures associated with the building and capsizing of the passenger liner, and its perceptible pomp and glamour, alongwith the fact that it was an English ship, and India, in 1912, was an English colony, led to the understandable repercussions in India. Though R.M.S. Titanic was not the world’s largest ship, among its 1324 passengers on board were some of world’s more renowned, powerful, and wealthier dignitaries, intellectuals and business personnel, including Isidor Straus (1845-1912), William Thomas Stead (1849-1912), Helen Churchill Candee (1858-1949), John Thayer (1862-1912), Cosmo Duff Gordon (1862-1931), John Jacob Astor (1864-1912), Benjamin Guggenheim (1865-1912), Margaret ‘Molly’ Brown (1867-1932), and Jacques Futrelle (1875-1912). The usual media attention given to these individuals, the combined resources the Titanic passengers ($ 6,000,000), the tragic deaths of some of them, alongwith the spectacular success of the two English-language films Roy Ward Baker’s A Night to Remember (1958) and James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), have led to the ‘acknowledgement’ of the capsize of R.M.S. Titanic as one of the more disastrous peacetime maritime disasters in history.

Sinking of large vessels in war or by collision is as old as the period when they came to be increasingly used for business and ferrying passengers. In well-documented history, the English Tudor carrack warship Mary Rose, which capsized on 20 July 1545 during an Anglo-French naval confrontation, causing deaths of approximately 400 English naval personnel, was one of the earlier ships to sink. On the other hand, the sinking of the German cruise ship M.V. Wilhelm Gustloff by the Soviet submarine S-13 on 30 January 1945 in the Baltic Sea, which killed approximately 9400 Germans, and the capsize of the Filipino passenger-ferry M.V. Doña Paz in the Tablas Strait on 20 December 1987 after a collision with the oil-tanker M.T. Vector, in which 4375 people died, are two of the worst maritime disasters till date. Between 1707 and 2012, there have had been incidents of around 166 peacetime ship-sinking, while between 1588 and 1982, approximately 147 major battleships were lost at sea. Yet, among all these, the tragedy of R.M.S. Titanic has found the most consistent focus, with hundreds of memoirs and fiction having had been written on it to the extent of myth-making. Interestingly, in 1898 the American novelist Morgan Andrew Robertson (1861-1915), who would also predict the U.S. Pearl Harbour Bombing in his short-story “Beyond the Spectrum” (1914), published a novella named Futility which featured an enormous English liner Titan that hit an iceberg on an April night and sank in the northern Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, a stoker, John Coffey (1889-1957), inexplicably left R.M.S. Titanic at Queenstown, Ireland, later claiming to have had a ‘sense of foreboding’ about the voyage and about the fate of the White Star Line-owned 1911 passenger ship which weighed 46, 328 G.R.T., and was 269.1 metres long, 28 metres wide and 53.3 metres high (from keel to funnel-top). The ship, which left Southampton for New York on 10 April 1912, had 9 decks, lettered ‘A’ to ‘G’, and the 29 boilers and 159 coal-burning furnaces that gave R.M.S. Titanic its incredible 23 knots per hour speed, required supply of 825 tonnes of coal a day. Importantly, though there were 2223 people – passengers and crew – on board the luxury liner on its maiden voyage, there were only 20 lifeboats, which could together carry a maximum of 1178 people.

Constant research have recently had made many significant and startling statistical data regarding the so-called ‘unsinkable’ ship known to inquisitive commoners. With its official number of 131428, the ship had 2 fifteen-tonne-anchors, 3 giant propellers, 4 funnels, and approximately 10,000 light bulbs were used to light it up. In 1912, a first-class-passenger would have to pay $ 4350 for a Titanic journey from Southampton to New York; the rates for second and third class tickets were respectively $ 1750 and $ 30. The luxury liner had 4 restaurants, a 30' x 14' swimming-pool, 2 barbershops, 2 libraries, a fully equipped gymnasium, and one fully-equipped photographic darkroom. Edward John Smith (1850-1912), who captained R.M.S. Titanic and went down with it, had 43 years of experience at sea, with 26 years of travelling on the northern Atlantic Ocean, and was assisted by Henry Wilde (1872-1912) as the Chief Mate. History is silent about what caused these efficient officers to ignore warnings – which had been arriving regularly from The Caronia, The Baltic, The Californian and The Mesaba between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. on 14 April 1912 – about the presence of large icebergs on their ship’s route and continue with the speed of 21.5 knots. Perhaps the wireless operators John G. Philips (1887-1912) and Harold S. Bride (1890-1956) were so busy forwarding the passenger telegrams that they could not appropriately react to the iceberg warnings. When the watching officers Reginald R. Lee (1870-1913) and Frederick Fleet (1887-1965) finally spotted a large blue iceberg directly in front of the ship at 11:39 p.m., First Officer William M. Murdoch (1873-1912) could do little about stopping the collision that occurred 37 seconds after the sighting.

R.M.S. Titanic went down into the northern Atlantic Ocean, 640 kilometres away from mainland and approximately 2000 kilometres away from her destination, at 02:20 a.m. on 15 April 1912, almost two hours before The Carpathia could arrive for rescue. In between the fateful midnight and earliest morning, hundreds of actions of bravery and cowardice were enacted on board the sinking liner. In recent times, investigative television channels like Discovery and The History Channel have minutely covered the different expeditions undertaken by scientists and historians to the wreck of the ship lying around 3700 metres below the sea-level, and they have identified an improper and poor-quality riveting to be one of the principal causes of the liner’s sinking. Whatever might have led to the disaster, the fate of R.M.S. Titanic continue to remind people of the terrible forces of nature and the dangers of pride and presumption.

– Reported by: Pinaki Roy; Balurghat, 18 April 2012. Picture by: Sreeparna Roy (Chattopadhyay).