FIVE THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE TITANIC
It’s April fifteenth, the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. You’d think we’d know everything about the sinking by now, after all the books and movies (and Broadway musicals), but that’s not true.
Here are some things you may not know about the Titanic:
1. THERE WAS A PSYCHIC ON BOARD.
The well-known spiritualist, W.T. Stead, who claimed to be telepathic and clairvoyant and to have received all sorts of messages from the Other Side, was on the Titanic. But, I mean, how good could he have really been? If he was really psychic, he’d have known the ship was going to sink and would have taken another ship.
2. MOLLY BROWN WAS EVEN MORE OF A HERO THAN YOU MAY BE AWARE OF.
As you probably know from THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN (the less said about the misbegotten movie, TITANIC, the better), she gave the passengers in her lifeboat her fur coat and the rest of her clothes and then, stripped down to her underwear, kept their spirits up by singing songs she’d learned in her saloon days in Leadville.
She did NOT brandish a gun, but she tried desperately to get the crewman in charge of the boat to go back and pick up the passengers in the water, to no avail. (In his defense, he was afraid the boat would be swamped and/or overturned when they tried to climb aboard), and after trying to persuade him, she threatened to throw him overboard.
But it was once safely aboard the Carpathia that she really began to shine. She helped the crew identify the passengers. She knew several languages (as you know from THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN), and she used them to find out who the rescued immigrant women and children were, to comfort them (they’d just lost their husbands and fathers), and to see if they had any relatives who could help them when they got to New York.
She also started up a fund for them, and when the richer passengers didn’t pitch in, she posted a giant sign in the ship’s dining room headed, “The following people have not donated,” with a list of their names below. By the next meal, everyone on board had coughed up a donation. Over all, she raised ten thousand dollars for them, but she was still not done.
When the ship docked in New York City, she put the immigrants up in hotels at her own expense, worked tirelessly to contact their families and friends, and didn’t leave town till every single one of them had either been reunited with loved ones or had been put on a train (also at her expense) to where those relatives were.
When she finally made it back to Denver, she definitely deserved all the press declaring her to be a hero and the warm welcome she got. Later on she went to Halifax to lay wreaths on the graves of those whose bodies had been recovered, and gave medals to the captain and crew of the Carpathia. A true heroine!
2. LIEUTENANT LIGHTOLLER WAS A HERO TWICE OVER.
Charles Herbert Lightoller was the second officer on the Titanic. As soon as he realized the ship was sinking, he began getting the women and children into the lifeboats, working hard to launch and lower the boats on the port side. When all the boats were gone, he began working to free the collapsible canvas boats tethered to the top of the officers’ quarters. He was attempting to untie Collapsible B from the roof when the bow of the boat went under and he was swept, along with the lifeboat, into the water. (Later on, at the American inquiry, a senator, attempting to accuse him of dereliction of duty, asked him, “When did you leave the ship?” Lightoller replied, “I didn’t leave the ship, Senator. The ship left me.”)
Once in the water, Lightoller swam to the now upside-down Collapsible B, crawled on top of it, helped others climb aboard, and then somehow kept it afloat till the Carpathia got there, shouting directions to the men to shift their weight in response to the swells and keep the boat from capsizing. He was the last person to board the rescue ship, waiting till the very end to make sure every last person was saved.
He then went on to have a successful career on other ships, served in the Royal Navy in World War I, and sank a U-boat. He retired just in time for the evacuation from Dunkirk, when he took his yacht, one of his sons, and a teenaged Sea Scout across the Channel to rescue over 120 soldiers.
When I saw the movie Dunkirk, I said, “I’ll bet the grandfather in the movie was based on Lightoller, and it was, right down to the aircraft evasion maneuver he used, which had been taught to him by his youngest son, and that youngest son’s having been killed earlier in the war.
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3. THERE WERE DOZENS OF OTHER HEROES
The Titanic was full of heroes, some famous, others unknown. Like the man who was helping load the boats when a woman and her twelve-year-old son came up. “He can’t go. He’s too old,” the crewman loading the boats said. The man grabbed a hat off the head of a nearby woman, clapped it on the boy’s head, and said, “There! Now he’s a girl, and now he can go.”
And the second-class passenger who, when he realized the ship was sinking, went below and released all the animals from their kennels, including a champion bulldog who was later seen paddling gamely in the freezing water. When I’ve told this story, some people’s response to it is, “So what? It didn’t do any good,” but I don’t hold with the idea that good deeds only count when they succeed in the desired outcome, and at least they didn’t drown in their cages.
4. NOT EVERYBODY ON BOARD BEHAVED AS WELL AS THEY DID.
There were many brave people that night, from 22-year-old Edith Evans, who gave up her place in the last boat to a mother to the stokers who kept the fires going and the lights on till the very end, knowing that if they did, they wouldn’t have a chance to get out themselves, but not everybody was a hero.
J. Bruce Ismay, for instance. He was the chairman and managing director of the White Star Line, along to bask in the glory of the Titanic’s maiden voyage. When it began to sink, however, he promptly got in a lifeboat and became one of the few men who survived the disaster. At the hearings afterward, he claimed he had a perfect right to do so–he was a passenger and not a crew member, and thus had every right to try to save his own life, a truly wretched excuse.
Even worse, once aboard the Carpathia, he demanded a cabin all to himself and spent the harrowing trip home sedated so he didn’t have to face the other, orphaned and widowed survivors. And worst of all, as the investigations proceeded, it became obvious he had 1) limited the number of lifeboats on board (he thought they ruined the view on the boat deck) and 2) ordered the ship to go full speed ahead through the ice field so the Titanic could set a speed record on her maiden voyage and become famous.
She became famous, all right, and so did he. He was branded a coward and was vilified in the press. As one newspaper put it, “Mr. Ismay cares for nobody but himself. He leaves his ship to sink with the powerless cargo of lives and does not care to lift his eyes.” he was shunned by friends, bombarded with hate mail, and forced to become a complete recluse. His reputation never recovered, and he’s gone down (deservedly so) as the villain of the Titanic.
On a lesser scale of criminality, there was also the nameless passenger, whose remains (sort of) were found when the ship was located in the 1980s. Among the treasures brought up was a little heap of necklaces, brooches, and rings which had been found lying in a stateroom. One of the passengers had obviously taken the opportunity of everyone being up on the boat deck to break into their staterooms and steal their jewelry. Not that it did him any good. The recovery team concluded that the things were in the pocket of his pants, which had long since ratted away. So had he.
5. JUST BECAUSE PEOPLE WERE CRIMINALS DIDN’T MEAN THEY HAD TO ACT LIKE IT.
But not all the crooks on board behaved badly. A gambler who regularly worked the boats, travelling back and forth to play cards with the passengers and cheat them out of their money labored manfully to put lifebelts on people and load the boats. He made no attempt to board one himself, but when the last boat on his side was being lowered, he suddenly darted forward and handed a letter to a woman in the boat, asking her to deliver it to his sister. It told her simply that he was on the Titanic, an essential message since he was travelling under an alias, and no one would ever have known what happened to him otherwise. It reminded me of countless noble card sharps and con men in literature, like the gambler in the 1939 movie, STAGECOACH, whom I had always thought were romanticized but who I now realized might have been based on real-life heroes.
When I wrote PASSAGE, my novel about near-death experiences and the Titanic, I read every book
I could find on the subject. The best one (except for first-hand encounters and UNSINKABLE: R.M.S. TITANIC by Daniel Butler) is still the first one ever written: Walter Lord’s A NIGHT TO REMEMBER. It captures the panic, the heroism, the tragedy, and the meaning of the sinking better than anything written since.
That’s because so many of the other books on the sinking have an agenda: the sinking represented the downfall of the British Empire or the horror of class inequalities or the flaws of capitalism and greed. It does all those, of course, but that isn’t why it immediately captured the public’s fascination and has never let go. It was bigger and more universal than all those things. As John William Foster, the author of THE TITANIC COMPLEX put it. The reason we cannot stop talking about the great liner is because the Titanic is about everything.”
THE ONION once put a picture of the Titanic on its front page with a headline that read: WORLD’S LARGEST METAPHOR SINKS,, which is funny, but also true. But it’s not a metaphor for greed or women’s suffrage or British notions of chivalry. It’s a symbol of something larger–of fate, of death, of how we’re going along, blithely thinking we’re going somewhere, only to come up against a hard and inexorable reality. And face to face with ourselves.
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Connie Willis
