Just Off the Nightstand: The Wreck of the Titan

Although Caleb’s fascination with the Titanic seems to have lost first status, he still draws the Titanic sinking – with lifeboats in the background – at least as often as he draws anything else. A few weeks ago, I bought a book for him at a rummage sale written by the man who led the expedition to find it. It referenced a book written in 1898 called Futility. The book was later republished under the title The Wreck of the Titan. In The Wreck of the Titan, a super ship, named the Titan, hits an iceberg and sinks. There is a shortage of lifeboats and most of the passengers are lost. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? The speed of the ship, location of the iceberg, and length of the ship are also all comparable with those of the Titanic. Because of the coincidences, some people thought and think that the book foretold the disaster of the Titanic.

Interested (especially because the book is really a novella), I found it through our library published in a book called The Wreck of the Titanic Foretold? edited by Martin Gardner. Gardner has complied stories and poems about ships colliding with icebergs – all of which seem to foretell the Titanic wreck. But, Gardner is skeptical – and his reasoning leads the reader to be so too. The fear of colliding with an iceberg was not unwarranted 100 years ago. As ships began being built larger and larger, it was natural to imagine what would happen if a ship carrying two or three thousand people hit an iceberg and sank. And what would happen would not be all that unique compared to any other ship hitting one – a tragedy.

The book also contained an excerpt from the book From the Old World to the New by W.T. Stead and the short story “The White Ghost of Disaster” by M.C. Garnett. Both of them are about ships hitting icebergs – the white ghost story is more parallel to the Titanic than the Stead book. However, W.T. Stead (who was a sort of psychic in his day) actually died on the Titanic. There were also 3 poems about iceberg shipwrecks (2 written before the disaster). I began to get the feeling that people were just as fascinated with a Titanic-like tragedy before it happened as they have been since it happened. The contrast between an enormous, opulent, modern ship and a simple iceberg is sharp. I thought Garner summed it up well by quoting Carl Sandburg’s poem The People, Yes:

“Is that an iceberg on the horizon, Captain?”
“Yes, Madam”
“What if we get into a collision with it?”
“The iceberg, Madam, will move right along as if nothing had happened.”

Now that's chilling!