Titanic’s story
Ever wondered as the clock
strikes 12 at night today that it will be 93 years since Titanic- the
“unsinkable” British ocean liner owned by the White Star Line, sank on its
maiden voyage… the disaster took place in 1912 resulting in the death of more
than 1,5000 men, women, and children-more causalities than in any other marine
disaster in peacetime history. The magnitude of this tragedy, combined with the
sheer improbability of the event, has cast the Titanic into the realm of myth
and legend. So, let’s take a trip down memory lane and revisit Titanic.
The dawn of the 20th
century was a time of enthusiastic technological progress in the United States
and Western Europe. Steamships made of steel and powered by mechanical engines
were replacing wooden ships driven by wind on sails. The Cunard Line’s new
steamship, the Lusitania, was transporting passengers across the Atlantic Ocean
faster than ever before. White Star Line, which had become Cunard’s direct
competitor in the Atlantic passengers routes, was eager to attain in
competitive edge. White Star Line was managed by J. Bruce Ismay. Ismay believed
White Star could compete with Cunard’s faster liners by building ships that
were safer and more luxurious, and he envisioned a fleet of three large ocean
liners that would be named the Olympic, the Titanic, and the Gigantic (later
called the Britannic).
The Titanic was the second
of the three ships to be built by Harland and Woff of Belfast, Ireland, at a
reported cost of 7.5 million dollars. It boasted a double- bottomed hull
divided into 16 compartments that would allow it to stay afloat even if three
of the compartments were breached. Its creators, thinking that no more than two
compartments could ever be breached at one time, believed this design made the
ship virtually unsinkable.
The Titanic measured 883
feet (270 meters) long and 93 feet (28 meters) wide, was as high as an 11
storey building, and had a gross tonnage of just over 46, 000. It was also
considered the most luxurious, comparable to the finest hotels in Europe.
On 10 April 1912, the Titanic commenced
its much-published maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York. Four
days later, as it sailed the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, it received a
total of seven iceberg warnings, yet the captain of the ship saw no need to
slow down. At 11.40 P.M there was a sudden alarm of an iceberg dead. The
officer in charge instinctively reversed engines and swerved the wheel to avoid
the iceberg.
Nevertheless, it passed
along the ship’s starboard side leaving a series of gashes at least 250 feet
(80 meters) long. Later analysis of the disaster suggested that if the Titanic
had hit the iceberg head-on, its bow would have crumpled but it would not have
received any fatal wounds to the starboard side; it would have remained afloat.
Or, if the engine speed had not been reduced, the ship would have turned more
quickly with the greater forward motion and a collision could have been avoided
altogether. But as it was, the gashed had opened six compartments to the sea,
an eventuality that had never been imagined, let alone planned for. The sinking
of the Titanic was inevitable.
Many of the passengers and
crew could not believe that the titanic would actually sink. The evacuation was
disorderly at first, but as the ship began to list, the passengers and crew
soon panicked. Although the ship’s 20 lifeboats could accommodate only slightly
more than half of the 2, 227 people on board, the crew followed the implicit
rule of “women and children first” and rarely filled the lifeboats to capacity.
In additions, most third class, or steerage, passengers, many of them women and
children, remained trapped in the lower decks of the ship.
Less that three hours after
the initial impact, the Titanic sank, at 2.20 AM on April. Lost at sea were
1,522 people including the ship’s captain, one of its designers, most of the
crew, most of its third class passengers in first and second classes. The 705
survivors in the lifeboats awaited rescue by the Cunard liner Carpathia amid
the clamoour of hose dying of hypothermia in the cold Atlantic water.
Even as the tragic loss was
mourned on both sides of the Atlantic, extensive inquiries were underway in the
United States and in England. They called for major changes in safety regulations
for ocean travel, and the first International Convention for safety of Life at
Sea convened in London the following year to implement new safety requirements
for passenger ships. All ships were required to carry enough lifeboats for all
passengers and crew, and lifeboat drills became mandatory. The Morse code
signal “SOS” was adopted as the new universal distress call because it was easy
to recognize and to send. Furthermore, all ships carrying 50 or more people
were required to have a 24-hour radio watch.
The wreck of the Titanic
remained undisturbed in its watery grave for many decades, but on 1 sept.,
1985, a French and American expedition led by Dr. Robert Balland, an underwater
geologist, succeeded in discovering the remains of the Titanic off the coast of
Newfoundland, Canada. It was in two pieces, separated between the third and
fourth funnels, and was lying at a depth of nearly 13,000 feet (4,000 meters).
Countless renditions,
interpretations, and analyses of the Titanic disaster have transformed the ship
into a cultural icon. The story has been the subject of many screen and stage
productions, the first one being a silent film that was released just a month
after the actual event.
In 1958, the story was
revisited in the epic film, A Night to Remember that featured a cast of
hundreds. The famous ship also made as appearance in the 1960 Broadway musical The
Unsinkable Molly Brown, which portrayed Colorado heiress Molly Brown as a
heroine in the Titanic disaster. The musical was made into a film starring
Debbie Reynolds in 1964.
The year 1997 alone saw the
debut of an award-winning Broadway musical and a blockbuster film that became
one of the top grossing films in Hollywood history. As the 20th
century drew to a close, the public became more intrigued by the Titanic than
ever before in part because its fate symbolized the great triumphs and
tragedies that defined the 20th century. T
The Titanic was the last
grand dream of the Gilded Age. It was designed to be the greatest achievement
of an era of prosperity, confidence and propriety. Although no one knew it, the
world was about to change drastically. Radio had been invented in 1901. The
Wright Brothers’ first successfully flight was in 1903. The old presumptions
about class, morals, and gender-roles were about to be shattered. If the
concept of Titanic was the climax of the age, then perhaps its sinking was the
curtain that marked the end of the old drama, the start of anew one.
Myths about Titanic
It is sometimes difficult to
sort the truth from the rumors, since the accounts by survivors are notoriously
contradictory, and some seemingly impossible events appear to be factual. For
example, Joughin, the ship’s baker, is said to have climbed out unto the
poop-deck rail angular and exaggerated, add a space, and then hold it up to a
mirror, it seems to spell “No Pope”
Clearly, the letters opined,
the Ulster Protestants who built Titanic had assigned her this coded message on
purpose, and divine retribution had ensued. On the other side of the coin, many
people in England firmly believed that hundreds of Belfast steel workers went
down with the ship, despite the illogical reasoning of this assertion, since
their job had been finished almost a year before.
The intensely competitive
transatlantic steamship business had seen recent major advances in ship esign,
size and speed. White Star Line,
No comments:
Post a Comment