A century on
A HUNDRED years ago today, 2 224 people - passengers and crew - were ploughing through the North Atlantic in the largest ship afloat, the super-luxurious and "unsinkable" Titanic, pride of the White Star line and on her maiden voyage to New York from Southampton. She was steaming at close to top speed through an icefield.
A day later, Titanic was to become to a byword for horror and tragedy; for failed technical design; for failed expertise; for pointless discipline and courage, the band still playing as the ship went down.
It was also to become part of the metaphor of the English language, to denote impending disaster. "Re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic" potently describes inadequate measures to anticipate looming disaster in whatever context.
It's also possible to see in the fate of the Titanic – where 1 514 people died in the flat calm but freezing waters of the North Atlantic – a foretaste of other horrors to come. The ship and those aboard in ways represented the hubris of the early 20th century. Technology rode supreme. The ship was unsinkable, the epitome of mechanised, steam-powered seafaring. It was quite all right to steam at full speed through an icefield. The ship was unsinkable, after all.
Only two years later, Europe was to be shattered by a mechanised war that brought home the full potential horror of modern technology. That war destroyed four empires – German, Austrian, Russian and Ottoman – and badly weakened a fifth, the British. It spawned Soviet communism (and eventually the Cold War). It spawned the Nazi scourge and another war.
What had seemed to be impregnable bastions of science, art and social stability in places like Berlin, Vienna and Moscow crumbled into savagery. New and continually developing military technology was destroying civilisation. It's possible to see in the Titanic disaster the first failure of technology as an answer to everything.
Reliving history
DURBAN schoolteacher Kathy Scott loves history Her Grade 4 pupils at Clifton will have the opportunity next week to relive it through the pages of the Daily Mirror (London). When she was just nine and living at Carlisle, in England just south of the Scottish border, her grandmother gave her a copy of the paper, which broke the news of the Titanic hitting an iceberg.
The front page is taken up by a photograph of the majestic four-funnelled vessel leaving Southampton, attended by a tugboat.
The headline: "DISASTER TO THE TITANIC: WORLD'S LARGEST SHIP COLLIDES WITH AN ICEBERG IN THE ATLANTIC DURING HER MAIDEN VOYAGE."
Four pages inside are taken up by the story. But wireless communication in those days was so sketchy and spasmodic, and the messages coming through were so confusing, that at first it was thought the ship had survived; that all passengers and crew had been taken off safely by other ships and Titanic was being towed to port. How sadly wrong could they be?
To quote the Mirror: "The last signals from the Titanic came at 12.27 this morning. The Virginian's operator says that these were blurred and ended abruptly. – Reuter."
Oh boy!
First SOS
THE TITANIC disaster was the first time ever that a wireless SOS was sent out. It saved many hundreds of lives. As the Mirror put it: "'Wireless' has again demonstrated its immense value, assistance being summoned by this means."
Note the inverted commas. "Wireless" was still very much a novelty. (Today most people would call it "radio").
Some says SOS stands for "Save Our Souls" or "Save Our Ship". This is a bit fanciful. In Morse code it's rendered as dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot (or di di di dah dah dah di di di, to use the lingo of wireless operators), which is obviously simplicity itself.
In fact some seafarers maintain that Morse code accounts for the eccentricity of so many radio operators. With di di di dah dah etc ringing through their headphones all day, they go off their chump. An officer I knew said he sailed for years with a radio operator who used to take his imaginary dog for walks round the deck.
Di di di dah … V for Victory. That's us against Auckland tomorrow.
Tailpiece
PASSENGER on the Titanic: "Waiter! I asked for ice but this is ridiculous!"
Last word
Titanic, name and thing, will stand as a monument and warning to human presumption.
-The Bishop of Winchester (in Southampton, 1912).
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