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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 21, 2005
The Titanic
There is a point in every boy's life, when he becomes absurdly interested in the Titanic. Girls, too, perhaps -- but I know nothing about them. Except, that when James Cameron made the Titanic into the most successful film of all time, he had to put a tacky harlequin romance right onto the ship's prow, to appeal to all audiences. A boy (take my word for it) needs only the ship, and the prospect of it sinking. Even an old boy, like me.Well, truth to tell, I have never seen that movie, nor any Titanic movie, and few other movies, besides. (I've never understood how you get tickets.) I'd watch, if it were put in front of me, but in the expectation that I would find all the beautiful people and their love scenes an irritating distraction from the director's reconstruction of the ship. More to my taste was Robert Ballard's discovery of the wreck, in the mid-1980s, and his exploration of it from the deck of the Knorr, descending more than 2,000 fathoms in the Alvin, and with other submersibles. The coffee table book that came from that is one of the less defensible items in my library. I have also recently obtained Mark Warren's (no relation) edition of reprints from The Shipbuilder. This was the British trade journal for marine engineers and like professionals, in the Edwardian age. One may retrieve from its pages not only detailed elevations and deck plans, and contemporary photographs, but schematics for the boiler and engine rooms. Also, advertisements from the company that made the Titanic's davits, or another that sold the India rubber tiles for the stateroom floors. One enters, through such pages, another technological era, though one not so far removed that we can't picture it precisely. Fully loaded, the Titanic bore afloat some 13,000 tonnes of crew, passengers, cargo, ship's supplies, and fuel. Some 6,000 tonnes of that was coal, and deep in the orlop, below the waterline, tiny men stoked the giant furnaces with shovels. The beauty of it being, that a mere stoker probably understood, in principle, how and why the huge reciprocating engines worked. (Today, few of us have the fondest idea how or why anything works, but take things on faith, attributing more to "scientists" than our distant ancestors ever attributed to genies.) The arrangements for navigating such a ship (please, never say "boat" for a liner), in the days before the GPS gadgetry, was also basically comprehensible. One found the ship's position by dead reckoning, from the last position measured in the altitude of the stars -- using sextants, and the many ship's compasses whose readings needed adjustment for known errors, including the magnetic influence of the ship's own gargantuan steelplate hull. One consulted endless numerical tables, and small, vague charts. A complicated business, but each stage of it explicable to a simple, patient mind. It was from throwing myself into the navigational questions -- it is summer, gentle reader, the season of idle pursuits -- that I became convinced of what happened on the 15th of April, 1912. All the myths and clichés, generated from the first public inquiries, and the blame-giving that began the morning after the ship sank -- all the innumerable insinuations of "hubris" -- come to nothing in the end. I realized, after my own inspection of the facts, that on the ship itself, everyone from Captain Smith down did his job properly, within his lights. And the Titanic had more lifeboats than were legally required. Indeed, she not only exceeded the safety standards of her day, but would exceed today's standards in almost every particular. She was a magnificent ship. She just happened to hit the wrong iceberg, at the wrong angle, at the wrong speed, on the wrong moonless night, popping rivets off one watertight compartment too many. It was very bad luck. No large ship had ever hit such an iceberg before, in that glancing way; none has hit one since. The ghoulish romance of the Titanic is itself a product of many coincidences, including the way she went down. And she did so, in retrospect, at an exquisite moment, so that she has come to symbolize the last, elegantly drowning breath of a seeming golden age. But this was all in the stars, beyond human intention. So what is the conclusion? In this, as in other human events, we blame anything and anyone except the culprit. Blame the iceberg, I say. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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