Titanic – A legacy

14^th April 1912, it sank. This ship was the TITANIC. This tragedy has captivated us whole of the last century and the number of books and movies made based on it is testament to that fact.

         There were 2207 people on board but only 705 survived. This is one of the major reasons the Titanic has captured attention.

        So many controversies have be associated with the Titanic like ,

Was it the Titanic at all which sank or was it it’s twin sister ship the Olympic which was notorious for accidents. According to this theory it was a financial scam to defraud the companies insuring the ships, a scam that went horribly wrong.

The number of lifeboats on the ship was originally 32, which would have been adequate to save all the passengers on the   ship from drowning, but the number was reduced in the final design.

All day (April 14^th )there had been warnings about iceberg patches from six different ships, none of them were heeded. The most interesting part is that the last message was received 40 minutes before the accident from a ship called the Californian.

The wireless operator did not heed to the entire message and cut it off half way through before he could be told that they were sailing towards it. None of these warnings were informed to the captain (E. J. Smith).

Many stories have been told about premonitions of the Titanic’s fateful crash.

A novel entitled FUTILITY by Morgan Robertson in which a massive ocean liner called Titan sailing from Southampton across the Atlantic was sunk by an iceberg killing more than 2500 people. The chilling fact is that the novel was written in 1898 fourteen  years before the Titanic sank. Even W.T. Stead another well known novelist predicted the sinking of the Titanic in one of his novels, the twist Stead was on the Titanic when it sank.

Well this was the Titanic but the man whose account was seriously shocking. One day in April 1935, William Reeves was keeping lookout on his tramp steamer sailing from Tyneside to Canada when his mind for no reason started to dwell on the Titanic. His birthday was 14^th April, his ship was called Titanian, all these coincidences kept crossing his mind when he just screamed to stop the ship and to the horror of the crew in front of them in the darkness stood AN ICEBERG.

Well I suppose it is these mysteries which has encouraged Hollywood to create so many movies based on this legendary ship. To my knowledge a minimum  of four movies have been based on this ship. The latest of them ,well I guess  we all know this one , the one starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo de Caprio. This movie cleaned up at the Oscars when it was there.

Whatever be the reason the controversies ,the premonitions or the movies, more than half the people in the world are interested in this ship for one reason or the other. So I guess Titanic   has deserved the title  of the worst maritime tragedy of the 20^th century during non-war times.


Rahul