Titanic Lives On!
Ship carrying dreamers arrives in New York in April of 1912
Murphy’s Law says that “things will go wrong in any given situation, if you give them a chance”. Similarly, physicist John Archibald Wheeler said, "Whatever can be, is". Wheeler was involved in the development of the atomic bomb and believed that as long as it was not outside the laws of nature, anything can exist. He was born in 1911 – the year before the Titanic went down in the Atlantic Ocean.
The sinking of the unsinkable was at the intersection of the philosophies of these two men because the iceberg which travelled down from Greenland to cross paths with the Titanic around 11:40pm (Ship’s time) on April 14th, 1912, was following the laws of nature and simply floated south according to those laws. The transatlantic route from Southampton to New York was one travelled regularly without incident by passenger ships. On this one occasion things had a chance to go wrong. And they did.
This is not strictly a story of fancy, nor is it a re-telling of the fate of a ship that, had it not met with disaster, would have been just another footnote in maritime and cultural history. The ship and the iceberg were not destined to collide in the night. Rather they were part of a series of decisions that came up against the ebb and flow of nature.
Which means people and nature could easily never have collided, leaving the RMS Titanic to dock safely in New York on the 17th of April instead of altering the future of the passengers and crew, and their families and friends.
What would that scene have been like?
As the largest and most luxurious ship of the time, the fanfare would have drawn an eager crowd waiting to catch an early glimpse as the distinctive 4 funnels of the liner came into view. 1,513 more people would have completed the journey to New York, and not have “accidental drowning, SS Titanic, at sea” as the official cause of death on their death certificate. Many of those who would have walked down the gangplank were 3rd class passengers who died in greater percentages than 1st and 2nd class passengers. The Titanic’s last port of call before heading across the Atlantic was Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland which was a main emigrant boarding point for ships bound for America at the time. While there have always been stories that class distinction was responsible for the disparity in survival rates, that is not exactly true and locked doors and gates depicted in the Titanic movie are also disputed. What is true is that the 3rd class section of the ship was aft and lower down. That put those passengers furthest away from the lifeboats, which proved to be inadequate in number for even 1st and 2nd class passengers.
It also meant that it took longer for the messages to arrive telling everyone to move on deck and prepare to abandon the sinking liner. When those messages did make it down below, many who were awakened from their sleep were like the 81 third-class passengers who were listed as Syrian and most likely spoke little or no English. Except for the many small twists and turns that made the Titanic disaster what it was, they would all have been able to join the growing Syrian community in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Or gone on to Canada.
One of those was Sleiman Khalil Attala. His native country was Syria, but he had become a journalist in Ottawa, had been abroad to visit his former home and was returning to Canada on the Titanic. His body was never identified. He likely knew two other Syrians passengers who never made it home either. Joseph Caram was also returning to his Canadian home after travelling back to Syria to marry Maria Elias Khalil. Joseph was a successful garment merchant and had they been two of the passengers who landed in New York he and Maria, and their future children, could have been a name that today’s citizens of Ottawa might recognize. Maybe a small brick building, near Boushey’s Market on Elgin Street, but by now gone and replaced by one of the many restaurants, cafes, and diners in the area.
(I should note something common among the 3rd class passengers making the voyage to a new country. Their names were often Anglicized or given phonetic spellings and may not have been recognized by even their own families in the lists of the missing and dead. And while there were 81 passengers in 3rd class listed as “Syrian” there were probably many more as immigration authorities at the time defined Syrian more narrowly than they themselves may have and certainly not the way they identify today.)
One of those from 3rd class who did survive was able to shine a light on what is often overlooked when we talk about the marine disaster. 705 passengers and crew who survived that night shared memories like those of a young Syrian boy who later said he would never forget the frightened voices of those facing death as the ship started to tilt bow first. With debris sliding across the decks and in cabins and passageways he was hearing the sounds of people most surely injured and in pain before ever jumping or falling overboard.
When passengers did hit the water, they were plunged into -2.2C (28 degrees Fahrenheit) temperatures. As long as they were wearing lifejackets, most of those probably died of “immersion hypothermia” and not drowning as the official record stated. At those freezing temperatures death occurs anywhere between 15 and 45 minutes as heat is rapidly conducted away from the body by the water. Struggling and swimming hastens the inevitable. The cold-water shock causes panic, disorientation, and pain.
Colonel Archibald Gracie was an amateur historian and writer who survived the sinking. He wrote “…there arose to the sky the most horrible sounds ever heard by mortal man except by those of us who survived this terrible tragedy. The agonising cries of death from over a thousand throats, the wails and groans of the suffering, the shrieks of the terror-stricken and the awful gaspings for breath of those in the last throes of drowning, none of us will ever forget to our dying day.”
Though Gracie did survive, it was only after being immersed in the cold waters, but luckily close enough to one of the collapsible lifeboats to be rescued. However, the effects of hypothermia and his subsequent preoccupation with the tragedy contributed to a rapid decline in his health and he died less than 8 months after the sinking.
Gracie was not alone among the survivors who had to live with what they saw and heard as the ship finally began its slide to the bottom of the ocean. Miss Ellen Mary Toomey was also affected by what she heard, “The Titanic was gradually sinking and when we were about two miles away, we could hear the awful shrieks of the drowning people”. Like many of the survivors, she never fully recovered from the experience and retreated to a convent and died in 1993 while in the care of the Little Sisters of the Poor in Indianapolis.
Had the Titanic not had its encounter with the iceberg, survivors would not live the rest of their lives with the image of the ship’s stern rising “...high in the air, the bow less high. Then she went down slowly amid heartrending cries for help of hundreds of doomed men and women”, as Miss Susan Webber told the Western Times of Exter, Devon, in England.
The iceberg that halted the maiden journey of the ‘unsinkable’ ship most likely travelled down from Greenland having been born or calved from the Ilulissat glacier two years earlier. A glacier where the snow was approximately 10,000 years old and only produced a few icebergs in 1909. Yet that particular iceberg was carried by the Labrador Current southward for a rendezvous with the Titanic about 610km (380 miles) off the coast of Newfoundland. It travelled 13km (8 miles) per day and even an hour faster or slower would have changed the lives of the 2,240 passengers and crew.
Arthur Rostron captain of the Carpathia (which rescued many of the Titanic survivors) said in his autobiography many years later that these icebergs were “cold monsters that are beautiful to look at and so dangerous to touch” (Chapter 2 of Home from the Sea).
When the massive steamship docked at Pier 59 in New York on April 17th, one of the first passengers to leave the ship could well have been John Jacob Astor the IV. He was one of the richest men in the world and was definitely the richest person on the Titanic. The 47-year-old Astor was travelling with his second wife, 18-year-old Madeline Force who was 5 months pregnant, accompanied by Astor’s dog Kitty, and the couple’s servants. He was a philanthropist, had several patents to his credit including a new type of bicycle brake, and wrote a science fiction novel titled A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future set in the year 2000. The Astor family held a great deal of sway in social, cultural, and government circles and many believe that had he lived his influence would have expanded in scope especially in cultural and philanthropic activities. So much so that he could well have changed the results of the US presidential election in November 1912. In that election, Democrat Woodrow Wilson beat out Republican incumbent Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had been president from 1901 to 1909 as a Republican and in 1912 was running under the Progressive or “Bull Moose” party banner. Astor would certainly not have supported the fourth contender Eugene Debs who was head of the Socialist Party (Interestingly, he ran again in 1920 while in jail for sedition) and not likely Roosevelt’s Progressive Party either. If Astor’s novel is indicative of his political leanings, he would not have been a fan of the Party’s platform which included an inheritance tax, more disclosure of political campaign contributions, a securities commission, women’s suffrage, and a trust-busting agenda to limit trusts and monopolies. His novel envisioned the start of the 21st century as a world run by a corporate style government heavily influenced by the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company. The company used its lobbying strength (another power to be limited under the Roosevelt platform) to convince world leaders that they could use the power of technology to tinker with the Earth’s axis every year to ensure more even weather and make winters a thing of the past. The whole of Astor’s novel leans into controlling the environment to bend to the wishes of men (women seemed to have little if any role in the novel), which would have gone against the grain of the Progressive Party in the real world of 1912.
“Free to delve into the allurement and fascination of science, emancipated man goes on subduing Nature, as his Maker said he should, and turning her giant forces to his service in the constant struggle to rise and become more like Him who gave the commandments and showed him how he should go.”
(Chapter V, A Journey in Other Worlds)
Astor’s foray into sci-fi saw a world dominated by the United States and during the real time of Howard Taft’s term as president from 1909 to 1913 they would have seen eye-to-eye on many policy issues. Among those would have been Taft’s announcement in his inaugural address no less, that African Americans would not be appointed to federal jobs. During his time in office, he was true to his word and went on to remove several black office holders. In the novel, Astor’s characters boast that “The erstwhile ‘Dark Continent’ has a larger white population now than North America had a hundred years ago” (Chapter IV) and that the modern world was freed “from the domination of our local politics by ignorant foreigners” (Chapter V). Even when it came to exploring new planets and new worlds, Astor’s personal views were all too apparent as the plan for the space explorers was to “absorb or run out all inferior races” (Chapter VII). It is also worth noting that in the novel, Canada had come to “realise that their future would be far grander and more glorious in the union with the United States than separated from it.” When the 1912 presidential matchup came, Astor would have had a game plan in mind to get Taft elected. The new Progressive party led by Roosevelt was splitting the vote between Wilson (D) and Taft (R) which meant the Progressives needed to be kept in check. While he may have seen some possibilities in working with Wilson, Taft’s track record was known, his platform friendly to capitalists, and he was likely a friend of the Astors. With the thumb of John Jacob Astor IV on the scale in support of Taft, the U.S political landscape would have experienced lasting changes including the U.S. entering WWI much sooner.
Astor was not the only writer on board the Titanic and there was one particularly intriguing mystery writer whose career would have earned a place in literature alongside Arthur Conan Doyle. John Heath Futrell wrote under the name of Jacques Futrelle. Like Conan Doyle he built a character who solved mysteries by applying logic to any number of problems such as escaping from a prison cell while under the watchful eye of prison guards and readers. The character Augustus SFX Van Dusen was also known as ‘The Thinking Machine’ (which seemed awkward to me and if I was to put on my editor’s cap would have tried to discourage its use) and first appeared in a short story, ‘The Problem of Cell 13’ (Which made the HRF Keating 100 Best Crime & Mystery Books list and was adapted for TV in the sixties). As Futrell, he started out as a journalist so when it came time to get serious about crime fiction it was fitting the Thinking Machine’s first triumph was serialized over six weeks in the Boston American. Futrelle loved technology and brought the telephone, telegraph, electric lighting, and Marie Curie and her work with radium into his writing. Despite writing convincingly about a character who could solve any mystery and escape impossible predicaments, Futrelle was not able to escape the sinking of the Titanic. His wife May Futrelle said the last glimpse she had of her husband was of him standing with John Jacob Astor IV on the deck watching the departing lifeboats as they smoked a cigarette.
Some characters on board the Titanic most certainly would have appeared later in a Futrelle story in one form or another with Michel Navrátil at the top of the list. Futrelle the mystery writer may have noticed something odd about widower Louis M. Hoffman and his sons, John, and Fred. Though Hoffman was booked in 2nd class and Futrelle in 1st, they probably met over a game of cards where the writer may have noticed that Hoffman never let the 2 young boys out of his sight. Had there been a chance to observe the boys at play they were boisterous enough for children of that age (3 and 4) but also tended to stick close to their father and not always scurry over when called. Futrelle may also have wondered about a revolver under Hoffman’s jacket (it was found when the body was recovered). Some further investigation would have revealed that Louis Hoffman was actually Michel Navrátil, was not a widower, and the 2 boys were Michel Jr. and Edmond. The father had separated from his wife Marcelle and while the divorce was being finalized in France, Michel had the boys with him for Easter. He took them and set sail for America on the Titanic instead, and it is said he left his wife a note saying the boys were in good hands, but she would never see them again. See them she did however, for after Mr. Navrátil was lost in the wreck the boys became famous for a while as the “Titanic Orphans” and their pictures were circulated in newspapers on both sides of the ocean with the nicknames Louis and Lola.
Their mother saw the pictures, identified the boys, and the White Star Line paid for the return passage for Mme. Navrátil to collect the boys. If the voyage had proved to be uneventful, Michel Navrátil may have continued his career as a tailor and perhaps with the connections he made onboard, built an elegant middle-class clientele similar to what he had in France. Though he had a checkered past he may have changed as he built a new life and tried to make things work with his wife. Marcel Jr. went on to become a philosophy professor in France but says that as his father put his two sons into the lifeboat, he said to tell their mother he still loved her and always hoped they could live happily again in the New World.
Other passengers on board the ship with back stories that would have made for good crime fiction were professional gamblers. These men were experienced in their craft, knew who would likely be a good target in a card game, and travelled extensively back and forth across the Atlantic. First-class of course. So frequent were the appearances of these card sharps that they had to travel under assumed names such as George Brayton otherwise known as “Boy Bradley” (real name George Brereton), C. Rolmane also known as Henry Romine (real name Charles Romaine), or Baron von Drachstedt (real name Alfred Nourney). The White Star Line warned passengers (especially those in first-class) to avoid gambling and to be wary when playing cards, but in 1912 sitting around a card table smoking and sipping their favourite brand of expensive liquor was what the rich did, and these gamblers were on hand to take advantage of both old and new money. All three men survived the sinking. Mr. Nourney stands out as the last adult male from the first-class passenger list to die (1972, in Germany). Even he, however, was affected by the cries of those left in the water to die which he described as sounding “like a siren”. Nourney also carried a revolver as witnessed by other survivors who said he fired off all his cartridges to help attract the attention of rescuers to the lifeboat he was in. By the time an unscathed Titanic docked in New York, enough money would have passed into the hands of the gamblers that an astute writer of fiction or true crime would have all they needed to churn out more than a few stories.
For all the average lives, the antics of the rich and famous, the romances, and the grand plans of those bound for a new life, the final word in this story goes to the ship itself. After brushing past the iceberg which rose 30 meters (100 feet) above the surface of the water, the grand Titanic would have found itself passing the Statue of Liberty and docking at its planned destination. All its passengers safely onshore with their dreams intact. More than 3,000 bags of mail and upwards of 700 parcels would have reached their intended recipients with greetings from families and friends, packets of newspapers from home, and letters from wives left behind and longing to bring children to join their father. The rare, jeweled copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam stored in the cargo hold would have been safely in the hands of its new owner Gabrielle Weiss, a well-known book collector and dealer who was likely waiting at the dock for his new prized possession. When he died in 1946, many books from his collection were left to the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library. The intact Rubaiyat would have ended up in one of those rare book rooms and been on display to mark the successful maiden voyage of the Titanic. Or more likely the ship’s voyage would barely have been remembered.
Beyond its grandeur and size, it was just another ship in the White Star line. In 2 years and 3 months from the maiden voyage, WWI started and liners like the Titanic were pressed into service as troop ships. Its sister ships the Olympic and Britannic became part of the war effort with the Olympic moving Canadian soldiers across the Atlantic and the Britannic becoming a hospital ship. In November of 1916 the Britannic hit a mine in the Aegean and sunk with the loss of 30 passengers. The Olympic survived the war and went back to shuttling passengers across the ocean until it was retired in 1935 and scrapped. The Titanic would have fared no better or worse.
The woeful end of the Titanic did have a significant impact on maritime safety. Shipwrecks are the inevitable and unwanted companion of ships since they started to regularly move people, goods, and armies as far back as 2500 BCE. The loss of the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic raised many questions and there were investigations on both sides of the Atlantic to determine what went wrong. Was the ship going too fast? Was the captain negligent? Was there a problem with the design? When so many lives are lost, we tend to look for someone or something to blame - but there really was no single person or factor to carry the weight of the sinking. One thing was clear from the outset of the investigations and as survivors told their stories - there were not enough lifeboats for all the passengers and lifeboat drills did not happen. After the sinking that changed. Passenger liners had to have enough lifeboats for the entire passenger and crew complement and lifeboat drills were mandated. The Titanic had a wireless room with the latest equipment and was staffed by Marconi Company operators, who by all accounts, performed their duties above and beyond to try to save all aboard. Without the repeated distress calls, the loss of life would have been far greater if not total because no ships would have altered course to rescue survivors. After the sinking, new regulations were passed which made wireless equipment not only mandatory but required a permanent 24-hour radio watch (prior to the sinking most ships had only a single radio operator) with regular intervals of radio silence to listen for distress calls. Double-sided hulls become required on ships because after the Titanic’s single hull was split open by the impact, the Atlantic Ocean began to rush in. The water eventually rose over the watertight compartments, so new regulations required bulkhead heights raised so at the very least, it would slow the sinking of a ship. The first International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea was convened in 1913 in direct response to the Titanic disaster. It created the International Ice Patrol which plied the waters off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland to monitor and report on icebergs in the North Atlantic. The patrols were done by ships but beginning in 1946, aircraft were brought into the picture, and by 1982 aerial reconnaissance had replaced ships entirely. The patrol remains to this day.
The lone iceberg which sunk the Titanic and brought about so many changes continued its journey after the steamship was gone and the search and recovery of bodies was completed.
On April 20th, 1912, a photograph was taken by a sailor onboard the MS Bremen of what was believed to be the iceberg that had such an impact on maritime safety. The gigantic lump of ice would have drifted on through the warmer gulf waters and within a week or two met with the same fate of other icebergs which had been drifting in the area. Completely melted and leaving no sign of its passing, except for the bodies of 1,500 people and the wreck of a 269-meter (882 feet) long ship at the bottom of the ocean.
Sources consulted:
Astor, John Jacob. A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future. SF Gateway/Gollancz. London, 2015.
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Davenport-Hines, R.P.T. Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From. William Morrow, 2012
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Various files and images from the Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/
Titanic Historical Society https://titanichistoricalsociety.org/
Encyclopedia Titanica https://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/
No AI was used to create content for this article and wherever possible I verified quotations and did not solely rely on secondhand material.