THE UNSINKABLE TITANIC

SUNNY THOMAS

The Tower of Babel, the Titanic and Space Shuttle Columbia carry a fatalist flaw. And a hollow ring of absolute certainty that crashed on the land, in the high sea, and in the air. Everything that could be said has been said, and nothing new could be added, except fiction, on these tragic milestones of human civilization.

 

What an irony of fate for a man who foresaw and warned of the danger of a colossal tragedy himself became its victim! W T Stead was the much-respected editor of The Times (London) who wrote in his column that a tragedy of enormous magnitude could befall the Titanic, the proclaimed unsinkable ship, should it sink because of shortage of lifebelts and life boats. On its maiden voyage, the liner was packed with celebrities, one of whom was Stead himself! 

In 1912, the Titanic created quite a sensation across the world: The World’s Luxury Queen, the Fastest Ship Ever, Titanic the Unsinkable Liner! What attracted the global imagination was Titanic the Unsinkable!! The builders and designers of the ship (Harland and Wolff ship yard at Belfast) were less to blame than the myth-builders and myth fabricators, the White Star Line that owned her. Fabulously built for a capacity of 2222 (plus one), alas, the ship’s 1514 passengers perished on a tryst with the ocean.

   

The shortest lived ship, Titanic clocked four days of sailing on April 14, 1912 when an iceberg hit the vessel, south of Newfoundland. It was 11: 40 pm (GMT).  The hull plates buckled inward on the starboard side and opened five of her 16 water-tight compartments to the sea. Just before 2:20 am, the ship broke up and sank, with over a thousand people still on board. Those in the water died within minutes because of the freezing temperature.

 

Realizing in time the gravity of the situation, the shipping magnate and chairman of the liner, J Bruce Ismay, rescued himself instead of rescuing those who have placed their trust and money with him. The rest of his life, he lived as a recluse, ostracized by the society. Many of the victims were émigrés from Europe, seeking a better life in America, and most of those who survived lost everything and had to begin life from scratch.  

  

In a saga of adventure, Captain Rostron of Carpathia sailed 58 miles in three hours and a half through an iceberg-ridden route, halting and diverting to avert a shipwreck, to rescue the 710 survivors from their lifeboats.  

The most colourful personality among the survivors was the much interviewed and photographed Molly Brown.  The 7-year-old Eva Hart, perhaps the youngest survivor, recalls her mother’s comments: I don’t like this ship because a vessel called unsinkable was flying in the face of God. The Shipbuilder magazine (1911 edition) described the Titanic ``practically unsinkable’’ because of its water-tight doors when closed would permit not a drop of water.

As a background, it must be noted that Greenland is a kind of huge ice factory with about 20 iceberg producing glaciers. Glaciers are formed from snow, accumulating for thousands of years. The glacial ice thus formed moves slowly as a kind of viscose ice river trekking to the ocean. And the break-away ice, we call icebergs.  

In the final analysis, the speed (22 knots) at which Captain Edward John Smith raced the ship through a known ice-field in the dark waters, egged on by Ismay, in spite of three iceberg warnings, is reckoned as the primary cause of the disaster. It was precisely the time when rivals were competing for high-speed vessels, and the success of her sisters, Olympic and Britannic, gave her their share of false confidence. And some even blame First Officer William Murdoch for the tilt he ordered just minutes after they spotted the iceberg. A tilt in the opposite direction would have saved the ship, they maintain. 

 

On that fateful night, the Achilles’ heel of Titanic was exposed: the ship was not nimble enough to avoid an iceberg. In What Really Sank the Titanic, the authors claim that it was not the steel that was weak but the rivets, the all-important metal pins that hold the steel hull plates together.

In 1985 when the remains of the Titanic were finally located 2.5 miles down on the ocean bottom, it opened a new world of Titanic literature, Titanic movies, and Titanic museums.  

The exit of Columbia, with Kalpana Chawla and six other astronauts, was much more dramatic in that tragedy snatched one of the greatest moments of history! Those who came to celebrate remained to mourn.  It is widely known that when a spacecraft enters the earth’s atmosphere from outer space, it generates enormous heat that could explode the aircraft. Yet that is what happened to the spaceship that NASA launched, without adequate unmanned experiments and safety tests. Cost cutting on safety always cut short human lives that are treated as guinea pigs.

People’s idea of the universe was once so primitive that they thought gods and goddesses were up in the sky. They sent incessant rains for 40 days that the whole earth was destroyed, except very few. When humans began to muster enough confidence, which means the few became many, they decided to challenge the gods and punish them forever so that people on earth are not at the mercy of gods and goddesses. 

So a magnificent building programme was launched that would one day reach the heavens. They built and built but their ideas did not match. Out comes mortar when steel was needed, out came a pillar when bricks were needed. Something went wrong with their planning because there were too many builders. The building that was supposed to reach the sky halted in the mid-air. They called it Babel and blamed the gods. 

    

Three stages of human civilization, yet the same fatal flaw!