Titanic: A Captivating Guide to the History of the Unsinkable Ship RMS Titanic, Including Survivor Stories and a Real Romance Story

Chapter 1 – A Predictable, Preventable Disaster

One of the saddest aspects of the tragedy of what happened to the Titanic and its passengers and crew is that it was so preventable. It wasn’t any one thing that caused the events of the night of April 14, 1912, but many of the problems that resulted in the death of over 1,500 people were known problems. Laws and actions that were not viewed as being problematic at the time, we now look back on today and wonder how the shipping companies were allowed to put the lives of so many people at risk. Many of the rules and safety regulations that we take for granted today are directly related to the most famous disaster on the sea.

Any expert of the ocean knew about the risks that were being taken by the companies that owned and operated ocean liners and shipping companies. They knew that if a disaster occurred, it would be impossible to save everyone on board a ship. There were drills for putting people in lifeboats and other safety precautions, but a sense of inevitability made it difficult for crew members and captains to be as objective as they should have been. Any person who worked on the ocean was already familiar with the potential problems and the worst-case scenario that could happen for any ship that went out to sea.

By the end of the 19th century, companies were working toward building increasingly larger ships and trying to provide a luxurious experience on passenger boats. This trend was exacerbated in the early years of the 20th century as companies pushed for larger and larger ships while meeting only the bare minimum safety requirements for passenger vessels on the ocean. One of the major problems was that the law did not take into account the likelihood of a disaster, particularly for ships that were in the middle of the northern Atlantic.

We will look into the shortcomings of the laws in the next chapter—for now it is enough to know that for anyone who was intimately familiar with ships and the laws at that period of time, the inadequacies of the laws were glaringly obvious.

Morgan Robertson – Analytical Author

As the son of the captain of a ship, Morgan Robertson had spent a large part of his life on the ocean. He started working as a cabin boy and sailed on various ships from 1866 to 1877. When he left the sea, Robertson had reached the position of first mate. Robertson became a diamond setter until his eyesight began to suffer, and then he returned to the ocean—this time only on paper. Though some things had changed, much of what he had learned while a seaman were the same, including the laws that were the greatest concern to all ships.

As a writer, Robertson wrote about what he knew best while engaging his readers in his yarns. Although he had been successful as a diamond setter, it didn’t lend itself to the kinds of fantastical stories that he could write if he were to focus on sea stories. Writing about realistic settings and problems, his stories followed possible events that he knew were real possibilities given how risky the current laws and trends were. Many of his works were short stories, but he did write several short books, including Futility, which would later be revised and renamed The Wreck of the Titan. This was one of two books that earned him the reputation for being a clairvoyant. Robertson naturally declined this title before he died in 1915 saying that it was his knowledge of life on the ocean that made it easy for him to accurately write a story that would eventually come to pass. In addition to writing a story that was eerily similar to the tragic events of the Titanic, he wrote a story that some say predicted the attack on Pearl Harbor. Like his story about a fictional ship named the Titan, Robertson’s story about a Japanese surprise attack on America was written based on past events and behaviors that were less well studied by Americans. The friction between the US and Japan was not new by the 1940s, and the Japanese preference for stealth was well documented during the Russo-Japanese War. Because they were a small island, stealth was essential for their success against large nations like China. Japan had also shown that they were very capable of taking on Western nations, and for someone like Robertson who was familiar with the ocean and how oceanic countries behaved, it likely seemed like an inevitability that a war would arise between Japan and the US.

Even more obvious to him was the risk that companies were taking with the lives of their passengers on the increasingly larger luxury vessels. The end result was a work of fiction that was as much a warning as it was a story.

Futility or The Wreck of the Titan

In 1898, Robertson penned Futility. The book was the story of a man who suffered after the sinking of the ship Titan, where he had been one of the members of the crew. The story includes the struggles that he faces both during the sinking of the ship and the years that come after it. The main character becomes an alcoholic and finally finds God. It includes a lot of events, including how the main character saved a child by slaying a polar bear.

The story was published 14 years before that night in April 1912, but after the worst known naval catastrophe, the book gained in popularity. It was republished and renamed The Wreck of the Titan. Robertson had never been particularly successful as a writer. However, following the maritime catastrophe, people began to notice all of the similarities between the book and the events of the Titanic.

The trend for ships was for them to be increasingly larger and more lavish. There were several companies competing for the business of passengers crossing over the Atlantic, and larger ships made the most sense for getting the most profit with the least effort. While the ships of this time were known for their well-appointed first-class accommodations, the focus was actually on those who were in steerage, the people immigrating to the US looking for more opportunities. There were far more people in this class than in first class. White Star Line was one of the largest British companies competing for this business. Unfortunately, all of the companies frequently only met the bare minimum requirements for safety (particularly the number of lifeboats onboard) to ensure that their expensive ships started to turn a profit as quickly as possible.

One of the most problematic aspects was that these ships were continually built to be larger and faster, but safety was not considered as important as speed and passenger count. All of this was already well-known to Robertson when he penned his most famous and prophetic book.

There are many similarities between the book entitled Futility and what happened to the Titanic. The first and most obvious similarity was the name of the ships—Robertson’s ship was called the Titan. This was in keeping with trends that are still common today though. Companies are prone to call their greatest achievements after something literary and well-known. The most famous NASA missions were named Apollo, after the Greek god, and resulted in the first humans walking on the moon. At the turn of the century, it was obvious that ships were getting bigger, and it was only a matter of time before companies began to name their ships after the largest creatures in Olympic myth, the Titans. Given that Robertson’s ship was the largest ever built, it was clearly a logical decision to call his fictional ship something that was likely to be used as the name of one of the real behemoth ships. While it is a little odd that it was the Titanic that ended up being the one of three ships that was in a collision, it was also the largest ship of its time, making it less prophetic and more logical, but no less tragic.

The sizes of the Titanic and the book’s ship Titan were also incredibly similar, within 25 meters in length. And they were both capable of reaching speeds over 20 knots which was far faster than ships at the end of the 19th century. Given that the ships were becoming increasingly larger and faster, it was fairly predictable that one would eventually strike an iceberg in the north Atlantic. Both the Titan and the Titanic were called unsinkable, but anyone who had spent years on the ocean knew that sinking was a risk that was taken every time a large, heavy ship traveled through the icy cold regions of the Atlantic. It was the public and those who had less knowledge of the sea who could be so blind to the risks inherent with traveling rapidly across the ocean without the ability to quickly turn. Icebergs could easily puncture