Titanic

Tonight, at 11:40 pm, will be the exact 100th year anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.

Actually, it will be the exact moment the massive luxury liner collided sideways with the iceberg. It sunk some two hours and 40 minutes after. But you don’t need me to rehash any of the facts. Most of us, I think, are aware of them, thanks in no small part to the work of James Cameron.

We watched a special on the Titanic last night on NatGeo. Cameron pulled together a group of twenty or so experts and debated the final events of that terrible night, based in part of the photographic evidence from dives to wreckage sight. Cameron himself made 33 dives (!) to that graveyard at the bottom of the northern Atlantic. It was entertaining and informative, and his fascination and passion with the subject was onhand for all to see (and admire, I must admit). The special ended with revised animated footage of the Titanic’s fate over those couple of hours.

I can understand that fascination and passion, but unfortunately I can’t share it. Whenever I see an animated Titanic break up and twist and glide two-and-a-half miles to the ocean floor, all I think of are the hundreds of innocent men, women, and, yes, children, trapped and dying within it. Therefore, I can’t smile with glee watching the Titanic’s mysteries unfold to be solved.

I did read wikipedia’s article on the sinking, and found it morbidly interesting. It’s here, if you’re so inclined. What a terrible, terrible, and utterly avoidable tragedy. In fact, one of the better segments of the Cameron special was a roundtable discussion of what they’d do if they were Captain Smith post-iceberg-impact. Ideas such as “spend the two hours tearing the deck apart to make more rafts” to “put all the inflatable vests down into the flooding holds for additional bouyancy” to “evacuate to the iceberg” to “steer backwards towards that mysterious ship on the horizon” were floated and debated. Good stuff.

It was mentioned that passageways to the lower decks, where third-class passengers resided during the voyage, were barred and locked, for fear of a mad rush to the insufficient numbers of lifeboats. If true, how heart-renderingly, horrifyingly vile. If me and my family were traveling on that ship that night, that’s where we’d be. Statistically, there would be a 66% chance my children would have perished, a 54% chance my wife would have, and an 84% chance I would not have made it. Of all the ways one could go that night, none are easy and none are preferable to any other (except, perhaps, to have been killed instantly in a boiler explosion).

So, pause a moment before bed tonight, and offer up a small prayer for the 1,514 innocent lives that were lost on this night, a hundred years ago.