Every few years or so, I become what I like to call “Titanic Brained”. I start obsessively learning the details of this ship that bumped some ice on its first voyage. And I’ll start telling you, “Boat 7 was the first boat to launch,” and “Boat 15 almost crushed boat 13” and “Collapsible Boat B went upside down” until people say, “Could you please stop saying the word boat so much?”
I think what grips my imagination about the Titanic so much is the paradox of how everybody knows about the Titanic, and yet nobody knows about it. People in general know a lot of “facts” about the Titanic, which are basically inaccuracies that they cobbled together from the films “A Night To Remember” and “Titanic”. While those are the two most historically accurate Titanic films ever made, they do contain a few inaccuracies, exaggerations, and deliberate breaks from the actual history for the sake of crafting a story, and sadly, despite all the accuracy, people have an unfortunate tendency to remember the inaccurate stuff.
The idea I’ll be discussing today, is that the tragic story of the Titanic contains a lesson about humanity’s hubris. I’m not saying humanity isn’t capable of hubris, but what I am saying is that the story of the Titanic is not about that. If there was a lesson to be learned from the story of the Titanic, I would say it’s, sometimes bad shit happens Timothy.
Why Timothy, you could slip in the shower tomorrow, and that could be the end of you. And do you know what people would say Timothy? They’d say, “AHHHHHH the hubris! Timothy tried to steal fire from the gods by thinking he could clean himself everyday using running water, and now, Timothy is dead! AHHHHHHHHHHHHH the hubris AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!”
Perhaps that’s why people find the idea that the Titanic has a “lesson” comforting. There’s something unsettling about the idea of 1500 souls being taken from us, in such a horrific manner (freezing to death is in my top ten of ways I don’t want to go), and, it’s just a bad thing that happened, like if you were just sitting down in a park, enjoying the sunshine, and all of a sudden an asteroid hit you and you died.
But wait a second, wasn’t there quite a few mistakes that were made that led to the Titanic’s downfall? Up to a point yes, and it’s only right that lessons were learned, but, the reason it seems so obvious to us now, is because we have the benefit of hindsight. Of COURSE Nigel shouldn’t have gone to that park when an asteroid was about to hit, what was he thinking? The hubris! So it’s very easy to say DUH, have enough lifeboats, but my argument is that, given how previous maritime tragedies had played out, this would not have been as obvious as you would think.
Why Didn’t The Titanic Have Enough Lifeboats?
This one seems very pants on head obvious to us today. And I’m not saying there weren’t people who weren’t aware of the problem. There was a book written called Futility, Or Wreck Of The Titan, about a ship, colliding with an iceberg, and it didn’t have enough lifeboats.
https://everything.explained.today/The_Wreck_of_the_Titan%3a_Or%2c_Futility/
Hang on, a story, about a ship, called the Titan, that struck an iceberg and didn’t have enough lifeboats? Doesn’t this prove author Morgan Robertson was psychic? Why yes actually, or he just knew a lot about ships and was able to craft a story based on that.
So I’m not saying that nobody was aware of the problem, but my argument is that the idea that ships should have enough lifeboats wasn’t as supremely and undeniably obvious as you might think it is. Because, in a heavy storm, that’ll dash a wooden lifeboat to pieces with ease, having enough lifeboats is of no help to you at all.
The SS Atlantic
Before the Titanic, the biggest shipping disaster for the White Star Line was the SS Atlantic. This ship struck a rock near Nova Scotia, during a horrific storm, resulting in the loss of at least 535 people.
Do you know what didn’t make even the slightest difference to people’s survival in this tragedy? The lifeboats. There weren’t enough lifeboats for everyone, as was the style at the time, but the lifeboats that were there didn’t even save one single person. Because you see, during a storm, and storms were how a lot of ships went down, the Titanic was a much more unusual way for a ship to meet its end, your chances were much better staying on the ship than in getting in the lifeboats. Those who got in one of the lifeboats on the SS Atlantic, all died, when the boat was torn to pieces by the storm. The only real chance you had was to stay on the ship as long as possible.
Those who survived the SS Atlantic did so by climbing onto the rigging, railings and masts and clinging on for dear life. Eventually, a fairly ingenious method of rescue was devised. Ropes were tied from the ship to the nearby Golden Rule Rock, and passengers and crew were then able to swim to Golden Rule Rock while holding onto the rope.
So this is the information that the White Star Line is working with. The SS Atlantic was arguably the Titanic of its day, a highly technologically advanced, highly luxurious ship that was cruelly taken by the sea. If you lived at the time, would you reasonably conclude that more lifeboats were the answer? I don’t think you would. What I think really saved lives that night, was that the ship sank slowly enough that the passengers, crew, and the residents of Meagher’s island and other nearby communities, were able to strategize an escape plan. The lesson to be taken from the SS Atlantic would not have been, “there weren’t enough lifeboats.” So from such a tragedy as the SS Atlantic, you would be likely to take the lesson, “Build a ship that won’t sink, or failing that, a ship that will sink very slowly, so there is ample time to effect a rescue.” And that’s the kind of thinking that went into the Titanic.
The Titanic WAS The Lifeboat
It may seem ironic to say the Titanic was one of the safest ships on the water at the time, but I believe this to be true, it’s just that, on that fateful night, the ship was the victim of absolutely catastrophic bad luck. The ship was equipped with 16 watertight compartments, and it could float with any three of them breached, or with specific combinations of four of them breached.
However, the Titanic’s Achilles heel was that it could not float with five breached (in fact, six compartments were breached by the iceberg.) With six compartments flooded, the ship’s bow was pulled down very low in the water, which allowed the water the opportunity to get into the seventh compartment, pulling it down lower, allowing the water to get into the eight compartment, and so on and so forth. It’s actually explained quite well in both A Night To Remember and Titanic. To point out two inaccuracies, In A Night To Remember I find it VERY unlikely that Captain Smith believed the Titanic, or any ship, was unsinkable, and Titanic plays into the “Ismay was a villainous villain” trope, but I think both films explain very well the physics of why the ship sank.
So the ship could float with three, or in some circumstances four, watertight compartments flooded. There will never be a scenario where ships will sink zero percent of time, there will always be situations where a colossal amount of bad luck is at play. Think of the highly specific things that had to go wrong that night.
- An iceberg was spotted, and the ship couldn’t turn fast enough to avoid hitting it.
- Six of its compartments were breached.
- Despite the ship sinking relatively slowly, taking two hours and forty minutes to sink, nobody came to the rescue.
This doesn’t sound to me like a lesson about humanity’s hubris, this sounds like a lesson about how sometimes no matter what you do and how you prepare, you will have a really, really bad day. What were the odds that in the Atlantic ocean, with ships regularly travelling from Europe to the United States, no ship would be able to arrive on time? And yet, that’s what happened.
What If There Had Been Enough Lifeboats?
Despite the fact that previous sinkings, such as the SS Atlantic, showed that lifeboats could be completely ineffective in a sinking, shouldn’t they have had enough, just incase? That’s the argument I’d make. My argument isn’t “They should have had enough lifeboats because it was blindingly obvious that this was a good thing” my argument is, “They should have had enough lifeboats because of the one in a million chance that they could be effective in a disaster.” But here’s the funny thing about it. Had there been enough lifeboats, there would have still been a colossal loss of life. I reckon more people would have been saved, but I think it would have been maybe an extra one hundred, maybe an extra one hundred and fifty at most. And sure, if they saved even one extra life they would have been worth having. But what a lot of people don’t realize about the sinking of the Titanic is, there simply wasn’t enough time to launch all the boats they had, let alone any extra boats. Look at this scene from A Night To Remember.
So what happened here? What happened was that the ship was almost gone, and the crew desperately tried to launch Collapsible Boat B as the Titanic disappeared beneath their feet. In the panic to launch the boat, they accidentally flipped it upside down. There was no time to flip the boat over again and launch it properly, and it simply floated off the ship, and, fortunately, despite being upside down, saved a few lives. An upside down boat in the freezing north Atlantic is still more precious than gold in that scenario.
A similar thing happened with Collapsible Boat A. I found this handy video of various depictions of Collapsible Boat A in various films.
These clips illustrate how the ship was practically gone as they tried to launch this boat. Indeed, it almost went down with the ship, taking on a fair bit of water, meaning the occupants of this boat had to survive as best they could, while surrounded by freezing water despite being lucky enough to have made it to a lifeboat.
So that’s the bizarre thing about the Titanic story. It’s become the posterchild for why ships should have enough lifeboats, and while they should have, I’m not sure this lesson is even applicable to the Titanic. In the context of this disaster, all that would have happened was most of the boats would have sunk along with the ship, there being no time to launch them.
Why Has The Titanic Been Immortalized In the Way It Has?
The Titanic was a tragedy that really became a part of our collective memory, despite being not the first and not last ship that sank. The circumstances of the SS Atlantic sinking are even vaguely similar, one of the finest ships in the world meeting a really cruel end. The sinking of the SS Arctic is a grim tale of how people’s darker nature can take over in a time of crisis, here’s an excellent video on that subject.
More recently you had the Costa Concordia, a tale of how, sometimes the captain of a seafaring vessel is a colossal prick. During the sinking of the Costa Concordia, Captain Schettino got himself to safety in a lifeboat, and outright refused to assist in the rescue of the passengers and crew. Here is an entertaining recording of the Italian coastguard tearing him a new one for his callous disregard for the people he was supposed to protect:
Fortunately Schettino served prison time for his negligence. The second most famous sinking is probably the Lusitania, torpedoed and beneath the waves within eighteen minutes, with the ship listing at such an angle that launching the boats was an extremely difficult task.
So there have been many sinkings throughout human history that are very interesting, very tragic, and often, very uplifting tales of people willing to risk their lives to save others. So why did the Titanic become immortalized as no other doomed ship before or since has been? I think this is for two reasons. Firstly, the irony of an extremely safe ship (it’s a myth that anyone thought it was unsinkable), sinking, not just the fact that it sank at all, but sank on its first voyage. I think the second reason it was so well remembered is that a lot of “important” people died on that voyage. Now, of course the lives of these people were of no more worth than the Third Class passengers who died that night, but sadly, we live in a society that reveres the rich. So the Titanic was remembered as the tragedy that killed John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim and Isador and Ida Strauss. And I think that’s a big part of it. If a car crash killed 3 “ordinary” people, it wouldn’t be as well remembered as a car crash that killed Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Bill Gates. That’s the world we’re living in.
Hubris Is A More Comforting Explanation For The Bad Things In The World
If hubris was the explanation for why the Titanic sank, well, that’s something you can work with. You could explain to the people involved that their ego has gotten out of control. You could try and replace those in charge with other people of a more reasonable temperament There would be something you could do if it was hubris. But, what can you do about, things just, randomly going wrong, in ways nobody could have anticipated? Nothing really. And that’s, very scary.
I think another part of the puzzle is, people like to think that they’re so much smarter than people who suffer from the notable disadvantage of, having existed before the Titanic sank. I’m so clever! I could have easily anticipated that the ship would strike an iceberg, that six compartments would be flooded, that a full complement of lifeboats would be needed, that some sort of method would have to be devised to launch them much faster, and that in the body of water existing between Europe and the United States, not one ship would manage to arrive in time despite having 2 hours forty minutes in which to do so. I am the smartest!
But there’s something else I wish was explainable by human hubris. And that’s climate change. I wish it was because of utter foolishness that our leaders were destroying the planet. I wish there was a stupidity involved that could be reasoned with. I wish it was down to their own hubris. (Can we make the amount of times I say “hubris” into a drinking game?”
But it’s not. The science is very clear, those in power know what they’re doing. They haven’t been blindsided by their own egos. They just know they’re old enough, and rich enough, to escape the damage to the climate, while the rest of us have to face the consequences.
So before you climb on top of a mountain and yell at the top of your lungs, “OH THE HUBRIS OF MAN!” stop and think. Maybe we’d be better off if more things in this world COULD be explained by human arrogance. So here’s to hubris, which while bad, is at least slightly better than the alternatives!
Ponderings Of An Autist 