A Sea Story *

October 13, 1996

* Or, perhaps more accurately, an I SEE!! story

When the Titanic sank after hitting the iceberg in April 1912, I was about seven months old. I grew up with the stories of how brave the men were, standing stoically on deck, waiting to perish, as women and children climbed into the lifeboats. In the several movies made of this terrible tragedy,there was portrayal of a cowardly wretch of a man who dressed in women’s clothing in order to get into the lifeboat.

In the Oct. 14, 1996 issue of “The New Yorker,” John Updike reviewed the book, DOWN WITH THE OLD CANOE: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE TITANIC DISASTER. I found the article informative, stimulating and somewhat disillusioning about the legends that accumulated about this tragic sinking.

The book was stimulated by the discovery of the wreck in 1985, “three hundred and seventy miles southeast of Newfoundland and two and a half miles below the surface of the Atlantic. There is an unresolved dispute as to whether the wreck should be a “sacred resting place” or that there should be salvage of articles and relics to be sold at high prices (lumps of coal from the Titanic’s bins can be bought for twenty-five dollars each).

The “unsinkable” Titanic “at its launching became then the largest movable object ever made by man – eight hundred and eighty-two feet (nearly three football fields) in length, forty-six thousand tons in weight.”

The disaster brought in its wake not only sorrow at the tragedy but praise for the heroic males who gave up their lifeboat seats to women and children, extolled as “that Christian knightliness which seeks not its own, but the good of others.” “The
stories were glorification of the ruling class.” Furthermore these brave Christians were Anglo-Saxons, as proclaimed by the Atlanta Constitution:

“The Anglo-Saxon may yet boast that his sons are fit to rule the earth so long as men choose death with the courage they must have displayed when the great liner crashed into the mountains of ice, and the aftermath brought its final test.”

The difficulty with that fulsome praise is that it is just not true. Mark Twain once observed that “The very ink which all history is written is fluid prejudice.” The findings demonstrate that maxim to some degree at least.

“Of the first-cabin men, 31 percent survived, compared with 10 percent in second-class and 14 percent in steerage. In all, 60 percent of the first-cabin passengers lived, compared with 44 percent of the second cabin passengers and only 25 percent of the steerage passengers.”

Think about that – my father came to this country as a steerage passenger. Good thing for me, and you, my sons, daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren that he came on a different vessel some eight or ten years prior to the Titanic disaster. Incidentally, I remember him telling us that when he embarked from Sweden, he had with him three-dozen hard-boiled eggs which his mother had prepared for him. I surmise she did not trust steerage food for the son she was never to see again.

John Updike’s view goes into detail about how the romanticizing of the tragedy and the mythical heroic behavior of the men in first class reflected the class structures of the time. A Marxist thinker would make much of that. Walter Lord’s A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (1955) pointed out that “somehow the loss rate was higher for third-class children than first-class men.”

There are many provocative “ifs” and “only ifs” in the book and review concerning the ship, the voyage and the disaster.

Probably Biel’s book and Updike’s review will be criticized as “revisionist” history, casting doubts on the findings. But I believe the presentation of facts will be difficult to refute. Truth-seeking is, and always has been unpopular in most areas of human culture – economics, religion, politics, science – you name it.

In conclusion, I was reminded of the scene in Charles Dickens’ THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP (p. 466) where Brass is denouncing the despicable rogue, Quilp:

“If the truth has come out, as it plainly has in a manner that there’s no standing up against – and a very sublime and grand thing is Truth, gentlemen, in its way, though like other sublime and grand things, such as thunder-storms and that, we’re not always over and above glad to see it ....”