RMS Titanic

Ninety-five years have passed since the Royal Mail Steamship Titanic slid forever beneath the waves of the Atlantic, taking with her some fifteen hundred innocent souls for whom everything had been absolutely normal less than three hours before they died. Titanic's story stands unique among maritime disasters for a bizarre mix of reasons. She was on her first commercial voyage and she was the pride of her fleet, the triumphal flagship of her opulent age. Her passengers placed absolute confidence in her, unable to begin to envisage the shattering disillusionment that lay in wait. She carried the torch of corporate human endeavour; the hopes and aspirations of a humanity riding on the crest of a wave of Victorian and Edwardian progress. But, hurled as she was like an overweight speedboat at dead of night into an ice field of menacing scale, she was cast into a chain of events that her designers could not have foreseen.

Now Titanic sits gracefully at the foot of a gentle slope, some two miles down, off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Her wreck was discovered by Bob Ballard too many years ago for children to remember, and since then she has been the subject of movies, documentaries, books... and an internet newsgroup, alt.history.ocean-liners.titanic.

I have a keen fascination for Titanic and, eager to meet up with like-minded enthusiasts, I started to post on that forum some years ago. And then I stopped. And this is why.

I had thought I would meet (among others) people like me, who wanted to discuss Titanic, talk about what happened to her and those aboard her, learn from one another, and explore the hitherto unexplained. One question that particularly interest me was the attitude displayed by many toward the wreck itself. There is a popular and vocal lobby that would outlaw all invasive exploration of the wreck, out of a sense of 'respect' for those who lost their lives that awful night in 1912. To a point I can see this, but I see also glaring inconsistencies. After a tragic air disaster, with horrific loss of life, do we leave the twisted fragments of the aircraft forever undisturbed on the mountainside, out of 'respect' for the souls who perished? Of course we don't. We clear up the mess and examine the bits of aircraft to establish the cause of the disaster. Even if that means cutting up the aircraft parts.

No-one would seek to stop French and Belgian farmers earning an honest living by ploughing up the battlefields of the First World War. Daily, old ordnance and human remains are brought accidentally and inevitably to the surface, reminding us starkly that any repeat of such insanely wasteful slaughter must at all costs be avoided. Yet no-one claims that the Somme should be declared a no-go area out of 'respect' for the thousands upon thousands of young men who were cut to pieces for nothing at all.

What, then, makes Titanic so different? I believe it has something to do with the seven decades for which she was unseen by humankind. I believe that something in us feels that her re-discovery has spoiled the game. That she was somehow taken from us as a punishment for our human arrogance, and that she now belongs out of the reach of humankind. That by finding her, and by probing her for her secrets, we are somehow not playing fair.

This viewpoint, argued as above, I expounded on alt.history.ocean-liners.titanic, and I was astonished at the result. A significant number of regular correspondents reacted as though they had been personally attacked. Not only did they refuse to contribute constructively to the honest and open discussion I wished to stimulate; they resorted to an ad hominem attack on me as poster. It was popularly agreed (but never rationally argued) that I was a troublemaker who showed no respect for those died aboard Titanic.

After a great deal of pondering I believe I now know what motivated (and probably still motivates) those people to behave as they did. As long-time members of the newsgroup they feel a kind of ownership, not only of Titanic herself but of the enormous emotive aura with which she has come to be suffused. Any kind of rational dissection of the issues risks puncturing the veil of exclusive inward-looking obscurantism, and might just expose the shallow platitudes that abound in that newsgroup for what they are.

I must add that there are also polite, civilized posters on alt.history.ocean-liners.titanic and that I was privileged to converse with more than one of them. But even they failed to come up with any arguable reason why Titanic is different from any other site that has been visited by tragedy. They just declared the issue off limits, claiming that if I couldn't understand the difference then no-one could possibly explain it to me. When pressed, they resorted to ad hominem criticism which sidestepped the point.

The scale of the tragedy of that night is nothing less than colossal. Every one of those passengers and crew was a human being with a face and a smile and a warm hug and a past and love and feelings and loved ones and hopes and fears and problems and successes and anxieties and trivia and... and in the blink of an eye, the crack of steel rivets, the inrush of freezing water, the knives of bitter cold, and the vice of earsplitting pressure as the hull sank, all of that was snuffed out. And the lives of thousands more, the families, the close friends, were devastated beyond hope of redemption. All of that I can understand and perhaps begin, on a tiny scale that is almost an insult to the memory of those involved, to feel.

I resent the attitude of some of those who post on alt.history.ocean-liners.titanic. I resent their muscling-in on the tragic misfortune of Titanic's company. I resent their attempt to superpose their own bored pseudo-emotions onto a real, genuine cataclysm. I resent the implication that the tragedy belongs to them and that any attempt to discuss Titanic rationally is an insult to the departed and, by their own warped logic, an insult to the posters themselves.

So strongly do I feel this that I was moved to pen the following humble verse, in which Titanic's lost souls take up the tale.

Three score and thirteen years we lay
Beneath the ken of mortal soul
Beyond reach, ever locked away
From ev'rything warm, human, whole.

Cruel tragedy of epic scale
'Tis true, that night scarred many a mind,
From old to young came down the tale:
Our wreck, 'neath ocean deep, enshrined.

We stole, as down we fell from view
To crushing, freezing, tearing end,
The lives of those we loved, and who
Without us, cursed to live, remained.

Our lonely land inviolate
For long years cold, dark captive held
Through ages we could only wait
Revered, awed: and yet, expelled.

Somehow, they say, here we belong,
Debarred forever from life's glow.
To visit us would be quite wrong!
Nay, show respect! Leave well alone!

Fewer and fewer, they who knew
The parting torment, pain and grief,
'Til lately, we attract a new
Voyeur: an abstract kind of thief.

In history we took our place
(Though how we suffered, few can know)
Most contemplate that night with grace
But some would claim it for their own.

When once again light shone upon
Our wreck, and human heartbeats came,
These frauds, these do-good hangers-on
Cried, "Stop! We're out to spoil the game!"

Safe hid for years in waters deep
Our wreck, they felt, had now become
In some way theirs, to hold and keep
Apart from life's rich, vibrant hum.

Explorers, so they said, defiled
The sanctity of our repose.
"True caring folk," they coldly smiled,
"Would simply let her decompose."

You self-indulgent pushers-in;
You parasites on what we shared,
Go take a walk! Please pack it in!
You'd come and find us if you cared.

Your only thought is for yourselves
Your halos, polished daily, shine
With smug, complacent tone that tells
The others, "Hands off! Mine, mine, mine!"

Seduced by glam'rous tragedy
You cheaply seek to buy a share
By laying claim, vicariously,
To moral high ground, deep down there.

Perhaps your lives are too bereft
Of real subjects for your tears.
Instead, you hit out, right and left,
At those who would roll back the years.

Come, Ballard, Cameron, everyone!
Pray lighten once again our gloom!
Let us back in! Let us back on
Life's roundabout! We're just like you!

The world should see where we were cast
Against our will for years in tens.
The sanctimonious naysayers last;
First place to those with common sense.

Titanic is a ship no more.
A treasure-house of secrets, she
Is yours to see, touch, feel, explore
She's nothing left for such as we.

We cannot take material things
Where we have gone, nor would we seek
To mar the thrill discovery brings
For one and all, where life still beats.

Possessiveness has no place here.
She's man's creation; man's to use
As he sees fit. We have no fear
Of anything that man might do.

Look long; look well, for quite soon now
The sea will end what she began
In 1912. This crumbling bow
Will merge forever into sand.