My father took this photograph of the Queen Mary just before we boarded in late May,1956. I was 11. We returned from Europe on the Andrea Doria, in mid-June, her last completed trip to New York before she sank off of Nantucket in July, 1956.
No surprise that I’ve had a life-long interest in ship disasters and their histories. No one saw James Cameron’s “Titanic” more times in a theatre than pre-teens and yours truly. They were there for Leo. I was there for the ship.
On this 100th anniversary year of this disaster, I went to the 3-D version of Cameron’s “Titanic” which is the only 3-D movie I know that looks better without the glasses. Why James Cameron bothered to mess with trying to retrofit and wrangle this movie into 3D technology is beyond me. But, as it turns out, not even he can ruin his own movie. When I took off my glasses at some point for three reasons: wondering why the colors were so dull, distracting blurred foregrounds of heads and columns were bothering me, and, lastly, the constant irritation of the boundaries of the glasses limiting my view of the screen, I realized it looked better without the glasses!
I watched the final 45 minutes of the unraveling of this ship without complaint. Even if parts were blurry, the enormity of this tragedy was there on the screen, in spite of 3-D. His original film should have been re-released. But, hey, he didn’t ask my opinion.
The BBC has offered audio files of the wireless transmissions from the Titanic. They asked an “audio artist” to translate the transmissions into synthetic voices. They can be listened to here. I was astonished to hear the wireless operator upbraid another ship for interrupting him with a clear, ominous warning about icebergs and ice fields directly in their path. The ship reported they were stopped in the water. The wireless operator’s transmissions of boring first class passengers “Hi, how are you? I’m on the Titanic” messages (written before encountering the iceberg) were somehow more important? He not only told the ship to stop interrupting him but also never sent the message to the bridge. Other messages of ice sightings had been sent to the bridge, although none of them were in the same exact location as the Titanic.
When they did strike the iceberg and the Captain came down and told him to transmit SOS/CQD signal, he did stay at his post, transmitting the distress signals over and over again till after 2 AM. He had full knowledge that the ship was sinking from midnight on. In the minutes before she sank, he somehow managed to land into a collapsible life boat, but died from exposure before the Carpathia arrived on around daylight.
PBS has two programs. “Saving the Titanic” which focused on the engineers and boiler men (stokers) who managed to keep the lights powered on the ship right up until minutes before she sank. I had always wondered how that was possible. Now, I know. 50% heroism, 50% total ingenuity. None of them survived.
Another PBS program narrated by Len, a judge from Dancing with the Stars, I almost didn’t watch because…well, because it was narrated by Len, a judge from Dancing with the Stars.
What possibly could he tell me? Turns out, quite a bit. Click Here to watch it. He interviewed relatives of crew members as well as descendants from survivors. Stories I’ve never heard before.
Finally, I am still listening to audio files that the BBC has put on-line from interviews they have done over the years with survivors of the Titanic. They can be accessed here.
The anniversary is tomorrow. One first class woman describes being told to get to the lifeboats. She threw on her fur coat and before she left her stateroom, she locked all her trunks as well as porthole windows. She gave the keys to the steward telling him to keep a watch over her things when the ship was towed to shore. The steward told her to kiss her trunks goodbye.
That’s one way of saying it.
PS. I also read for the first time Charles Dickens account of his first ferociously unpleasant transatlantic voyage to Boston. He described the cramped cabin on this supposedly “luxurious” mail boat as “a hearse with windows”. He also described the horrible passage in such Dickensian terms and detail that I am surprised the another ship was built.
