The sinking of the Titanic was unthinkable. The very idea was inconceivable. Yet, just three days into her maiden voyage, she struck an iceberg and was lost. It remains one of the most terrible chapters in the history of the sea.
There are dives down by the Salford docks where the old salts spend their days between sailings. To this day, they will swear that the Titanic was doomed long before she ever departed.
You see, as the Titanic was pulling away from the dock at Southampton, the immense suction of her propellers caused the vessel moored alongside her to snap its lines. That unmanned ship, the New York, broke free and drifted dangerously, attempting to follow the great liner. A serious collision was narrowly averted. Physicists refused to concede any mystery, chalking it up to hydraulics, but the old salts called it an omen.
An omen.
As the Titanic pulled out into the harbor and aimed her bow at the open sea, there was no cheering, no tooting of ships' whistles as was customary for a launch. The world's largest ship was setting out on her maiden voyage in an utter, eerie silence. Ship's officers explained there had been a simple mix-up in the timing of the departure. What the ordinary seamen called it, again, was an omen.
In Queenstown, another odd thing happened. By some quirk of impishness, one of the Titanic's stokers decided he wanted a breath of fresh air. The Titanic had four stacks, but one was a dummy funnel used for ventilation only. So, this stoker climbed up the inside of that funnel, all the way to the top, and peered out over the edge.
Now, that is all that happened. But to the highly superstitious seamen on the dock, seeing this unrecognizable, crooked, blackened face peering out over the rim of the funnel was another omen. And it was not a good one.
The Titanic was built at the Green Island shipyards of Harland and Wolff in Belfast. A Catholic priest was among the visitors who came to see The Floating Palace take shape. During his tour, the priest noticed that the workers had scrawled initials, names, and various words in chalk on the bulkheads. Then, on one of the hull plates on the starboard bow, he saw that some worker had scrawled a blasphemous phrase.
The priest was not amused. He asked that the profane words be erased immediately, but his escorts only chuckled at his concern. The priest warned of dire misfortune for a partnership inscribed in blasphemy. And still, the words on the hull of the starboard bow remained.
On the night of April 14, 1912, the Titanic was steaming across the Atlantic on her way to a record. Suddenly, the lookout reported an object about a mile ahead. At twenty knots, that doesn't allow much time to maneuver a ship of that size. There was time enough, however—except that on the bridge, nobody answered the phone.
The lookout kept peering into the murky darkness as the ship bore down on the huge object. You know what it was now: an iceberg. Again, he sounded the buzzer to the bridge. This time, he kept his finger on it until it was finally answered. But precious minutes had been lost.
The helmsman swung the wheel hard to starboard, converting a certain head-on crash into a sideswipe. But it was too late to avert a collision. The great ship lurched into the subsurface ice at an angle, her bottom ripped open. The water, which would weigh the Titanic to the bottom, came pouring in through the ruptured steel plates.
And in the hull, on the starboard bow, in one terrifying instant, the blasphemous words were finally erased.
Now you know the rest of the story.
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