That's why it was a controversy for the longest time over whether or not the Titanic broke up as it sank, despite there being actual witnesses to survive and tell the story. And that's why it's a good example of how learning history is helpful because it shows just how much our understanding of events are shaped by external forces, by our biases and by our environment.
— @meimeimeixie, “What can learning history do to help me in the real world?”
I think Titanic is also cool for teaching history because it sits right in a couple of interesting boundaries. For one, it’s recent enough that there’s photographic evidence, and even video, and plenty of reporting.
But it’s also old enough that those records are incomplete, such that it is possible to still have a debate on, for example, whether her central screw had 3 or 4 blades. And, yeah—how the ship broke up, and how to resolve conflicting witness testimony about the precise order of the sinking.
Even in reexamination, it does not always become clear. Recently I’ve seen more folks argue that the flex of the Wellin davits could certainly have given the impression that the boats were overloaded even when they could’ve taken more passengers—not simply that people ignorantly chose to remain because they thought it was all no big deal. That seems like ripe grounds for speculation.
Over the years we’ve gained more insight into the process of her design and construction, and the context of British shipping at the time. Did Titanic not carry enough lifeboats because someone at White Star thought it made the decks look cluttered? No, probably not. Okay, fine, put that one in the “misconception” column.
But… more fundamentally, can you really say that Titanic didn’t carry enough lifeboats, when the undermanned and undertrained crew couldn’t manage to launch the ones they had over the course of the ship’s agonizingly slow sinking? The second of her two emergency cutters, designed to be lowered at a moment’s notice, went into the water only a half-hour before Titanic herself did.
Well There’s Your Problem’s two-part, very long episode on Titanic (Part 1; Part 2) is still in my opinion their best work, much credit to guest Kyle Hudak. One thing it does brilliantly—and not even always explicitly!—is clearly present the case that Titanic was, in many ways, not special. It was an engineering disaster that can be analyzed like any other, at a time period when such a disaster was an inevitability that Titanic happened to be on the wrong side of.
This sticks in one’s craw, because there is so much there that makes it so enticing. How could it be of equal importance to, I dunno, RMS Empress of Ireland, or PS General Slocum or “any other” shipwreck of the era? What of the story? Surely it must be sui generis—why else would we keep talking about it?
Was Ismay a coward or a scapegoat? Could the Californian have made a difference, or was Lord’s inaction that night inexcusable but also irrelevant? Was Titanic truly thought of as unsinkable, or is that a myth? Or is it a myth that it’s a myth that Titanic was thought of as unsinkable? What does it mean that we, today, think of it as an inextricable part of the Titanic that she was seen that way?
That is the second intersection. Titanic is interesting because it is an open and obvious mixture of reality and lore. And I don’t just mean curses or conspiracy theories about swapped ships and insurance fraud. I mean it helps show how our sense of major events is often a constructed one. Like I said about Balto and the Serum Run:
the past was fact; history is fiction—and it has authors
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Titanic is like White Noise’s “Most Photographed Barn in America”—that its importance is a consequence of us seeing it as important, a consequence which obscures our ability to actually understand the ship as an object. But it is a historical event that has never been separable from the human stories of its destruction.
Not just the literal stories of survivors, which @meimeimeixie does a good job presenting as evidentiary context. Here I mean more the larger and less intimate stories of the day, for which the ship became immediately useful, and in which it was immediately cast. The fact is that Titanic sank. The history of that sinking is not objective, and does not exist in a vacuum.
So much of what we have internalized about “The Titanic” is narrative. Narrative about class, about engineering, about Man’s Hubris, about capitalism and the profit motive. But that was always the case. The first blockbuster Titanic film debuted on May 16, 1912, about exactly a month after the ship sank. It has always been part of popular culture.
And it has always consumed popular culture.
Just before midnight on the 22nd of January, 1906, the SS Valencia, bound from San Francisco to Seattle, struck a reef southwest of Vancouver Island. Her captain tried to drive the stricken ship ashore, and she grounded less than a hundred yards from land.
The crew put off lifeboats in a panic. Out of seven lifeboats, they launched six. Three flipped over as they were being lowered. Two capsized when they hit the water, and the other disappeared. Just over two years earlier, SS Clallam had also run into trouble, in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. They also launched lifeboats, which also foundered; 56 aboard died. The only survivors were those who remained on the ship.
So there was some reason to stay aboard, although everyone who remained on Valencia would eventually perish: either 99 or 100 people, including all the women and children. She is, perhaps, the most famous ship in the “Graveyard of the Pacific.” They say that there were ghostly apparitions of lifeboats manned by skeletons. They say that her form appeared in the smoke pouring from the funnels of other ships.
Perhaps you may not have heard of her. But people in 1912 would’ve. And specifically, they would’ve recalled hearing the story of the last of her seven lifeboats being launched, and what the only survivors of the ship recalled. The same story ran in countless papers starting around the 26th of January, 1906, but let’s pick one from Birmingham, England because it’s succinct:
The Central News San Francisco correspondent telegraphs:—The “Examiner” to-day publishes the account given by an eye-witness, who was on board one of the rescue steamers, of the closing scene on board the Valencia, which was wrecked on Saturday on the coast of Alaska. The wreck was sighted with 25 survivors, five of them women, clinging to the fore topmast, and those on board the rescue ship said the mast collapsed, carrying the little band into the sea. They were singing “Nearer, my God, to Thee,” when they disappeared [emphasis mine]
Did the Titanic’s band play that hymn as their own ship sank? Obviously, we’ll never know for certain. Some survivors claimed so; others denied it. That said, mentions of the hymn and the Valencia were being printed in the several-day-span between its sinking being known and RMS Carpathia docking in New York on April 18th with the surviving Titanic passengers and their actual stories, so it was clearly in the public consciousness.
And it was something that newspapermen of 1912 found as evocative as they had six years earlier, because it showed up in headlines the same way. Now it is a thing people know about the sinking (or perhaps they know that the last song might have been “Autumn”), but neither its initial reporting nor its tight subsequent attachment to the Titanic story emerged organically from the accounts of survivors. It was a good story.
Titanic is a good story. History is full of those, and Titanic is a wonderful way of worrying the threads of those narratives and how they come together in the first place.
(…It is also at the intersection of “people who are into history” and “very intense people,” I guess. I am not a Titanic historian, in case that wasn’t obvious. If it seems like I might be, rest assured I have definitely done some research—not mentioned here; nothing I say here is controversial—that I am nowhere near confident enough to go anywhere close to Encyclopedia Titanica with because I am pretty certain they would eat me alive XD)