The Titanic Tragedy Foretold: A Mini-Essay

     On a bitter April night, an eight-hundred-foot ship collided with an iceberg in the middle of the North Atlantic. Equipped with only twenty-four lifeboats, the massive vessel quickly foundered and took with her all but thirteen of the 3,000 souls aboard. Named Titan and touted as the largest and safest craft afloat, the ship’s sinking mortified the world. The tale, related in Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novella Futility, was published fourteen years before the Titanic tragedy and, with its striking similarities to the historic event, is regarded as one of the foremost examples of psychic premonitions surrounding Titanic’s sinking. It is not, though, the only case. From Celia Thaxter’s poem “A Tryst” (1872) and William T. Stead’s novel From the Old World to the New (1886) to Herman Melville's poem “The Berg” (1888) and Mayn Clew Garnett’s short story “The White Ghost of Disaster” (1912), several works of literature have presented stories of pernicious iceberg collisions. In all of the aforementioned texts, the fated encounter involves a massive ship (often the largest, safest, and most luxurious), human vanity which propels the vessel forward at break-neck speed through a dangerous ice field, a limited number of lifeboats (this scarcity is either present at the start of the voyage or caused after the collision damages most of the crafts), and a severe loss of life. 
     For some, such as Rustie Brown, these parallels to the Titanic disaster extend beyond mere coincidence and reinforce notions that her doomed maiden voyage was preordained, with each fictional tale a forewarning of potential tragedy which went unheard. For others, such as George Behe and Martin Gardner, the stories are not psychic predictions, but the authors’ keen understanding of the technological complacency which had consumed the era. After Germany entered the transatlantic race following the Naval Review at the Spithead roadstead in August of 1889, the competition reached a fevered pitch as shipping lines viciously fought to produce the largest and fastest ships. Regulators, particularly the British Board of Trade, were incapable of keeping pace and, out of frustration, fashioned generic standards (the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894, for instance, set lifeboat minimums to sixteen crafts for vessels over 10,000 tons). Bedazzled by progress, much of the world fed into the notion that these transatlantic behemoths were indestructible pinnacles of industrial might. For a small majority, the luster gave way to concern and the realization that inadequate safety regulations and a blind confidence in technology made perfect ingredients for disaster (in 1911, for example, Shipbuilder magazine commented “it makes one wonder if these new super liners might be too big to navigate properly”). Hence, according to Behe and Gardner, authors such as Robertson and Stead were not divinely inspired to warn of Titanic’s sinking, but simply tapping into a growing concern at the time. Brown and her peers contend that it’s a sound argument; however, they raise an intriguing rebuke: if these authors were using fictitious sea disasters to explore the dangers of outdated policies (especially the Merchant Shipping Act), why would each one select an iceberg collision? 

Works Referenced

Behe, George. Titanic: Psychic Forewarnings of a Tragedy. Wellingborough: The Aquarian Press, 1988. 

Brown, Rustie. The Titanic, the Psychic, and the Sea. Lomita, CA: Blue Harbor Press, 1982. 

Gardner, Martin. The Wreck of the Titanic Foretold? Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998.