This month, much of the world will observe the centennial of the sinking of the great White Star ocean liner, the Titanic. So much has been written about this dreadful event, most notably Walter Lord’s “A Night to Remember” (1955), that it is difficult to imagine there is much more to be said, yet John Maxtone-Graham says it. He is an octogenarian who has been sailing ocean liners for ages and writing about them for four decades in about two dozen books, the first of which, “The Only Way to Cross” (1972), remains his best known and is still in print, proof that nostalgia for these great ships remains powerful. “Titanic Tragedy” may join it in popularity, not merely because the public’s thirst for anything about the Titanic seems to be unslaked but because Maxtone-Graham puts some interesting twists on a much-told story.
For me, as for millions of others, that story has lost little if any of its visceral appeal. It is an oddity of human nature that while we are somehow able to come to grips with calamities of almost incomprehensible dimensions (the millions murdered by Stalin and Mao, for example), comparatively minuscule ones (the 1,500 who died when the Titanic went down, the 3,000 killed on 9/11) leave us almost numb with grief. Perhaps it is because in them we can see individual humans (the musicians playing on the sinking Titanic, the people leaping to their deaths from the twin towers) rather than an indistinguishable mass. Whatever the explanation, the Titanic catastrophe continues to haunt us.
In “Titanic Tragedy,” Maxtone-Graham explores several aspects of the case to which perhaps insufficient attention has been paid: the role of wireless telegraphy in enabling a Cunard liner, the Carpathia, to rescue 703 people from the Titanic’s lifeboats; the class distinctions that persisted during and after the sinking, bringing rescue and in some cases glory to the privileged but neglect or death to those from the lower orders; the questionable behavior of the ship’s allegedly heroic captain, Commodore Edward John Smith, and the decidedly unheroic behavior of Stanley Lord, captain of a ship in the vicinity, the Californian, who did nothing even though men aboard his ship had spotted rockets fired by the Titanic in hopes of attracting attention; and the stories of little-known individuals that shed light on various aspects of the tale.
The “wireless miracle” of Guglielmo Marconi was only a few years old when the Titanic set sail in April 1912, but by then “almost every North Atlantic steamer had been equipped with wireless and Marconi operators were stationed aboard nearly a thousand of them.” The telegraphers aboard the Titanic were 25-year-old Jack Phillips and his 22-year-old deputy, Harold Bride. Both men were intelligent and dedicated, and the equipment on the Titanic and its sister ship, the Olympic, “was state of the art, the world’s most powerful.” The chief shortcoming was that, though Phillips and Bride had “a telephone line connected to the ship’s switchboard, there was, curiously, no direct communication with the bridge.”
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