Logan Marshall - The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters

First published in 1912

First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2016

Introduction 2016 by Skyhorse Publishing

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas

Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-244-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-888-9

Printed in the United States of America

THE TITANIC

The largest and finest steamship in the world; on her maiden voyage, loaded with a human freight of over 2,300 souls, she collided with a huge iceberg 600 miles southeast of Halifax, at 11.40 P.M. Sunday April 14, 1912, and sank two and a half hours later, carrying over 1,600 of her passengers and crew with her.

CAPTAIN E. J. SMITH

Of the ill-fated giant of the sea; a brave and seasoned commander who was carried to his death with his last and greatest ship.

To the 1635 souls who were lost with the ill-fated Titanic, and especially to those heroic men, who, instead of trying to save themselves, stood aside that women and children might have their chance; of each of them let it be written, as it was written of a Greater OneHe Died that Others might Live

I stood in unimaginable trance

And agony that cannot be remembered.COLERIDGE

He that will not sail till all dangers are over must never put to sea .

Thomas Fuller

Human errors.

Design errors.

Hubris.

Arrogance.

An iceberg.

These are some of the reasons why the RMS Titanic sank. But there are more than three million shipwrecks in the waters of the world. So why is the Titanic the most famous wreck of all time?

The sinking of the Titanic was the line of demarcation between the Gilded Age and Modernity. In Titanic: The Musical , theres a song called Ladys Maid, and in it, the three Kates sing about coming to America where the streets are paved with gold. Sure, its a clich now, but at the beginning of the century, with immigration a vigorous, bustling endeavor that was actually embraced, that was the thinking of people traveling to America on ships like the Titanic .

The sinking was a global wake-up call that forced the world to ask the question, Are we humans not as magnificent as we think we are?

Not enough lifeboats. No PA or alarm system. No lifeboat drill. Ignoring ice warnings. A third of the 900-member crew hired last minute. Watertight compartments that werent.

These contraventions of safety, protocol, and design were, for the most part, ignored. And then the Titanic sank, and the White Star Line speedily went about rectifying these dangerous floutings of maritime safety.

There were hearings on both sides of the Atlantic, and one hundred years later, we have found the wreck, visited it many times, salvaged it, and there have been hundreds of books written about the disaster.

One of the first was this volume, The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters by Logan Marshall. Marshall, an editor at Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, did an extraordinary job researching, interviewing, and writing about a disaster that had taken place only months before his book was published.

And its all here: the notable passengers, the sumptuous luxuriousness of the ship, then the largest moving vessel on Earth, the legendary storiessome of which are certainly apocryphal in hindsightincluding Captain Smiths final words, the band playing Nearer, My God To Thee, First Officer Murdochs suicide, and oft-heroic deeds by both passengers and crew alike.

The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters is one of the more important books about the disaster and, until Walter Lords 1955 classic, A Night To Remember , served as a major source for details about the sinking of the ship Titanic .

Granted, there are discrepancies in the book, particularly regarding firsthand reports recounted by the author. He states with certainty Captain Smiths last words, when today, after other remembrances have long surfaced, we know only one thing with certainty: we cannot be confident regarding what were Captain Smiths final words. Marshall also does not seem to know that the ship broke into two parts; he has a section titled Titanic Stood Upright, which is true, but now we know that the great ship then snapped in half, each piece sailing down to the ocean floor separately. He states that the ship went under with a quiet, slanting dive, but in his defense, this was the prevailing belief until Dr. Ballards discovery of the wreck in 1985. (Although it must be noted that a surviving crewmember did testify at one of the hearings that the ship broke in two, but his story was not believed and quickly dismissed.)

But these inconsistencies are essentially irrelevant. What is told in The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters is akin to breaking news: Some details may be incorrect but the overall benefit of having such a timely account is well worth taking the book seriously and giving it due consideration in the library of tomes about the Titanic . Any book written contemporaneously with a great event is bound to have things in it that will later be corrected. But lets face it: wouldnt a book written by someone in the audience when Lincoln was assassinated be a fascinating read? And Marshalls book is precisely that.

The tone of the book is somewhat antiquated with subheadings that tend toward the melodramatic: Pitiful Scenes of Grief, A Man in Hysterics, Noble-Hearted Band, to mention a few. Plus there was this paragraph, which we now know is undeniably in errorbut, again, was accurate and believed at the time:

The Titanic and her valuable cargo can never be recovered, said the White Star Line officials. Sinking in mid-ocean, at the depth which prevails where the accident occurred, said Captain James Parton, manager of the company, absolutely precludes any hopes of salvage.

Its inaccuracies notwithstanding, however, The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters , now over a century old, is a maritime history classic.

Its somewhat odd to say that there is romance in the Titanic story (and Im not talking about the movie, although that certainly contributed to the obsession), and acknowledge that the world has been ensorcelled by the tragedy since 1912.

But its true. The story of people spending their life-savings to come to America, only to die at sea, often alone, and likely waiting until the last moment to lose hope is heartbreaking. Someone will come! Someone will save us! Im too young to die! What happened to my children? My husband? My brother?