“Titanic!” the Carpathia’s Captain Rostron wrote in his 1931 memoir. “Of all the remarkable incidents connected with the short life of that ship of destiny, not the least was her name. If you look in your dictionary, you’ll find: ‘Titans—A race of people vainly striving to overcome the forces of nature.’” As he looked back in 1931 and drew that single lesson from his encounter with history, it did not escape Rostron’s notice that he might have glimpsed the world to come.
Three decades after Rostron penned those words, Madeline Mellinger wrote to Walter Lord from the depths of Cold War politics, humanity’s first ascents into space, and the first signs that civilization might one day outstrip the ability to provide itself with food, power, and clean drinking water. “I hope you can find some light in this crazy, dark world,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder, as all thinking people must: Where will it all end?”
Compartmentalization. Time and again, compartmentalization builds complacency, kills humility, then fails to hold—from the Titanic and the Britannic through the Twin Towers to Fukushima. In the year of Fukushima and before the eve of the Titanic’s centennial, civilization itself seemed on the verge of compartmentalizing into increasingly isolationist factions whose leaders sought to further isolate themselves behind the illusory watertight bulkhead of the “nuclear deterrent.”
We are more fragile than we believe, but we are more powerful than we understand, and that is civilization’s onus. For an electronic civilization pregnant with promise and peril and standing on the precipice of either excelling or falling, nothing really does exist except a still unrealized interdependence.
And the living, and the yet to be born.
Notes
The Lord/Pellegrino file consists of approximately 725 pages of letters, memoirs, and other correspondence from Titanic survivors and their families with Walter Lord and myself, along with discussion notes about the survivor accounts as illuminated by discoveries during the various Titanic expeditions. In addition, the file contains approximately two thousand pages of expedition log notes and discussions with key people in this book, including Robert Ballard and the Cameron brothers, the Tullochs, Barbara Shuttle, Roy Cullimore, Tom Dettweiler, and Lori Johnston. In 2001, the file was copied to the British Maritime Museum, the Titanic Historical Society, and James Cameron’s historical research team. It is also being reproduced on Charlespellegrino.com (available for free download with a request that people make a donation to the Michael J. Fox Foundation or the Firefighters Burn Center). Below, the file is abbreviated as simply the L/P file, with page numbers and dates cited.
1. CONVERGENCE
On the origin and age of the ice field that drifted into the Titanic’s path: D. A. Meese et al., “The Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 Depth-Age Scale: Methods and Results,” Journal of Geophysical Research 102, no. C12 (1997): 26,411–26,423; M. De Angelis et al., “Primary Aerosol (Sea Salt and Soil Dust) Deposited in Greenland Ice during the Last Climatic Cycle: Comparison with East Antarctic Records,” Journal of Geophysical Research 102, no. C12 (1997): 26,681–26,698.
The Hudson Strait or Labrador Current carries ice from as far north as Baffin Bay. Greenland and Baffin Bay ice, near the very bottom of the ice sheet, is strewn with gravel and can exceed a hundred thousand years in age. The extreme calm of the water in the Titanic’s path was emphasized by Charles H. Lightoller, transcript of audiograph interview, Nov. 1, 1936, p. 1.
John William Thompson’s experience of the impact is contained in Wyn Craig Wade, Titanic: End of a Dream (New York: Penguin, 1979), 243–244. Charles Hendrickson reported his experience to the British Inquiry into the Loss of the Titanic, chaired by Lord Charles B. Mercey, May 9, 1912, pp. 116–117. Violet Jessop’s description is recorded in her memoir, Titanic Survivor (London: Sheridan House, 1997), 125–126. Laura Francatelli, in the neighboring room, wrote about similar shivering walls on page 1 of her letter from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, New York, to a family member named Mary Ann on Apr. 28, 1912, L/P file, pp. 433–437.
Albert Moss is recorded in Per Kristian Sebak, Titanic: 31 Norwegian Destinies (Oslo: Genesis Forlag, 1998), 28, 51, 59, 65, 75.
Conditions in the foremost boiler room at the moment of impact were reported in the British Inquiry, May 9, 1912, p. 116. The fire in the number 10 stokehold, the estimated temperature (1,300 degrees Fahrenheit), and the condition of the critical bulkhead were recorded by Fred Barrett, Charles Hendrickson, and Edward Wilding in the British Inquiry, May 7, 1912, pp. 57–59, 71, 122–123, and June 17, 1912, p. 528. What Barrett saw and did, the occurrence of impact just as he responded to the alarm, and the damage seen just two feet above the floor plates were recorded by Barrett in the British Inquiry, May 7, 1912, pp. 34, 57–58; American Inquiry, chaired by Senator Alden Smith, May 25, 1912, p. 1141; discussion with Walter Lord, Sept. 10, 1991, pp. 10–12, L/P file, pp. 96–98. Barrett reported the post-impact response of John (“Jack”) Shepherd and George Beauchamp in boiler room number 5 to the British Inquiry, May 7, 1912, p. 59.
Heating problems, which caused Norman Chambers, Charles Stengel, James McGough, Jack Thayer, and others to leave their portholes open (a factor that quickened the rate of the Titanic’s sinking), were discussed with Walter Lord in “Artifact,” series of discussion notes, p. 8, June 1993, L/P file, p. 38. Cases discussed included personal communication by Lord with Bertha Chambers (regarding the open porthole in stateroom E-7); also Stengel in the American Inquiry, Apr. 30, 1912, p. 981.
Chambers and McGough actually recalled ice falling through open portholes (noted in Lord’s mapping of passengers and staterooms; L/P file map used from 1996 expedition onward), with the ice fall indoors mentioned in Walter Lord, A Night to Remember (New York: Holt, 1955), 5. Thayer reported his open porthole in the memoir he produced for his family, Sinking of the SS Titanic (Indian Orchard, MA: Titanic Historical Society, 1940). Refer also (with regard to the Thayer account) to Walter Lord, James Cameron, and Charles Pellegrino annotations in “The Archaeology of the Titanic: Reconstructing Falling Stars,” in Jack Thayer, In Their Own Words: Titanic, http://www.charlespellegrino.com, p. 22.
On stateroom overheating: E. S. Kamuda, “F. Dent Ray: A Titanic First-Class Saloon Steward,” Titanic Commutator 18, no. 5 (Jan. 1995). In a letter to E. Kamuda, Oct. 16, 1965, F. D. Ray wrote, “In Belfast, when the Titanic was being [made] ready for her first voyage—they found that the first-class staterooms near the engine room [were] too hot. So they had to insulate the walls near the engine room with extra walls behind which they packed granulated cork.”