April 15, 2007

• Thanks, Bobboggis. MonkeyFilter: Go on, indulge your morbid curiosity Like the Titanic, the watches aren't waterproof
• my family name is very uncommon in America (altho not quite as much so in the UK) and I have read that there was a staff or crew member on the Titanic with my last name (and a common male first name in my family)...always wondered if it was a relative.
• I find any ship's passenger list interesting, but I'm one of those people who don't find the Titanic story particularly compelling, other than the sheer hubris of it all. In my mind, it's a disaster famous for being famous, kinda like Anna Nichol Smith.
• Good find, Bobboggis! The quality of the site is a lot higher than what I'd expected...
• It looks like the only two remaining survivors were infants at the time. History is going to become very interesting as there will be reliable video, photographic and audio records of people long dead in the not too far future. We have really only had people's writings for true historical accuracy. The deceased or survivors of any plane or ship disaster that has occurred in recent years will have much more concrete evidence of who was there and what that person looked like, etc. I wonder if it will take a bit of the romanticism out of history.
• Mr. Fred Clench, Able Seaman. That is all.
• Perhaps, bernockle, but I suspect that the contemporary view was much the same at the time. They now had wireless, which allowed for far more information to be collected than at any time previously. The romantic account was no longer possible, as the ship didn't simply become a 'mystery of the sea.' No doubt future generations would see us as romantic simply by virtue of not having cryogenically-frozen clones standing by, ready to be activated with memory implants. "The fools!"
• I had read somewhere about some students who were asked how they would have saved the passengers, and someone came up with the idea of using the loading cranes to transport them to the iceberg until rescuers arrived. I was always wondering what could have been done that night, and I found that to be the most logical way to save those people. Whether or not it could have been done in the small time frame between the damage assessment, and sinking, one and one-half hours, I believe is questionable. I loved this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn3UTGDeD3g
• Offhand, I would expect that the momentum of the ship would have been such to carry it well past the iceberg. It's not that it crashed and stopped, right? Idunno.
• Reading the descriptions of the unidentified bodies and their personal effexts led me to look up what a cholera belt was. When I'd run across the term in novels, I thought it was some part of a nurse's uniform.
• The original iceberg that the ship hit was quickly lost in the dark of the night. Even if there was a lot of ice, though, getting people onto an ice flow isn't easy. One of the outstanding things about the Titanic disaster is the lack of a decisive, unified, command. Forget saving all the passengers, they didn't even fill the lifeboats! Today's people draw all sorts of lessons from the Titanic, like the danger of hubris or the cruelty of class inequality, or what have you. These are all great Lessons. But for the Edwardians, Titanic was an extension, to the seagoing realm, of the need for proper emergency preparedness and updated health and safety regulations. That seems kind of a lot less noble and interesting to us, but that's because we live in a world of EXIT signs and medevac choppers, and the emergency services a phone call away.
• Good point, thanks Dreadnought, I hadn't considered it that way.