I have been pretty vocal about my inability to understand why people are
so gripped by the Titanic disaster. Just a shipwreck, I’ve said. I don’t get
it. Why not the Lusitania, which was by a torpedo in the same era, or any of
the thousands of disasters that happen every day?
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| Titanic survivors. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. |
Maybe I get it now.
The RMS Titanic set out from Southampton on April 10, 1912, a luxury
ship carrying more than 2,200 passengers. She made port in France and Ireland
before heading out to sea on April 11.
I’ve just started experimenting with ways for historians to use Twitter,
and for the last several days have been tweeting snippets about the voyage, day
by day: the vessel leaving port; the crew member who jumped ship in Ireland;
the ten-course dinner of April 14; the radio operator’s determination to send
out passenger messages as soon as he could raise the Newfoundland station late
in the night of April 14; his brusque dismissal of a nearby ship’s warning of
an ice field. As I trawled through little events, what I began to see was just
how calm and safe and, well, unremarkable, the experience of the Titanic’s
passengers was.
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