The R.M.S. Titanic’s story is a familiar one. The flagship of England’s White Star Line, Titanic was the largest moving object in history when it set sail in 1912, only to strike an iceberg and sink on its maiden voyage, claiming the lives of more than two-thirds of those on board. The ship was as magnificent as its sinking was tragic. It was luxuriously furnished with a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a Turkish bath, a squash court, and numerous common rooms designed to evoke the Palace of Versailles. It was also a technological marvel, equipped with an electrical plant stronger than most cities employed and a remotely activated bulkhead system with watertight doors. The Titanic’s passenger list complemented its extravagance, boasting famous names like Astor and Guggenheim.
Mark Twain satirically labeled this era “The Gilded Age,” and the French remembered it as “La Belle Époque,” “the beautiful time.” It was a time of boldness and decadence, innovation and pride, where relative peace following the Civil War in America and the Franco-Prussian War on the European continent enabled rapid industrialization and cultural development. Exponential improvement was the faith of this era, with men believing their creations could match, or even surpass, God’s and allow resolute mastery of the world. Of course, these optimistic sentiments were often real only for the upper classes. While some reaped the benefits of this economic prosperity, most toiled for a pitiful wage and many demanded change to ameliorate their miserable conditions. On the Titanic, a few enjoyed lavish staterooms, while many impoverished immigrants packed into crowded and noisy steerage cabins, although they were still leagues ahead of most other offerings.
“Titanic as Gilded Age,” emphasizing the class component of the disaster, is a tired trope, true but exhaustingly explored. Ultimately, neither rich nor poor could predict the ship’s sinking. Both wealthy and destitute passengers believed in some form of civilizational progress, the former enjoying a comfortable ocean crossing impossible a hundred years before, and the latter searching for better lives that only the New World could provide. Few believed this progress would stop; fewer predicted it would stop in such a spectacular fashion. Two pieces of fiction did imagine such a disaster, both emphasizing a lack of enough lifeboats to save passengers. One of the authors actually died on the Titanic.
And so, the tragedy was an unfathomable event in a world that crowned man master of all, limited only by his whim and wonder. The claim that the Titanic was an “unsinkable” ship, likely offhand bravado, ultimately cemented the disaster’s legacy as a testament to mankind’s hubris in this age of limitless possibilities. It was almost as if nature had intervened to humble mankind. The Titanic’s sinking heralded an age of immense uncertainty and incredible loss, the resulting disbelief surpassed only by the First World War, which erupted little more than two years later. As Titanic survivor Jack Thayer wrote, the disaster “was the event that not only made the world rub its eyes and awake, but woke it with a start – keeping it moving at a rapidly accelerating pace ever since with less and less peace, satisfaction, and happiness.”
Historians often wonder whether an event represents change or continuity. In many ways, the Titanic’s sinking signifies change. Its place in historical memory is worth considering. When the ship sank, more than 1,500 people went into the cold Atlantic, so frigid that Thayer purportedly compared it to a thousand knives stabbing you at once. Recovery teams found only about a fifth of the victims’ bodies; most were lost to the sea forever. And few tangible records of the Titanic’s fateful voyage survived. Notably, a vacationing Catholic priest, Father Francis Browne, took numerous photographs of life on the ship before he departed at its penultimate stop, his superior having ordered him back. The photos are endlessly fascinating. Father Browne took one of the last known pictures of the ship, and likely the last one of its captain, Edward J. Smith, ominously peering down from a higher deck, the photograph itself taken at such a jarringly sharp angle that it looks like Titanic is already sinking.
The wreck lay undisturbed for more than 70 years, until a 1985 expedition led by Robert Ballard finally located the watery grave, more than two miles below the ocean’s surface and remarkably preserved. Humans had gone where no man should go, piercing the void and granting the majestic ship an audience once again. Ballard’s team knew they were on the right track when they entered a debris field, first spotting a boiler on the ocean floor on their grainy video feed. The next day, the Titanic’s bow emerged from the darkness. Later expeditions extensively photographed the area. The debris field looks like a battleground, with anything the depths’ primordial creatures could not devour strewn about as if a bomb had gone off. Yet it is strangely peaceful. A bottle of champagne remains unopened, a stack of dishes unbroken, and a lifeboat davit still attached to the ship. Most poignantly, matching boots sit next to each other in the sediment, where their owner came to rest more than one hundred years ago.
But the Grand Staircase’s ornate carving, “Honour and Glory Crowning Time,” is lost forever, having either immediately splintered during the ship’s plummet or gradually disintegrated over time. Judging from its supposedly identical companion on the Titanic’s sister ship Olympic, the carving was beautiful, and its allegorical value rich. Even if its practical purpose was to hold a clock, what does it mean for time to be “crowned,” especially in an age of limitless possibility when mankind’s progress seemed inevitable? Maybe the carving meant that despite this progress, man and his creations are ultimately temporary, subject to forces greater than ourselves. For the Titanic, which will eventually fade into a pile of rust, time has ultimately prevailed, recording the exception to progress that nature had forced.