The RMS Titanic: Conception, Catastrophe, and Legacy

By Captain Meghan Cleary

This book focuses on sketching a clear portrait of the Titanic herself: from design to construction to the terrifying disaster in the North Atlantic. Even if she had experienced an uneventful passage to New York in April 1912, Titanic was an awe-inspiring creation of unequaled grandeur. That she met such an untimely demise makes her story that much more important to retell.

• Language: English
• Publisher: becker&mayer Press
• Release date: Mar 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781603802550

Captain Meghan Cleary

Captain Meghan Cleary is a freelance writer who lives aboard her 35-foot sailboat. In addition to the two short books Blackbeard: Pirate Captain of the Queen Anne's Revenge and The RMS Titanic: Conception, Catastrophe, and Legacy, Cleary has published numerous articles in sailing magazines such as Blue Water Sailing and Living Aboard. She has also worked as writer-at-large for the American Sailing Association.

Book preview

1912.

Preface

There is insufficient room in this book to tell the full story of what happened to Titanic. Hundreds of eye-witness accounts exist that give a poignant picture of the lives that were involved; the congregation of myriad human motivations, backgrounds, and intents that could fill books ten times this size. I would fail miserably if I attempted to pay proper homage to the lives lost on Titanic, as that would require hundreds of names and countless human details. Instead, this book focuses on sketching a clear portrait of Titanic herself. Even if she had experienced an uneventful passage to New York in April 1912, Titanic was an awe-inspiring creation of unequaled grandeur, worthy of preserving with narrative. That she met such an untimely demise makes her story that much more important to retell.

Chapter 1 — The Gilded Age: The Conception of Titanic

In 1867, a shipping tycoon named Thomas Henry Ismay acquired the White Star Line, a fleet of wooden sailing ships engaged in the Australian gold trade. Though the gold trade in Australia was profitable at the time, Ismay shrewdly recognized the booming opportunity that existed in the North Atlantic, ferrying passengers back and forth across the pond from Europe to the New World. He moved the White Star headquarters to London and promptly commissioned a new fleet of iron steamships from the Belfast shipyard of Harland and Wolff.

The first in the line, an impressively large, fast, and unusually attractive ship, was launched in 1870 with the stately letters OCEANIC painted on her towering iron hull. She was a head turner, more like an imperial yacht than a passenger liner, the papers reported. And, as historian Daniel Allen Butler writes, "With her unparalleled accommodations and stunning appearance . . . the Oceanic established the White Star Line as the arbiter of comfort on the North Atlantic."

BELOW | J. Bruce Ismay, 1912. Ismay succeeded his father, Thomas Henry Ismay, as director of the White Star Line in 1899.

Being the belle of the transatlantic ball was the coup d’état of the late nineteenth century. Ismay was not the only one who had discovered the passenger ferry niche; in fact there were several companies and countries heatedly vying for the mythical Blue Riband—the honor captured by the ship that recorded the fastest Atlantic crossing. British liners, usually either White Star’s or those of Cunard, White Star’s competitor, held on to the Blue Riband for twenty years before the Germans captured the prize in early 1897 with Kaiser Wilhelm Der Grosse’s smoking 22-knot record crossing. The following year, the Germans added insult to Britain’s injury with Deutschland’s 23-knot passage,