Tome Thursday: A Night To Remember

Hello everyone!

I'm still reading too many books at a time, and revisiting some old books that I really, really love but have been around for a while, although granted I've found one that I'm definitely going to be devouring as soon as I get my hands on a copy. I'll tell you all about it later, however, as today's blog post is dedicated to a book which I had ran across by complete accident when I was a teenager, and didn't quite understand at the time of the first read. Now, however, things have changed and I'm definitely more grown up than I was ten years or so ago, and I've been in the mood currently, so I revisited it.

I'm talking about Walter Lord's 'A Night To Remember'.

For some inexplicable reason, I've been in a Titanic phase for a while now, and so I went back to our personal 'library' (no other word for the amoung of books at the house) and dug through it to find the old book which is falling apart at the seams,and the crispness of the paper makes you think it might have actually been written way back when the ship first sank. In my language, it's titled 'Titanic', and not a direct translation of the novel's actual calling. But despite the age of the translation, the message it gives out is still crystal clear.

On April 10, 1912, the ship left Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York. Her cargo included a priceless copy of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and a list of passengers collectively worth two hundred fifty million dollars. On her way over she too struck an iceberg and went down on a cold April night. This is the story of her last night.

Foreword, p.6

The book begins at precisely 11:40 PM, when the lookout in the crow's nest rang the bridge of Titanic with the words 'Iceberg right ahead', and received a polite 'Thank you' for his efforts. From there, we are taken through the motions of this small city afloat as the boiler rooms fought for control of the massive vessel to try and break her forward motion and hit reverse, while turning the ship hard to starboard. Unfortunately, because of the large amount of the iceberg which remained hidden underwater, while it might have looked to the lookouts and the men on the bridge that Titanic's prow was turning away and they would avoid collision, the bottom side of the ship struck the ice and her steel frame was punctured.

This meant that, by midnight, the deck had already started to tilt to the side as she was taking on water; her water-tight compartments had been rent, one too many for comfort and for safety, because of which Captain Smith ordered the lifeboats be made ready, and just after midnight the first CQD call for help speeds into the night.

The night crackled with signals. Ships out of direct contact got the word from those within range … The news spread in ever-widening circles. Cape Race heard it directly and relayed it inland. On the roof of Wanamaker’s department store in New York, a young wireless operator named David Sarnoff caught a faint signal and also passed it on. The whole world was snapping to agonized attention.

p.43

By 12:45 AM, the first signal rocket was fired into the clear night sky, crying for help to the ships passing along the steamer lines across the Atlantic ocean; at the same time, the first lifeboat, full only to about thirty percent of its capacity, was lowered into the freezing waters of the Atlantic.

By 2:10 AM, the last wireless signals, now changed to SOS, had already been sent, and the ship went under at 2:20 in the morning.

The first ship to arrive on-scene was Carpathia, who picked the first lifeboat a little after 4 AM in the morning. By that time, there was no more sign of Titanic except for debris strewn around the sea, and a lot of the frozen bodies of the unlucky passengers had already sunk as well.

The book takes us through the happening by witnessing it through different eyes, as it is a compilation of accounts from eye witnesses from all three classes, the surviving crew members, and the passengers and crew on Carpathia who came to the rescue. There is a certain mechanic feeling to the whole story, but at the same time, it's a narration that rends hearts even today, more than a hundred years after the ship had gone down.

The great thing about this book isn't the sad story it holds within its pages, but the fact that it's a transcript, more or less faithful, to the accounts made by survivors, and it's a mirror of a by-gone age. Because after the Titanic sank, the world's elite stopped being an elite, and simply became the inaccessabily wealthy - while the lower social classes never again took to their destiny with such meekness of heart. It was the end of a world order, and a tragedy blown out of proportion by a lot of IFs on that fateful night. And it's a story about Man and his arrogance, curbed by Mother Nature.

What troubled people especially was not just the tragedy—or even its needlessness—but the element of fate in it all. If the Titanic had heeded any of the six ice messages on Sunday … if ice conditions had been normal … if the night had been rough or moonlit … if she had seen the berg 15 seconds sooner—or 15 seconds later … if she had hit the ice any other way … if her watertight bulkheads had been one deck higher … if she had carried enough boats … if the Californian had only come. Had any one of these “ifs” turned out right, every life might have been saved. But they all went against her—a classic Greek tragedy.

p.123

xx

*image not mine

**all quotes taken from the e-book version of 'A Night to Remember'