“‘Unsinkable’: The Full Story of RMS Titanic”, by Daniel Allen Butler

304 pages, Stackpole Books, ISBN-13: 978-0811718141

The story of the sinking of the RMS Titanic is almost too classically Hollywood to be believable: one of the most luxurious ocean liners of all time, billed as “unsinkable”, strikes an iceberg and sinks, resulting in the highest casualties of its time (prior to the sinking of the Titanic, the grand total of deaths on an ocean liner in the past forty years was six people) with poor people trapped below as the ship sinks, families saying tearful goodbyes at the lifeboats, and musicians playing even as the ship goes under? If it didn’t actually happen you’d think it was a bad, maudlin script and throw it in the circular file. But happen it did, and in “Unsinkable”: The Full Story of RMS Titanic by Daniel Allen Butler we have purports to be just that: the tale of the Titanic, from start to finish. Butler gives us some background into the building of the Titanic and some general stats about the ship, but he wastes no time getting to the good stuff (the night of the sinking occurs on page 63), and Butler goes into almost exhausting detail covering almost every moment of the ship’s final hours…

…only, if you’ve ever read A Night to Remember by Walter Lord well, then, then you’ve read Unsinkable, too. The author tries to present himself as an original researcher who has painstakingly recreated the disaster for readers to immerse themselves in and, yes, he does put some interesting tidbits in (he’s one of the few Titanic authors who claims the last song the heroic band played was “Nearer, My God, to Thee”). But there is very little new under the sun, or in Unsinkable, and Walter Lord did it first. Oh, Butler discusses the crew’s response as well as the experiences of multiple passengers, from first class to steerage, and examining several myths about the treatment of the third class passengers once the ship started to sink.  It’s true that there were gates keeping the third class passengers from the rest of the ship, Butler says, but this was an immigration regulation and most of those gates were unlocked when the ship began to sink. It is in this replay of the Titanic story is best as it places the tragedy in the context of the social setting: “the men and women aboard the Titanic demonstrated almost every derogatory characteristic of Edwardian society: arrogance, pride, snobbery, prejudice, racism, chauvinism, and maudlin sentimentality. They also showed in equal measure the Edwardians’ capacity for self-confidence, self-reliance, self-sacrifice, gallantry, noblesse oblige, and devotion to duty”.

Another interesting fact that Unsinkable unearths is how the battle cry of “women and children first” affected the women’s suffrage movement: you see, “…the sad truth for the women’s suffrage movement was that, as Mrs. John Martin of the League for the Civic Education of Women put it, ‘We are willing to let men die for us, but we aren’t willing to let them vote for us.’ She was merely underscoring the basic hypocrisy of the suffrage movement of the early 20^th Century, a hypocrisy that the Titanic exposed and that the suffragettes had not considered: equality of rights also entailed equality of risk. The suffragettes lost much of their credibility as a result, as too many of their number, unlike the women of sixty years later, were eager to secure rights without accepting responsibility”. This was a fact I hadn’t considered, but is one that is inforce today: after all, how many feminists truly believe in equality of opportunity and equality of risk? The only good thing to come out of the Titanic sinking was that it illustrated how dangerously out of date the safety regulations on ships were. After he finishes covering the sinking and the rescue of the passengers, Butler spends several chapters discussing the numerous investigations and inquests that followed the sinking. The sinking was the direct cause of massive reforms on ocean liners, improving everything from the radio technicians shifts to the number of required lifeboats. The Titanic was a horrifying tragedy, Butler argues, but it was a tragedy that could have been avoided numerous different ways, and because of the sinking, ocean travel became safer for future passengers.

With every tragedy that befalls us it is fashionable to say that “the world is changed forever”. Well, with the sinking of the Titanic…the world changed forever: it signified the beginning of end of an era, not just the Edwardian age, but the end of the rigidly stratified class structure with its built-in inequities (it would take the first World War to truly bury it). Also, the hubris of technology suffered a blow; we were never so innocent again as to place our belief in “unsinkable” ships, or the infallibility of any work of man. For all of its appropriations, Unsinkable tells its tale of human hubris and short-sightedness well, and all in one slim easy-to-read volume, to boot…

…OH! I almost forgot to quote my favorite line in the entire book: “[Astor] had even written a science fiction novel, A Journey Into Other Worlds, whose hero, Colonel Bearwarden, was contracted by the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company to make the Earth’s axis perfectly vertical, creating perpetual springtime.” Who knew Astor could channel Douglas Adams 40 years before his birth? And I want to read that book.