The Sinking Of The Titanic

Jay Henry Mowbray

Jan 2012 · Jazzybee Verlag

About this eBook

The human imagination is unequal to the reconstruction of the appalling scene of the disaster in the North Atlantic. No picture of the pen or of the painter's brush can adequately represent the magnitude of the calamity that has made the whole world kin. How trivial in such an hour seem the ordinary affairs of civilized mankind--the minor ramifications of politics, the frenetic rivalry of candidates, the haggle of stock speculators. We are suddenly, by an awful visitation, made to see our human transactions in their true perspective, as small as they really are. Man's pride is profoundly humbled: he must confess that the victory this time has gone to the blind, inexorable forces of nature, except in so far as the manifestation of the heroic virtues is concerned. The ship that went to her final resting place two miles below the placid, unconfessing level of the sea represented all that science and art knew how to contribute to the expedition of traffic, to the comfort and enjoyment of voyagers. She had 15 watertight steel compartments supposed to render her unsinkable. She was possessed of submarine signals with micro-phones, to tell the bridge by means of wires when shore or ship or any other object was at hand.There was a collision bulkhead to safeguard the ship against the invasion of water amidships should the bow be torn away. In a word, the boat was as safe and sound as the shipbuilder could make it. It was the pride of the owners and the commander that what has happened could not possibly occur. And yet the Titanic went down, and carried to their doom hundreds of passengers and men who intimately knew the sea and had faced every peril that the navigator meets.

Ratings and reviews

You do need to be careful reading this book to remember that - although written at the time of the sinking - it is a compilation of news reports/eyewitness statements and therefore (as with a lot of witness statements generally) comes with a lot of rumour/hearsay codicils. Bruce Ismay, for example, is at one moment a black-coward leaving in the first lifeboat (and demanding to be fed immediately when onboard Carpathia) and in another statement is meekly helping women/children into boats first. You will see many conflicting views as different people recount what they saw, and I'd say it is important to bear this in mind before reading. Although split into chapters, where the chapter headings tell you what will be covered, it also has more the format of a magazine - the information in many chapters becomes duplicated as one witness tells their version in one chapter, and another witness gives their version in another. So, please also don't expect this to be a book with a 'beginning/middle/end'! But that said, even as someone who has followed the Titanic story for a VERY long time, this has been a wonderful book to read. I've found a lot of new viewpoints that have simply been lost elsewhere over the years. Some of the statements made here make very interesting reading in light of other viewpoints expressed many, many years later - e.g. did Murdock realise that he was far more responsible than has possibly ever come out; the timing and the manner in which he shot himself (if that was the case) makes me personally feel there was more than is known. If you are interested in simply reading a fairly jumbled set of eyewitness statements taken from the news stories/witness statements at the time then you are in for a real treat - I've had a wonderful (and emotional) time reading this. If you're looking for a book that gives you a timed-event history of how the Titanic came to go down, you will probably be disappointed.

Very good and I have been working on the project will also have been c

Did you find this helpful?

Yes

No