I have always been intrigued by the uncanny coincidences surrounding the fate of The Titanic.
If you're familiar with this please indulge me but for those who don't know; Victorian journalist William Stead published a book in 1892 entitled "From the Old World to the New" in which a fictional vessel - The Majestic - rescues survivors from a collision between their passenger ship and an iceberg. The Majestic's captain is named Edward J. Smith. The real life captain of the real life Titanic which sank twenty years later was... Edward J. Smith.
It doesn't end there. Six years after Stead's book appeared, author Morgan Robertson wrote a novella entitled "Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan" in 1898 - still fourteen years before the real life sinking of RMS Titanic.
In this fictional story, the world's biggest ocean liner, The 800ft long Titan - triple propellored, described as "practically unsinkable" and travelling at 25 knots, is struck on the starboard side by an iceberg in the North Atlantic, 400 nautical miles from Newfoundland on a night in April. The ship has nowhere near the adequate complement of lifeboats for her capacity of 3,000 passengers and crew and sinks, claiming the lives of more than half of the 2,500 aboard.
Compare that with what really did happen over a decade later: the world's biggest ocean liner, the 882ft long Titanic - triple propellored, described as "unsinkable" and travelling at 22.5 knots, is struck on the starboard side by an iceberg in the North Atlantic, 400 nautical miles from Newfoundland on the night of 14th April, 1912. She had nowhere near the adequate complement of lifeboats for her 3,000 passengers and crew capacity and more than half of the 2,200 people aboard drowned when she sank. Believe it or not, one of those doomed victims was none other than William Stead - author of the first book.
