Titanic 2012

eyes.

“And why for God’s sake would Smith, a seaman with a spotless record save for the Hawke incident—and on his final voyage… on the maiden voyage of the greatest ship ever built to date, intentionally take her to the abyss with so many lives at stake? To engineer a mass murder?”

“Mass sacrifice, if you will. David, there was a disease aboard, a terrible, terrible disease. By this time, she was a plague ship.”

“One man’s journal, this Declan Irvin, your great-great grandfather who was aboard the ship—he alone tells the truth?”

“At the time he was a young intern out of Belfast, Northern Ireland where he’d watched Titanic as she was being built in the shipyards there. He and two other men boarded the ship in Southampton in an effort to convince Titanic’s captain to quarantine his vessel and to stop her before she could set off toward her eventual grave.”

“Quarantine her in Southampton?”

“To keep her from leaving Great Britain, yes. To understand, you need to read the entire journal, David.”

“Quarantine against this disease you mentioned, eh?”

“A dreaded, terrible disease.”

“A life-threatening disease.”

“No, no—a life-draining disease.”

“Smallpox you mean?”

“Worse than smallpox.”

“Kelly, no disease known to mankind has killed more people than smallpox through the millennia. So what are we talking about? Some precursor to TB?”

“It had no name, David, but it was like… like the Black Plague, let’s say.”

“Black Plague aboard Titanic?”

“Something akin to it, let’s say; at the time, no one had ever seen anything quite like it. It decimated a healthy person within days… hours.”

“Decimated how?” David wondered why he continued to humor her in this mad distortion of Titanic history that was so far from reality that it could not be embraced.

“The disease completely dehydrated its victims—every ounce of fluid in the body consumed… gone, disappeared… as I said, in a matter of hours, and there was no cure, and with this outbreak aboard rampaging, Captain Smith was left with only one horrible solution.”

“The murder of more than a thousand six-hundred souls that we know about? That’s an answer?—whoa, what am I saying— a cure all? This is just plain old nuts. Hey, maybe your ancestor was insane. Ever think of that?”

“Excellent penmanship for a madman.” She tapped the ink-splotched words before him with a rapid-fire index finger banging out a thumping rhythm, a requiem for his discomfort at hearing this story of hers.

“Yeah, well Edgar Allan Poe’s handwriting looked like that of a normal person, too.”

She frowned and threw up her hands, walked about in a tight circle, obviously upset, but she wound up after him again, replying, “This thing, it was and still is incurable, and eventually Titanic was —or would have been—a ghost ship filled with plague on its arrival in New York. My ancestor was an intelligent physician, and he was not an asylum escapee, David. Please, just read the journal. Read page one.”

“Kelly, how can you be sure the good doctor who wrote these words—” he indicated the book in his lap —“wasn’t crazy?”

“Eccentric, yes, insane, no! Declan Irvin survived long enough to write it all down; he was among those who did not get off Titanic; a friend, his closest friend, managed somehow to get aboard one of the few lifeboats.”

“Just under what, twenty lifeboats, less than half filled…” he muttered, recalling his reading of the incident at sea. “707 saved by the lifeboats. Hold on… if the Captain himself ordered the ship scuttled… rammed into a berg the size of a continent, then why would he turn around and order the lifeboats away? It makes no sense.”

“Come on, Dave, you know how chaotic it became… how it turned into a riot. Even those closest to Smith, even those loyal to him, faced with certain death might well have panicked, and in the end, they chose to disregard his orders. Open your mind to the impossible, David, and you might discover the truth.”

“No, sorry, it’s just too implausible and the lifeboats did get away.”

“Yes, yes but not one of them filled, and one literally lost over the side! This done by trained seamen, trained on filling lifeboats and lowering them properly, orderly, in the best of British fashion. There were struggles, fights breaking out.”

“I read the same history, but you’ve got it all twisted round.”

“The first twists came at the two inquests—the lies told at the hearings held on two continents.”

“They did manage to use a third of the seats.”

“Some—some less than a third!”

“All right, I give you that, but they couldn’t get people to take the situation seriously; no one aboard a warm, solid-seeming ship firmly underfoot wants to be put off into a small boat—in scale beside Titanic, the size of a cork.”

“Yes, OK, agreed… scary being awakened and put off and into a lifeboat in a black sea on a cold night. But at the same time, these kinds of stories—they’re what Lightoller claimed at the hearings. It all has become part of the legend, women and children first, all that nonsense, David.”

He could say nothing. Their eyes met, and she pleaded, “David, neither Smith nor his officers trusted all the officers and crew to go along with what they considered their only course of action—and guns had to be broken out to enforce it for fear—”

“Yes, the officers were armed in the end,” he agreed.

“For fear,” she continued, “that the carrier… the plague carrier would get off the ship.”

He took in a deep breath of air and ran his hands through his hair. “But if the lifeboats were launched and hundreds saved, then sinking the ship—this so-called solution—would have failed.”

“It did fail, don’t you see? Failed miserably. Human nature being what it is—hell even Lightoller in the end saved himself rather than end his life, but then so did the ship’s owner, J. Bruce Ismay, and others.”

“Lightoller went under; he told the entire horrid story in detail at the hearings. Never changed a word. He very nearly died.”

They fell silent for a long time; he stood and paced but found there was no room for pacing. He continued in the same tone. “People with the disease, they could well have been on the lifeboats. The plan was flawed from the start—if there’s any validity to this journal at all, which I still doubt.”

“Those in the cabal to bring the vessel down, David, they fully expected any boats getting away would be sucked under by the displacement from Titanic’s dive—they expected those in the boats to follow the order to stay close to the ship, close enough that they’d be sucked down with it. They knew the power of the draft it would cause; they had seen how it could sink an ocean liner tied to a dock!”

“They were given orders to remain close in on the ship?”

“To guarantee that everyone aboard go down to the bottom whether aboard or in a lifeboat, yes.”

“And they would have had the crew and officers follow Smith’s orders explicitly, and I suppose that’s in the journal too?”

“Yes, yes,” she pleaded.

“The crew was given the order to destroy the ship beneath their feet?”

“Declan writes about it in detail in his journal.”

“The cabal, you mean? Please, just tell me what was the plan?”

“Any boats getting off and into the water, the officer aboard was to venture in close to Titanic’s hull to ostensibly pull other survivors from the frigid sea, but the seamen would know that to remain close to the ship would surely have scuttled all boats hugging Titanic. And historic record bears this out.”

“And historic record bears you out?”

“The inquest in both New York and in London, showed testimony from the survivors; they pleaded with those operating the lifeboats to pull people from the water, that people were pleading for the boats to come back, to