Monday, June 1, 2009

One More Coincidence of the Titanic


The sinking of the great ship Titanic has been associated with an eerie series of coincidences that is still continuing. The latest in this series is the death on Sunday of Millvina Dean, the last surviving Titanic passenger. She died exactly on the 98th Anniversary of the launching of Titanic on 31 May 1911. When Millvina died she had just entered the 98th year of her life.

Some 14 years before the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on April 14, 1912, a novel written by Morgan Robertson had described another ocean liner, which set sail from Southampton on her maiden voyage. She struck an iceberg and sunk with a heavy loss of life, since there were not enough life boats on board. The name of the vessel in Robertson's novel, Futility, was Titan.

The similarity between the two ships didn't end with the names. Titan and Titanic were approximately the same size, were capable of attaining the same speed, and both were capable of carrying approximately 3,000 people. Both ships were described as "unsinkable" and both ships went down in the same area of the North Atlantic.

William Thomas Stead, a journalist, wrote a short story in 1892 that resembled the Titanic disaster. Stead was also a spiritualist who had received messages through mediums urging him not to set foot on the Titanic. He ignored the warnings and was one of Titanic's 2,223 passengers who died on the fateful voyage.

8 comments:

zedzed said...

interesting!

Khilath Rasheed - journalist and blogger from Maldives said...

I guess Titanic will continue to capture our imagination because it was the biggest technological folly of human vanity!

Anonymous said...

Not worth writing about.

Anonymous said...

This is almost as stupid as people finding Arabic holy names in old walls and dry leaves, not to talk of tomatoes.

subcorpus said...

as you said ...
they are coincidences ...
thats about it ...

Anonymous said...

For some people these are just coincidences. For others they are some sort of miracles and signs of supernaturl forces.

Anonymous said...

The Titan does not strike the iceberg a glancing blow on a clear night, as is the case with the Titanic, but drives headlong onto an ice shelf possibly formed by the recent overturning of a berg, rising up and falling on her side.

The Titanic hit the iceberg in perfect sailing conditions, while the Titan hit the iceberg in bad, misty and foggy conditions.

705 people aboard the Titanic were saved, while only 13 of those aboard the Titan survived.

The Titanic sank on her maiden voyage, while the Titan had made several voyages.

Titanic sank while sailing from England to the USA, Titan was traveling in the opposite direction.

The Titan sinks a ship before hitting the ice. The Titanic came close to an accident with the New York but did not actually hit it.

The Titan had sails to improve her speed;Titanic did not.

The Titanic was the second of three nearly identical sister ships; the Titan had no sister ships.

Khilath Rasheed - journalist and blogger from Maldives said...

The absence of coincidence is a coincidence in itself?