Weird Stuff- Strange Titanic Coincidences
Astonishingly, the tragedy of Titanic was anticipated in stories written before the ship set sail. The most striking is “The Sinking of a Modern Liner” written in 1886 by W.T. Stead, the famous English journalist and spiritualist. By a macabre coincidence, Stead went down with Titanic. In his story, a liner leaves Liverpool, picks up passengers and mailbags in Queenstown and on its journey to New York is in a collision. There are too few lifeboats, panic ensues and the Captain brandishes a revolver to keep steerage passengers from storming the lifeboat deck.
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A Story From Real Life
An 1892 story by Stead involves the real-life White Star liner Majestic and the real-life Captain Smith, a ship’s collision with an iceberg, and a spiritualist premonition of the shipwreck. In Futility (1898) by the American writer Morgan Robertson, the “practically unsinkable” liner Titan is the same size as the future Titanic and sails the Atlantic at Titanic’s exact speed. It collides with an iceberg in April and there are too few lifeboats for the panicking passengers. In “The Ship’s Run” (1908) by the Irish detective writer, M. McDonnell Bodkin, RMS Titanic of the Blue Star Line (precisely half the tonnage of the real Titanic), steams from New York to Queenstown with gamblers among its passengers, in the same way as the real ship..
Did Bodkin hear of the future Titanic three years before she was launched, or did he dream his ship up?
“The White Ghost of Disaster” by the American writer Mayn Clew Garnett was published just before Titanic left Southampton. Garnett’s liner is the same length as Titanic and travels at the real ship’s exact speed before it ploughs into an iceberg which the look-out has seen too late. This causes panic and the captain shoots himself as the ship sinks.
Several passengers and crew booked to travel on Titanic’s maiden voyage were luckily too ill to travel or missed the ship’s departure and some thanked providence for their close shave with death. Numerous passengers had forebodings about their voyage or received strange warnings not to sail. First class passenger, Edith Evans had been warned by a fortune-teller that she would meet her death on the water; she surrendered her place in a lifeboat to someone else and went back on board, never to be seen again. After the disaster, W.T. Stead related to a medium the sinking of Titanic, his drowning and his arrival at the blue island of the afterlife!