The Titan: Did a Book Predict the Sinking of the Titanic

As far as I can tell, there are three interpretations of what it means when people say “I don’t believe in coincidences”. I’m fairly sure what the majority means is that coincidences are not random happenstances of two things being in a certain place at the same time. They believe that these events have happened for a reason, that there’s something karmic, spiritual or religious going on to have caused these people or events to come together.

Although I suspect that that’s only when the coincidence is a positive interaction as nobody enjoys thinking about God or the Universe conspiring to hasten your demise. This is more of a meet-cute situation of two fresh faced young people who bump into each other somewhere and then, when it happens again, one of them will gaze at the other and proclaim that they don’t believe in coincidences. Bleurgh.

Sticking with the TV tropes, there’s also the slightly grimmer, hard-nosed police investigator example who, when faced with a familiar crime scene or modus operandi will say “I don’t believe in coincidences” to make us, the viewer, realise that it’s the same person behind all the crimes even though we probably already knew this. Then there’s the people who say “I don’t believe in coincidences” and mean exactly that. No matter how inexplicable or interesting the events are, they point blank refuse to acknowledge any sort of link or similarity and just see them as events that happened to occur at the same time.

If you are in this latter group, you ain’t going to like this article very much.

The Mystery

In the early hours of April 15th 1912, the Titanic, the largest and most luxurious passenger liner of its time, was on its way to the bottom of the Atlantic after having hit an iceberg just a couple of hours earlier. Over 2,200 passengers and crew were on board for her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York and only 706 of these survived. We know that there were many things that could have been done to reduce the lives lost in the disaster.

The Titanic didn’t have enough lifeboats on board even though it was designed to hold enough to give everybody a seat. The crew were not very well trained on how to launch these boats and there was no cohesive plan to evacuate the ship. The design of some of the interior compartments was also at fault.

Supposedly “watertight”, the compartments weren’t actually tall enough to stop water flowing over the tops once the hull had been breached. This meant that once the water came flooding in, it caused the ship to tilt forward until the ship’s propellers were lifted right out of the water and with so much stress on the steel structure of the ship, it eventually broke in two and both parts headed down to rest on the bottom of the sea. What made the whole event even more shocking was that the Titanic had been widely touted as being “unsinkable” with the definition of the adjective “titanic” being: “of exceptional strength, size, or power”.

So you’d think you’d be nice and safe on such an enormous, metal ship cruising through the freezing waters of the North Atlantic. After the accident, people were quick to throw fancy words like “hubris” around, blaming the Titanic’s owners for tempting fate by calling it unsinkable. But was fate really involved in some way?

Or was the sinking of the Titanic just a totally unfortunate accident that nobody could have predicted? Nobody you say? Well, let’s get into it.

The Wreck of the Titan

In 1898, American Morgan Robertson published a novella called “Futility”. No big deal there, I hear you say, and indeed it was no big deal until it was republished in 1912 following the Titanic disaster and people really started taking notice. Why?

Because it seemed as though Robertson had actually predicted the sinking of the Titanic, years before the ship was even a twinkle in the White Star Line’s eye. Let’s start with the title. It was originally published under the name “Futility” but to draw attention to the similarities and therefore bump sales, it was republished in 1912 as “The Wreck of the Titan”.

Yes, the ship in Robertson’s story was named the “Titan”. True to its name, the Titan was the largest ship of its day and the first line of Robertson’s story is “She was the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men.” Not far into the story, the Titan hits an iceberg while travelling in foggy conditions and the description of the crash is eerily similar to that of the Titanic.

Robertson wrote: “…and with her keel cutting the ice like the steel runner of an ice-boat, and her great weight resting on the starboard bilge, she rose out of the sea, higher and higher - until the propellers in the stern were half exposed - then, meeting as easy, spiral rise in the ice under her port bow, she heeled, overbalanced, and crashed down on her side, to starboard.” Not only were the names and manner of sinking very similar, the Titan in the story was also travelling in the North Atlantic and also in April, exactly where and when the Titanic was sailing. And that’s not all.

The sizes of the liners and passenger capacity were also pretty close. The Titan was 800 feet (244 metres) long, with the real-life Titanic being 882 feet or 269 metres long. The Titan was carrying 2500 passengers although it had room for 3000.

The Titanic was officially carrying 2,229 people although it had room for around 3,500. The Titan was sailing fast through foggy waters and hit the iceberg “at a rate of 50 feet per second” according to Robertson. That translates to about 30 knots although to be honest, 50 feet per second or about 15 metres per second is a much more relatable way to picture it if you’re not that familiar with nautical terms.

Anyway, the Titanic was also going way too fast at 22.5 knots which is 38 feet or 11.5 metres per second. The Titanic was literally going full steam ahead at just half a knot under her top speed which seems pretty risky looking back on it now.

The lifeboat situation was also almost identical. As mentioned, the Titanic only carried 20 lifeboats, enough to seat 1,178 people. While this was far below what would be needed for a full ship, it was above the legal requirement for lifeboats at the time.

This was in part because nobody thought the whole boat would sink and everyone would need to be in lifeboats all at once. Much less life-threatening scenarios were envisioned where they would just be used to ferry people from a damaged or broken down ship to another rescue boat under no immediate pressure of sinking. In “The Wreck of the Titan”, we find that the Titan was also woefully short on lifeboats.

Here is main character John Rowland’s description of the situation after the Titan hit the iceberg: “Curse them, with their water-tight compartments, and their logging of the look-outs. Twenty-four boats for three thousand people - lashed down with tarred gripe-lashings - thirty men to clear them away, and not an axe on the boat-deck or a sheath-knife on a man.” I mean, as similarities go, that’s pretty creepy.

Also, in the novella, survivor John Rowland mentions that New York was “nine hundred” miles away. The wreck of the Titanic is 1084 nautical miles from New York, practically next to the Titan if you take the vastness of the Atlantic into account.

So what on Earth was going on here? Was Morgan Robertson psychically predicting the Titanic disaster? According to the highest authority we have on the matter, the man himself, the answer is a no.

If he did have any clairvoyant capabilities he would have made an absolute killing on the spiritualist circuit so I think it’s safe to say that it was all just a coincidence. Robertson spent over 20 years on the seas, mainly as a merchant seaman, so had deep knowledge of sailing, ship building and possible shortcomings of the industry. He was also writing an adventure story and knew all about ice fields in the North Atlantic so having a huge ship collide with an iceberg wasn’t that far-out of an idea.

While that whole part of his book is very similar to what ended up happening to the Titanic, the sinking of the Titan is over and done with by page 30 of a 243 page book. There are also polar bears, pirates and a doomed and drug-addicted main character just trying to do a good deed. You can read it free online if you’re interested.

The similarity in the names of the liners is also not that coincidental if you think about it. You’re talking about naming the biggest ships of the time - what kind of names are you going to come up with? Stuff like Gigantamax, Collosotron, Ginormo McGiantface. You get the idea.

“Titan” and “Titanic” both point to the ships’ enormous sizes and strength so really the naming pool was probably quite small. All in all, this was an event in an adventure story that was horribly close to a future real-life event. You could argue it was actually a prediction as going too fast in bad conditions and the shortage of lifeboats should have clued people in to how to run a ship safely but of course no-one takes any notice of these things until it’s too late.

The “Mail Steamer”

OK, moving on from a book that may have predicted the sinking of the Titanic to…another book that may have predicted the sinking of the Titanic. This one is slightly different though as it was specifically written as a cautionary tale for life boat shortages on ships and even directly flagged up the issue at the end. Not that it helped, of course. It took a real-life disaster and huge loss of life before shipping companies thought it might be a good idea to have enough room for everyone in case of an emergency.

This story, by journalist and editor W.T. Stead was originally published in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1886 and catchily titled: “How the Mail Steamer went down in Mid Atlantic - by a Survivor”. In it, a character on board a packed ship suddenly has a thought about lifeboat safety and goes to check on the situation.

His conclusions are as follows: “At the finish I calculated that, by loading all the eight boats down to the water’s edge and packing the children along the bottom boards, we might accommodate 390 people. We were carrying 916 altogether.” In the story, the ship which is again going fast in bad conditions, collides with another vessel and starts sinking almost straight away.

There’s pandemonium everywhere with people fighting to get into the limited boats, the boats not being easy to release, guns being fired and even the main character shoving a baby away that a mother is trying to give him to take to safety. It’s every man for themselves with the crew jumping to get into the boats before any passengers, lifeboats going off half-full and even being destroyed by people throwing themselves overboard into them. In the end there’s one boat left for the 700 people remaining on the steamer.

They plunge into the water with the main character managing to grab onto a lifeboat as it passes by. Charitably, this exchange occurs: “‘Shall I hit his fingers,’ said a man. ‘No, let him come,’ and then I was laid, sick and dizzy, on the bottom boards of a crowded boat.”

The story ends with an editor’s note: “NOTE.— This is exactly what might take place and what will take place if the liners are sent to sea short of boats.” And yes, it turns out that Stead was exactly right.

But his coincidental link to the Titanic doesn’t end there. W.T. Stead was also a pretty hardcore spiritualist and wrote another story called “From the Old World to the New” in 1892.

In this story, a character has a dream or a vision of a ship sailing through icebergs, hitting one and sinking. Only seven people are left as survivors on an iceberg as the rest go down with the ship. Another character confirms that he too received a psychic message of a ship in the North Atlantic hitting an iceberg in the fog and sinking.

A ship called The Majestic goes off to search for the survivors, receiving telepathic messages along the way and finds them, but only one is still alive. Maritime accidents were quite a theme in his work and Stead himself had visions of drowning and asking for help only to be denied it by people in rescue boats. In 1912 he was asked to give a talk at New York’s Carnegie Hall on the topic of world peace.

You may have guessed where this is going but on the 10th of April 1912, lifeboat-shortage-wary Stead set out for New York on none other than the Titanic itself. While it’s hard to confirm accounts of his last moments on the ship, it has been generally agreed that he was calm and collected and may have last been seen in the freezing water with multi-millionaire John Jacob Astor the Fourth. Stead’s body was never recovered and while he seemed to predict his own death by drowning, he wasn’t worried about this particular trip.

One of his last published writings includes the line: “I expect to leave by the Titanic on April 10th and hope I shall be back in London in May.” So yes, in a sad and ironic coincidence, the man who foretold and warned about the dangers of lifeboat shortages on boats died on the most famous boat in history due to its shortage of lifeboats.

The “New York” Incident

There were things going on at the time that caused people to book passage on the Titanic, to cancel their bookings on the Titanic or to move over to work on it instead of another ship at practically the last minute. There was also an event that occurred before the Titanic had even hit open water that could be seen as foreshadowing the disaster to come. One of the things going on was the first national coal strike in England that started in March 1912.

This meant that there was a huge shortage of coal for steam liners so many couldn’t sail when they were supposed to. As the Titanic was the big flashy new flagship of the White Star Line, a couple of other ships had given their coal to her to be able to sail and their passengers were also given the option to swap to the Titanic, which some did. We all know that the Titanic was sailing to New York on her maiden voyage but did you know that there was something known as the “New York Incident” before she had even set out?

The SS City of New York, later known as the SS New York, was a popular passenger liner for crossing the Atlantic but in April 1912 it was temporarily out of service due to the lack of coal. Some of the crew on the New York transferred over to the Titanic in time for the latter’s grand outing. When it was time for the Titanic to leave the harbour, it sailed past sister liner Oceanic and the SS New York.

Due to the size of the Titanic, it created a huge amount of suction as it went past, so much in fact, that the New York’s mooring ropes actually snapped and the ship drifted out into the path of the Titanic. A newspaper report of the incident called it an “exciting start”. Due to the Titanic being the largest ship of the time, the whole suction theory had been hypothetical and not really believed until people saw it that day with their own eyes.

The article went on to say: “between the Titanic and the quay—a distance of two or three hundred yards-the New York was drifting stern first towards the outgoing liner. What was said to have happened seemed a fantastic absurdity until I saw the frayed end of a steel wire hawser about as thick as a man’s wrist lying on the quay. ‘It snapped like the crack of a gun,’ a man told me who saw it break.

Broken hemp cables hung down the New York’s side. The crowd was breathless with excitement; people climbed into railway trucks to see what was going to happen.” Unfortunately for the expectant crowd, thanks to some quick thinking by Captain Smith, the Titanic’s engines were shut down and reversed to create some distance and a couple of tug boats helped the New York back to the side or whatever the naval term is for the side of a harbour.

In what we can say now is another link to the forthcoming disaster, one of the helpful tugs that day was called Neptune. There are photos online that you can see of the Titanic, the New York and Neptune, which is quite eerie when you think that New York was the intended destination but instead the Titanic ended up in Neptune’s domain, the Roman god of the sea. An inauspicious start, then, for the doomed ship.

Repeat Survivors

Being caught up in one ship-sinking incident is pretty rare and probably not something people actively seek out but what are the chances of surviving two sinkings? And then how about three? Introducing Violet Constance Jessop, good luck amulet or maybe curse-bringer of the White Star Line.

Jessop started off small with a bump in the RMS Olympic in 1911 where she was working as a stewardess. The ship hit another, HMS Hawke, which was designed to ram ships and the Olympic hit it right on the ramming part. With two holes in the hull, it limped back to Southampton but in order to repair it, the manufacturers had to use parts that were supposed to go on the Titanic which was going to be ready the following year.

The Olympic needed further repairs a few months later, again meaning that parts meant for the Titanic were used for the Olympic instead, delaying the Titanic’s maiden voyage to the fateful week in April. OK, so the Olympic didn’t actually sink but it was still a maritime accident and would have been quite scary. The captain of the Olympic at the time was Edward Smith who went on to captain the Titanic when it was eventually ready to set sail.

Jessop was once again a stewardess when the Titanic was finally ready to go. As the ship was going down, Jessop was used a model passenger to calm people and show non-English speakers what they needed to be doing. She watched as other people were given priority to get in the lifeboats but due to a need to get everybody in the lifeboats to stop panicking, she eventually managed to get a seat in Lifeboat 16.

As if getting off a sinking ship wasn’t stressful enough, an officer tossed a baby at her that he’d found lying on the deck and she held onto it for 8 hours until the lifeboat was rescued by the Carpathia. According to Jessop’s memoirs, as soon as she reached the Carpathia a woman grabbed the baby from her and ran off. She recounted: “I was still clutching the baby against my hard cork lifebelt I was wearing when a woman leaped at me and grabbed the baby, and rushed off with it, it appeared that she put it down on the deck of the Titanic while she went off to fetch something, and when she came back the baby had gone.

I was too frozen and numb to think it strange that this woman had not stopped to say ‘thank you.’” That was one lucky baby.

After surviving the Titanic with no injuries, Jessop joined the British Red Cross at the start of World War 1. Hitting the seas once again, she boarded the Britannic which was another White Star Line luxury liner and had been converted into a hospital ship in 1915. On November the 21st, 1916, the Britannic hit a sea mine which exploded and sank the ship in less than an hour.

Although she easily made it into a lifeboat this time, horrifically the small boats were getting sucked under the ship by the strength of the propellers. Jessop dived out of the lifeboat and managed to swim to safety. It wasn’t until years later that a doctor said she’d probably fractured her skull at some point in the escape.

Even rocking a broken skull didn’t slow her down, though. To the disbelief of her family and friends, she returned to work on the White Star Line in 1920 and continued a life at sea for the next 40 years or so. She died at the age of 83.

Weirdly, she wasn’t the only survivor of the Titanic and Britannic. Boiler stoker Arthur John Priest also survived both disasters and in fact he was the survivor of an incredible 5 sinkings in total. Sailor Archie Jewell was the third person to survive both, but he was later killed in the sinking of the SS Donegal during World War One.

The Titanian

Still up for some more coincidences? Good, here’s the last one. First we had the Titan, then the Titanic, and now it’s the turn of the Titanian.

This was a real ship, carrying coal across the Atlantic in 1935. According to William Reeves who was the lookout at the time, he was familiar with Morgan Robertson’s Titan novella and also, obviously, the fate of the Titanic. All of a sudden in the middle of the ocean he got a creepy feeling and called out that there was an iceberg ahead even though he couldn’t actually see anything.

The crew heeded his warning and the Titanian stopped. As the air cleared they found that they were indeed right in front of an iceberg and miraculously had managed not to hit it. Reeves also claimed that they were in the same spot the Titanic had sunk which is what gave him the premonition but sources disputed this afterwards.

There is proof from telegraphs that the Titanian was in an ice field, got damaged and requested an ice breaker to come and rescue them, though, so I guess Reeves just got a bit carried away in the last bit of his storytelling. If you thought that was a bit weak, here’s a little extra bit to perk you up: William Reeves was born on the 15th of April, 1912, the exact date the Titanic sank.

And, actually, here’s another little tidbit. Also in 1935, The Times newspaper reported another British passenger steamer that got into a collision in Hamburg, Germany. Its name? The Titan. Maybe we should retire that name from the list now, it’s obviously got major bad vibes.

Of course, it’s easy to see things with hindsight and make connections that wouldn’t mean anything if the accident hadn’t happened but it’s always interesting and sometimes quite amazing when some of these coincidences occur. If you believe in coincidences, of course. Whatever that means.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the three interpretations of the phrase ‘I don’t believe in coincidences’?

The three interpretations are: 1) Coincidences are not random and have a karmic, spiritual, or religious reason behind them. 2) A hard-nosed police investigator’s phrase to indicate a pattern or the same perpetrator behind multiple crimes. 3) A refusal to acknowledge any link or similarity between events, seeing them as random occurrences.

What were some of the design flaws that contributed to the Titanic’s sinking?

The Titanic’s design flaws included insufficient lifeboats, poorly trained crew for launching the boats, no cohesive evacuation plan, and ‘watertight’ compartments that weren’t tall enough to prevent water from flowing over the tops once the hull was breached.

What is the plot of Morgan Robertson’s novella ‘Futility’?

The novella tells the story of the Titan, a large ship that hits an iceberg in foggy conditions and sinks in the North Atlantic. The story includes details similar to the Titanic’s fate, such as the ship’s size, passenger capacity, and the shortage of lifeboats.

How did W.T. Stead’s story ‘How the Mail Steamer went down in Mid Atlantic’ relate to the Titanic?

Stead’s story highlighted the dangers of lifeboat shortages on ships and directly flagged the issue at the end. Stead himself died on the Titanic, having been a vocal advocate for adequate lifeboat provisions.

What was the ‘New York Incident’ involving the Titanic?

The ‘New York Incident’ occurred when the Titanic’s size created a huge amount of suction, causing the mooring ropes of the SS City of New York to snap and drift into the Titanic’s path. The Titanic’s engines were reversed, and tug boats helped the New York back to safety.

Who was Violet Constance Jessop and what maritime incidents did she survive?

Violet Constance Jessop was a stewardess who survived the sinking of the Titanic and the Britannic. She also experienced a maritime accident on the RMS Olympic. She was known for her luck or curse-bringer status with the White Star Line.

What happened to the Titanian in 1935?

The Titanian, a coal-carrying ship, narrowly avoided hitting an iceberg in the Atlantic. The lookout, William Reeves, claimed to have had a premonition about the iceberg, which he attributed to his familiarity with Morgan Robertson’s novella and the Titanic’s fate.

What was the significance of the name ‘Titan’ in relation to the Titanic?

The name ‘Titan’ was used in Morgan Robertson’s novella for a ship that sank after hitting an iceberg, similar to the Titanic. The name was chosen to signify the ship’s enormous size and strength, much like ‘Titanic’. Another ship named Titan was involved in a collision in Hamburg in 1935.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Titan: Did a Book Predict the Sinking of the Titanic
• Hero image source by Geni / openverse, by-sa.