Lessons from a tragedy

Today is the 109th anniversary of the Titanic tragedy. Despite the passage of the years, the sinking of what was declared an unsinkable ship has continued to fascinate the general public. It has inspired books, documentaries, lectures, and has drawn tourists and adventure-seekers, including a couple who said their wedding vows in a submersible stationed on the ship’s bow.

Perhaps the best book written about the Titanic is A Night to Remember by Walter Lord, who as a boy enjoyed a cruise in Titanic’s sister ship Olympia, and had spent a good deal of time imagining what the experience might have been like for the passengers of the ill-fated liner. His preoccupation resulted in one of the finest examples of creative nonfiction ever written. Lord’s research was painstaking and rigorous. He interviewed about 60 survivors in recreating that fateful night. Not only did he ask the survivors what happened; he encouraged them to find the precise adjective or metaphor to describe a person, an object, or an incident.

Thus the “jar,” the point at which the ship grazed the iceberg, was described in several picturesque ways: “the ship seemed to roll over a thousand marbles,” “as though somebody had drawn a giant finger along the side of the ship,” “an unpleasant ripping sound… like someone tearing a long, long strip of calico.”




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Out of the 2,207 people (passengers and crew) aboard the Titanic that night, only 651 were saved. The ship was designed to carry 32 lifeboats but carried only 20 lifeboats that could accommodate only 1,178 people. After all, everybody felt the Titanic was unsinkable.

One passenger had teased a steward earlier that evening for putting a life belt in her stateroom if the ship was meant to be unsinkable. The steward laughed and said it was only a formality, she would never have to wear it: “God himself could not sink this ship.”

Such confidence had caused the loss of “even more than the largest liner in the world, her cargo, and the lives of 1,502 people. The Titanic marked the end of a general feeling of confidence. Until then men felt they had found the answer to a steady, orderly, civilized life… The Titanic woke them up. Never again would they be quite so sure of themselves.”

In the aftermath of the tragedy, many preachers warned that “the Titanic was a heaven-sent lesson to awaken people from their complacency… If it was a lesson, it worked–people have never been sure of anything since… to anybody who lived at the time, the Titanic more than any other single event marks the end of the old days, and the beginning of a new, uneasy era.”

The sentiment, if not the words, sounds familiar. Is that not the feeling we are getting now, at the time of a pandemic that has claimed almost three million lives worldwide? A virulent virus whose variants sprouted almost as soon as vaccines had been developed to fight the original virus?

It does feel like “the end of the old days, and the beginning of a new, uneasy era.” It is true we cannot go back to our old ways in the old days, which led us to this nightmare. Yet there is much to learn from the past. Greek statesman Demosthenes had said, “The time for extracting a lesson from history is ever at hand for those who are wise.”

Society had learned from the Titanic tragedy. We are learning from the Covid pandemic. Let us welcome the “new, uneasy era,” armed with lessons from the past, resist the tendency to be complacent, and emerge stronger than ever.