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    The Wreck of the Titan
    The Wreck of the Titan
    The Wreck of the Titan
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    The Wreck of the Titan

    By Morgan Robertson and Sam Leith

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    Once seen as a prediction of the sinking of the Titanic, this novella was written 14 years before that ill-fated event of 1912— now, on the centenary anniversary of the Titanic's sinking, the striking similarities can be examined again in this new edition John Rowland, a disgraced former Royal Navy lieutenant, has taken employment as a lowly deck hand aboard the largest ship ever to have sailed, the Titan. One night in deep fog, the ship strikes a gigantic iceberg and sinks almost immediately. Written 14 years before the Titanic's sinking, this novella has been hailed in equal measures as a prophetic work and the work of pure coincidence. Certainly the similarities are striking: two unsinkable ships steam ahead in treacherous conditions, carrying privileged passengers, with insufficient lifeboats aboard.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateJul 12, 2012
    ISBN9781780940779
    The Wreck of the Titan
    Author

    Morgan Robertson

    Morgan Robertson (Oswego, 1861 - Atlantic City, 1915). Fue un oficial estadounidense de la marina mercante, además de escritor y posible inventor del periscopio. Popularmente es conocido como el hombre que escribió en 1898 la novela Futilidad o El hundimiento del Titán. Del mismo modo, escribió en 1914 la novela titulada Más allá del espectro, pronóstico de una futura guerra entre Estados Unidos y Japón, incluyendo un ataque furtivo de los japoneses. La historia coincide con el enfrentamiento de USA y Japón en la Segunda Guerra Mundial y el ataque a Pearl Harbor por parte de ese país asiático, hechos ocurridos años después de la publicación del libro. El 24 de marzo de 1915, Robertson fue encontrado muerto en su habitación en el hotel Alamac en Atlantic City, Nueva Jersey. Tenía 53 años de edad. Se cree que murió de una sobredosis de protiodide (yoduro de mercurio).

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      Book preview

      The Wreck of the Titan - Morgan Robertson

      The Wreck of the Titan

      Morgan Robertson

      CONTENTS

      Title Page

      Foreword by Sam Leith

      The Wreck of the Titan

      Biographical note

      Copyright

      FOREWORD

      ‘World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg’ is the headline that the spoof newspaper The Onion gave to its report of the sinking of the Titanic in Our Dumb Century. That well encapsulates the attitude that, retrospectively, we have taken to the great maritime catastrophe.

      Futility: or, The Wreck of the Titan makes clear that the ship’s power as metaphor – its effectiveness as an image of hubris to both crown and bring to a close the Age of Steam – was not just a gift of hindsight. Look at that remarkable, strange and rather off-putting opening. The first pages read less like narrative than like the sales listing in a shipwright’s catalogue.

      Titan’s glories are lovingly blazoned in the ‘ninety-two doors of nineteen watertight compartments’, in the ‘hidden telegraph lines’ which eliminated the need for ‘nerve-racking’ shouts from human voices, in the ‘seventy-thousand tons’ displacement’ and the three small engines that are needed to start up the three big ones.

      It is at once bombastic and hilariously nerdy: we find room for a potted disquisition on the technical advantages of a ‘dead-rise’ over a ‘kettle-bottom’, before we find room for an introduction to the book’s protagonist John Rowland. The subject of the opening pages – and in some overarching sense the subject of the book – is ‘she’: ‘the greatest of the works of men’, in whose construction, significantly, ‘were involved every science, profession and trade known to civilization’. It is with the gentlest of nudges that we are reminded, more than once, that the Titan resembles ‘a city’.

      Here is self-confident fin-de-siècle civilization in its pomp. Modernity means the taming of the natural world and the mastery of chance. It means speedy and luxurious transatlantic crossings in a ship that barely feels as if it’s on the ocean – a floating hotel that steams at mechanically predictable speed between two great hubs of commerce in ‘fog, storm and sunshine…winter and summer’ alike.

      Modernity does not yet mean machine guns and aerial bombardment and other forms of mechanical slaughter. But the warnings are there. We are a few pages into Futility before we meet anything resembling an individuated human being. Instead the sailors are denominated in terms of the functions by which they serve the machine: ‘coal-passers’, ‘stokers’ and ‘oilers’.

      The Titan, if we follow the line of the metaphor, is both carelessly destructive and – ultimately – self-destructive. In her vast complacency – as her technicians predicted – she can scythe through another boat (the unfortunate Royal Age) and send it down with all hands, while sustaining ‘no more damage to herself than a paintbrush could remedy’. But then she meets an iceberg, and all the hubris of her designers is as nothing. It would be the work of a moment to sketch a Marxist interpretation of Morgan Robertson’s novel – but I think its author had his eyes on something more metaphysical, too. The original title, after all, is Futility.

      Marxism or metaphysics, that said, have for most of the last few years been beside the point: Futility has lived not so much as a novel as a historical curio, a footnote to the disaster of the Titanic. It is guaranteed a place in most Internet lists of Top Ten Spooky Coincidences – a place it seems to deserve.

      First published in 1898, a decade and a half before Titan’s near-namesake RMS Titanic went down, Futility told the story of an ‘unsinkable’ liner, the largest and most modern in the world, going to the bottom after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic on an April night. Both real and imaginary liners were 800-odd feet long and had passenger capacities of 3,000 – and on both ships, the great loss of life was exacerbated by the under-provision of lifeboats.

      There are points of difference, too, of course. Titanic was steaming towards New York when it went down, whereas its fictional Doppelganger was headed in the other direction. Titanic was actually larger than Titan (882 ft to Titan’s 800 ft). That didn’t prevent Morgan Robertson’s story being opportunistically republished in 1912, with the order of its title and subtitle reversed.

      But let us do it the service of looking at it as more than a footnote to the sinking of the Titanic. To the modern reader, several different things are striking about the novel: the crudity and energy of its arrangement; its hectic pace; and its collision of genres. It’s partly (though problematically) a providential morality tale, partly a nineteenth-century sensation-novel, partly a pert social satire. It reaches, at moments, towards naturalism; and then moves in the opposite direction, reaching into the drawer marked ‘Grotesque Wheedling Old Jew’, ‘Kindly Old Grandfather’, ‘New York Oirish Copper’, ‘Arrogant Officer-class Cad’ or ‘Drink-sodden Man of Sorrows’.

      It also touches on the real religious anxieties of the time. Rowland’s atheism has cost him his beloved Myra, and certainly has not contributed subsequently to his peace of mind. But it is not automatically dismissed as error. It is given full and fierce expression as he sits glumly on his iceberg waiting to freeze to death; even as his answered prayer seems to countermand it.

      Futility is barely long enough to have grazed the shortlist of a late-Victorian Booker Prize, and in literary terms would struggle to merit it. It ends inconclusively and its manner of telling – interspersing set-pieces of dramatic action and passages of stiffly melodramatic dialogue with anguished inner monologues and gauchely technical expository passages about marine engineering or maritime insurance law – is eccentric to say the least.

      Yet it is unquestionably – in being so much of its time and coincidentally so prophetic – a fascinating artefact, defects and all. It rattles along at a speed that would not shame Titan herself. In the space many modern novelists need just to clear their throats, Roberston gives us the sinking of two ships, a murderous conspiracy, a spiritual crisis, a thwarted love story, a tale of shipwreck and rescue, the fall and redemption of a man’s character and fortunes, a sort-of courtroom drama, a real courtroom drama, and a single-handed fight to the death with a polar bear besides. That is value for money.

      There are, too, passages of some force – the psychedelic indistinctness of Rowland’s hashish reverie, for instance, or the forensic description of the crucial collision. As a former merchant seaman, Robertson’s expertise lends a granular exactness to the detail even where his sentences are clumsy.

      …a low beach, possibly formed by the recent overturning of the berg, received the Titan, 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 an easy, spiral rise in the ice under her port bow, she heeled, overbalanced, and

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