Betsy's Reviews > Sinkable: Obsession, the Deep Sea and the Shipwreck of the Titanic

Edit 9/3/23: Downgrading to one star because I found MORE things wrong. Apologies for not including page numbers, I no longer have the book in front of me.

First, while listening to L.A. Beedles's Unsinkable podcast, where she reviewed this book (btw highly recommend for all Titanic people to take a listen to it), she mentioned that Stone talks about how the six Chinese survivors were ignored and had to fight for years to be included in the Titanic story, and then pointed out that this is untrue. None of them were supposed to be going to America in the first place due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, and so none of them mentioned that they were on the ship. Credit to Beedles for that one; I'm not super well versed in the journey of the Chinese survivors, which is probably because The Six still isn't widely available for streaming.

The other thing was something I thought of at the time of reading and dismissed as so hopelessly stupid it couldnt possibly be in the book, but it is, and it's now REALLY bothering me. At some point, Stone talks about the possibility of an officer suicide (a highly debated topic in the Titanic community) and comes to the conclusion that it would be plausible, which it is, because in the efforts to get Collapsibles A & B down from the roof of the Officer's quarters, one of them would, for some reason, have had to cut the lines securing the funnel to the deck, directly causing the fall of the first funnel. And leading to guilt, I guess? I mean, it would, if it had happened, but obviously it didn't and I can't believe I didn't write about this when I finished the book.

First off, this would have been impossible, because those lines were made of steel, not rope. Nobody in their right mind, even in 1912, was attaching steel funnels to the deck with rope. You can't cut them even if you somehow needed to.

Also, I don't know what purpose this would even have served. Those collapsibles were designed to be taken down from the deck with ample room to not get caught on the lines connected to the funnel, and it seems unlikely that the steel lines would have been in the way to begin with. Obviously both Collapsible A & B made it to the deck without getting stuck (though A did get broken and both kind of crashed). I don't know why this would even be a thing. It reads as if Stone read something about how a lifeboat (which wasn't A anyway) had to be cut from its lines and somehow thought this meant cutting the funnel lines instead of just cutting the ropes connecting the lifeboat to the davit. Which requires a level of ignorance about this subject that means you REALLY shouldn't be writing a book about it if you think that. I mean, all you have to do is watch the movie and you'll see them cutting the lines in question.

Considering the most likely suspect in the suicide question, I have to add this to the ongoing list of First Officer Murdoch slander, which is really just getting insultingly long at this point. Though the idea that he would have cut the funnel lines knowing full well that would cause the funnel to fall just ascribes a level of stupidity to him that's more insulting than the bribery scene in the movie. At least that one makes sense for Cal.

Original Rant below, but seriously, fellow Titanic people, avoid this one.


RANT AHEAD



HARD A STARBOARD



I think perhaps people who are obsessed with the Titanic are not the audience for most Titanic books, which sounds unusual, but it is true, because there are plenty of books about this ship (obviously...) and only a few of them are geared toward the serious obsessives who actually care about things like what the floor tile patterns looked like and what angle exactly the stern got to before the ship broke in two.

But then of course, we all read all of them, because what else are we going to do? So this review is for any other serious Titanic people who may have stumbled across this book and thought "Finally, a new angle!" Because that's what I thought too.

If you think this book is largely about the Titanic's cultural history, you are going to be mostly wrong. This isn't a historiographical account of the afterlife of a ship that never had much of a life to begin with. Which is a shame, because that would be an interesting read. This book purports to talk about the obsessives who gave the Titanic her afterlife and kept her from being forgotten, but really, mostly what it concentrates on is the years and decades that were devoted to the idea of finding the wreck and then raising it, along with a complete history of how oceanographic research and underwater research technology improved, along with all sorts of other wrecks. Which isn't exactly what I was expecting, which is perhaps on me. I suppose the story of Titanic as a wreck is only interesting because it is so unlike other wrecks, both in its cultural weight and what it represents.

But to me, the story of everyone obsessing over finding the wreck really isn't a big part of the story, because I was born after the discovery, and so the ship and the shipwreck have always sat side by side in my head. There was never a time for me when Titanic was ever going to be anything other than two mangled pieces of steel sitting two and a half miles down into the ocean. As this book makes clear, everyone else had decades of imagining the ship in supposedly pristine condition (and in one piece) before their imaginings were brutally torn apart in 1985.

This concentration on wreck finding is framed by the author's framing device of the story of Doug Wooley, the man who claims he owns the Titanic wreck, which I thought was an odd choice. Quite frankly, until this book, I had forgotten that there was someone who claimed he owned it. In the constant arguing in the Titanic community over whether anyone should be visiting and salvaging from the wreck site, pretty much no one ever brings this guy up, because he is completely irrelevant to any serious scholarship done about the ship, and isn't exactly the ambassador we want to present to the world.

The author says this himself, that he did none of the work, knew nothing about how to do any kind of deep ocean exploration, and yet somehow continued to insist he was the most important person in the Titanic's afterlife.

This is not the only time the author chooses the blowhards to highlight as examples of Titanic obsessives. In addition to Wooley, Jack Grimm, who claimed to find the wreck in the early 80s and the guy who is still supposedly trying to build the Titanic II are given ample page space. Dr. Ballard, who discovered the wreck, isn't portrayed in the most flattering light, which...I mean, look at everybody else you're highlighting.

James Cameron is barely even mentioned, even though by rights, he fits right in. Here's a guy who decided he liked the Titanic, proceeded to convince Hollywood to fund his dives to the wreck by making a movie, proceeded to go drastically overbudget on said movie, built a nearly full size Titanic replica, sank it and then continued to dive to the wreck, absolutely unable to let his obsession go.

But unlike the other useless arrogant white men in this book, Cameron actually did something. He made a billion-dollar blockbuster masterpiece, advanced underwater exploration technology by leaps and bounds, proceeded to discover things about the Titanic through his dives that no one thought we would ever know, so...I guess if you actually contribute something to the world you don't get highlighted in a book about Titanic obsessives?

I'm just salty because I'm well aware this is a weird subculture, and I don't think most of the normal people who are in this world deserve to be attached to the weirdos this ship brings out of its long-eaten-away woodwork.

Relatively normal, anyway. I do know that we all looked at a ship that, after all, failed to do its only job even one time, and went 😍😍😍😍😍 .

The wider Titanic community isn't actually full of ignorant, arrogant useless jerks who just want to cash in on a famous name. One of the few things I liked about this book was that it highlights just how much other shipwrecks are important for what they carry (whether that is something valuable, like gold or jewels, or something dangerous like nuclear warheads or fuel that is dangerous to the ecosystem they're in). With Titanic, you don't usually get that. Her value is in her story, and for most of us, when talking about wreck exploration, we're more likely to get excited about the possiblity of finding the swimming pool than anything actually valuable.

A nice highlight was how the Titanic Historical Society opened its archives to Jacques Cousteau, helping him locate the wreck of Titanic's sister ship, Britannic, because sharing info isn't usual among wreck finders, concerned with salvage rights. This was, unfortunately, the only time one of the legitimate Titanic organizations gets a mention in this book. Which is just...disappointing. There are any number of Titanic obsessives who would be willing to talk (and talk...and talk) for hours about what draws them to this ship and this story.

A study of what, exactly, it is about this ship would be fascinating, though I suspect the question can never really be answered. I learned about Titanic before I could read, and I have never grown tired of her. I can't explain why. She finds her way in and grabs you before you know it, and then suddenly you're rattling off lifeboat numbers and time stamps as if they're imprinted in your brain.

I suspect I could forget most of what I know and I could still tell you Titanic hit the iceberg at 11:40 PM on April 14, 1912. It is a fact I know so deeply I don't remember ever not knowing it.

Which leads me to my other major complaint, which is the sheer number of Titanic facts that are incorrect (those of you who had read a Titanic review of mine, you knew this was coming). I don't know how someone could write a book about Titanic obsessives and not realize we are all insufferably pedantic, but apparently you can.

(As a sidenote, the insistence on accuracy isn't actually because we want to be annoying. It is because this is the most famous ship in history, and there is a lot of both mis- and disinformation out there, so in order to find our way around stuff that is badly researched nonsense trying to cash in on the name, we basically have to fact check everything all the time to tell each other which books, documentaries, etc are actually worth checking out and which are useless.)

So here, in order, are a list of incorrect "facts":

"It was a tragedy, one of many in an uncertain era, that happened to kill mostly rich people."

NO, IT DIDN'T. Titanic FAMOUSLY killed mostly not-rich people, because most of her passenger complement were third-class passengers emigrating to the US who, EVEN MORE FAMOUSLY, were unable, and in some cases prevented, from going up to the Boat Deck until the last boats had been launched. If you count the crew, which accounted for by far the worst loss of life, the vast majority of Titanic's death toll were working class people.

It is true that the rich who died on Titanic were incredibly famous, and died very dramatically, which is why they tend to be the stories people know. They were the Musks, the Bezos's, the Zuckerbergs of their day, and look, I'm not immune. I have a very hard time imagining Elon Musk refusing to part from Grimes with a "where you go, I go", or Bezos dressing in his best, prepared to go down as a gentleman, or Zuck putting his wife and children calmly in a lifeboat and stepping aside to allow someone else to take the limited seats. I expect they'd be more like this:



The First Class men of Titanic, whatever their faults, earned their places in history. But they were the outliers, and this is something anyone who lives with this story on a daily basis keeps in mind.

"Bigger air pockets in the stern, occupied by first class cabins, smoke rooms, and the grand staircase..." The Grand Staircase was not in the stern. The Aft Grand Staircase was, but without making that clear, you know everybody is going to picture the showstopper that is the main Staircase. Aside from the plans, which show you exactly where the Grand Staircase was, the gaping hole where the staircase used to be is the favored entry point today for bots and ROVs to enter the wreck, which alone proves it is in the bow, because there simply isn't an entry point in the stern at all.

"The men rowing each lifeboat rowed harder and harder..." this is a little pedantic even by Titanic standards, but there were not enough men to row each boat. In quite a few boats, the women were the ones rowing.

"The Carpathia...had sent the first reports of the Titanic in danger..." uh, no she didn't. Titanic was N by NW of Carpathia's position, so was closer to New York to start with, and Carpathia's wireless was not powerful enough to reach land. The New York based wireless operators the author talks about here picked up Titanic's distress calls directly, because Titanic's wireless was much more powerful, particularly on a cold, clear night.

"...scientists conducted a metallurgical analysis...and determined that the original rivets were brittle and prone to break under stress." The idea that Titanic's steel was somehow faulty is repeated several times throughout this book, and this has been debunked. Titanic's steel was perfectly within standards for the time. Today, we would not use it to build a ship (nor would we use rivets when welding exists), but White Star was not cutting corners by using bad steel. Olympic did perfectly well with the same steel, I might point out.

"The sundeck was on top, he explained." EXCUSE ME?? The Titanic was not a cruise ship. The uppermost deck on Titanic was called the BOAT Deck because it is where the lifeboats were. Not much sun to take on the North Atlantic in April.

"...at least one early film..." There was more than one early film. There were THREE in 1912 alone, and one in 1929, another in 1933...you get the picture. These are known quantities. All but the earliest still exist. This also belies the author's point that the Titanic was not popular prior to the 1950s, when clearly, there was plenty of interest. The 1950s is simply the first great revival of interest, and the beginning of serious study and the first historical societies dedicated to her.

"After a half century, the two halves of Titanic remained in decent shape." The stern was never in decent shape to start with, considering it basically exploded on the way down. The author mentions this in other parts of the book, so I don't know why this pronouncement was made at all.

"Even if there were enough lifeboats, they had to be closer to the water, which would make the ship's famous black abdomen look like it was wearing a skirt." This only applies to cruise ships. On an ocean liner, lifeboats are still higher up, to avoid the larger swells encountered in the North Atlantic. Look at the Queen Mary 2, her lifeboats are definitely higher than the black hull. (They are still lower down than Titanic's were, but QM2 is quite a bit taller than Titanic to start with). In this section, the author also states that "global regulations of cruise ships had transformed since 1912" which just irritates me because it insinuates that Titanic was a cruise ship, which she was not. She was an ocean liner. Cruise ships didn't exist in 1912.

I don't have a quote for this one, but throughout the book the author talks about the rust on Titanic's wreck, which just grew progressively more annoying because THERE IS NO RUST ON THE WRECK. There is no oxygen that far down, and so metal cannot oxidize. There are rusticles, which look like rust, but are actually products of iron-eating bacteria, which the author shows very well that he knows, so why he continually kept referring to actual rust is beyond me.

Perhaps, in a book about people obsessed with the Titanic, the author should have talked to some of us, because we would undoubtedly have told him which facts were incorrect, and would perhaps be portrayed in the book less as weirdly obsessed rich cranks with pie in the sky dreams and more just as people who learned about a ship that tragically sank on its first voyage, and couldn't forget it.