Lessons Americans can learn from the Titanic

Here’s a trivia question: Who christened the Titanic? I’ll answer that question later.

Interest in the Titanic never seems to abate. My wife and I got to visit an interactive, high-tech exhibit on the mammoth ship, which included a few artifacts brought up from the bottom of the sea, such as Capt. Smith’s binoculars.

The website for the exhibit notes: “Titanic: An Immersive Voyage in Florida is an extraordinary expedition that takes you deep into the history of the Titanic. Immersive video animations and 3D projections allow you to experience what it was like to be a passenger aboard the ship, while discovering one of the most famous tragedies in history.”

April 10, 1912, marked the maiden, and only, voyage of the Titanic. The steamship was 885 feet long, and it was more than 10 stories tall. As of that time, it had been described as “the largest moving man-made object in the world” and a “floating palace.”

On its maiden voyage, this huge steamship was going from Southampton, England, to New York City when it collided with an iceberg about 400 miles from Newfoundland and sank within three hours. There were 2,207 people on board, and about 1,500 perished, including the millionaire John Jacob Astor. The lifeboats were for women and children first.

Daniel Allen Butler wrote a classic book I highly recommend, entitled “Unsinkable” (Stackpole Books, 1998). In the Preface, he wrote, “No other disaster in history could have been more easily avoided or was more inevitable … a once-in-a-lifetime combination of weather and sea conditions came together to make the iceberg nearly invisible to the ship’s lookouts.”

The Greeks had their ancient plays where the flawed hero ended up in tragedy because of his hubris – his arrogance. And when you look at many of the facts surrounding the sinking of the Titanic, you find multiple examples of pride, in the worst sense of the word.

The Titanic is indeed a reminder of that ancient principle from Solomon the Wise: “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” One error compounded on another, but each was predicated on the assumption that the ship was unsinkable.

Before the voyage, one woman, a Mrs. Albert Caldwell, watched “a group of deck hands carrying luggage aboard the Titanic. Impulsively, she stopped one of the men and asked him, ‘Is this ship really nonsinkable?’ ‘Yes, lady,’ he replied, ‘God Himself couldn’t sink this ship.'” (Butler, “Unsinkable,” p. 39).

Hindsight is always 20/20. But that wasn’t a very smart thing to say.

Because of a 10-second brush with a 5,000-year-old iceberg, April 14-15, 1912, turned the luxury voyage into a night of horror.

I gleaned the following facts from Butler’s book. Because the Titanic was viewed as unsinkable …

• The crew didn’t bother to make sure they had lookout glasses, i.e., binoculars, onboard. (They were actually there, it turns out, but locked up and stashed away, unknown to the present crew because of a last-minute change in personnel.)

• They should have gone through a practice drill in case of emergencies, but they didn’t.

• They should have had far more lifeboats, one space for each passenger. Instead, as was the custom of the day (which was changed after the sinking of the Titanic), they used an elaborate mathematical formula to derive a much smaller number of lifeboats.

• They were going at the fastest speed of the voyage at the time of the brush with the iceberg (22.5 knots). The captain was trying to make the trip in record time.

• They should have heeded the six wireless messages from different ships warning them about the ice fields. The last one, at 11 p.m. (about a half hour before the accident), came from the Californian ship: “Say, old man, we are surrounded by ice and stopped.” To that message, the Titanic’s radio operator responded, “Shut up! Shut up! I am busy.”

In retrospect, what made him so busy – compared to 1,500 human lives lost that night?

So, who was it that christened the Titanic? No one. It was never christened. It didn’t need to be. After all, it was unsinkable.

The father of our nation, George Washington, wrote his Circular to the States letter on June 8, 1783, in which he prays that Americans would practice the humility of Jesus – “the Divine Author of our blessed Religion.” And he adds that if we don’t humbly imitate Him, “we can never hope to be a happy Nation.”

We would do well to learn the lessons from the Titanic.

In a funeral service around the time of its sinking, the Bishop of Winchester said, “The Titanic, name and thing, will stand for a monument and warning to human presumption.” That message is still relevant, more than a century later.