Like the Russian – Crimean invasion, the most renown maritime disaster of all time also lays claim to the notoriety of having been foretold by the fiction of its time. Here’s the story.
“A floating palace sailed from Southampton in 1898 on her maiden voyage. It was the largest and grandest liner ever built, and rich passengers savored its luxury as they journeyed to the United States. But the ship never reached its destination: Its hull was ripped open by an iceberg, and it sank with a heavy loss of life.
“That liner existed only on paper, [and] in the imagination of a novelist named Morgan Robertson. The name he gave to his fictional ship was the Titan, and the book’s title was Futility.
“Both the fiction and the futility were to turn into terrifying fact. Fourteen years later a real luxury liner set out on a similar maiden voyage. It too was laden with rich passengers. It too rammed an iceberg and sank; and, as in Robertson’s novel, the loss of life was fearful because there were not enough lifeboats. It was the night of April 14, 1912. The ship was the RMS Titanic.
“In many other ways. . . the Titan of Robertson’s novel was a near duplicate of the Titanic. They were roughly the same size, had the same speed ad the same carrying capacity. . . Both were ‘unsinkable.’ And both sank in exactly the same spot in the North Atlantic.
“But the strange coincidences do not end there. The famous journalist W.T. Stead published, in 1892, a short story that [also] proved to be a preview of the Titanic disaster. Stead was a spiritualist: He was also one of the 1,513 passengers who died when the Titanic plunged to the bottom of the ocean.”
Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, p.406
I told you! Amazing! Tomorrow, one more Persona Non Grata-like world event will bear witness that time and fate are governed by coincidence. But then again, I don’t believe in coincidence, do you?
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