Titanic: The Novelization (110th Anniversary Edition)

Prologue

Once upon a time in 1845, two Englishmen, James Pilkington and Henry Threlfall Wilson, founded a brilliant shipping company called the White Star Line. It's purpose was to capitalize on the Australian gold rush by sailing passenger ships to the Southern Hemisphere. It's first acquired ship was Elizabeth and it's first built steamship was Royal Standard. But like so many others in the shipping trade, they had their share of bad luck. The Tayleur, which they described as "superior to any ship hitherto dispatched to the Australian colonies" ran aground off Lambay Island and sank on her maiden voyage in 1854 with the deaths of half the people on board. In 1863, the Lord Raglan vanished with 300 people. The following year, Royal Standard struck an iceberg on her return trip, but she managed to limp back home. And on top of everything else, the company was being driven to bankruptcy.

But that wasn't even the worst of it.

As late as the mid nineteenth century, ocean voyages were grim necessities instead of pleasure cruises. After his 1842 voyage from Liverpool, English author Charles Dickens called his Boston-bound ship "not unlike a gigantic hearse with windows in the sides". Of his bunk he wrote, "nothing smaller for sleeping in was ever made except coffins". American author Mark Twain was equally unimpressed with a similar mid-century voyage of his own. He complained of no place to smoke but in an ugly den with no seats. He wrote: "The seas broke in through the cracks every little while and drenched the cabin thoroughly." Even after commercial ships began to sail on fixed schedules, passengers endured cramped, unsanitary conditions for up to a month. Food was bad, disease was rampant and the sea was unpredictable. Of every hundred ships that would set sail, sixteen would never reach port. Some even disappearing without a trace. Some ships sank, like the Birkenhead, a troop carrier that went down off Cape Town with 454 drowned. A mid-Atlantic fire claimed 471 lives aboard the Austria, an emigrant ship bound for America. It wouldn't be until the invention of wireless communication that the vanishing of certain ships, like the City of Glasgow, would cease.

The North Atlantic may have been harsh, but the world was getting smaller. Travel and mail between Europe and North America were increasing. By the late nineteenth century, technology and ship design were advancing to meet these needs and shipbuilders focused on comfort, style and speed. With each advance, the transatlantic run took less time. Seeking to make the most of this trend, a 32-year-old Liverpool businessman named Thomas Henry Ismay legally incorporated the name, emblem and goodwill of the nearly-bankrupted White Star Line he bought in 1867 for one thousand pounds. Formerly the directors of the National Line, Ismay and his friend George Hamilton Fletcher saw the commercial possibilities of introducing superior, iron ships to the North Atlantic passenger trade. Fletcher, who also owned a fleet of sailing ships, served as the business force behind Ismay's visions. Their Oceanic Steam Navigation Company found the capital for a revitalized White Star Line in financial backer Gustav Schwabe, another Liverpudlian. Following a billiard game with Ismay, Schwabe arraigned the deal with one main stipulation: that Ismay work exclusively with the Belfast shipbuilding firm, Harland & Wolff, partly owned by Schwabe's nephew, Gustav Wolff. The following year, Ismay brought aboard another friend, William Imrie, whose father had been an early mentor in his career, and Oceanic Steam Navigation became Ismay, Imrie and Company. Thus prepared, the new White Star ordered six innovative liners. The first one was Oceanic and she sailed in March 1871. The remaining five were Baltic, Republic, Tropic, Asiatic and Atlantic. All were single-propeller, iron hulled liners. Within just a few years, Harland & Wolff began using steel instead of iron. As the technology advanced and the commercial liners needed more power, the number of propellers would increase to two and later three.

The new luxury liners were built for a new kind of passenger who can afford them. In their world, a dog arrived at a party in a fifteen thousand dollar diamond collar. An elegant dinner was served entirely on horseback. Newfound wealth found a new style during the Gilded Age, a name given by American author and social critic Mark Twain to the last three decades of the 19th century. The industrialized western world was secure and prosperous in the years following the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. Poverty was still everywhere, but the growing middle class now enjoyed leisure time and the upper class flaunted it's wealth. The great minds of science and business were speeding up a pulsing, industrial beat that drowned out Mother Nature's slower, gentler rhythms. Progress was the new God for those who wanted to see results larger than life. Few thought about the consequences.