The Wreck of the Titan E-Book

Morgan Robertson

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 120

Beschreibung

Once seen as a prediction of the sinking of the Titanic, The Wreck of the Titan was written fourteen years before that ill-fated event of 1912. Now, on the centenary anniversary of the sinking, the striking similarities between the fate of the Titan and Titanic can be examined again in this new edition. In this 1898 novella, 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 in the North Atlantic, the Titan strikes a gigantic iceberg and sinks almost immediately. The foreword is by Sam Leith, who has examined chance and coincidence in his novel, The Coincidence Machine.

Leseprobe

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 crashed down on her side, to starboard.

The holding-down bolts of twelve boilers and three triple-expansion engines, unintended to hold such weights from a perpendicular flooring, snapped, and down through a maze of ladders, gratings, and fore-and-aft bulkheads came these giant masses of steel and iron, puncturing the sides of the ship, even where backed by solid, resisting ice; and filling the engine- and boiler-rooms with scalding steam, which brought a quick, though tortured death, to each of the hundred men on duty in the engineer’s department.

And who, for that matter, could fail to be haunted by the dying words – heard drifting weakly up from the darkness – of one of the sailors aboard the bisected Royal Age: ‘May the curse of God light on you and your cheese-knife, you brass bound murderers!’

To the modern eye, though, its most glaring defect is a moral rather than a literary one, in the person of ‘a corpulent, hook-nosed man with flashing black eyes’ and an ‘oily smile’ who pronounces ‘what’ ‘vwhat’, ‘people’ ‘beeple’ and exclaims in dismay to ‘Father Abraham’. In Meyer, Robertson presents an anti-Semitic caricature that strikes us as all the more grotesque for the fact that, in 1898 and even on republication in 1912, it would likely have passed without comment. There is not much more to be said of it than that it is, too, regrettably of its time – and that if Meyer is to be enjoyed it is at the level of a pantomime villain; Ron Moody as Fagin in Oliver!

Rowland’s arrival in New York returns us to the satirical register. Here, on dry land, are the same privileged class who shipped on the Titan as passengers – those who sit at ease on the decks while the engines of capitalism grind away below them, stokers ‘with faces like tortured fiends’ shovelling coal into the machine.

Civilization, in Robertson’s account of it, is a place so super-subtle in its sympathies that those at the helm of it, like those at the helm of the Titan, are careful to protect themselves from the lurid horrors of the engine rooms:

In New York City there are homes permeated by a moral atmosphere so pure, so elevated, so sensitive to the vibrations of human woe and misdoing, that their occupants are removed completely from all consideration of any but the spiritual welfare of poor humanity. In these homes the news-gathering, sensation-mongering daily paper does not enter.

The story of Rowland’s final rehabilitation reads almost like a parable. From a ground-zero of deprivation, he starts with the most basic economic activity: he subsists day-to-day by fishing with a found hook, an old bit of string and some bait he scratches from the ground. (Fixing and baiting the hook one-handed must have been a challenge.) From surplus, he makes profit – ‘two more, one of which he traded, the other, sold’ – and thereby begins to climb the ladder to reclaim his status as a gentleman.

The end of the story seems to me ambiguous. Is this an essentially conservative tale – in which redemption consists of Rowland’s regaining his former position in society, through the mechanisms of getting and spending that underpin ‘civilization’? Or does it, rather, suggest that there is something different in character in Rowland’s ascent, beginning as it does with the material dignity of labour? Where are we left in terms of the religious agonies of the first half of the book (Rowland responds to his apparently answered prayer, let it be remembered, with a drily ironic remark about whether a given ‘clause in the prayer is considered’)? And what do we make of the last sentence, with its pregnant en dash? ‘And the man went to see – Myra.’ Both mother and daughter share the name, so how we choose to read that sentence makes a great difference to what we read into Rowland’s character, and how we imagine what comes after.

Futility is not, by most standards we might apply, a literary masterpiece. But it is a book positively buzzing with interest – and not simply because of the accident of its having anticipated a real-life disaster. Often it is in the popular literature of an age that you can see its preoccupations and anxieties most vividly and artlessly articulated – and with what colour and energy are those preoccupations articulated here.

The year before Conrad’s Heart of Darkness first saw print – making its arch comparison between the ‘civilization’ of a Western city and the ‘barbarism’ of the Congolese jungle – here is Robertson making a stab at the same themes:

‘C’m an wi’me,’ uttered the officer, rapping his prisoner on the head with his club and jerking him off his feet. Then, while an approving crowd applauded, the man who had fought and conquered a hungry polar bear was dragged through the streets like a sick animal by a New York policeman. For such is the stultifying effect of a civilised environment.

Titan, and Titanic, hit an iceberg and went to the bottom. Contra The Onion’s version of it, however, the world’s largest metaphor sails serenely on.

The Wreck of the Titan

 

CHAPTER I

She was the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men. In her construction and maintenance were involved every science, profession, and trade known to civilization. On her bridge were officers, who, besides being the pick of the Royal Navy, had passed rigid examinations in all studies that pertained to the winds, tides, currents, and geography of the sea; they were not only seamen, but scientists. The same professional standard applied to the personnel of the engine-room, and the steward’s department was equal to that of a first-class hotel.

Two brass bands, two orchestras, and a theatrical company entertained the passengers during waking hours; a corps of physicians attended to the temporal, and a corps of chaplains to the spiritual, welfare of all on board, while a well-drilled fire-company soothed the fears of nervous ones and added to the general entertainment by daily practice with their apparatus.

From her lofty bridge ran hidden telegraph lines to the bow, stern engine-room, crow’s-nest on the foremast, and to all parts of the ship where work was done, each wire terminating in a marked dial with a movable indicator, containing in its scope every order and answer required in handling the massive hulk, either at the dock or at sea – which eliminated, to a great extent, the hoarse, nerve-racking shouts of officers and sailors.

From the bridge, engine-room, and a dozen places on her deck the ninety-two doors of nineteen water-tight compartments could be closed in half a minute by turning a lever. These doors would also close automatically in the presence of water. With nine compartments flooded the ship would still float, and as no known accident of the sea could possibly fill this many, the steamship Titan was considered practically unsinkable.