Rewind, book: 'Futility or the Wreck of the Titan', by Morgan Robertson
When the British ocean liner Titanic sank on her maiden voyage in 1912, it may have sounded eerily familiar to some people. The disaster was foreshadowed in the 1898 novella Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, by the American sailor Morgan Robertson.
by Morgan Robertson
concerns a British liner - the SS Titan, the largest passenger ship ever built - which carries too few lifeboats. On an April voyage, the Titan hits an iceberg and sinks in the North Atlantic 400 miles from Newfoundland.
" 'Ice!' yelled the lookout. 'Ice ahead. Iceberg. Right under the bows.' The first officer ran amid-ships, and the captain, who had remained there, sprang to the engine-room telegraph, and this time the lever was turned. But in five seconds the bow of the Titan began to lift, and ahead, and on either hand, could be seen, through the fog, a field of ice, which arose in an incline to a hundred feet high in her track," Robertson writes.
Like the doomed Titan, the Titanic was described as unsinkable. It was the largest passenger ship ever built. It hit a North Atlantic iceberg 400 miles from Newfoundland in the same month, April. The Titanic carried too few lifeboats, causing mass drowning of the type also documented in Robertson's story. Then there is the striking similarity between the two liners' names.
