sank on the night of 14/15 April 1912 as a result of a collision with an iceberg. Nearly 1,500 of the 2,200 people on board died in the shipwreck. There were too few lifeboats on board the dubbed “unsinkable” liner, and the closest ships arrived too late to help most of the victims.
What is the “Curse of the Titanic”?
British author James Bancroft has written an entire book proving that the Titanic was doomed before it set sail on its maiden and final voyage. In The Titanic Disaster: Omens, Mysteries & Misfortunes of the Doomed Liner, he enumerates examples of what he believes are evidence of a “curse”.
The Titanic was one of three Olympic-class liners commissioned by White Star. At the time she was launched, she was the largest and most luxurious ship in her class. In 1912, its value was estimated at 7.5 million dollars, and the construction of the ship itself took three years and proceeded with some complications. Finishing works were postponed several times due to unforeseen failures in other units belonging to the same fleet. Due to the faults of the twin Olimpica, improvements were made to the structure of the ship on an ongoing basis, but it was not without other problems.
Bancroft points out, among other things, that a fire had broken out on board the Titanic while the ship was being built at the Belfast shipyard, which was supposed to have weakened the strength of the hull. Another bad omen was that when the ship was launched, a wooden beam broke out from under the hull, which crushed the leg of one of the workers – despite quick help, he died of his injuries (in total, 17 people died during the construction of Titanic and Olimpica). The writer also mentions that the liner was leaving the harbor and nearly collided with the SS New York.
The ship’s captain, Edward Smith, was appointed to his position on April 1, and at that point in his career he had already had five serious maritime accidents, one of them involving the sister ship Titanic. Bancroft maintains that the captain felt cursed, which he told his friends. Reportedly, some of the crew who served with him on the Olympic refused to sail again on board the Titanic – reports Caroline Howe of “. In turn, the astrologer Count Louis Hamon was to warn the British journalist, sci-fi writer and supporter of spiritualism William Thomas Stead against boarding ship.
“I see more than a thousand people, and you among them, how they are desperately struggling in the water. They are screaming for help and fighting for their lives. But it’s nothing for them – neither for you,” Stead was to hear. The journalist boarded the Titanic at the invitation of President William Howard Taft, who asked him to speak at a peace congress. There are a lot of conspiracy theories associated with this writer.
Stead wrote the story “How the Mail Steamer Went Down in Mid Atlantic by a Survivor” in 1886. He devoted it to describe how a large liner sinks after colliding with a smaller barge in thick fog. Most of the passengers die because there are far too few lifeboats on board. Nevertheless, the fact that in 1892 he published the novella “From the Old World to the New”, in which the ship Majestic rescues the shipwrecked from the ship that collided with the iceberg, is still impressive. Let us also add, by the way, that in 1898 Morgan Robertson – a former sailor and writer – published a book in which he described the course of the catastrophe of the great and considered unsinkable liner Titan, which sinks in the Atlantic Ocean after colliding with an iceberg and also has too few lifeboats.
William Stead devoted much of his writing to describing Egyptian curses, and for several years he pushed the theory that the cursed mummy caused mysterious deaths in London of scientists and people who brought it from Egypt to Great Britain. Stead was also supposed to talk about the “curse of the mummy” on board the Titanic, which was reported by The Whashington Post after the shipwreck. Some claimed that the mummy in question was even on board the liner – which is not true, as it is still on display in the London museum. It is known, however, that Margaret Brown, who was traveling on the Titanic, was actually carrying Egyptian artifacts on board the ship, which were to be displayed at the museum in Denver.
Conspiracy theories about the sinking of the Titanic
There are also other theories about the Titanic disaster. “Br” describes the concept that the liner White Star was sunk by a German U-boat, and the whole thing was simply covered up. Some argue that the Titanic never really sank – the ship was to be replaced at the shipyard with the twin Olimpica, which had a collision in 1991.
As it was ruled that the accident was the fault of the captain, the insurance company did not want to pay compensation. In order not to lose money, the heads of the White Star line were to repair the Olimpica enough to allow it to sail. In the event of a sinking, the company would receive a payment – this concept was strongly denied by scientists.
Shipwreck and the illusion of frequency
Probably nothing extraordinary happened during the construction of the Titanic, and the ship was certainly not cursed. The fact is that many people dealing with the history of the famous liner and its disaster have experienced the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion. The term was adopted after an article appeared in St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1994, the author of which wrote that since he knew the name of the German band Baader-Meinhof, he kept finding information about the group somewhere. Following this article, the newspaper received hundreds of letters from readers who had also observed a similar phenomenon in themselves. In 2005, Arnold Zwicky, a lecturer at Stanford University, called such experiences the illusion of frequency. And this happens because the human brain is sensitive to finding patterns. So when we code that some information appears more than once, our brain unconsciously searches for subsequent repetitions and tries to detect the sequence. Zwicky posits that this is due to the overlapping of two common cognitive biases – selective attention and the cognition effect.
Selective attention leads to the fact that we pay attention first to information that is more significant under certain conditions. In turn, the confirmation bias means that we only take into account facts or news that fit our idea of a given situation – regardless of whether they actually coincide with the truth. The illusion of frequency makes us only think that a certain phenomenon occurs with a higher frequency.
Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
