The Titanic set sail on this date, April 10, 1912. It left the shores of Southampton, England, which is about 70 miles southwest of London.
I know we all know the story. We know how it all turned out. But here are some statistics on the people aboard, which I find interesting.
• The RMS Titanic could carry 3,547 passengers and crew.
• The number of people aboard (passengers and crew) was 2,223.
• The RMS Titanic’s crew was 885 people.
• All of the passengers accounted for a total of 1,316.
• There were a total of 325 first-class passengers on the ship.
• Cost of first-class (parlor suite) one-way ticket was £870 or $4,350 ($83,200 today).
• 285 was the number of second-class passengers aboard the RMS Titanic.
• Second-class tickets cost £12 or $60 ($1200 today).
• Third-class passengers on board were 706. £3 to £8 or $40 ($298 to $793 today) was the cost of third-class tickets.
And the aftermath.
• Over 1,500 people lost their lives.
• 68.2% of the passengers and crews were lost.
• 130 of the first-class passengers died during the sinking of the ship.
• The second-class passengers lost 166 people.
• Third-class passengers accounted for the largest loss of life among the passengers with 536.
• The ship’s crew suffered the most, losing over three-fourths of their numbers with 685 casualties.
• The search and rescue team recovered only 306 bodies.
They had four good days of sailing before hitting the iceberg. It only took a few hours to sink the ship from there.
The building of the ship started in 1909 and took more than two years to complete.
It took 74 years to find the wreckage.
I am always interested in the sinking of this ship for some reason, maybe because it was so large and infallible. The unsinkable. A sure bet.
And because it went down, the Titanic gives us that reminder, once again, that there are no sure bets. The course of our lives can change at the flip of a switch, a blink of the old eye.
I am a Taurus by birth. Taureans like to be safe and secure. We like comfort and familiarity. And life will remind us that those things are mostly illusions.
A good example of this, for me, was the United States of America for the past couple of years. I thought our country was unsinkable. I thought I would always know the land of the free, the home of the brave, hotdogs at ballgames, apple pie, and such.
And then I could see it sinking. I saw it hit the iceberg, and I was certain it was going down. At the height of this, I watched crazed terrorists, claiming to be patriots, storm the Nation’s Capitol. I was looking for the life rafts.
While our ship bumped the iceberg pretty hard, it didn’t quite tear a hole in the hull. But it might have made a small fissure. And perhaps we are on a slow leak. I don’t know. I think, right now, the powers that be, are doing a pretty good job of getting down there and stopping the bleed. I hope.
All I can say is that for now, I am glad we are moving onward, forward. Thinking more about ways to make the country better. We have a leader who no longer talks about “hate” every day in his speeches and Twitter feed.
One more historical note. It was on this day, in 1923, that Adolph Hitler made a demand of the German people. He called for “hate and more hate.” And we also know how that played out over the next twenty years.
I think one thing is true in all of this. We are all on the same boat. It doesn’t matter in what class our ticket is. If the ship goes down, we all go down. I hope we can all start paddling together, one way or another.
(Statistics from https://comparecamp.com/titanic-statistics/)
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“You don’t command wind in the direction it blows, but you command a ship in the direction it sails.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo
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“There will always be rough days and easy ones. Like a ship, we must sail through both.”
― Nabil N. Jamal
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“We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.”
― Blaise Pascal
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When the ship sinks in more ways than one
