The first piece in Mysterious Powers and Strange Forces (1979) tells about the sinking of the Titanic, the British ocean liner that sank on April 15, 1912, after striking an iceberg on her maiden voyage from England to New York City. One thousand four hundred ninety-six people died; those that survived likely had descendants alive nearly a century later to see the big-budget film adaption. Have you ever wondered how the film would have fared had O'Shea Jackson voiced the iceberg?
The Titan
The authors say one of the strangest examples of an “apparent premonition” is Futility, an 1898 novella written by American author Morgan Robertson (1861-1915). The story features a fictional British ocean liner named Titan that sinks in the North Atlantic Ocean after striking an iceberg. Thus Wikipedia:
Although the novel was written before the RMS Titanic was even conceptualized, there are some uncanny similarities between the fictional and real-life versions. Like the Titanic, the fictional ship sank after wrecking on an iceberg in April in the North Atlantic Ocean, and there were not enough lifeboats for all the passengers. The Titan would have survived a head-on collision with the iceberg, but a glancing encounter did more extensive damage. There are also similarities in size (800 ft long for the Titan versus 882 ft long for the Titanic), speed, and life-saving equipment. After the Titanic's sinking, some people credited Robertson with precognition and clairvoyance, which he denied. [1]
An apparent premonition, eh?
Heba Hasan, writing in Time, says, "these eerie coincidences strike most as borderline creepy" but that it's likely not all that it's cracked up to be.
[A]ccording to Paul Heyer, a Titanic scholar and professor at Wilfrid Laurier University. Heyer explains how most of the similarities can be explained by looking at the author’s biography.
“He was someone who wrote about maritime affairs,” Heyer said. “He was an experienced seaman, and he saw ships as getting very large and the possible danger that one of these behemoths would hit an iceberg.”
Robertson’s real-life experiences and knowledge of naval trends probably gave him plenty of material for writing accurately about maritime catastrophe.
After the sinking of the Titanic, Robertson gained great acclaim for being a clairvoyant, a title he denied.
“No,” he would reply. “I know what I’m writing about, that’s all.” [2]
The Two Other Stories
The next sentence in the book is an excellent example of tantalizing readers with so little information that it's almost an embarrassment:
"There were two other stories that appeared to foretell the disaster, both written by a passenger on the doomed ship – one of them over 20 years earlier."
If you know these stories exist, surely you can mention the author's name - right? Granted, it didn't take too long to figure it out:
Another oft-cited Titanic legend concerns perished first-class passenger William Thomas Stead (1849-1912). According to this folklore, Stead had, through precognitive insight, foreseen his own death on the Titanic. This is apparently suggested in two fictional sinking stories, which he had penned decades earlier. The first, "How the Mail Steamer Went Down in Mid Atlantic by a Survivor" (1886), tells of a mail steamer's collision with another ship, resulting in high loss of life due to lack of lifeboats. The second, "From the Old World to the New" (1892) features a White Star Line vessel, Majestic, that rescues survivors of another ship that had collided with an iceberg. [3]
A newspaperman by trade, Stead, as assistant editor and later editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, wrote pieces influencing the government to strengthen the British Navy. That said, did Stead have similar "real-life experiences and knowledge of naval trends" similar to Robertson?
References
- [1] Wikipedia: The Wreck of the Titan: Or, Futility
- [2] "Author ‘Predicts’ Titanic Sinking, 14 Years Earlier"; Time, April 14, 2012.
- [3] Wikipedia: Legends and myths regarding the Titanic
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