Inspiration

Editor's Note: Remember this site was originally created Department of Education & Children Services, Southern Australia  www.decs.sa.gov.au 

The Titanic, probably the most famous shipping disaster of all time - certainly the most well known, has been the subject of many books and endless speculation it has always been a subject of intrigue for students of the sea and the general populace - sparked by the attraction of the colorful passenger list, the pathos of human tragedy, the uncertainty of the cause of the disaster (still not clearly and definitively resolved) and the legends that have surrounded the event.

Fact and fiction have become woven into an almost inseparable whole. Poor original records, incomplete investigations, inaccurate contemporary reporting, memories affected by stress, the passage of time and the subtle effect of the culture and society of the day have all conspired to produce this tangled web that has delighted novelists and tormented scholars almost from the day after the tragedy up to the present day!

This project began with the data files in the SATCHEL MS-DOS product and grew into what you see now. Although a hackneyed phrase, truth has certainly proven stranger (and more interesting) than fiction as this project has unfolded.

It is hoped that users will be able to glimpse behind the cold and somewhat stark words and images on the screen and come to grips with the human dimension of the society of the day and this tragedy in particular. This will only occur if users see the information as a starting point and surround them with research that is book and film based.

The beginnings of the original project owe much to Walter Lord's novel 'A Night To Remember' and to the discovery of the wreck by Dr. Robert Ballard on September 1, 1985. The words from the epilogue of his book 'The Discovery of the Titanic' are an hauntingly appropriate conclusion to this introduction:

"The bottom of the ocean is a quiet place, a peaceful place, fitting for a memorial to all the things that sank when the Titanic went down.

The wreck we found and photographed can stand as a monument to a mistake of arrogance, to a lost age, and to a kind of innocence we can't recover - and to the people, both guilty perpetrators and innocent victims, who figured in the drama."