It was on 14 April 1912 that Britain's luxury liner Titanic
struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, sinking within hours. The
ship carried too few lifeboats and only 705 of the 2207 people
aboard survived. The terrible fate of the Titanic horrified people
the world over, yet to some, including one of its victims, it was
not entirely a surprise.
In 1892 English jounalise W.T. Stead had published a magazine story
titled "From the Old World to the New", which described an ocean
liner picking up survivors from an iceberg collision in the
Atlantic Ocean, a disaster in which many lives were lost because
insufficient lifeboats were on board. The fictitious captain's name
was E.J. Smith -- the captain of the Titanic was also named E.J.
Smith.
In a talk in 1909 Stead, a committed spiritualist, had attacked the
Society for Psychical Research, comparing their methods to rescuers
who, instead of throwing a drowning man a life preserver, demanded
proof of his identity before saving him. Stead put himself into his
example: "Who are you? What is your name?" "I and Stead! W.T.
Stead! I am drowning here in the sea." Stead drowned in the
Atlantic when the Titanic went down.
Morgan Robertson's 1898 novel Futility also included the fatal
encounter of an iceberg and a luxury liner -- this time, the Titan,
in the month of April. Said to be unsinkable, the Titan did not
carry enough lifeboats for all its passengers and crew. Robertson's
Titan foreshadowed the Titanic in such details as its displacement,
three propellers, two masts and passenger capacity of 3000. But it
must be said that as a sailor and a shipping expert, Robertson was
familiar with ships and collision with icebergs were not
unknown.
Yet a number of people claimed to have premonitions of the
Titanic's sinking. Author Stead himself received a letter from a
clergyman who warned him not to board the ship. Colin Macdonald,
assigned as the Titanic's second engineer, refused three times to
sign on because of a hunch that something terrible would happen.
Some would-be passengers, including banker J. Pierpoint Morgan,
also decided not to travel. Psychic V.N. Turvey, on 10 April,
predicted that a great liner would soon go down. And on the night
of the disaster, an English boy named J.P.J. Chapman reportedly had
a vision of the event as it occurred. The child recalled, "The
small boats, the drowning people, the wreckage just faded away." In
fact as in fiction, the great ship had gone to its destiny.
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