Counter-Currents
2,424 words
Hypocrisy there is in the story, and weakness, false pride and vaunting, deceit, poltroonery, ugly perversions, and baleful frenzies. But there is more also. Through the story runs the scarlet thread of courage and the golden thread of heroism. — George R. Stewart, Ordeal by Hunger
It may be trite to state that people show their true colors in extreme circumstances, but what better way is there? James Cameron certainly mocked the hubris of the Titanic true believers in the first half of his iconic 1997 movie, but the numbers of the disaster reveal a chivalry which speaks fairly well of the people who traveled and served on that ill-fated, immortalized vessel.
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For a much better movie about the Titanic, try A Night to Remember from the 1950’s. It’s deeply moving, and closely based on fact.
And speaking of ethnic traits, the British stiff-upper-lip once was real, and very beneficial, as portrayed in A Night to Remember in multiple instances. You might have to search for it in the horror show that Britain has become.
Thanks for this great review, Mr. Quinn.
James Cameron’s Titanic is a morally hideous film. It completely subverts the heroism of the real story. The antagonist, who represents the Anglo-Saxon elite of that time period—the class of men who invented the ethic of “women and children first” and in real life laid down their lives for that ideal—is portrayed as cowardly, vicious, and depraved. It is maddeningly insulting. A proper Titanic movie would reaffirm the right that that class had to rule by showing how gallantly they sacrificed themselves to save others while the unwashed masses trampled each other below the deck. I’ll have to check out A Night to Remember.
+1. A higher percentage of women from steerage survived Titanic (something like 92%) than men from first class. But our fellow citizens get their history lessons from Hollywood.
Ordeal by Hunger is delightfully melodramatic, but it is error-strewn, as it is copied from a sensationalistic newspaper series (published in book form in 1879 as The History of the Donner Party, by Charles McGlashan). Patrick Breen was neither improvident nor 40 years old, as Stewart portrays him: this father of seven was 50, and had owned several farms and businesses in Ontario, Illinois, and Iowa. The “mongrel” Jean Baptiste Trubod was actually named Trudeau, and to judge by a surviving photograph he was not visibly a mongrel.
Cannibalism is the main drawing card in the story of the Donner-Reed Party, but the instances that Stewart retails from the McGlashan version are highly doubtful. We have the testimony of the Breens and Reeds (the two families that survived intact) that their own people did not indulge in human flesh, and many survivors likewise denied the accusation. Following Stewart’s version, cannibalism seems to have been done mostly by people who did not live to tell the tale! A notable exception to this is the main purveyor of cannibalism yarns, Lewis Keseberg, who seems to have dined out on his lurid campfire tales for years afterwards.
The corrective to this book, Winter of Entrapment by Joseph King, was published in 1992, and was used as the basis of that year’s PBS Donner Party documentary by Ric Burns.
Not only did the Breens and Reeds survive the ordeal, they became as wealthy as they had intended to become when they set out for California, and for generations owned extensive spreads in Santa Clara, Monterey and San Benito counties.
In all, 52% of the 109 children and 74% of the 425 women onboard survived, with the vast majority of this latter group being 30 and under. Of the men, only 20% of the 1,690 onboard survived.
The Titanic may represent the best of long Victorian British high culture. But a more fitting shipwreck for the one currently in progress might be the 1854 sinking of the SS Arctic.
The incident saw the ship’s crew — its technocratic elite — act as a cohesive outlaw gang, taking the chance to rape and pillage while drunk on booze if not power. All but the captain turned immediately to a bacchanal of savagery, reveling in atrocities that they knew the dead would never report.
When the ship’s deck began sinking below the water line, the whiskied crewmen slashed and smashed their way to the remaining few lifeboats, boarded and left nearly 400, mostly women and children, all aboard of whom died, to freeze and drown.
One might call it Superdome ethics by lifeboat.
Thank you, Antichomsky. You might be interested in this paper which confirms that the Arctic may be closer to the truth than the Titanic.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2051006
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