24.5.2009

Playwright's Prediction

    

    Playwright's Prediction

http://www.netsaga.is/media/files/Glow320kbps.mp3

    In the 1880's Arthur Law had written a play in which the sole survivor of a shipwrecked vessel, the Caroline was called Robert Golding. Within days of the play's first performance he read a newspaper story about a real shipwreck in which there had been only one survivor. The name of the ship the Caroline; the name of the survivor, Robert Golding.

 

    

    Cabin-boy Fodder

    The circumstances of the above incident only add to the bizarre nature of a similar story which began with Arthur Koestler when he wrote an article on coincidences for the Sunday Times. As a follow-up the newspaper offered a hundred pound prize for the reader who submitted the best coincidence. The winner was Nigel Parker, aged twelve who told a story that demands comparison with the story told by Law all those years before.

    Parker's story was of his grandfather's cousin, a cabin boy on a yawl, the Migonette which foundered in 1884. The boy and three senior crew members managed to launch an open boat. They were the only survivors. The three men eventually ate the boy, whose name was Richard Parker. The case was reported in The Times of 28 October 1884. In 1838 Edgar Allan Poe had written a story called, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Poe tells a similar story of shipwreck and a cabin boy survivor who is also eaten by the other survivors. His name, Richard Parker!

 

    

    Titanic Tales

    Several works of fiction relate to the Titanic tragedy. The best known concerns Morgan Robertson, a writer of stories about the sea. In 1898 he began working on a new novel, allowing his imagination to guide him. In his mind-like an animated panorama-he saw a ship moving through fog in the Mid-Atlantic, at a rate of twenty-three knots. As it came closer, he saw it was a large luxury liner, 880 feet (268 metres) in length, driven by three propellers and he estimated, 75000 tons deadweight. People strolled on its long, broad decks. There were more than 2000 on board, more people than any ship had ever before carried. As the panorama became more focused, the name of the ship stood out: Titan. The word 'unsinkable' came to him. He counted the life-boats. There were twenty-four-not enough for the number of passengers and crew on board, which Robertson was to explainaway as due to her unsinkability. Then ahead of the ship he saw an iceberg...

    He leant forward and started working feverishly. The writer's block that had troubled him had vanished with the vision: She was the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men, spacious cabins... decks like broad promenades... Insinkable, indestuctable, she carried as few life-boats as would satisfy the laws...Seventy-five thousand tons...rushing through the fog at the rate fifty feet a second.. hurled itself at an iceberg...nearly 3000 human voices, raised in agonized screams, Robertson called his work of fiction 'The Wreck of the Titan or Futility'. In the issuethat hit the newsstands on 7 April 1912, Popular Mechanics carried another fictious story about the maiden voyage of the largest ocean liner in the world. As she nears Newfoundland an iceberg rips through her hull, sinking her.

    The unsinkable Titanic was not built until 1911. It was the largest craft afloat and went down on its first voyage on the night of 14 April 1912, with up to 2207 people on board, after hitting an iceberg. Some years before the 1898 novel was written, The Pall Mall Gazette had run a story about a ship as large3 as the Titan/Titanic which also sank in mid-Atlantic. Its author, WT Stead wrote another article in 1892, about a steamship colliding with an iceberg in the Atlantic in which itsonlu surviving passenger is rescued by the White Star liner Majestic a ship that actually existed at the time and was captained by Edward Smith (who later captained the Titanic).

    Stead sailed on the Titanic, despite his own predictions and despite warnings from psychics that it could sink and he perished along with 1502 other passengers. Like many authors he had not seen what he was writing as a prediction or a fatal coincidence.

    Morgan Robertson's story has interested Noel Prentis for many years. He explained why in a letter to me: On 3 April 1945, toward the end of my air force service in WWll, I sailed from the port of Brisbane aboard a troopship, the US Liberty Morgan Robertson.

    Late that night, heading north in very rough conditions, we were wakened by a frightening crash. We thought it was 'the End'. However the cause was a bulldozer which had broken loose from its ties and crashed from one side to the other as the ship rolled. Fortunately our army colleagues and crew managed to constrain it by dumping a large number of tires into the hold. During this scare we recalled the rumours to the effect that Liberty ships' welded construction was relatively vulnerable.

    Having drafted this letter last night, I was amazed to see in today's newspapers and TV programs the report that US marine experts now blame the loss of the Titanic on low-grade steel construction. The Morgan Robertson eventually delivered us to Morotai in the Halmaberas. There our radar unit boarded a landing in the invasion fleet of about seventy ships which took us to Japanese-occupied Tarakan... We arrived in the harbor on the night of 30 April for the landing operation commencing the next morning, on which 'all hell broke loose'. The army decided to 'borrow' our landing craft and put us aboard a US troopship on which we remained until our 'turn' came to move into the beach-head. The ship's name Titania!

    Prentis passed on the details as a bemusing incident and this might well have been the end of the matter, However, his interest piqued, he rang his son, an academic, to tell him he had written to me and to ask whether his son might be able to help in tracking down Morgan Robertson's book. No problems said the son. His own son, aged twelve was at that very moment reading Robertson's book; he had for some time been interested in the history of the Titanic and was currently buildin a model of it. Some doubts about the authenticity of the Robertson story were raised with its republication in 1986 by the Ayer publishing company of Alem, NewHampshire. Bibliographical details show the book as having been first published in 1912.

    For obvious reasons, the point of the work as a piece of non-predictive coincidence would be lost if this were the original publication date, even had it been published shortly before the sinking, when the name and other details were by then general knowledge. However, the British Library catalogue gives the lie to the 1912 date; it shows Titan was published c. 1900 by Stone&Mackenzie of New York. In fact, according to its listings all Robertson's five novels were published between 1899 and 1901. Doubts about the predictive basis of Robertson's story have been raised elsewhere. It must be kept in mind he was an ex-mariner with a detailed knowledge of ships, and as a writer on the subject he kept himself in touch with the latest developments. Planning for the building of the Titanic was going on years before the keel was even laid and among the worst-case scenarios considered were its collision with an iceberg-it was after all, to sail a route wher that was of concern, even though icebergs rarely drifted that far south.

    Dr. Ian Stevenson, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, argues that even the name Robertson chose for his ship may have had some logic in it. -Titan has connoted power and security for several thousand years, he says. Other facts in Robertson's story which foretold the Titanic disaster, such as insufficient lifeboats, the time of year the tragedy happened and the belief that the ship was unsinkable, amount, Stevenson feels, to a case of inference on the author's part rather than to coincidence or precognition.

    Against that is the fact that Robertson was not the only one who put pen to paper...