“It’s the fascination of such an impossible story, and I think that fascination will continue on and on,” said Don Lynch, a Los Angeles-based author who advised director James Cameron on the 1997 blockbuster “Titanic” and joined the filmmaker on two dives to the wreck in a 7-foot-wide sphere.
“It’s the biggest ship in the world; it’s on its maiden voyage; it’s supposed to be unsinkable; and there are rich and famous people on board,” added Lynch, official historian for the Titanic Historical Society, created in 1963 in Springfield.
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The ship was a behemoth — 883 feet long, 92 feet wide, and 175 feet high from the keel to the top of its four stacks.
The 1997 film, which depicted the sinking in striking detail, revived interest in the Titanic, but the tale of the doomed ship had never strayed far from public consciousness. More than a dozen films have been made about the tragedy, including some produced only months afterward, and hundreds of books have been published.
Those books include “A Night to Remember,” a 1955 nonfiction account by Walter Lord that found its way to movie houses three years later. Lynch, who co-authored “Titanic: An Illustrated History” in 1992, said the appetite for Titanic books has been enormous.
“The ship sinks so slowly, so there’s all this incredible drama, and the band is playing right up to the end,” Lynch said. “There are different things that people focus on; there’s bravery, of course, and there’s also cowardice.”
Paul Burns, a Titanic Historical Society board member, said the ship’s lasting appeal lies in its indelible humanity.
“It’s a story that’s never ended,” said Burns, who also is chair of Titanic Museum Attractions, which displays artifacts from the ship at museums in Missouri and Tennessee. His favorite artifact, Burns said, is a pin cushion that Francis Brown, a Jesuit priest in training, had bought on the Titanic and given to his niece after disembarking near Cork, Ireland.
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If Brown had continued on the shipacross the Atlantic, Burns said, he probably would not have survived.
Dan Finamore, curator of maritime art and history at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, said the Titanic has a compelling resonance that cuts across popular culture.
“It’s always the Titanic that people turn to,” Finamore said. “At a basic level, it has something to do with the hubris involved, and something with human failing. You realize this is the apex of elegant life, and then you’re on your way to the ocean bottom.”
The Peabody Essex has an original plan of first-class cabins that wealthy passengers would use to choose where they wanted to stay, Finamore said. The collection also has a pocket watch that stopped when a passenger hit the water.
The Titanic, he said, “is an icon, a symbol that is lost and cannot be replaced, no matter how much money you have today.”
The ship’s excruciatingly long sinking — 2 hours and 40 minutes after striking an iceberg late on April 14, 1912 — is yet another riveting aspect of the tragedy that occurred 900 miles east of Cape Cod.
As time passed — from the officers first considering the collision a nuisance, then slowly realizing its devastating damage and shepherding too few people onto too few lifeboats — the prospect of dying in frigid ocean waters crept closer and closer for two-thirds of the passengers and crew.
Only 712 survived, many of them women and children who had been given seats in the lifeboats while husbands, fathers, and sons remained on board and perished. But there also were women, such as Ida Straus, who refused to leave her husband, Isidor, the co-owner of Macy’s, and chose to go to her death with him.
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And toward the end, as the ship’s decks began to slant, the Titanic’s band played on.
The tragedy for the ship, bound for New York, has connections that persist to this day. The Widener Memorial Library at Harvard University was named for first-class passenger Harry Elkins Widener, a 27-year-old Philadelphia businessman and Harvard graduate who died along with his father, George D. Widener.
The library was built with a $2 million donation by Harry’s mother, Eleanor Elkins Widener, who had been given a seat in a lifeboat and survived.
Visitors still stop by the graves of Titanic victims who were buried in Halifax, Nova Scotia. And in Boston, as newspapers carried the names of survivors, the first games ever were played at Fenway Park, between the Red Sox and the New York Highlanders, who would later become the Yankees.
Lynch, the author who visited the wreck in 2001 for a documentary with Cameron, said the search for the missing submersible Titan has rekindled his memories of seeing the Titanic for the first time, including viewing the bow of the ship he had studied for so long, where the emergency flares were launched, and where Ida and Isidor Straus might have stood.
He recalled looking through robotic cameras at cabins and reception areas and even a doctor’s office with medicine bottles still stashed away.
“It really hit close to home because I had been in a submersible there. I’ve experienced the bottom of the ocean in a very tiny vehicle,” Lynch said, “It was just phenomenal to go to places that had never been photographed before.
“It meant a lot to me emotionally.”
Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at [email protected].
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