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The Riddle of the Titanic

1996; Wiley; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

1542-734X

Richard Howells,

Maritime Security and History

The Riddle of the Titanic. Robin Gardiner and Dan van der Vat. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995. Conspiracy theories make good media, and a theory so bold as to claim that the never sank was bound to catch any lively news editor's eye. It is hardly surprising, therefore that The Riddle of the Titanic proved controversial even before it reached the bookshops. Now that it has been more widely read, however, the controversy has considerably abated. This is not because the volume has proved its point: rather, it is because the conspiracy theory which it advocates turns out to be so thinly argued that it has proved impossible to take it seriously. Gardiner and van der Vat's theory runs like so: The did not sink; rather, her damaged and almost-identical sister-ship, the Olympic, was substituted and deliberately sunk in her place as part of a gigantic insurance fraud. The Olympic, as the authors correctly point out, was the slightly elder of the two ships, and was damaged in collision with the Royal Navy's HMS Hawke near Southampton, England, in the autumn of 1911. The owners, it is argued, discovered that the damage was far greater than they had feared, and so they decided to write off the Olympic on the Titanic's insurance. This, the theory continues, was accomplished with a simple switch. To the un-trained eye, the Olympic and the were almost identical, and so a clandestine sleight-of-hand was accomplished while the two ships were in dock together at the Harland and Wolff yard at Belfast in March 1912. Name-plates, life-belts and so forth were secretly swapped. The Olympic, now disguised as the Titanic, was patched up and deliberately sailed into a known ice-field. The authors stress that this is not a mass murder conspiracy, but insurance fraud which went horribly wrong. The plan, they speculate, was that the Olympic/Titanic would indeed hit an iceberg, but that her water-tight compartments would keep her afloat for long enough for other ships of the same line safely to take off all the passengers and crew before the great ship went down. Unfortunately, for all concerned, they claim, the liner's ever-impetuous Captain Smith got it wrong and hit the ice-field early, resulting in massive and terrible loss of life. This is the theory which, understandably, caused such a furor in the British press as the publisher's publicity machine went into action. …