It was on this night, the 15th of April in 1912, 106 years ago tonight to be specific...that the RMS Titanic went under the cold, dark waters of the Atlantic Ocean...over 1500 lives were lost...the ship had hit an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. on 14 April several hundred miles from Newfoundland...the ship was thought to be unsinkable by many...it had ‘watertight’ compartments but those compartments were not actually watertight at all...they could be breached by the water by simply flowing over the top of the compartment wall and flowing into the next one, and the next one, and so on...the weight of the water would pull down the front of the ship sending it and many of its passengers and crew to their doom...there were not enough lifeboats to hold all on board, and some of the lifeboats were lowered with room for more available...one ship that could have helped, The Californian, was extremely close but ignored the distress rockets sent up by the Titanic’s crew...it did try to send an ice warning for small ice and growlers previously, and the message did reach the bridge...however, when The Californian stopped due to ice, the communique was not sent to the bridge by the Titanic’s wireless operator by some unfortunate occurrence...The Titanic did its best to miss the iceberg when it was sighted, but it brushed against the side of the ship inflicting a fatal gash...one can only imagine the terror of that night...the Carpathia steamed to help but it was over 4 hours away...there is an excellent movie ‘A Night To Remember’ which is a faithful re-enactment of the sinking...not the silly one made recently...both The Californian and The Carpathia were sunk during World War I...there is an excellent museum about the Titanic located at The Luxor hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada...they have an actual piece of the hull from the ship...I highly recommend going there...by the way, it has been said by some that the museum has had some paranormal activity take place within it...perhaps the times I was there, the spirits had the night off and were on the Strip somewhere, but I’ve never witnessed any...it seems unlikely to me that any spirits would find their way to a museum thousands of miles away to do any haunting.
