The monuments of world

BELFAST, Northern Ireland – I knew before I left for Belfast that the world is divided into those who don’t care, and those who can’t seem to get enough of the doomed ocean liner Titanic, which sank on its maiden Atlantic crossing a century ago today off the coast of Newfoundland.

The Belfast Titanic Society says there are more than 100 museums and monuments associated with the ship worldwide, and Belfast added to the list March 31 by opening a $150 million building on the slipway where the Titanic was built from 1909 to 1911. Tim Husbands, president of the foundation that runs Titanic Belfast, said the city “has, at last, a focal point for its Titanic and maritime heritage.”

For my wife and me, the nautical stuff was secondary. We thought maybe the new Titanic Belfast space had room for us to make like Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in 1997′s Titanic. We wanted to do the “flying sequence” in the film, where Leo and Kate stand, hopelessly in love, with arms trustingly outstretched at the bow of the liner.

We’re suckers for that, and I don’t think we’re alone.

But, Belfast is the perfect place to understand the Titanic not just as a romantic or fictive ideal, but as something anchored in economics, social history, technology, and innovation. That took us first to the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, the ungainly name for a sprawling collection of exhibits in a wooded preserve about seven miles east of central Belfast.

There’s a Titanic exhibit in domed buildings reminiscent of Quonset huts, with a snack bar, bookstore, seating for resting weary feet, and a welcoming pace that allows for slow absorption of the complex story behind the ship and its demise. Huge blowups of historic photos are hung on the curved walls and ceiling, and visitors walk over gantries and trusses as if they were at the 200-acre Harland & Wolff shipyard where the Titanic was built.

To get a sense of the size of the ship, the Titanic was 42 percent larger than any ocean liner in the world in 1912. The ship was a bit narrower than the Eagles’ football field is wide, and at 882 feet, nearly three times the length of the Lincoln Financial Field gridiron.

By contrast, the Costa Condoria that struck a reef Jan. 13 off the coast of Italy is 952 feet, proof that while they can make ships bigger today, they can still wreck them, too.

It wasn’t just size that set the Titanic apart, we learned. Belfast was a provincial powerhouse of invention, and the ship was, for example, the first ocean liner with onboard refrigeration. First-class passengers enjoyed fresh fruit and vegetables, cheeses and savories, chilled strawberries and champagne.

Of course, class and wealth mattered then as they do today. The first- and second-class passengers on the voyage – about 600 of the 2,200 people on board – had the best chow, private baths, and hot and cold water in their rooms. They could walk the decks any time they wanted, while the more than 700 third-class passengers were confined below decks, with only an hour on deck permitted daily – locked gates and armed guards enforced the rules. All of the third-class passengers shared only two bathrooms, one each for men and women.

Titanic sank three hours after hitting an iceberg. More than 1,500 men, women, and children died because there weren’t enough lifeboats on the ship. There was room on Titanic for enough lifeboats to save 4,000 people, but the company cut corners on safety. Only about 700 passengers survived, yet there were almost 500 empty seats on the 20 lifeboats that were launched. Most of those who died were third-class passengers and crew.

One of the crew lost was assistant ship’s physician John Edward Simpson. We met his great-nephew John Martin and great-niece Kate Dornan at the Belfast Titanic Society monthly meeting in March. Martin, a retired physician, spoke about his great-uncle and shared photos and eyewitness accounts of Simpson’s last minutes on the Titanic.

“There were three survivors who spoke about Simpson,” Martin told the jammed auditorium. One of his nurses was so upset as the ship began to fall apart, he poured her a whiskey and water to calm her. “?’Let’s drink to the mighty Titanic,’ she said he joked with her.”

“He went on deck to help load the lifeboats,” Martin continued. After securing the last boat, he gave his flashlight, a valuable and rare appliance for the day, to the engineer pushing off, saying he would no longer need it.

“Goodbye, old man,” were his last words, according to witnesses, Martin said.

Asked if his great-uncle was a hero, Martin paused a moment and offered, “If he was a hero, there were 1,500 other heroes that night taken by the Atlantic.”

The next day, we met Susie Millar, a retired BBC broadcaster whose great-grandfather was an engineer on the Titanic. Her grandfather was 5 years old when the liner sailed down the Lagan River with his father, Thomas Millar, on board. Before he left, Millar gave the boy two pennies dated 1912 and told him not to spend them until he returned.

“Of course, he never returned,” said Susie Millar, who drove us to the family cottage a few miles downriver, the site where her grandfather saw the ship and his father leave Belfast forever. “And my grandfather never spent the pennies. They’re on loan to the Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tenn.”

Billy Scott, a native of Belfast and former British soldier, took us to see the great dry dock where the Titanic got its three propellers, rudder, and paint job. The plan is to permanently seal the dock so that visitors can descend into the immense cavity where once the Titanic lay.

“They’ll be showing the old movies down there for the tourists soon,” said Scott, whose great-granduncles worked on the Titanic. “Should scare the pants off you.”

And then it was time to walk through Titanic Belfast, which calls itself not a museum but a “sensory experience” about a “global brand.” The structure up close looks like a series of huge ships pulled close to the docks, their prows arching skyward.

Inside, everything is digital and photographic presentation, with a few Disney touches – a mockup of the rudder, “molten” steel being poured for the hull, a huge gantry carrying workers to the top of the ship, and lots of archival film, including interactive media. The best part, the most arresting moment in our four days of trying to discover the Titanic in Belfast, came atop the building.

From there, one looks out at the Titanic slipway, with the ship’s form outlined in lights. Then the unsettling truth becomes clear that where we were standing by a glass wall overlooking the docks below would be where Leo and Kate where doing the “flying” scene.

Looking down made us almost ill, so terrifying was the height. Pause a moment, and you realize that that was just the bow of Titanic. The rest of the immense ship continued skyward.

Leaving the building brought fresh challenges. After the first-floor cafe and bistro, the private elevator rises to the top-floor banquet area – where we got dizzy, and which is otherwise closed to tourists – and there’s a souvenir shop where Titanic books from scientific to social history to kids’ treatments filled shelves, along with T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, pencils, notebooks, calendars, wall hangings, and the like. (In the city, you can buy Titanic whiskey, Titanic potato chips, candies, and other oddities.)

A rubber duck, though, brought me to sober reflection.

Dressed like a ship’s officer on the Titanic, the toy reminded me that while the duck still floats, the Titanic and all those innocent souls are at the bottom of the sea.

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