Nearer My God, to Thee
Today, on the 110th anniversary of Titanic’s iceberg collision, I am thinking about the wind. It has been violently windy around Illinois for what feels like forever. I don’t have measurements, or anything other than my internal barometer, but the intensity of the wind across the last few months has been the worst that I can remember.
Today might have been the worst sustained wind of this entire period. I watched as empty Amazon boxes and separated drainpipes careened down my street like missiles. A neighbor’s eight-foot, inflatable yard chicken —I have no idea, don’t ask— swayed in their yard with such violence that I started feeling sorry for it, as if it were alive, anchored into the ground and forced to endure the endless onslaught with no hope of escape.
On the night of April 14-15, 1912, in the North Atlantic Ocean, there was no wind. A calm so fierce that it directly contributed to the fate of Titanic. With no wind, the water became stationary, and so reflected the stars above, making the horizon line nearly invisible to the eye. And without waves, the crashing of the water against the base of any iceberg —an important visible clue for lookouts— was nonexistent. Add in the rampant human errors, and even the strange coincidences that aligned that night, Titanic, and more than 1,500 of its passengers and crew, had no chance.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am fascinated by the wreck of the Titanic. Leave Jack Dawson and Rose DeWitt Bukater out of it; they are an entertaining, but fictional, branch of a tree that never needed additional branches to be compelling. Why exactly this disaster, and not any number of countless others, engrosses me so much, I don’t really know, but I will, without the slightest hesitation, launch into longwinded lectures on whatever random element of the sinking you want (or don’t want) to hear about.
Like how First Officer William Murdoch and Second Officer Charles Lightoller had different interpretations of Captain Edward Smith’s order of “Women and children first.” The latter believed this order to mean that all women and children need be allowed off the ship before men; the former believed this order to mean that once the women and children in a given area were loaded onto lifeboats, it was acceptable that men be allowed to board as well (hence why some men did survive in lifeboats —and were not like Caledon Hockley conniving his way on one in the movie). That is one of a million pieces of trivia that I could place in this space. And here I wonder why no one wants to sit next to me at parties.
Music, and by extension the musicians, have been an important element in the story of the sinking. My guess is that you’ve heard most of what there is about that part of the story. I am a believer that the dramatic elements of the band’s role —the playing of “Nearer My God, to Thee” in the ship’s final moments, for instance— are apocryphal, but their presence throughout is still romantic in my eyes. Surely, at the beginning, they were as in the dark as many of the passengers, and were merely playing at the behest of Captain Smith in order to keep the mood calm and orderly, with little idea of the severity of what was about to happen.
Regardless of what the band did or did not play that night, the violin of Wallace Hartley, the bandleader, was recovered with Hartley's body after the sinking. The violin was rediscovered in 2013 in someone’s attic. After every test imaginable was done on it, it is said to absolutely be the bandleader’s violin. Forget “Nearer My God, to Thee,” or any of the apocryphal stories, to have an artifact like that feels like finding Excalibur or something. Whether the stories are true or not, simply having the artifact that spawned those stories is incredible.
Hartley was reported to have once said he would play the song were he ever on a sinking ship, so it’s possible they did play “Nearer My God, to Thee,” but it feels unlikely that they did so as the ship was taking its final plunge into the icy North Atlantic.
Then again, maybe they did. After all, it is the most insignificant details that make the stories that change everything. If just 5mph of the wind that roared down my street this afternoon had been transplanted to the North Atlantic on April 14, 1912, or if the binoculars for the lookouts hadn’t been locked in a cabinet, whose key was with an officer who had been replaced just before departure; or if Harold Bride, the Morse code operator, hadn’t chastised the operator on the Californian for bothering him with ice warnings during a busy period of his shift; or if the Californian, just 12-20 miles away, hadn’t shut off its Morse code operation after the chastisement, or if the Californian hadn’t ignored the rockets on the horizon, or if Officer Murdoch would have hit the iceberg head-on, instead of trying to “port ‘round” it, if lifeboat requirements had been based on passenger number and not ship tonnage, or if Captain Smith would have simply stopped for the night, then perhaps Titanic docks in New York, or all 2,200 passengers are saved.
I wouldn't have believed all of those things happened either: An unimaginable confluence of circumstances that conspired to sink Titanic. The confluence makes tragedy feel like destiny, which seems a little disrespectful to speak of any disaster as being destined to happen, as if each of those 1,500-plus people lived all of their respective lives in order to die in that moment. I don’t think I believe that. But I believe in the essence of their story, regardless of which song was played and when. It is the story that endures regardless of the details History may or may not remember correctly. And that's all it takes for the wind to grab it, and carry it 110 years away.