https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animals_aboard_the_RMS_Titanic

Oh 😢 ..... reading about the pets...and the story of Frou Frou .. poor little darlings... how’s one female refusing to leave her pet... and her body was seen holding a big shaggy dog.
Now I’m tearing up... back later.

A few years after beaching

Wow, what an excellent find Gnads!
It’s incredible.
What a shame it was used for practice bombing during the war.
Pulverised it a lot until it was classified and protected.

Inside the Lermontov, but not deep within. I drift into the Cinema - on its side, like the Wreck. The chairs mostly still in place. I drift along side of them - a wall of chairs just a metre away. Some Divers ahead of me, some behind me. I'm careful not to 'silt up' the Cinema room, as I hover momentary next to a chair that still holds it's bottom imprint from years of use pre-sinking.

Long ago. A Russian Warship came to New Zealand when it was a young Colonial/Maori existence. They ordered submission or bombardment. The New Zealanders had to comply and put up provisions freely.
Not so long ago. Russian ship the Lermontov is given a notoriously drunken reputational Pilot to steer the ship through the Malborough Sounds. Of course he takes a short cut so he can dock and get his next drink and damages the ship where it limps into a sound to sink eventually.
Karma.

I slide along a ladder in a passage and come into the room of dolls. A haunting place where many tiny dolls are strewn about in this room. Some, their heads or arms detached. Not many divers linger here for some reason. Nor did I and kicked my fins gently to move along into another part of the Wreck. Where outside - I drift by a very tall wall of very well preserved wooden decking. Visibility allows me to see a wall that is shrouded in both directions along the 117m length of the big wreck. Strange being near such a big wall, that was once a deck. Through the wall, I hear and feel a creaking of metal as maybe some part of the wreck has collapsed.

SS Morro Castle (1930)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Morro_Castle_(1930)

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Another terrible ship disaster that could have been avoided.

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Fire at sea. I wouldn't like to be in that situation. Especially at night in bad weather as was the case with Morro Castle.

SS Morro Castle after the fire; photo taken from the seaward end of the Asbury Park Convention Hall pier, November 1934 (from the Wikipedia article).

Last apparently transmitted message from Amelia ...

The words "This is Amelia Earhart!" were repeated several times, followed by broken transmissions of two people arguing, cries for help and "Water's knee deep!"

Carl D wrote on Nov 28^th, 2022 at 11:57pm:


Thank you! I’m glad you did a resurrection… one of my all time fave topics in shipwrecks is the Titanic!
I have big fancy pop up books on Titanic.
We can never learn enough about this ship and all that happened.
It makes me teary when I think of how frightful it must’ve been on that fateful night.
As I’ve sailed in many ocean liners… first thing is we all must go to our assigned muster areas with life jackets. It was thanks to the tragedy of the titanic this safety drill was put into place.
Only recently… the crew now electronically mark you down as having attended…. as many in past didn’t bother. So there’s a fine or something for those that don’t attend the safety drill. The crew even go around to each stateroom looking for anyone hiding out.

Crazy isn’t it? Some will never learn from something tragic like the sinking of the Titanic to appreciate safety precautions put into place in current times for our benefit.

Actually, all of this reminds me that I haven't watched the Leonardo and Kate 3 hour Titanic epic for a while.

The iceberg collision and initial flooding scenes were especially well done for 1997.



One thing that has always made me cringe is towards the end of that video clip when the watertight doors are closing and men are scrambling to get under them before they close (with a couple of close calls too) and then we see men who didn't make it looking around in panic not knowing what to do and the audience probably thinking they are going to drown.

While this makes for a bit of 'dramatic cinema' all those men needed to do was climb up the escape ladders to the deck above. Even ship designers back in those days knew there could be situations where individual compartments had to be sealed off quickly and escape ladders were needed.

In fact, after the collision the workers in the 2 flooding forward boiler rooms climbed up the ladders and waited for orders for what to do next - and those orders were to climb back down and start putting out the fires in the boilers which is what a couple of men are doing in the attached image below from the 1958 Titanic movie A Night To Remember which shows shipbuilder Thomas Andrews (played by Michael Goodliffe) on one of these escape ladders in one of the flooding boiler rooms - he's the one on the right and the expression on his face says it all after he's surveyed the damage and realises the ship is doomed.

The actual dialogue from that scene was:

Chief Engineer Joseph Bell: "Anything more you want to see?"
Thomas Andrews: "No. (turns his head and looks around) Chief, I'd get those men up as soon as you can".
Joseph Bell: "Yes, I'll... I'll do that, Mr. Andrews".

The other thing from the James Cameron epic in the video clip is when First Officer William Murdoch closes the watertight doors from the bridge and an indicator panel lights up showing when the doors have closed (this is also in A Night To Remember and other Titanic movies).

Turns out there was no such lighted indicator panel on the Titanic. One was retrofitted to the Olympic after the Titanic disaster and one was also fitted to Britannic, the 3rd sister.

There was just a single lever on the bridge to close the watertight doors on the Titanic... and still today no one is absolutely sure exactly where it was located. Oh, and there was a button next to the lever to sound warning bells to let those down below know that the doors were about to close (and Murdoch waited about 10 seconds between sounding the bells and moving the lever to close the doors - he didn't do both at the same time as shown in the film clip).

And that lever only closed about 12 "automatic" doors at the very bottom of the ship as you see in the video clip. The rest - about 20 or 30 throughout the ship from memory - all had to be closed by hand. Some were, some weren't and some were even closed then opened again later (including some of the "automatic" doors in the engine compartments and unflooded boiler rooms) to run hoses and pipes when the engineers were trying to rig extra pumps.