We have two questions:

1. How well did you do on our quiz?

2. Have you stopped humming that Celine Dion song yet?

Well, we can help with the first question, anyway. (The second may require therapy.)

True or false?

1. The engineer who designed RMS Titanic claimed that 'God himself couldn't sink this ship.'

False. In fact, there's no record of anyone from the White Star Line making the claim that RMS Titanic was 'unsinkable'. This claim appears to have been an invention of the yellow press, made up after the fact. (Yeah, they had sloppy journalism back then, too.)

2. Titanic's sister ship also sank.

True. HMHS Britannica, being used as a hospital ship during the First World War, was sunk on 21 November 1916 off the island of Kea in the Aegean. The wreck was located by Jacques Cousteau in 1975.

3. As a passenger, your chances of surviving the disaster were better if you were a woman.

True. 75% of the female passengers survived, as against 20% of the male passengers. It really was 'women and children first', although 50 children died, 49 of them from steerage. The youngest, Sidney Leslie Goodwin, was only 19 months old.

4. No dogs survived the sinking of RMS Titanic.

False. Accounts differ, but at least two dogs survived, a Pomeranian and a Pekingese who were carried to the lifeboats by their people. No cats survived, because there were no cats aboard. (Cats have been smug about this ever since.)

5. One of the ship's owners disguised himself as a woman in order to board a lifeboat.

False.   Bruce Ismay was accused of this, but the charge was not true. One male passenger later admitted he donned a shawl to get on a lifeboat, though.

6. RMS Titanic was the first ship to use the SOS distress call.

False.Titanic was the fourth ship to use this new signal. If only the California had arrived sooner.

7. The captain of RMS Titanic went down with the ship, because this was the accepted Law of the Sea.

True and false. Captain Smith did indeed die during the sinking of Titanic, but the notion that this was expected of ships' captains is romantic nonsense. The idea that his last words to the crew were 'Be British' appears to be another unverifiable legend.

8. In 1912, moviegoers were able to see accurate newsreel footage of Titanic sinking.

False. The 10-minute newsreel that circulated shortly after the sinking contained mostly footage of Titanic's sister ship, Olympic, but they passed this off as the genuine article. See comments to question 1 above. Oh, and while we're at it, stop bothering those people on the educational websites. Jack Dawson was not on the passenger list. Neither was Rose.

9. The sinking of Titanic marked the second greatest maritime loss of life in peacetime up to that day.

True. Loss of life from the Titanic disaster was second only to that of the Mississippi steamboat SS Sultana on 27 April 1865. About 1800 people died in the wreck near Memphis, Tennessee. Most sadly of all, many of them were returning POWs liberated from camps such as Andersonville.

10. The final song played on Titanic was 'Nearer, My God, to Thee'.

False (probably). A great deal of ink has been spilt, and pixels disturbed, in answering this question. None of the band members survived, as they sacrificed their own chances of safety to calm the other passengers. They died with their boots on, and we honour them. A reliable witness, Harold Bride, Titanic's junior wireless operator, said the last song he heard was a popular tune called 'Autumn'. It makes sense that the band members were playing something cheerful. In addition, there is the problem that some passengers were from the US and some from Britain – the two countries used different tunes for 'Nearer, My God, to Thee'. The whole hymn business was probably the invention of our old friends, the yellow press.

We hope you have found this quiz enlightening. Notice that – unlike several Titanic-related websites we have visited – we haven't included any cruise ads.

Happy (and safe) sailing!

Dmitri Gheorgheni

09.04.12 Front Page

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