Titanic was an enormously well-publicized ship from the beginning. The fact that she was the most luxurious liner of her era and, at the time, the largest moving object ever built immediately captured the popular imagination. The unimaginable disaster of her sinking and the great loss of life quickly took root in this fertile ground, and a large number of myths and rumors sprang up about her. Of course, the first myth about Titanic was that she was "unsinkable." This was not a claim advanced by either Harland & Wolff, the shipbuilders, or White Star Line, the owners. It was probably first made by the press. The "Irish News and Belfast Morning News" in its June 1, 1911 coverage of the launch of Titanic's hull, described the system of watertight compartments and electrically controlled watertight doors and concluded that these made the ship practically "unsinkable." That same month, "Shipbuilder" magazine devoted an entire issue to Titanic, and offered the same assessment. She was, in fact, designed to stay afloat with four compartments flooded. The same basic designs had been employed in the building of a far more "unsinkable" ship, The Great Eastern, more than 50 years before Titanic. The full realization of that system on Titanic would have required an additional set of bulkheads (the watertight walls) running longitudinally through the ship, and the upward extension of the bulkheads to seal at the top of D Deck. Such measures would have made the crew's movements through the ship much more cumbersome. Of course, most of the mythology arose from the sinking. It is sometimes difficult to sort the truth from the rumors, since the accounts by survivors are notoriously contradictory, and some seemingly impossible events appear to be factual. For example, Joughin, the ship's baker, is said to have climbed out onto the poop-deck rail and held on as the ship's stern rose out of the water and then sank. He followed the ship down to the water-level, and was later pulled into a boat with his hair still dry. But if the truths were sometimes strange, the fictions certainly rival them. Walter Lord reported that after "A NIGHT TO REMEMBER" was published in 1955, he received several letters from Ireland explaining the "real" reason that Titanic sank. Purportedly, the hull number assigned to Titanic as it was being built in Belfast, 390904, had a secret meaning. If you hand-write this number making the '4' rather angular and exaggerated, add a space, and then hold it up to a mirror, it seems to spell "No Pope." Clearly, the letters opined, the Ulster Protestants who built Titanic had assigned her this coded message on purpose, and divine retribution had ensued. On the other side of the coin, many people in England firmly believed that hundreds of Belfast steel workers went down with the ship, despite the illogic of this assertion, since their job had been finished almost a year before. One legendary relic from the disaster was a violin which, according to marine historian John Maxtone-Graham, circulated for years through auction houses, touted as the instrument used to entertain and calm the passengers on the boat deck as Titanic sank. Since none of the musicians were saved, its provenance seems doubtful. One persistent "myth" eventually proved to be the truth. Survivors disagreed on the fate of the ship itself. Some asserted that the ship had broken in two, while others insisted it hadn't. The "authoritative" writers sided with the latter group for decades. Col. Gracie, in his 1912 book, flatly discounted 17-year-old Jack Thayer's account that it broke in half, suggesting instead that Thayer merely witnessed the forward funnel falling. (Gracie's unequivocal conviction on this point is especially curious considering that elsewhere he described how he personally went down with the bow of the ship and, after an extended struggle under water, came back to the surface to find the ship had completely disappeared... so he did not witness the ship's final moments.) John Maxtone-Graham, writing in 1972, was similarly dismissive of Thayer's account. It was only after the wreck was discovered in 1985, in two sections lying 1/3 of a mile apart on the ocean floor, that the accepted "fact" of Titanic's end was altered to conform with what Jack Thayer saw. The final fate of the lifeboats remains a minor mystery. Most of the boats were corralled by Carpathia and brought to New York, where they floated at White Star's dock for a few days. From there on, their whereabouts are unknown. Very likely, White Star Line painted out the markings and re-deployed them to other ships. There was, after all, a new demand for lifeboats on passenger liners. The one boat not brought back by Carpathia was Collapsible "A", which had been swamped and was deemed unsalvageable and cut adrift by Officer Lowe when he transferred survivors out of it into a more stable craft. It was found a month later by the liner Oceanic, two hundred miles from the collision site but still afloat with three bodies and an assortment of jewelry and personal belongings in the bottom of it.

TM TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX © 1997 BY PARAMOUNT PICTURES AND TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.