RMS TITANIC : 91 YEARS
1912 - 2003
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The Toledo Blade ran an article about Titanic Toledo 2003 as it was being held. We met aboard Boyer on Saturday armed with copies of the paper. It was fine advertising, and no doubt helped to draw people to the attraction that night.
Fund-raiser to help keep SS Willis B. Boyer museum afloat The Toledo Blade : Friday 9 May 2003 * * *
Capt. David G. Brown wants to set the record straight: The Titanic did not sink. Instead, it was the ship's debris that plunged to the ocean's floor April 14-15, 1912, when the British steamship broke apart after hitting an iceberg that buckled its steel and popped its fittings. It's a subtle departure from the conventional wisdom of the accident that might get lost on all but the most ardent of Titanic buffs. But it shifts a bit more of the blame for the disaster to the ship's construction and brings into question the generally accepted theory of the accident as well as several minutes of the James Cameron film epic that starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. "It's like saying that an aircraft that breaks up in air after being hit by a missile `crashed,'" said Captain Brown, who pilots a water taxi along the Maumee River. "The airplane ceases to be when it blows apart. It's the debris that strikes the ground." Captain Brown and Capt. Erik Wood, a ship captain from Topeka, will be among the dozen or so Titanic buffs who are meeting today and tomorrow aboard the SS Willis B. Boyer for the Boyer's second "Titanic in Toledo," a fund-raiser to help maintain the old freighter-turned-museum. The Boyer was built in 1911, about the same time as the Titanic. The public is invited to a forum at 1 p.m. tomorrow. A re-enactment of some of the scenes from the sinking Titanic will be held at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10 for the re-enactment. According to the generally accepted story of the accident, the ship's crew saw the iceberg too late, rammed the ship's engines in reverse, and grazed the berg - resulting in a 300-foot-long gash along the ship's starboard side that then swamped the ship's compartments like water filling an ice cube tray. But Captains Wood and Brown said that theory simply doesn't, well, hold water. For one thing, a narrow, long gash would have made the ship roll over and sink in a very short time, Captain Wood said. Instead, the two men theorize that Titanic ran aground of the underwater part of the berg and the subsequent structural damage simply began breaking the ship apart. That means the iceberg wasn't solely to blame for the death of the approximately 1,500 crew and passengers; the ship's frailty helped doom it. As the ship began to fall apart, its bow section twisted away and its stern - buoyed by trapped air - was set upright. It would take about three hours after the original impact before it dropped to the ocean's floor. "The problem is that 90 percent of the Titanic historians aren't navigationally minded," Captain Wood said. Titanic's real demise was misunderstood by most people, and likely covered up by "British officialdom," according to Captain Brown. In the pre-World War I years, Britain and Germany were locked in economic warfare, with both claiming to rule the ocean. To admit that Titanic sank, in part, because it fell apart, Britain would forfeit an edge to Germany, Captain Brown said. © 2003, The Toledo Blade. or return to the home page. |
