OCULA Conference 2021: Switching gears: Finding time to check-in and check-out

Over 109 years after the largest ship in the world, RMS Titanic, struck an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage and the disaster continues to fascinate new generations. Whether one’s interest is history, physics, business, psychology, engineering, or the arts, elements of the disaster have relevance across many disciplines.

As a librarian, I am interested in the nature of information related to the Titanic disaster. What do people really know about a disaster that they confidently feel they understand? How did misinformation and myth propagate alongside facts from the unfolding of the sinking to the present? For many casual followers of the Titanic story who have gleaned most of their information from the odd documentary and a certain 1997 blockbuster film there is usually at least one glaring omission from their knowledge of the disaster: Another ship visually watched as the Titanic steamed up, stopped, fired multiple rockets and then “slowly steamed away.”

Join me for a lunctime lecture to hear the curious case of the SS Californian. A ship which was itself stopped due to ice, equipped with a similar Marconi wireless telegraph system as Titanic, and had several of its watch officers, crew, and its captain all visually observe Titanic at different points in the night. Despite watching eight rockets fired and receiving no reply to her own morse code lamp signals, the Californian stood still, made no rescue attempt, and was a bystander to one of the great marine tragedies of the modern age. We will use original testimony and contemporary evidence and analysis to consider not just why the Californian stood still, but why it is a largely untold part of the popular narrative of the Titanic disaster.