Early
in 1912, a man Benjamin Hart decided to sell his home in Essex, England, and move
his family to Canada. Business had been bad, and Hart wanted to get a fresh start in a new
country. His wife, Esther, didn't like the idea. From the moment that her husband shared
his plans with her, Esther sensed anamed feeling
of disaster.
"Please
reconsider," she asked him a number of times. But he wouldn't change his mind. First,
he sold his business, then the family's house, and finally he booked passage on the
steamship Philadelphia.
Then
Benjamin learned that, because of a coal strike, they would not be sailing on the Philadelphia.
Esther was pleased to hear of the cancellation. Perhaps the terrible feeling that she
had would go away. A few days later, Hart was told that they could sail instead on a new
ship, the White Star Line's Titanic.
The Titanic
was the largest and most luxurious ship in the world. It was designed to be
unsinkable, featuring a double hull and fifteen watertight doors that, in case of an
accident, could be closed almost instantaneously to seal off the ship's compartments and
keep her afloat. She was set to leave Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912.
The fact
that they would be sailing on an unsinkable boat should have comforted his wife, Hart
thought. So he told her, "I know you haven't wanted to go up to now, but surely now
that you know you're going in this wonderful ship, the chance of a lifetime, surely you've
overcome all your fears."
"Oh,
no," she replied. "I feel even worse about it than I did before." Then she
began to cry. "That ship will never get to the other side of the Atlantic," she
warned.
On the day
of their departure from Southampton, they stood on the dock with their daughter, Eva, and
observed the massive ship in silence. Both Benjamin and Esther knew what the other was
thinking. Finally, Benjamin picked up Eva and began to carry her up the gangplank.
"Please,
Benjamin," Esther pleaded one last time. "Don't."
Hart turned
around, quite angered by now, and said, "Well, this is ridiculous. If you feel so
badly you'd better go home to your mother and I'll go on my own and you can follow when
you see I've got there quite safely."
Esther had
no intention of going to her mother's house, so she composed herself and followed her
husband up the gangplank. By the time they reached their cabin, though, she had made a
decision. She may have decided to accompany her husband on the ship, but she was going to
do as she wished now that they were on board.
"I am
not happy about being on this ship," she announced, "and I will not be keeping
my usual hours. I will sleep in the daytime and sit up at night, because whatever's going
to happen I feel sure will happen in the night."
###
As the ship
left Southampton harbor, a gathering of people stood on the roof of Jack and Blanche
Marshall's house celebrating the maiden voyage of the Titanic.
As her
daughter later reported in her autobiography, Blanche Marshall gripped her husband's arm
as the ship passed and cried, "That ship is going to sink before it reaches
America!"
"Oh,
Blanche, it's unsinkable," someone said, trying to comfort her.
"It's
going to sink, I tell you," she replied loudly.
Her sharp
tone caused everyone to stop talking and stare at her in amazement.
"Don't
stand there staring at me!" she said. "Do something. I can see hundreds of
people struggling in the icy water. Are you all so blind that you are going to let them
drown?"
Blanche
Marshall's vision
was so vivid and upsetting that the party ended
quickly, and no one mentioned the Titanic to her again for five
days.
###
Two days later, on the night
of April 12, a fourteen- year-old English girl named Anna Lewis was spending the night
with her grandmother when she had a terrifying dream about a ship. Asleep in her
grandmother's bedroom, Anna dreamed that she was standing by a road looking at a scene she
knew well: a nearby park that had a large lake. Then a large ship appeared to be sailing
on the lake. She recalled:
Suddenly
it lowered at one end and I heard a terrific scream. I must have woke up making
a noise because I frightened Gran. She said, "No more suppers for you,
lady; dreams are a pack of daft," after I had told her what I'd seen.
After a
while I must have gone to sleep again and saw the very same scene, and when the
people screamed I must have done the same. Gran was real livid with me this time
....
Her dream
left quite an impression on the family. Unknown to Anna and other members of her family at
the time, her uncle (her grandmother's son), Leonard Hodgkinson, had taken the position of
senior fourth engineer on the Titanic. Leonard had wanted to sail on every White Star
liner before he retired and asked to be transferred to the Titanic
to fulfill his wish. No one, except his wife, knew of the last-minute change, which makes
Anna's dream even stranger still.
###
A feeling, a
vision, a dream--all suggesting that the Titanic (or a large ship,
in Anna's case) was in danger of sinking. You might wonder if any of these experiences
involved traveling through time.
All three experienced some
knowledge related to the Titanic.
###
For the first three
days of the voyage, Esther Hart slept during the day and kept vigil each night. On the
night of April 13, she heard some odd sounds. She woke her husband and made him find out
what had happened.
"Ice
floes," he told her, when he had returned to the cabin. "Small ice floes
scraping against the side of the ship. Nothing to worry about."
The next
morning, a Sunday, she decided to stay up a bit longer so that she would attend a church
service. Afterward, she had lunch with her family.
One of the ship's officers
approached her table during lunch. "Mrs. Hart," he said, "have you given up
taking care of the ship?"
"Not at all," she
said. "I intend to sleep as soon as I've finished my lunch. I will be awake
tonight."
That night, April 14, 1912,
was one she would always remember.
###
That same evening, in
Kirkendbright, Scotland, W. Rex Sowden was awakened by a knock on his bedroom door. As the
local leader of the Salvation Army, Sowden was used to handling emergencies at odd hours.
"Will
you please come at once, Captain?" the caller asked. "Jessie is dying."
Jessie Sayre
was an orphaned girl in the care of the Salvation Army. She had been quite ill and no one
expected her to live much longer.
"Hold
my hand, Captain," Jessie said as Sowden entered her room. "I am so afraid.
Can't you see that big ship sinking in the water?"
"That's
just a dream you've had," Sowden told her.
"No,"
she said, "the ship is sinking. Look at all those people who are drowning. Someone
called Wally is playing a fiddle and coming to you."
Skeptically,
Sowden looked around the room, but saw no one. Then Jessie fell into a coma and died a few
hours later.
###
About the same time that
Jessie died, at 11:40 P.m., Esther Hart felt the Titanic lurch
"like a train pulling into the station." As she had done the night
before, she woke her husband and asked him to find out what had happened.
"It's the ice
floes," he said.
"Benjamin,
please," Mrs. Hart pleaded.
Reluctantly, he gave in. As
soon as he left, Esther woke her daughter and began to dress her.
When Benjamin Hart returned
a short time later, his face was ashen.
"You'd better put
this thick coat on," he told Esther.
She never asked what had
happened. As she told reporters later, "There was nothing to ask him. I didn't have
to ask him what it was. I didn't know it was an iceberg, but I knew that it was something.
Her feeling of disaster was coming true.
He helped
his wife and his daughter make their way to the lifeboats, put them safely in, and watched
them lowered into the water. Benjamin Hart, whose wife had tried to warn him that there
would be disaster, was one of the 1,450 people who died when the Titanic
sank.
###
The world
learned the next day that the Titanic had brushed against an
iceberg in the North Atlantic. The ice had ripped into the first five watertight
compartments on the starboard side. Water poured in, filling them, and then continued to
flood the others. The watertight bulkheads hadn't worked properly. As each compartment
filled, the ship's bow began to dip downward, raising the stern. Few were injured upon the
impact of the iceberg. The problem was that there were only twenty lifeboats for the
twenty-two hundred passengers aboard. What's more, many passengers did not take the
collision seriously and refused to use the lifeboats at first. After all, they thought,
this ship is unsinkable. This caused many lifeboats to be lowered with fewer passengers
than they could hold.
The Titanic
sank at precisely 2:20 A.M. the morning of April 15. Until the moment that it sank,
the band, under the direction of bandmaster Wally Hartley, played hymns.
Only on
April 15 did Captain Sowden discover that his childhood friend Wally Hartley had been on
board the Titanic. Perhaps, thought Sowden, Jessie had seen his
old friend Wally-and the sinking Titanic before she died. He determined that she had
"seen" the sinking about three and a half hours before it had actually occurred.
###
The
experiences of Esther Hart, Blanche Marshall, young Anna, and Captain Sowden were not
unique. Hundreds of others were reported after the Titanic sunk;
many are described in George Behe's book, Titanic: Psychic Forewarnings of a
Tragedy.
However, one
of the strangest forewarnings of the Titanic's tragedy was
a novel, entitled Futility, written by Morgan Robertson in 1898.
It tells the story of the largest ship, named Titan, which had
the best equipment and crew. Unfortunately, it lacked enough lifeboats to hold all of the
passengers. Because the ship was unsinkable, no one was concerned, however.
Titan
set sail in April at full speed, trying to break the record for the shortest
transatlantic crossing. On a foggy, moonlit night, Titan brushed
against a large iceberg, which pulled the ship out of the water before it slammed onto her
starboard side. Most of the lifeboats were smashed in the collision. As Robertson imagined
it, only thirteen of three thousand passengers survived the sinking.
What amazed
many people is that Robertson's description of Titan was so
similar to the Titanic. In fact, there are a number of striking
comparisons between these two supposedly unsinkable ships.
Besides
their almost identical names, both collided with an iceberg in the month of April.
They also
were about the same length and could travel about the same speed.
Both had
the same number of propellers and almost the same number of lifeboats.
When you
consider the fact that Robertson wrote his book fourteen years before the Titanic
was built, you can understand why some people believe that Robertson saw the future.
Others, however, think that Robertson based the Titan on his
knowledge about shipbuilding at the time; he simply made logical assumptions about the
size, speed, and equipment of such a mammoth ship. He also was quite familiar with
episodes in which ships had collided with icebergs. Did he see the future, or did he
simply use his powers of logic and reasoning?
ŠJames M. Deem. Originally
published as Chapter 9 of How to Travel Through Time
(Avon Books, 1993). All rights reserved.
