SINKING FEELING: Azamara Journey passengers ride the rail en route to the sinking site. (No Jack or Rose, though.) (NY Post: G.N. Miller)
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DAY 5 — Finally, this ship reached its long-awaited destination early today: the spot in the ocean where, exactly 100 years ago, the Titanic sank, at 41°43’57”N, 49°56’49”W.
“We’re here to remember one of the most poignant moments in maritime history,” said Captain Jason Ikiadis, who took to the ship’s loudspeaker right after midnight this morning, “We shall never forget.”
This was the big moment that nearly everyone had been waiting for, the climactic moment when at 2:10 a.m. the ship’s crew and passengers made it up to the top deck, where a memorial service was conducted.
Rev. Robert Lawrence , led the group in prayer.
After that, Capt. Ikiadis and the ship’s chief engineer launched to plane wreaths, made of twined branches and tied with white ribbon, in the ocean.
The Balmoral, the sister memorial cruise, that had encountered difficulties en route, made it on time, and was visible about 500 yards away.
Once the band finished, at 2:30 this morning, the lights on deck were dimmed and the crowd dispersed. One hour later, the ship turned around and made its way back to New York.
Still, as the Azamara Journey sat above one of the world’s largest nautical graveyards, with not an iceberg in sight, one question hung over this entire centennial Titanic memorial cruise: Was this a celebration, or a desecration?
Take, for example, the itinerary for yesterday. Before the memorial got under way, here were just a few activities that took place during what was billed as a somber “day of reflection”:
8 a.m.: Su doku and crossword.
9 a.m.: Shuffleboard.
10:30 a.m.: Seminar; Detox for Health and Weight Loss.
11 a.m.: Texas Hold ’Em tournament.
12:15 p.m.: Ping-pong.
2 p.m.: Seminar; Revitalize Your Hair.
5:30 p.m.: 2-for-1 Bingo.
8:30 p.m.: Cabaret.
Also, playing on a loop in all staterooms: “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” and, of course, James Cameron’s “Titanic.”
“We set the atmosphere throughout the day,” said Tony Markey, 52, the ship’s cruise director. “We [didn’t have] ‘ABBA Night.’ ”
Nor did they ask passengers to be at all uncomfortable, and that seemed disrespectful: In short, organizers felt, if it was really cold in the North Atlantic — nights have been around 40 degrees, with wind chills in the 20s — why go outside if you didn’t have to (i.e., if you weren’t actually sinking)?
“We [didn’t] expect the guests to listen to two-hour homilies,” Markey said. “We [couldn’t] expect them, just because it’s authentic, to say, ‘OK, I’ll be on deck for four hours.’ ”
So instead of the lengthy ceremony originally posted on the tour’s Web site, last night passengers got an abbreviated ceremony. Then, a howling alarm system went off close to midnight, along with the ship’s foghorn, to mark the moment of impact.
At 12:11 a.m. this morning a ship officer sent out the original distress call sent by the Titanic over the ship’s loudspeaker. He used a Morse-key replica and tapped out the call — initially sent by Titanic’s head operator Jack Phillips, who sent out a “CDQ,” and, later that night, a new signal devised by an international coalition called “SOS.”
This signal, too, was sent via closed circuit last night to Cape Race in Newfoundland, which was site of the first wireless station in Canada.
Names of the Titanic’s dead ran on a loop until 1:20 this morning.
Then guests were left to do their own thing — which, as it has for the past four days, mainly involved drinking and smoking on the deck.
At 2:10 this morning (the Titanic sank at 2:20 a.m on April 15, but this cruise’s organizers have had some problems, well, organizing things) everyone went up to decks 9 and 10, where Capt. Ikiadis spoke for a few moments.
After that, a wreath was lowered into the sea and a Titanic tribute band performed “Nearer, My God, to Thee” — the last song believed to have been played by the Titanic’s band, who famously went down with the ship.
The tribute band’s conductor, New Yorker Kevin Carpenter, 35, was thrilled.
“When I can’t sleep at night, I play documentaries about the Titanic,” he said.
Carpenter spent all day and night in a tuxedo and has been obsessed with the Titanic since he was a little boy: the unprecedented opulence, the strict class system that determined who lived and who died, man’s hubris in the face of the natural world, ever disinterested and capricious.
“Nature is in control, thank you very much,” Carpenter said. “You can spend as much money as you want and still wind up at the bottom of the Atlantic.”
Of course, Carpenter was right, and so it was more than a little odd to see many passengers walking around in full-on Edwardian drag Friday night. The main activity that evening: a seven-course dinner that replicated the last meal many of Titanic’s first-class passengers consumed.
Stepping into the drawing room Friday night was like time travel, or being on a movie set: The soft, worn furniture with its old- money feel; the walls of carved wood; the middle-aged white men in tuxedos, gathered around each other and clutching their old-school cocktails in their bejeweled, well-fed hands.
The Titanic was unprecedented in so many ways: At 882.5 feet long, 92.5 feet wide and 46,328 gross tons, she was the first ship of that size, and the first to be advertised as “unsinkable.”
Her sinking was also the first news story to break around the world as it happened. Kept behind glass at Halifax’s Maritime Museum of the Atlantic is the original distress log, written in pencil by Jack Goodwin, who was manning the Cape Race station and recorded the Titanic’s incoming calls. The penmanship was so small and so exact for such an unthinkable, enormous tragedy.
“10:35 p.m., call goes out ‘have struck iceberg,’ ” the log read.
By 2 in the morning, Goodwin fielded calls from newspapers all over the world, who had picked up the Titanic’s distress signals on their own wireless — another first.
“2:04 am, newspapers calling,” Goodwin wrote. “About 300 of them.” That was 16 minutes before the ship went down.
There are parallels, too, with the reportage and rumors in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Just as people repeated the (untrue) story of the 9/11 “survivor” who “surfed” down a steel beam, reports circulated that a second-class passenger named Emilio Portaluppi “rode a cake of ice for hours.”
Titanic also spawned an insatiable demand for quickie books on the disaster, and at least six were published within a year of her loss. The definitive account, however, is Walter Lord’s “A Night to Remember,” which wasn’t published until 1955.
Lord, himself a New Yorker, took his time — he knew it was the human thing to do — and eventually spoke to more than 60 survivors. As a result, he wrote with authority and heartbreaking austerity.
Of the traumatized survivors picked up by the rescue ship Carpathia, Lord wrote about a hysterical mother who couldn’t find her babies.
“Over and over again she cried, ‘Bambino!’ ” Lord wrote. “An Italian steward coaxed out the information that both her babies were missing. One was soon located, but she held up two fingers and the hysterics started again. Finally the other one was found, too — in the pantry on the hot press, where it had been left to thaw out.”
Juxtapose this with the scene after dinner Friday, when couples and families posed in a special corner so a photographer could snap their souvenir photos.
It was something done at prom, and it looked and felt so surreal and distasteful — it’s hard to imagine tourists, 100 years from now, coming down to the 9/11 memorial to eat from the breakfast menu that was to be served at Windows on the World, or entering a building that simulates what it must have felt like when first plane hit.
As soon as the service concluded this morning, this centennial Titanic cruise turned right around and headed back for New York — the site of Titanic’s never-reached destination, and the place her survivors most wished to go.
