In the early hours of April 15, 1912, the biggest ship in the world ran into an iceberg, leaving over 1,500 people dead. In immense, absorbing detail, Titanic: Ship of Dreams traces the story of the most famous nautical disaster in history — from the ship’s inception, through that horrifying night, all the way up to the movie adaptations.
The sheer volume of events that, if they had played out just a little bit differently, could have saved hundreds of lives, is mind-boggling: a delayed departure, a missing pair of binoculars, undelivered messages, a cancelled safety drill. The podcast reveals a seemingly endless chain of butterfly-effect machinations that might have changed everything.
If your ship is about to crash into an iceberg, it makes sense to swerve to avoid it. However, the long gash that this evasive manoeuvre scraped into the side of the Titanic was what allowed such a vast amount of water to flood in. Although it seems wildly counterintuitive, if the vessel had ploughed straight into the iceberg, it likely wouldn’t have sunk; at the very least, many more people would have survived.
For the men at the wheel, it was a real-life trolley problem with the most heinous stakes: definitely kill the passengers at the front of the ship to protect the rest, or risk everyone’s lives for the tiny chance of saving all. Throughout the show, we learn about the various moral dilemmas that plagued the passengers and crew. The etiquette surrounding the lifeboats — and the famous ‘women and children first’ credo — being yet another wrenchingly fascinating example.
Of course, with over a century of hindsight at our disposal (and from the warm, dry comfort of our homes), it’s easy to pretend that we know how we ‘d have behaved in this most extreme of situations. Paul McGann — best known as the 8th incarnation of Doctor Who — narrates Titanic: Ship of Dreams, and he’s joined by a vast array of experts who’ve written books like 101 Things You Thought You Knew About The Titanic… But Didn’t and Don’t Panic! The Psychology of Emergency Egress and Ingress. While these are people who know what they’re talking about, and have often formed their opinions about the way certain passengers behaved during the disaster, the majority also acknowledge that it’s impossible to know what any of us would have done in their place. We can try to imagine, but we can’t know.
The general acceptance of that fact among the podcast’s contributors lends it a valuable empathy. So much of the Titanic story revolves around human fragility, after all — and there is no situation in which humans are more fragile than when asked to stare death in the face. Many of the details that appear strange were simply the norm in the early 1900s. It’s well known that the Titanic didn’t have enough lifeboats for all passengers, but less well known is that it actually had more than regulations required at the time. The historical context offered here is illuminating and vital.
Although Titanic: Ship of Dreams is dense with information, much of it very technical in nature, the priority is on conjuring images for the audience through beautifully chosen words. “You didn’t need an alarm clock in this city, because the tromp of boots on the cobbles would have woken you up,” says one contributor, describing the hordes of men who worked on the Titanic in the Belfast shipyards. That sort of vivid description helps the 113-year-old story feel thrillingly tangible. Similarly, the recounting of the bioluminescence in the sea that night, and the weather phenomenon that caused a ruinous false horizon, evokes an eerie beauty that really lingers in the mind.
The podcast also does an excellent job balancing big-picture logistics with the intimate stories of the people on board: famous aristocrats, a group of poor Lebanese immigrants heading to a new life in America, a father in the midst of a custody battle who’d kidnapped his son, a notorious lingerie designer, and the stokers who kept the ship’s boilers burning but weren’t allowed to interact with other passengers for fear that their grimy appearance would alarm the elite.
That one of these stokers was Jimmy McGann, great-uncle of host Paul and his brother Stephen (another contributor), underlines the show’s desire to emphasize the personal. This all may have taken place more than a century ago, but the last survivor, who was only 2 months old at the time, didn’t die until 2009. We’re far closer to it all than we might think.
And that, in a nutshell, is what Titanic: Ship of Dreams does best: it takes the disaster out of the history books and away from the glossy movie adaptations and makes it sweaty, bloody, complex, horrifying, riveting — and real.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd page.