More mundane myths are exposed at the Philadelphia Maritime Museum, where the Titanic’s last lunch menu and Mrs. Smith did not go down with his ship but survived and “was seen wandering around the Great Lakes mumbling, ‘I’m Smith of the Titanic.” The same goes, Haas added, for the tale that Capt. ![]() Such as? “The famous mummy legend, that the Titanic sank because she carried a mummy with a curse on her. Haas said they are now writing two books to “puncture some of the pernicious myths.” Charles Haas, a schoolteacher, and Jack Eaton, a hospital clerk, president and historian, respectively, of the Titanic Historical Society, returned recently from touring towns in Ireland and England where the Titanic was built and launched. “It was built for comfort and speed, not safety.” “It really wasn’t the state of the art,” Lord said. Other myths, according to Lord: A man did not dress as a woman to escape in a lifeboat the ship’s official number does not spell “NO POPE” when held before a mirror and other ships of the time used better bulkheads and were far more “unsinkable.” Lord figures the band more likely was playing a then-popular light waltz called “Songe d’Automne,” which was confused with the Episcopal hymn “Autumn.” And, sorry, he says, but when the waters neared, the musicians threw down their instruments and ran like everyone else. “Plus, the whole idea of the band playing was to cheer people up.” “I discovered the hymn is played to an entirely different tune in England than in the U.S., so there’s no way everyone could have recognized it,” Lord said in a telephone interview from New York. ![]() According to Lord, for example, the eight-man band generally depicted playing the dirge-like “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” as the icy Atlantic swirled around their feet on the tilting boat deck, did no such thing. Who could believe it?”īut the myths persist. “It was the largest ship, the biggest thing man had ever built, the most luxurious ship, proclaimed unsinkable, filled with the most glamorous people of the age, sinking on its first voyage, taking 1,500 lives. “It was such a remarkable story,” said Walter Lord, the author, who has just published a sequel to his 1955 classic, “A Night to Remember,” debunking many of the ship’s myths.
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