Titanic Conspiracy Theories: My Favorite Three Little Words
^ And just like that, we’re back to the movie that seems to constantly fill up any empty void in my mind and I wonder why I have palpable anxiety
For those of you who are not at the receiving end of a deprecating weekly screen time report from our judgmental friends at Apple telling you how much time you spend on social media, you may have missed the wildly enlightening trend where men were asked how often they thought of Ancient Rome. It appears that most men are obsessed to the point of unaware infatuation, with the majority of men internally rehashing events like the Punic Wars at least a few times a week and furthermore the consciousness of this fact did not seem to register as the least bit unconventional.
In a rebuttal, some have posed the question: what is the female equivalent?
Taking stock of where my thoughts tends to wander, personally I spend a concerning amount of time dreaming up outfits I don’t own for both interactions and events that would never occur and I would never be invited to. But aside from playing Barbie with my Second Life avatar, the few precious moments spent not entrenched in thinking about what I’m going to eat next, I would say is evenly split between solving/reliving the current murder podcast I’m listening to and the Titanic.
Now we all love the movie but I’m talking about fastidiously pouring over every fact, image, artifact, story, and nugget of information – however insignificant – about the actual ship. Reference the ill-fated ship in a news headline and rest assured, I’m blindly diving in head-first with reckless abandon. And I believe many of my girlies out there feel the same.
So to carelessly drop at least half of you down a bottomless rabbit hole, let’s discuss…
Titanic Conspiracy Theories.
^ All of your other browsers and work-related applications waiting helplessly for you to come back for them after doing your own investigative journalism on this
Conspiracy theory #1: J.P. Morgan planned the disaster to kill his rivals
According to this theory, millionaire banker J.P. Morgan planned the Titanic disaster to kill off rival millionaires Jacob Astor, Macy’s Isidor Straus and Benjamin Guggenheim, who all perished aboard. The theory hinges on the fact that Morgan had originally planned to sail on the Titanic with a private customized suite featuring a promenade deck but changed his mind shortly before it took off. While I haven’t stumbled upon the logistics of the sinking behind this theory, the “why” claims Morgan wanted to kill them because they opposed the creation of the US Federal Reserve Bank. Conveniently in 1913, only a year after the sinking, the Federal Reserve Act was passed…
Conspiracy theory #2: The Titanic never sank
Unsurprisingly, insurance fraud is one of the Titanic’s most popular conspiracy theories. The premise behind this theory is that the Titanic was swapped with another White Star Line ship, the R.M.S. Olympic. The story goes that the Olympic was damaged while sailing from England to New York in 1911 and had to return to the shipping yard in Belfast for repairs. After one cross Atlantic trip, the ship returned again for repairs, only a few weeks before the Titanic set sail. As the theory explains, the Olympic was too damaged to be profitable so all the Olympic-branded materials were swapped with the still-in-production Titanic so that the Titanic could be purposely sunk (with proper rescue boats nearby) and reap the insurance money…however clearly the plan went awry.
Conspiracy theory #3: A mummy’s curse doomed the ship
It wouldn’t be a section on conspiracy theories without touching upon the supernatural. This tale stars a cursed mummy was forging a path of mysterious destruction across London. In the 1890s, four businessmen bought a fashionable mummy plate as a souvenir while in Luxor and so began the rath of Princess Amen-Ra to whoever her burial piece crossed. There are two versions of this story: one in which a passenger recounts the tale of the mummy’s curse to countless other passengers and the dark magic attached to the tale seeks vengeance on the ship. The other version is that the mummy was actual aboard the ship, accompanying its new owner to New York…
Conspiracy theory #4: The Wreck of the Titan – a premonition?
In 1898, a fictional book called The Wreck of the Titan told the story of a ship, The Titan, that had a lack of lifeboats and hit an iceberg. The author Morgan Robertson claimed to be psychic and got his inspiration for this story from his psychic abilities. Although the novel was written before the Olympic-class Titanic had even been designed, some remarkable similarities exist between the fictional and real-life counterparts. Like the Titanic, the fictional ship sank in April in the North Atlantic, and there were not enough lifeboats for the passengers. Coincidence or conspiracy?
Conspiracy theory #5: Jack Dawson is Jay Gatsby
Ok this one is an entirely romantic and inconsequential fan theory about the 1997 Titanic movie but this is my newsletter and my conspiracy theory section so let me have this. There is a theory on the internet that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Titanic and his character in The Great Gatsby are the same person. Now for this to make sense, it obviously has to exist in an alternate universe where Jack survived the sinking of the ship and went on to build a life for himself in America in an attempt to reunite with Rose. Once in New York, he builds himself into a party-going showman in the Jazz Age in hopes that Rose will one day appear, but ends up finding love with another woman, Daisy.
I obviously had to end on something poignantly academic.