Farewell, Titanic – Her Final Legacy

Nothing that teaches us about history is irrelevant. Nothing is irrelevant that instructs us regarding hubris. Posterity, when heeded, can illuminate far more than just the past—its brilliance can cast a meaningful glow into our future. Farewell, Titanic – Her Final Legacy should not be taken as just another book about a tragic ship or her history—author Charles Pellegrino has provided a wider scope of history, a template of humanity held against the context of Titanic‘s story.

Perhaps the most immediate question for the potential reader is: “Does it tell the story of the sinking?” The easy answer is “It does indeed.” But so do countless other books on the subject, not the least of which is Walter Lord’s A Night To Remember, which the author used as source material—including personal correspondence with Lord. Lord’s fascination with the Titanic began at a very early age which gave him the time to accrue a depth of knowledge regarding the event (her sinking) which few others could come close to except her survivors; Pellegrino does both Walter Lord and Titanic‘s human descendants a deft, factually thorough, and humanistic service in Farewell, Titanic.

Pellegrino’s approach is perhaps the most gripping in its narrative style. Outside of global war the Titanic story is one of history’s greatest cautionary tales of man’s arrogance and tragic greed. Having the chutzpah to sail not just into but through an ice field is (cetainly, in hindsight) hair-raisingly stupid—but to do so, on a moonless night in calm waters and run the engines “full ahead” based on human claims of “unsinkable” construction is barely a stones throw from qualifying as murderous. Farewell, Titanic is not a story told from the periphery, from solely a journalistic perspective or a ‘top down’ view, rather it is told from the ‘bottom up’, that is, from individual accounts and outwards. The accounts make for fascinating consumption but the sense of tragedy is crystalline—there is no distinct sense of removal from the unfolding horrors, from the first call from the crows nest to the life-long burden bore by some of her survivors.

This is not a book of generalities or reconstructions based on nebulous recollections or skewed newspaper reports. The author has been down to Titanic and experienced her firsthand. Pellegrino’s observations and analysis as part of James Cameron’s crew resulted in the director using some of his source material for the Oscar-winning film Titanic. Not only is the historic event recounted from people who were there but it is also a captivating record of what happened to the ship itself, as it broke up, sank, hit bottom, and rested 2.5 miles below the surface of the North Atlantic ocean.

Again, that would be the expected birds-eye-view of the event. Herein, however, one gets a wonderfully accessible scientific account of the forces at play in this drama. One of Pellegrino’s gifts is in his ability to convert such empirical properties into passages of uncomfortable understanding—”uncomfortable” only in the sense that one can truly grasp the chilling fear of a given moment as if you were present and watching it happen, such as in this passage:

“By the time Hendrickson reached the spiral stairs the sea appeard to be erupting through a geyser somewhere on the starboard side. Overhead, Hendrickson saw the tarpaulin beneath the number 1 cargo hatch ballooning upward like a huge dome. The surge of air pressure—which measured the pulse of water rushing in from below—whistled through the firemen’s quarters with ear popping force.”

Imagine what it must have been like to be close to the area where her hull struck the iceberg. Several accounts of this very instance are described by the folks who experienced it, and not just near the bow—you get a feel for how the collision was experienced from bow to stern, from first class to third class, from crew cabins down to boiler rooms, and certainly the terror experienced from the bridge down as more and more of the crew began to understand the truth of the situation as it unfolded.

Compartamentalization, the builder’s claim of man’s victory over nature, likely would have prevented the ship’s loss if not for metal weakened by excessive heat during an earlier boiler room fire; portholes left open to provide cabin cooling in the aftermath of the fire contributed to the speed of Titanic‘s sinking; the number of lifeboats available were not a direct result of designer intent, rather the number were reduced by money men trying to maximize deck space, again, based on the hubristic assumption that the ship could withstand anything.

Long held untruths are clarified, as in the case of the common belief that every lifeboat was launched only half full. Initially this was the case, as Pellegrino explains, but only because the officer loading the crafts had prior experience with boats of inferior quality and was highly concerned that loading Titanic‘s boats to capacity may cause them to literally disintegrate upon hitting water; her lifeboats had not been tested prior to her launch.

Titanic‘s legacy isn’t solely vested in the ghoulish allure of Victorian technology gone awry. Formerly undiscovered sea life has been found seeking refuge in her remains, not the least of which is the now familiar image of what the casual viewer would say looks like an underwater, rust-colored icicle—appropriately enough they are called “rusticles.” This life form is slowly dissolving away the available iron at the site. Other life in the depths have actually protected letters and photographs. The ship has, like Vesuvius, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the World Trade Center collapses brought new insights to our understanding of “down blast” effects and shock cocoons. In some places contents of the great ocean liner are fully intact while the stern section has been flattened like a pancake, her hull rippled outward like taffy. Pellegrino explores these forces, too, with parallels drawn between each one, often interconnnected by the fragile thread of human life.

Therein lies a key facet of what he has set out to accomplish with Farewell, Titanic. Without properly seeing the larger picture one could attempt to cast aspersions upon the writers’ odd sense of structure and adherence to the subject matter. Truth is, the subject matter, all along, is us—certainly us from a historical perspective, or us from the posture of failing to fully attend to our own better angels. Either way, this is not simply a story about iron against ice, nor one of science versus nature. Farewell Titanic rides a timeline of human frailty from 1912 to present day. To argue that the subject or context does not stay lashed to the narrative only serves to boldly emphasize the entire point—that life isn’t neat and tidy. Beyond our best intentions lie considerations we perhaps are neither capable nor ready to see. Life can be harsh and cruel . . . man can be utterly idiotic even while striving to beat nature at is own game—or man can be barbaric in nature’s name. Man, science, and the panoply of physics are all put under the proverbial microscope here; the connections between man’s nature and any event, large or small, are not always immediate to one another, but as Pellegrino makes clear Time always gets the final word, and eventually Time connects the dots.

Sixteen pages of photos provide a visual glimpse of what the author describes thoughout the book. And visuals, or the lack of them, are the book’s sole Achilles heel. I had very much hoped (frankly even expected) a diagram of Titanic to aid in my understanding of the various events as they are so vividly described—as a land lubber I have precious little sea-going experience, much less any functional knowledge or experience on a cruise ship, One can easily find such diagrams online, but that presumes that one has quick access to the internet when reading. It would seem logical to have such an illustration near the beginning of the book. Alas, the only illustrations, while compelling indeed, are of the ship’s resting place on the sea floor. It should be understood that considerations of such things are often well outside the authors control. Given the strict attention to detail throughout I can hardly conceive that Pellegrino didn’t include more illustrations for print. In his two prior books on this same subject, Her Name, Titanic and Ghosts of the Titanic there are multiple such images, although each book is from a different publisher, so some form of economizing should not be ruled out in the case of Farewell, Titanic.

Titanic presents a wealth of relevance to us today. Her shell slowly decays in the “ever-black” yet her very presence, after 100 years, still reveals secrets of time and lives lost, still illuminates stories of the human condition, both worthy and shameful. Farewell, Titanic indeed preserves her legacy and brings to light startling new details and tells a century-old story with the fierce vigor and endless curiosity only mankind could display. Pellegrino has allowed us not just a glimpse but a full-fledged tour of his fascination with the ship; at once haunting and enthralling, yet remarkably poignant in its undercurrent of humanity.

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The author has a very interesting addendum to the book on his website titled The Californian Incident. This intriguing addition tells the story of a ship which many Titanic survivors believed they saw just north of Titanic’s location on April 12th, 1912. It relates the controversy surrounding the Californian‘s captain and his decision not to investigate continued oddities that evening. It also relates stories of two other ships besides Carpathia which were in the area. As with the book Pellegrino has let the audacity of human decision making shine through. This web-only addition I highly recommend reading after you finish the book. It truly puts the final chill on a tragic event.

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I would like to profusely thank Wiley Publishing for providing a copy of Farewell Titanic for review.

Surely you’d like a copy of this beautiful book for yourself! You can find it online at the following places:

• Amazon.com Kindle/digital and traditional print
• Barnes and Noble (bn.com) Nook/digital and traditional print
• From the publisher, Wiley also available in epub format for digital readers

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Reaching For The Stars

In the service of fairness I provide the following heads-up: this post isn’t necessarily light and breezy, nor is it somber or discouraging. If you read further you will encounter a few snippets of things I have read recently and what I feel are, perhaps, the natural questions which arise from them. If you are not in the mood for something to feed your brain then by all means move along; no offense meant, and certainly none intended.

But, really, I consider this kind of stuff to be akin to mental peanut butter—it sticks to your brain and takes a bit of not entirely unpleasant work to fully unseat the matter at hand. If nothing else you might come away with a sense of awe, or maybe just a little conversation piece for later.

If you’re still here . . . thanks for sticking around :^)

Those who know me well enough understand that I have a quiet sort of curiosity, which, like a ceaselessly crying baby bird, constantly clamors to be fed. This doesn’t make me special or unique—it is but one facet of what makes me, well, me. To illustrate this I can tell you that when I do watch television it will most often be something like Discovery Channel, History Channel, or the Science Channel.

If I want to learn about the seedier side of human nature I’ll watch the local evening news for about ten minutes. Then I’m good for the next decade. Seriously. Try to convince me that local newscasts aren’t a downer . . . and good luck doing so.

Anyway, back to me!

Over the last couple years I have enjoyed offerings from The Teaching Company (The Great Courses); eleven of them thus far covering histroy (DUH!), meteorology, black holes, the brain, espionage, mythology, comparative religion, even basic structural engineering. I mention this because while browsing through another set of courses on sale I came across one titled The Joy Of Science (60 lectures—WOW!). While my wallet put an emphatic kibosh on ordering it, I did find the postulation at the end of the course summary intriguiing:

“Dr. Hazen also raises questions about claims that science is approaching its end—that all there is of significance to be learned about the natural world will soon be known.”

What . . . seriously?

The Holy Catholic Church knows better. Hell, they even tried to hide science in the basement like some sick, ethically impoverished parent. Okay, before someone gets offended understand that I’m talking back in the 17th century, people. The name Galileo might ring a bell.

Point being, man is far too curious to ever run out of things to explore, much too needful of knowledge. Once that has been achieved then he moves on to expression of that knowledge through such means as writing, art, or music. People of antiquity couldn’t quite understand their surroundings and events so they took to fanciful storytelling—myths, parables, fairy tales.

The First Doubter, Perhaps Also The First Scientist

At some point someone decided they’d had enough of all the hocus pocus and determined that a much closer inspection of what was behind the curtain was in order. We know the sky isn’t blue because Zeus (or God) colored it that way; it’s blue because of the way shorter wavelengths gets dispersed in the atmosphere, they are absorbed by gas and thus scattered. Longer wavelengths, like red, orange, and yellow pass straight through the atmosphere because they are largely unaffected by gas molecules . . . until the sun’s light is further down on the horizon, at which point those longer wavelengths are detected more readily by our eyes as they are bounced off particulate matter in the air, and we see a sunset.

See? The rational explanation does nothing to diminish the beauty of either and, frankly, just seems to make a whole lot more sense. Easy for me to say in the 21st century, of course.

Since I mentioned broad daylight and sunset I would be remiss if I didn’t touch on nighttime. We definitively state the night as being “dark,” right? But the explanation is a little deeper than that . . . sort of. First you must understand that all objects emit radiation. Some reflect more than they absorb, and vice versa. During the day the Earth reflects much more visible radiation—the longer wavelengths—so we can see; certainly, the Earth absorbs radiation, more than it reflects, actually. But at night, since the Earth produces negligible amounts of radiation at visible and ultraviolet wavelengths, we can’t see.

And you thought it was because we weren’t facing the sun.

The Universe As Death And Life

As of this writing I am currently (slowly) reading Charles Pellegrino’s Ghosts of Vesuvius. Though controversial, I was completely awed by Last Train From Hiroshima, and when GOV was suggested to me I knew I was in for an equal treat. Pellegrino has a deftly masterful way of taking the ponderously scientific and making it accessible to the reader. His writing, in both the aforementioned books, vaporizes any fallacy that science is approaching its end game.

On page 6 of Ghosts of Vesuvius he discusses how life may have been given a chance to take hold at the most profound depths of the oceans, around volcanic vents:

I know of a world in which water emerges four times hotter than steam, but the overlying miles of ocean press down with so much force as to forbid the water to boil, though it emerges hot enough to glow.

Ever drawn your hand away from a rush of steam, like from cooked food? Then you know how hot steam can be. Now reread the above quote again.

Tell me that doesn’t stoke your imagination.

And at the end of that first chapter he makes mention of noted cosmologist Carl Sagan, who “once tried to convey time’s vastness by compressing the entire history since the Big Bang (approximately 13.7 billion years) into a single year—with Earth forming between August 15 and September 10, dinosaurs arriving just ahead of Christmas Eve, and human civilization occupying the last few seconds of December 31. By Sagan’s measure,” he writes, “we have just entered the New Year, equipped with brains and seeking to understand how we were born.”

We don’t just think about the micro-world, we are intensely curious about what lies on the other side of our atmosphere. The cycle, in an odd yet sensible way, becomes a bit less vague, perhaps a touch better understood, when you consider that the macro and micro are what brought us here. We are cosmic dust. We exist because of what came from out there.

Does that sound like science is getting ready to wrap everything up and go home for eternity? I don’t think so.

As the title suggests the book deals with volcanism and its dual role as destroyer and preserver. Matter consumed by fire becomes carbonized, thus entirely destroyed yet also preserved because it no longer is susceptible to decay. This is the case with those unfortunates who lived in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Pellegrino provides exquisite (if not horrific) examples of what transpired as Pompeei’s inhabitants attempted to escape the volcanic onslaught of Vesuvius:

At the boatyard of Herculaneum, a man on horseback was vaporized to the bone in less than two-tenths of a second. Before the nerves could even begin to transmit pain, they had ceased to exist; and as he and the horse fell, the volume of water released from their tongues and their eyes and their internal organs flashed jets of vapor into the air—where, being immeasurably cooler than the surrounding atmosphere, the jets caused the ash to condense, to crystallize instantly into clumps of fluff—adding a strange, mineral snowfall to the terrestrial din. Their tongues were charcoal and their blood had become lava snow before their bones could fall to the ground.

Not only does man want to understand volcanoes and almost everything about nature iteself, we want to understand how nature affects us. In this case, nature not only killed but preserved, both horseman and horse, if only in skeletal form, their bones left for the archeological record.

Stepping Back To See The Bigger Picture

Dr. Pellegrino takes us for a ride along a historical timeline . . . but backwards. In doing so he brings a different, very intriguing perspective to the history of Time as we know it, not just the history of homo sapiens. He begins the journey in “A.D. 1996” (Ghosts of Vesuvius was published in 2004). He uses population numbers and the construct of a human cube as a framework for imagining the sum total of humanity on Earth at a given point in time.

In this year there are nearly 100 million fewer of us than shall exist just a year later (1997), yet the mass of human flesh upon the planet weighs in at just 450 million tons. Squeezed head to head, shoulder to shoulder, we humans would form a cube barely more than a mile on a side, barely more than four times the height of the Empire State Building or the Twin Towers. And if one were to shove that cube off the edge of the continent and into the Atlantic, it would fail to raise the height of the world’s oceans by the width of a human eyelash.

Now, again, I would argue that if science (and man) were interested in strictly numbers we would stop at the population figure. But we don’t. Many nations undertake a census to understand their demographic makeup, and from that we work to understand where our populations are coming from and going to . . . then ask why, and begin a whole other course of investigation. That would be social science, every bit as inquisitive as biology, medicine, astro-physics, etc.

An interesting historical aside: This is something I did not know, something I am a bit ashamed to say given my reading and study of late 18th and early 19th century America, especially the Revolutionary War period. Pellegrino writes about the names of streets in Manhattan when the town was practically just a village. One of the streets he mentions is Cherry Street—one particular address being Number 3, Cherry Street. I did some quick research and discovered this particular location had a mansion on it which was leased by the Continental Congress in 1785 to serve as the residence for the presidents of Congress. In 1789 George Washington moved in as he began his run as our first President of the United States. Pellegrino writes “George Washington had spent a presidency at Number 3 Cherry Street, the site of America’s first White House in America’s first capitol city. Number 3 Cherry Street is fated to disappear without a trace, under the northwest foundation of the Brooklyn Bridge.”

In case you were wondering, the global population was not much over 750 million in 1789.

One of my favorite sentences thus far comes after a lengthy discourse on the makeup of stars and their behavior within galaxies and constellations, about both the violence of the stars (collapsing of gas and dust, ingredients which led to our Sun), and their beauty:

Much as our species has been made puny against the power of volcanoes, geology diminishes under the frightful majesty of the stars.

There is so much more for us to know, so much so tantalizing just beyond our grasp. We humans are many things at any given time. Nature knows so much more than we do. It remains upon us, as a species, to strike the right balance and show her the proper respect even as we pursue those same answers she withholds from us. Perhaps she does so because she knows we are not ready to know.

As for me, I cannot fathom a time when I will know all there is for me to know. For I, like you, am but stardust, and in so being am innately curious to know everything divergent and convergent within its meaning.

Fill my mind with knowledge and I shall know of power.

Give my power purpose, reason, and wisdom, and perhaps I shall ultimately understand myself.

Until that time I shall continue to be in awe of volcanoes, the heavens, and everything ethereal and physical inbetween.

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The Last Train From Hiroshima

“Handle them carefully, for words have more power than atom bombs.”
—Pearl Strachan

As readers we connect on one simple but unflinching principle: words possess amazing power. In his latest work, Charles Pellegrino adroitly summons their potency. His detailed yet compelling analysis is woven with the thread of true human narrative, and even though he lays its foundation upon the objectivity of science, The Last Train From Hiroshima is at once accessible and seductive in both its horror and its fascination.

When I went to school—as I recall—we were given the commercial airline version of this small but devastating window in history—the 30,000-foot view, with little turbulence and a smooth ride to the deck of the USS Missouri to accept Japan’s unconditional surrender. Bereft of detail, the material taught was the modern equivalent of bullet points in a mind-numbing sales presentation. Mr. Pellegrino fills in the grim gaps, suturing closed yawning cavities in my inoculated learning. Be forewarned—the truth is not pretty, the details not sparse. The forensic detail alone is dramatic, and at times brutally graphic. Eyewitness accounts, diaries, family histories—a deep well from which Pellegrino draws to present, in stark clarity, the dawning of the nuclear age in warfare. This is not like the conveniently sterilized Hollywood versions we’re familiar with.

Be assured this book is, in no way, a discourse on the “we should” or “we shouldn’t” ideologies. In many places it reads cinematically, the story revealed from both ends of the delivery/reception spectrum. The author spends a little time in the beginning describing the detonation process—not in split-seconds or moments, rather in millionths and thousandths of a second. He refers to the explosions of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs as “brief reincarnations of distant suns.” At the outset, he describes events directly at Moment Zero, Ground Zero, at the Dome of Hiroshima’s Industrial Sciences Building (now known as the “Peace Dome”):

“At the moment the bomb came to life, before a globe of plasma could belly down to ground level, the top millimeter of the Dome’s metal cladding would catch the rays from the bomb and liquefy instantly, then flash to vapor. Bricks and concrete, too, were on the verge of developing a radiant, liquid skin.”

Immediately adjacent to that building, a woman tends to her garden. Pellegrino doesn’t sketch but clearly delineates the process of a human body being vaporized before the nervous system can register pain:

“From the moment the rays began to pass through her bones, her marrow would begin vibrating at more than five times the boiling point of water. The bones themselves would become instantly incandescent, with all of her flesh trying simultaneously to explode away from her skeleton while being forced straight down into the ground as a compressed gas. Within the first three-tenths of a second following the bombs detonation, most of the iron was going to be separated from (her) blood . . .”

This is a guided tour of Hell via the recollections of a number of double survivors—people who lived through the blast at Hiroshima and, for various reasons, took the last of two trains to Nagasaki, only to survive the destructive forces of a bomb three times as powerful as the first. We are given behind-the-scenes passes to watch as Paul Tibbets and Charles Sweeney pilot the Enola Gay and Bock’s Car B-29 bombers over their respective targets. And we are witness to a latent force at least as powerful as the physical destruction caused—the chasmal rifts and fractures the bombs would create within families and amongst old friends.

In both Nature and man’s nature, seeds of better things begin to sprout and slowly, if grudgingly, take root. Some of the survivors experienced a spiritual fallout, and a few of the hibakusha—the largely ostracized people who “lived” through the bombs—left philanthropic ripples in their eventual wake, taking up the gauntlet to present to the rest of humanity the terrors of atomic weapons—this despite the efforts of the Japanese government and the MacArthur Protocols. Through the many interviews with survivors Pellegrino has helped to remove the scab from a 65-year-old wound and apply a salve of truthful exposition to begin the healing process.

There are problems within one particular section, however. According to the New York Times, one of the men central to uncovering an accident on Tinian with the first bomb—a Joseph Fuoco—never participated in either of the bombing missions, as claimed by Pellegrino. He tells us that Fuoco filled in at the last minute for James Corliss, the intended flight engineer. But when Corliss allegedly becomes ill just before the Hiroshima mission, Fuoco becomes the go-to guy. Pellegrino appears to have performed due diligence in his research, but perhaps not enough. Corliss’s family has provided some amount of evidence which reportedly proves that it was Corliss on those flights, and not Fuoco. An Air Force spokesman has stated there exists documentation tying James Corliss to the Hiroshima mission, while they have no record of Joseph Fuoco having been assigned to that bomber squadron.

Mr. Pellegrino has, to his credit, stated that he will set the record straight for any editions yet to be printed. In an interview with the Times he stated “I’m stunned. I liked and admired the guy. He had loads and loads of papers, and photographs of everything.” He added, “The public record has to be repaired. You can’t have wrong history going out. It’s got to be corrected.”

As a writer I understand that it can be difficult to cover all bases all the time—sometimes you just can’t get to information you need, while others you simply overlook or don’t give due consideration. I cannot possibly begin to presume what happened in this instance. It strikes this reviewer as odd that the Corliss family had the documentation, and yet it doesn’t seem to have made it into Pellegrino’s account. Perhaps he had requested an interview and was rebuffed—I don’t know.

But the author did not hide behind any public relations smoke-and-mirrors apparatus in light of the information. He gets straight to the point and tells us he will fix it. Given the body of his previous work I find no reason whatsoever to believe this was, in any way, intentional. And it certainly doesn’t diminish the impact of the stories related by the survivors.

As readers we’ve all come across books that we recommend to friends, family, etc. We do so because we enjoyed them, because they’ve added value to the time we’ve spent within their pages. Once in a while a book comes along which is worthy of elevation above our personal recommendations—it merits an almost moral imperative to be read. The Last Train From Hiroshima is compelling to that end. This book should be at the core of any class traversing WWII history, although given the erroneous information concerning Fuoco and Corliss I would hope it would be the corrected version.

Pellegrino’s words, while painful, sometimes even disturbing, draw into bitter relief invaluable lessons about our capacity to kill, to survive, and even to inspire. Relative to the atom bomb, his words are more than equal to the task.

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I am most grateful to Ted Sturtz of the New York Journal of Books and Theresa Giacopasi of Henry Holt & Company for getting me a copy of this book to review.

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UPDATE: The Associate Press, along with other media outlets, have “exposed” apparent flaws in the Last Train story. Questions have been raised about more than the dubiousness of the Fuoco incident I mentioned in my review.

– There appears to be a grey area concerning a Father Mattias and a Jesuit monk, both mentioned early in the book. According to Pellegrino the Jesuit, a one John MacQuitty, was “a changed identity,” one which he neglected to include in the acknowledgements of the book. There was never a first name given for Father Mattias.

– Questions of the author’s doctoral pedigree are also raised. On his web site Pellegrino states he received a Ph.D. in 1982 from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. After the AP queried the university, they could find no proof of such a claim. Pellegrino does own up to a falling out with the university over a controversial theory of evolution, but the doctorate in question, while it had been discredited–along with a number of other scientists–was reinstated in 1997.

I do not consider the entire book to be a trove of falsehoods. One might argue that to find one such arbitrary fact discredits the whole. I am not so quick to judge given Pellegrino’s prior work. He should have owned up to such things in the acknowledgements, assuredly, but I cannot believe that the entire account is fictionalized.

It is disappointing to see such a work of importance marginalized by lackluster fact checking, but I think we do history a greater disservice by throwing out the baby with the bath water.

The publisher has offered to buy back copies of the book from book sellers, and will not re-publish any other editions or corrections. I, for one, am glad I had the opportunity to read the book before it is erased from our accounts of history. I will, undoubtedly, learn more in the long run, once all the wrinkles are ironed out, than I would have known at all had I not been exposed to the book.

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