When it departed England it symbolised man’s domination over nature. The ship, whose name evoked its massive size, was engineered to cheat the ocean. The fact the Titanic was touted as unsinkable also adds to its allure. More recently, Titanic exhibitions that invite visitors to examine relics and explore the ship’s recreated rooms have attracted huge crowds in New York, Seville and Hong Kong. The disaster inspired songs and multiple films in the twentieth century, including James Cameron’s 1997 epic romance, which long reigned as the highest-grossing film of all time. The Titanic’s maiden voyage and calamitous end was one of the biggest news stories of 1912, and has continued to fascinate us ever since. The Endeavour’s long-forgotten wreck was found scuttled off the coast of Rhode Island just last year. The Titanic is recognisable to more of the world’s population than, say, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria (Christopher Colombus’s fleet that launched the Spanish conquest of the Americas), or Captain Cook’s HMS Endeavour (the tall ship that set in motion the British conquest of Australia). The “unsinkable” ship that sunk on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic in 1912 after colliding with an iceberg is arguably the world’s most well-known boat. The question on many minds this week is why did some of the world’s richest men risk death to venture to the bottom of the sea in a cold and cramped “experimental” submersible for a chance to glimpse the wreck of the Titanic?
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