Quite the thing to do, ever since James Cameron’s Titanic became a top-grossing film: in one Halifax restaurant, shipwreck buffs do the First Class menu while an actor circulates in the guise of her doomed captain.
The courses are such as First Class might have enjoyed on the fatal night, exactly 84 years before.
Light-hearted Quebeckers at my big round table are amused that la voiture became a cropper, just like the Empress of Ireland!Ī multi-media museum will feature this ship, which sank long ago in the Gulf of St Lawrence, and our Benefit Banquet will help to fund it. Sweaty from toil, I enter the Château Frontenac’s ballroom as festivities begin. A wheel bolt objects to being unscrewed, so I must ease my Colt off the highway to enlist a car dealer’s help before continuing on. ON FRIDAY, MAY 29, 1998, driving to Quebec City for a gala dinner, I have a flat tire just shy of my goal. Joseph Conrad, The Lesson of the Collision What was it that was needed, what ingenious combinations of shipbuilding, what transverse bulkheads, what skill, what genius - how much experience in money and trained thinking, what learned contriving, to avert that disaster? Yet between sentiment and truth, which one is prior? You need both, says he. For me, the heart won out.īallard feels that it is wrong when someone attains truth only to have it denied. With my own evangelistic kinfolk I was more timid - keenly debating the idea of evolution with my father, but fearing that his faith might be undermined. This man of science told me that in youth, he locked his grandmother and himself in a room for all-out argument to make her accept evolutionary theory. Happenstance once found me in the company of oceanographer Robert Ballard, who sleuthed the Titanic’s final resting-place. Having written the ultimate shipwreck novel, Moby-Dick, he deserves notice. When sentiment is at war with reason, which should come first? For Herman Melville, the answer was clear: I stand for the heart. This may be sentimentality but what would the world be without sentiment. Our hearts are in Canada, said my father. Why? For burial in the British soil of his lineage. When he also died later in California, his siblings had his remains brought all the way to Toronto. IN 1914 MY GRANDPARENTS drowned in the Empress of Ireland disaster, leaving five orphans of whom the youngest was four-year-old Cyrus Creighton.
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