Titanic

Book excerpt: "Time is no more for the fifteen hundred souls who perished with them; but Honour and Glory, by strange ways and unlooked-for events, have come into their own. It was not Time, nor the creatures and things of Time, that received their final crown there; but things that have nothing to do with Time, qualities that, in their power of rising beyond all human limitations, we must needs call divine." "To say that all the men who died on the Titanic were heroes would be as absurd as to say that all who were saved were cowards. There were heroes among both groups and cowards among both groups, as there must be among any large number of men." "In such moments all artificial bonds are useless. It is what men are in themselves that determines their conduct; and discipline and conduct like this are proofs, not of the superiority of one race over another, but that in the core of human nature itself there is an abiding sweetness and soundness that fear cannot embitter nor death corrupt." The story of the sinking of the Titanic based on first hand accounts collected in the days and weeks following the disaster. The story of the Titanic is now well known, but in the months following the disaster wild speculation was rife. On Thursday 22 May 1912, a mere 37 days after the sinking, respected London publisher Grant Richards, delivered Filson Young's book to booksellers around the capital. It was the first attempt to plot the demise of the unsinkable ship from a well-respected writer who had already argued in the light of the Oceana sinking, for proper use of the wireless on board ships. Both Filson and Grant knew victims of the sinking and both worked hard to gather first-hand testimony to use in the book. Much of his telling of the story still stands today and his speculations about the feeling of daily life aboard the doomed ship are used in books and films on the subject.