By Andrew Guest With the centenary this year of what is usually but erroneously* described as the worst maritime disaster, the word “titanic” will be pressed into use more than usual in the next few months. Having inspired umpteen films and even more books and a news story virtually every day, the doomed passenger ship that sank on 15 April 1912 continues to fascinate the popular imagination like no other vessel and provides a seemingly inexhaustible supply of stories, metaphors and ideas: deckchairs are futilely re-arranged, the ship’s band plays on as waves lap at the musicians’ feet and tips of icebergs are unwisely ignored. In Titanic mythology women and children go first and captains go down with their ships. In icy waters there are both heroes and villains, while fate is tempted by the epithet “unsinkable”. The disaster has been seen as a defining moment marking the moment when one era ended and another began as the Edwardian period drew to a close and the first shots in the Great War, as it was originally known, would be fired two years later. Golden, hazy peace gave way to muddy, bloody battle. The sinking of the world’s largest passenger ship also spawned an industry all of its own – from memorabilia that continue to be sold a century on to the search for the wreck and its discovery. It was also the one casualty that by itself rewrote the shipping safety rulebook and lead to the eventual adoption of the Safety of Life at Sea convention and the creation of an international agency to supervise it. One hundred years on, the scandal of lifeboat accidents that have claimed the lives of hundreds of seafarers still evokes a cruel irony. Hindsight has identified hubris as the metaphorical iceberg that really sank not just a proud ship on its maiden voyage but arrogant ambitions. In unromanticised reality, a series of mistakes – poor communications on the ship itself and with other vessels in the area, too few lifeboat and excessive speed have been cited – were compounded in tragic synchronicity. The disaster in the Atlantic sent shockwaves around the world, not merely because of the high number of casualties (over 1,500 of which, it should be remembered, almost 700 were crew), but also through it being unthinkable – what might be called today a “black swan event”. As events last year showed, the practically unthinkable can and does happen. Those brave or foolish enough to have put their names to predictions for 2012 no doubt had the spectres of earthquake, tsunami, Eurozone crisis and the “Arab Spring” peering over their shoulders as they typed. The Titanic disaster also haunts the thoughts of those keeping an eye on developments in the Arctic and Antarctic as the number of ships sailing in iceberg-strewn waters increases year on year. Ecotourism and whale-spotting induce thousands to brave chilly environments where rescue and salvage resources are scanty, trusting in modern technology, management and safety measures to keep them from enduring a Titanic sequel. So far there have been only narrow scrapes, but as the ice-free periods in the Arctic seas lengthen and the number of visiting cruise ships rockets (350 visited Greenland in 2010 compared with just a couple in 2000), warnings of a “Titanic-scale disaster” will continue to be sounded. Today’s cruise ships with capacity to carry over 6,000 passengers, as well as more than 2,000 crew, dwarf the Titanic which was licensed to carry 3,500 but had only 2,224 on the night. These giant floating pleasure palaces that can boast 21 swimming pools are now so big they require their own purpose-built terminals. In an industry that rarely does things by halves, the appearance in the sea-lanes of such multi-storied cruise ships, as well as gigantic ore carriers and mega containerships, barely raises eyebrows, although they can still capture the public imagination. Magnitudes in shipping are not limited to the size of ships: its booms and busts and fortunes and losses tend to be on the epic scale. Those with long memories can recall the 1960s and '70s when tanker tycoons were made and unmade by the black-swan events of the time. It is also worth recalling the bust of the early 1980s and the deal of the decade when six Ultra-Large Crude Carriers (ULCCs) were bought en bloc for a bargain USD 5 million each in 1985 and, after being laid up in the meantime, sold for four times the original price in 1989. Whether such a majestic asset-play is in the making in the midst of the current crisis and market lows is a matter of speculation. Many now regard ULCCs as an evolutionary dead-end, the exception that proves the rule of economies of scale, such were the limitations on the routes they could serve. Indeed, the term ULCC, but not VLCC, has been appropriated by some for Ultra-Large Containership Carriers that have similar restrictions to their tanker counterparts, so only further confusing maritime terminologists already grappling with the possible interchangeability of Very Large Ore Carrier (VLOC), Valemax and Chinamax and the use of the term post-Panamax after the eponymous canal has been widened in 2014. (To spare them further palpitations, one should not suggest the term “Madmax” is being envisaged for a new class of medium-size bulk carriers.) On a similar note, last year ended with letters in the Financial Times complaining about the newspaper’s misuse of maritime terminology – in particular, the phrase “hard astern” rather than the correct “full astern” as a metaphor for the state of the shipping industry. The coincidence of the centenary of the 1912 disaster and the ongoing crises in the Eurozone and shipping markets will ensure the media will be awash with such maritime metaphors. A sharp lookout will be needed to check they are shipshape and not sailing in uncharted waters, although one should be wary of being overly semantic (“semantics” being, in fact, what seafarers do on shore leave.) Curiously, no-one suggested to the Financial Times the alternatives “hard aground” or, indeed, “iceberg dead ahead”. Fate can be tempted, perhaps, once too often. *The Dona Paz ferry sank in The Philippines in 1987 with the loss of over 4,000 lives, compared with 1,517 on the Titanic. Editor’s Note: Andrew Guest is a freelance journalist. Feature articles written by outside contributors do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of BIMCO.
　　Date: 04.01.12