Dead in the Water: The Lost Passengers of the Titanic

“Titanic struck an iceberg at 11: 40 p.m. on the night of April 14, 1912, in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, on her maiden voyage from Europe to the United States. Almost fifteen hundred people died. The story usually ends with survivors boarding the rescue ship Carpathia the next morning. But that is not how the story ended. Titanic was a horrible mass casualty event whose victims did not simply pass into legend. They became dead bodies.” While I have not read a lot of books about Titanic, the ones I have focus on the sinking and not the passengers' stories or the aftermath with the dead. Like the above quote states, the sinking wasn’t the end of the story, but it seems that is where almost everyone stops. What happened to the dead who were left floating in the ocean? What happened to the dead that were inside the Titanic when it sank? How is the shipwreck of the Titanic dealt with and have they found any remains? These are the questions that Doughty has spent years researching and she attempts to answer in this book. Like most people, I grew up watching the Titanic movie and this was my first introduction to the idea of a mass casualty event, but it wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that the dead of Titanic was never discussed in any of the books, movies, or documentaries that I have seen. So as you can imagine, I was extremely interested in reading this book to find out how this mass casualty event was handled and how the world handled it. But, this book was also dived into so much more about Titanic because it discusses the capitalism surrounding this disaster, death rituals at sea, the families and worlds reactions and feelings the events, the finding of Titanic, salvage rights to the Titanic, and the most recent Titanic disaster with OceanGate’s submersible Titan. This book was extremely eye opening for me because it humanized the passengers of the Titanic and kept them as the main focus throughout. Every piece of media I have consumed about the Titanic has just talked about the sinking itself and how it happened, and not focused on the people onboard and how things happened for them. Doughty brought humanity back to this disaster and showcased how even today, it is treated as an event to be exploited, and not a mass grave that should be respected. She also discusses the myths about the men staying behind to save the women and the exaggerated heroism of John Jacob Alistair. “The enemy was not the iceberg, nor the indignity of burial at sea, nor even death itself. It was a company steeped in the Victorian tradition of doing as little as possible to protect victims from its deadly malfeasance and offering minimal intention or care after the worst had occurred.” Learning about the operation to recover the dead of Titanic in the days following the disaster was honestly heartbreaking, especially for the families who were promised a body but didn’t receive one. White Star Line really refused to do the right thing and be honest with the families, and the world, but I honestly wasn’t surprised because things haven’t really changed. I also wasn’t really surprised that they prioritized recovering the First and Second Class passengers instead of everyone. Again, Doughty centered the families and their struggle as they were hoping to find their loved ones, realizing that White Star Line was lying and not actually bringing everyone back, and realizing their loved ones bodies were most likely never going to be recovered Doughty also dives into shipwreck salvage rights and protections for the Titanic, which is an area I knew nothing about and honestly was really surprised by how the rights to Titanic were won. Learning about how the Titanic has been treated since its discovery in 1985 was both fascinating but also heartbreaking because it is not treated as a mass grave, but instead exploited for money. RMS Titanic Inc, who owns the salvage rights to Titanic is all about consumerism and making money, to the point that they don’t even preserve the materials they have recovered, which as an archivist this makes me really mad, but I know I am not the only one. This company and OceanGate, the company who owned the Titan submersibles that imploded in 2023, are all about money, not preserving history or honoring a mass grave. “In archeology, a “tomb” or “cemetery” requires deliberate construction— the building of a place to house the dead. Nargeolet and the salvagers argue that Titanic was never intended to be a final resting place. Centuries-old maritime law supports their position. If you ask the U.S. government, Titanic is a protected grave site. If you ask U.S. admiralty law, Titanic is an active salvage site. Titanic, in a sense, is both a graveyard and a place where “grave-robbing” is legally allowed.” Overall, this was the best and most detailed account of what happened to the Titanic, and how recovery operations commenced afterwards, that I have ever read. Doughty doesn’t sugar coat what happened to these people and uses the passengers' own words to describe what they experienced during and afterwards. Not only that, she reminds us that the Titanic disaster didn’t end after the survivors were rescued by the Carpathia, it was actually just part one of the story. TW: death including children; animal death; drowning; classism; racism; *ARC provided by Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.*