Legends and myths regarding RMS Titanic
At the time the "Titanic" sank, the 1 May 1912 issue of "The Popular Magazine", an American pulp magazine, was on the news stands. It contained the short story "The White Ghost of Disaster," which described the collision of an ocean liner with an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean, the sinking of the vessel, and the fate of the passengers. The story, by Mayn Clew Garnett (the pseudonym of sea-story author T. Jenkins Hains), created a minor sensation. In 1898, fourteen years prior to the "Titanic" disaster,
Morgan Robertson wrote a book called "Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan". This story features an enormous British passenger liner called the "Titan", which, deemed to be unsinkable, carries insufficient lifeboats. On a voyage in the month of April, the "Titan" hits an iceberg and sinks in the North Atlantic with the loss of almost everyone on board. There are some similarities between the fictional sinking of the "Titan" and the real-life sinking of the RMS "Titanic".
RMS Titanic
The number of casualties of the sinking is unclear, due to a number of factors. These include confusion over the passenger list, which included some names of people who cancelled their trip at the last minute, and the fact that several passengers travelled under aliases for various reasons and were therefore double-counted on the casualty lists. The death toll has been put at between 1,490 and 1,635 people. The tables below use figures from the British Board of Trade report on the disaster. While the use of Marconi wireless system did not achieve the result of bringing a rescue ship to the "Titanic" before it sank, the use of wireless did bring the "Carpathia" in time to rescue some of the survivors who otherwise would have perished due to exposure.