Blog 148 - Marine Musings = TITANIC - PART VIII - MY TRYST WITH THE TITANIC

My confession is near posthumous, with a watery grave in my sight, in the North Atlantic, in the last moments before I lost the little of life I had left, lost to the warmer seas around me, where I was about to give up my body of ice and fresh water to the sea water that clawed at my sunken body and my head of ice that kept sinking closer and closer to the sea water, losing my every last bit of body by the hour. I finally vanished, consumed by the relentless sea that had consumed civilisations.

Do I identify myself now or keep up my anonymity till the last? No, the world deserves to know.

I am the infamous Snowflake turned Iceberg that the ‘Titanic’ struck on 14th April 1912, 112 years ago.

I am here to confess, as my very presence caused the loss of many lives although, I know, deep in my heart, that I am not at fault.

I do not know my age. I may be a million years old or maybe just a few thousands.

I started life as a watery snowflake and found, around me, millions of my brethren who were close to me, but not adhering to me. 

The seasons did not get warmer, so we started to cling to each other as more and more of my kind fell upon us.

Some were coarse, some were finer. The air around us started getting scarcer, as we started huddling together.

This went on for years, for centuries. How many I am unaware, as time, for me, was timeless, meaningless.

As time went by, I found myself very closely bound to all my brethren around me , the bond strengthening us into a solid mass of ice. I lost the memory of my snowflake days.

One day I woke up after a deep sleep to find small pockets of air around me, almost like bubbles. And there was very little of it. It did not bother me, as it had no meaning for me, being, by now, rock hard Glacial Ice.

I look around me and find I am near what the humans call as Greenland, close to the North Pole. An ancient, collective, memory in me tells me that we are the smaller part, as my cousins in Antarctica, much further South, are larger, stronger, denser.

I found that I had been named as a ‘Glacier’. Year after year, there was snowfall - never heavy - in winter and low temperatures in summer, lower still in winter. I hardened into thicker and thicker ice in summer and became heavier and heavier in the winters with the accumulated snowfall. I became huge.

The dispersal of my weight was not even and I protruded at the edges, whether in the air or in the water. As the protruding parts of our glacial body grew heavier and heavier, many of my brethren, even though small, just broke away and fell into the sea. Some would survive for days, some for months. 

The humans call my separation from my glacial body as ‘calving’. The forward motion of a glacier makes the end, or terminus, of the glacier unstable, causing ice to break off. 

I am then christened as Iceberg. 

At my ‘calving’, my weight was about 2 million tons

Unlike most of my brethren, I was one of the very large parts of the glacial body to be ‘calved’. I fell into the water and crashed into the sea, making a thunderous noise and causing huge waves. There was no one to witness my ‘calving’, my fall, my birth, my christening, my new name. There were no terrestrial objects to record the boom created by my fall into the water. 

That I would cause mayhem a couple of years later, I had no premonition. I was neither a soothsayer nor a fortune teller, but a mere Iceberg, slowly starting to drift along where the currents carried me.

There was a deafening silence as I drifted along, the silence of Death. 

First the East Greenland Current caught me and took me south. Then I was hitched on to the West Greenland Current, which took me west into Baffin Bay after which I passed Baffin Island, then passed Labrador in Newfoundland, till I was deposited on to the back of the Labrador Current.

Till then, I did not really mind, as these were cold currents, not moving at all during my winter sojourn, just existing in the Baffin Bay.

The Currents that Carried Me

As I started moving south, I could feel my size very gradually dwindling away, melting because of my nemesis, the sea and the slightly warmer sea water.

The current had weakened, I could feel myself slowing down, nearly stopping, waiting.

Awaiting my karma.

I was, then, about 70 to 80 feet high, 400 feet long. I had no way of knowing how big was my underside (underwater), as my lower body was numb from the freezing temperatures. But I am still a Colossus, weighing above a million tons.

I was at Co-ordinates : 41° 43′ 32″ N, 49° 56′ 49″ W, waiting for the Titanic, on the ill fated night of 14th April 1912

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I remain, nearly motionless, at the Grand Banks

I was about 350 nautical miles or 400 miles off the coast of New Foundland.

The seawater temperature was 28 deg F = -2.22 deg C.

The sea was calm.

There was no moonlight; the moon had already set.

Visibility was poor, the light of the stars being the only guiding light.

I was waiting for my tryst with destiny, my ‘Titanic’.

As God is my witness, this is my confession, my testimony.

As I was languidly snoozing in the freezing but calm waters of the night, my instincts alerted me to the underwater noise close by that only propellers can produce. 

That night I am like dark matter, almost invisible, in spite of my size.

In the distance I saw a huge ship heading straight for me.

I did not have any means of alerting her and she also did not seem to have sighted me.

At the last minute, there was a cry that rent the air - “Iceberg right ahead” - and bells ringing. 

The ship hit me at 1140 PM on 14th April 1912. Chunks of ice from above me broke away and fell on to the deck of the ship.

She scraped my side about 4 to 6 feet below the waterline, 10 feet below at places, 30 feet or more below the waterline at other places. 

The contact areas were countless, the scraping very heavy.

There were powerful impacts even further down.

If I could feel, I would have felt the enormous, tearing impact as tons of steel scraped hard against me.

If I could hear, I would have heard the grinding sound of rivet heads slicing off, the ‘popping’ sounds of rivets - suddenly free of a vise like hold, just plonked into the ship by the thousands.

If I could hear, I would have heard the heavy groan of steel plates detaching themselves from each other as the rivets that bind them fell away.

If I could hear, I would have heard the sound of water gushing into empty spaces.

If I could see, I would have seen the thousands of holes appear on the steel plates as the rivets popped.

If I could see, I would have seen a hundred plates separating from each other.

If I could feel, I would have felt the sharper points of myself, much below my main body and the waterline, piercing the steel plates at many points and tearing the plate as she scraped on me.

The impact lasted less than 9 seconds, before she pushed herself away.

But in those 9 seconds, I found that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of her rivets were smashed. The plates that those rivets held separated, allowing tons of cold water to flood into her compartments. 

Sharp tentacles of ice below my waterline punched holes into her steel plating at many places and tore open her plating, pouring huge amounts of water into her, the tentacles disappearing in the process. Either broken away or melting from the heat of contact.

All I could do was watch helplessly as she broke up and went down, sinking into the very waters that I was floating in.

For hours, I could hear the cries of those in the water, unable to help.

I rued the day I was calved.

Was this my destiny - to be responsible for thousands of deaths, the infamy?

Daylight found that I had a streak of red paint on my side, apparently from the hull of the ship, the Titanic.

I hovered around for the next two weeks, floating in the same area, listless and grief stricken as I slowly melted away to become one with the sea.

In the last minutes, my past flashed before me starting from my snowflake days.

And then ……. nothingness.

AR