so theres a lot of posts going round about the titanic wreck and the missing submarines; all of them that ive seen have made very good points about how shoddy the submersible seemed to be and how the company decided to wait eight hours before reporting it, and how this is a play stupid games, win stupid prizes for the ultra-wealthy who paid like 250grand a ticket for this thing.
but what i havent seen any posts about is how the titanic wreck is a gravesite and this tourism is disturbing the graves of over 1500 people.
sometimes its kinda hard to remember that those on the titanic were real people; it was over a century ago, the story has been romanticised in so many ways (like the movie), theres conspiracies theories galore that cloud everything with misinformation, but at the end of the day, those who died were real people.
do you want their names? heres a list of them; its a long read. and for fun, heres another site where you can see photos of the children and babies who died aboard.
their bodies are long gone and their lives long forgotten. all we have to remember them and honour them is the wreck itself. its all we have of them and it is their gravesite. its their tombstone.
caitlin doughty/ask a morticians video on the great lakes discusses the topic well, and why we should leave these shipwrecks alone because again, they are the gravesites of all the souls who died aboard those ships. we rarely have bodies to recover so we really are left just with the wreck.
and what really upsets me about titanic tourism is how the majority of those who died that night were not the ultra-wealthy rich folks you might picture when you think of ocean liners.
61% of the first class passengers survived
42% of the second class passengers survived
24% of the third class passengers survived
24% of the crew survived **
the majority of those who died that night were regular folk; not to be cliche, but they were just like us. titanics wreck is not only a gravesite for over 1500 people, its also a majority working class gravesite.
and look at us now. look at what were doing. the ultra-wealthy can pay the equivalent of peanuts to them to disturb a mass gravesite of the exact kind of people they exploit today to hold onto all their wealth.Â
its easy to point and laugh at these dumb idiots in their playstation controller submarine, seemingly held together with super glue and duct tape, but its also important to remember that what they were doing was simply disturbing a gravesite for fun. though the company does research, these guys werent down there to conduct research, they were there so they could brag about it to their friends. its like “climbing mount everest” while your sherpa does all the work.
if you cant tell, i have a lot of feelings about this. shipwrecks and ocean liners are one of my special interests and im currently building a (beginner’s) model of the titanic, for fucks sake. but i would never go down to see that wreck because its a fucking gravesite and we should not be disturbing their final resting place.
