How OceanGate sub is the latest victim of the Titanic

• Her Majesty’s hospital ship Britannic sank after hitting a mine in the Aegean Sea

She was to become the largest passenger liner of her time when she tragically sank at sea in a tragic collision – a devastating blow to the prestige of the British Navy.

No, not the RMS Titanic – but Her Majesty’s hospital ship Britannic, which sank in November 1916 after hitting a mine in the Aegean Sea. It was the largest ship lost in World War I.

However, it was linked to the ocean liner that sank four years earlier after striking a giant iceberg in the North Atlantic.

They were sister ships, built at the same yard – Belfast’s venerable Harland & Wolff shipyard – and launched within three years.

The sinking of the Britannic might give some people the idea that there is a curse attached to the Titanic – and that something or someone is involved.

And the litany of sad events of suicides and other tragedies makes for impressive reading.

Meanwhile, attempts to recover or recover the tragic ship failed, while films retelling the event were often plagued with difficulties and near-disasters.

Even Titanic museums weren’t spared – in 2021 a fake iceberg wall at a US Titanic museum in Tennessee collapsed, injuring three visitors.

The case of the Britannic is particularly shocking.

After the Titanic sank, the 883-foot Britannic was rebuilt to ensure she did not meet the same fate as her older sister.

Her hull was strengthened and she was fitted with more lifeboats. Unfortunately, even these safety precautions were not enough to save the ship from sinking or the deaths of the people on board.

Perhaps some crew members of the Britannic, aware that the Titanic had failed to use lifeboats effectively, launched the first two lifeboats prematurely as the great ship began to sink. They were sucked into the still spinning and partially surfaced propeller, crushing the boats and their occupants.

The death toll of 30 was small compared to the more than 1,500 who died on the Titanic.

But the Britannic wasn’t the only Titanic-connected ship to meet such a horrible end.

The RMS Carpathia, the Cunard passenger ship that became famous for rescuing Titanic’s survivors (and nicknamed the ‘Ship of the Widows’ because many of the survivors were women), was also sunk off the coast of southern Ireland during World War I by a German submarine torpedoed. Five crew members died.

But it wasn’t just ships that took damage. Many of the 706 reported Titanic survivors were not spared the “curse”. Many were haunted by the terrible trauma they experienced and led difficult lives.

The Countess of Rothes recalled how, a year after the disaster, while dining with friends, she “suddenly felt that horrible feeling of intense cold and terror” that she had experienced on the Titanic. She realized it was because the restaurant’s musicians were playing The Tales Of Hoffman, the last music she heard from the Titanic’s orchestra.

Decades before “survivor syndrome” was diagnosed as a specific mental illness often associated with feelings of guilt, many of Titanic’s survivors reported symptoms of dissociation, a condition in which those affected feel disconnected from their thoughts and memories.

Marjorie Dutton, an eight-year-old passenger on the Titanic, wrote in 1955 that her life never recovered from the voyage. Her father drowned, taking the family’s “worldly wealth” with him.

“Since then I’ve been blessed with bad luck and often wonder if it will ever give me a break, but it just seems like my destiny,” she said. Did it matter, she wondered, that it had been published at the time that her name was among the drowned?

Some of these traumatized survivors tragically took their own lives at an early age.

Madeleine Astor, a member of this fabulously wealthy family, had traveled home from her honeymoon on the liner when she was 18 with her late husband, John Jacob.

Under the cruel terms of his will, she could only inherit his fortune if she never remarried. She became increasingly dependent on prescription drugs and died at the age of 47 due to rumors she overdosed on sleeping pills.

Jack Thayer, fellow first class passenger, another member of a wealthy American family who survived the sinking but lost his father, fell into depression during World War II when another family member found a watery grave: his son, a bomber pilot , was shot down over the Pacific and never found.

Two years later, after his mother, another Titanic survivor, died just before the anniversary of the ship’s sinking, Thayer slashed his throat and wrists.

Attempts to film the Titanic tragedy also failed.

Even the Nazis tried. In 1943, Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels attempted to make Titanic, a budget film that attempted to portray the sinking of the ship as a damning indictment of British greed, stupidity and cowardice.

The film was certainly “cursed”. Its director was eventually hanged in a Gestapo prison cell for mocking the Nazi war effort. Due to delays and problems, the film was not finished until the Germans faced defeat.

Goebbels realized that a film about a ship sinking would be seen as an allegory of the Nazis, so it was banned in Germany.

The film was shot on a German battleship, the Cap Arcona, which was sunk in the Baltic Sea by British warplanes just two years later. Tragically, they didn’t know that there were 5,000 concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war inside. Only 500 people survived.

When impresario Lew Grade made the 1980 film Raise The Titanic, starring Jason Robards, so much was being spent on water tanks and scale models of the ship that the budget shot up to $40 million. Grade later said ruefully, “It would have been cheaper to sink the Atlantic.”

The production of the Oscar-winning 1997 feature film Titanic, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, was a nightmare for many involved. Winslet developed hypothermia and the flu, and was injured dozens of times during the six months of filming, mostly in Mexico.

When filming moved to Canada, many cast and production crew were mysteriously poisoned after being served clam chowder laced with the drug PCP. More than 50 people had to be hospitalized.

It appears that the ship, said to be unsinkable, has brought danger and death to those associated with it for decades. Now the world is praying that a tragedy like this doesn’t happen again – 12,500 feet below those freezing waves.