Fourteen years before the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and sank into the freezing waters of the North Atlantic, an American author published a novella describing that exact scenario. In 1898, Morgan Robertson released Futility, a fictional story about an ocean liner named Titan.
The fictional ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic in April and sank. The startling similarities between the fictional Titan and the real-life Titanic caused many people to later accuse Robertson of possessing clairvoyant abilities, a claim he firmly denied.
The Unsinkable Titan
In the first half of Robertson’s 1898 novella, he introduces readers to the Titan. Within the text, the author describes the vessel as the longest and fastest ship in the world, and it is explicitly considered unsinkable.
The story follows a disgraced former US Navy officer named John Rowland. Dismissed from the service and suffering from alcoholism, Rowland works as a deckhand aboard the massive ocean liner.
Collision in the Fog
During a voyage between America and Ireland, the fictional Titan sails at full speed through heavy fog and crashes directly into a smaller vessel, splitting it completely in half. Rowland witnesses the collision from his post on lookout.
The ship’s captain attempts to bribe the deckhand to keep the incident quiet. Rowland refuses the money and vows to expose the captain’s actions once they reach port. In response, the captain and his officers drug Rowland in an attempt to discredit his impending testimony.
The Iceberg and the Aftermath
The very next night, the Titan hits an iceberg and capsizes. Because the fictional ship does not carry enough lifeboats for all of its passengers, only 13 people survive the disaster.
Rowland manages to save the young daughter of a former lover by jumping directly onto the iceberg as the ship goes down. The pair eventually locate a lifeboat washed up on the ice, and Rowland fights and kills a polar bear before a passing ship rescues them and transports them to England.
Rewriting Futility After 1912
Although Robertson wrote the book before the RMS Titanic was even conceived, the parallels were undeniable. Both the fictional and real ships sank after hitting an iceberg in April in the North Atlantic. Both lacked adequate lifeboats. In the book, the Titan suffers fatal damage from a glancing blow with the ice, mirroring the real disaster.
Following the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, publishers reissued Robertson’s novella. They renamed it Futility, or The Wreck of the Titan and made several alterations to the text, including specific changes to the ship’s displacement figures to more closely match the real-life vessel.
