A storyteller's eye view of 'The Unsinkable Ship'

[Andrew Clarkson]

At the time the Titanic sunk on April 15, 1912, the regulations concerning life boats were based on the tonnage of the ship, rather than the number of passengers.

Oddly enough, the Titanic held enough life boats to meet the tonnage requirement, even though at full human capacity, the life boats could only have saved half of the people on board in the event of a major disaster.

Dale Blanshan, the Rochester-based storyteller who is tonight’s guest speaker of the New Ulm Public Library, said backward logic was doomed from the beginning:

“One would have thought the concept of life boats would have been a no-brainer. So that if there were 2,000 people on the boat, they had enough life boats for 2,000 people. Unfortunately, this became one of the main lessons we learned from the sinking of the Titanic, which was to stop weighing the ship, and to start counting the passengers and crew.”

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