RMSC exhibit opens up lives of Titanic passengers

[Andrew Clarkson]

An exhibit about the Titanic explores its passengers' lives as deeply as the lavishly equipped ship that they rode to disaster.

"Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition" sails this week into Rochester Museum & Science Center. Its cargo is 125 relics from the luxury liner that rammed an iceberg in 1912, killing at least 1,500 passengers.

The world's largest ship plunged 2½ miles into the freezing North Atlantic, becoming an instant cautionary tale about overconfidence.

"I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel," Capt. Edward Smith had said, before going down with his ship. "Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that."

Seventy-five years later, salvage crews began exploring the debris. Their finds — from upscale china to a Cherry Tooth Paste lid — have been touring the globe since 1994. More than 22 million people have seen them. It's an extraordinary afterlife for a cruise that lasted only 4½ days.
The exhibit, visiting upstate New York for the first time, is rich in telling touches that open up the passengers' lives.

An ornate gold-plated chandelier that once lighted Titanic's smoking room evokes a Gilded Age of plenty. So do tiny perfume vials still bearing their floral scents. Deluxe cigar holders and stylish au gratin dishes recall an indulgent time before nicotine and cholesterol became public enemies.

Some things, however, never change. A razor blade wrapper promotes Gillette's latest beard buster — the best a man could get, even in 1912. And moviegoers will do a double take when they see an amazingly well-preserved pair of suspenders. They seem plucked from Leonardo DiCaprio's shoulders in the 1997 movie Titanic.

Although these artifacts are a deep-sea grab bag of curiosities, the exhibit itself is rigorously organized. You follow the Titanic's voyage chronologically, from its Belfast ship builders to an icy seabed 453 miles southeast of Newfoundland.

The highly informative wall texts are enriched by vintage photos of the ship's grand staircase, smoking room and other highlights. Period videos show how the unsinkable marvel was built — with sledgehammers, elbow grease and 2,000 super-thick steel plates. An artificial but very cold iceberg gives you a sense of the 28-degree temperatures felt by those who missed the lifeboats.

At the entry, you also get a replica boarding pass of an actual Titanic passenger. It could be Macy department store tycoon Isodor Straus, silent screen star Dorothy Gibson or a lowlife such as DiCaprio's character.

You follow their fate through mini-biographies and a memorial wall listing those who drowned or survived. Such boarding passes have long been used at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and are an effective way of involving visitors in historic tragedies.

Like the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Titanic exhibit sets a somber tone with its black walls and steadily growing sense of calamity.

Along the way, it also exposes a less acknowledged tragedy — namely, sharp class differences that doomed some passengers from the start.
This insight is subtly conveyed in displays that contrast passengers' lifestyles. A recent tour with two museum staffers showed how this realization dawns.

They paused before three menus that demonstrated how status trickled onto dinner plates. Third-class diners got pork, boiled potatoes and cabin biscuits (don't ask). Baked haddock and turnip puree were served at second-class tables.

The beautiful people in first class had to tackle 10 bulging courses, including Filet Mignon Lili and peaches in Chartreuse jelly. The sheer volume of richly sauced meats probably guaranteed after-dinner bloat, if not gout.

"Well, at least they didn't live to suffer," says museum spokeswoman Debra Jacobson.

"Wait, they did!" exclaims registrar Kathryn Murano. "They were first class, so they may have lived."

In fact, first- and second-class passengers did enjoy a better chance of survival. They had their own promenade space on the deck, near the few lifeboats required by law.

After the collision, stewards kept third-class passengers below decks to ensure an "orderly" evacuation. Apparently, no one ever gave an order to release them.

Thus 60 percent of first-class passengers lived through the disaster, compared to 25 percent of those in third class.

Death was the most severe of the inconveniences suffered in steerage. Ten people often crammed into a cabin. More than 700 third-class passengers shared two bathtubs.

Meanwhile, the gentry sweated away their cares in a large Turkish bath with gilt ceilings. It's steamily portrayed in a vintage photo.

The exhibit also recreates life-size staterooms for the rich and the poor. The third-class cubicle has two double bunks and a fold-down luggage rack. The first-class cabin boasts red damask wallpaper, a large mahogany bed and elegant cream-colored sconces. Titanic's luxury accommodations would cost $57,200 to $103,000 in today's currency.

Visitors may wonder how even the best-made belongings managed to resurface in such fresh condition.

They didn't. The salvage teams that sifted Titanic's debris field found 5,500 objects, using mini-submarines and remote-controlled retrieval units. The artifacts needed intensive conservation to remove salt and rust. The ship had been attacked by wood- and iron-digesting microorganisms that coated its decks with brown ooze.

"A lot of the better preserved artifacts were found in leather suitcases," says Murano. "New processes for tanning leather helped those objects last longer."

All of the recovery was done from 1987 to 2004 by RMS Titanic Inc., a subsidiary of Premier Exhibitions in Atlanta, which is the only company legally authorized to search the wreck.

You can buy a few of the lesser treasures at the exhibit's gift shop. Be sure to wear gloves, because these are chunks of coal from Titanic's boiler room. You can take your lumps for $20 to $45 apiece. More traditional gifts include paperweights with floating models of the ship.

RMSC leaders hope that the new exhibit's colossal subject attracts equally colossal crowds.

"We drew more than 70,000 visitors to 'Our Body' in 2007," says Jacobson. "We expect comparable attendance for Titanic."

The odds seem favorable, since "Our Body" was a controversial display. By contrast, the Titanic has sparked fascination from the moment it was launched. The new exhibit, though appropriately serious in tone, should ride that wave with aplomb.

Source: http://www.democratandchronicle.com