Sinking of the Titanic

The Sinking of the Titanic is not a person but a moment, and yet the sky over the North Atlantic that night carries a haunting chart. In the early hours of 15 April 1912, four days into her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, the largest liner in service struck an iceberg and slid beneath the sea in two hours and forty minutes, taking more than fifteen hundred lives with only twenty lifeboats between over two thousand souls. The Sun stood in Aries, the pioneer sign, the bold self-starter forever pushing to be first and fastest; and it fell in the second house, the room of wealth, possessions and pride in what one owns. Here astrology reads almost too plainly: a monument to human confidence in its own engineering, racing at twenty-two knots through waters it had been warned held ice. The Moon rode in Pisces, the ocean's own sign, the boundless, watery, dissolving deep, with Aquarius rising to mark an event that shocked the world and broke the old certainties. A chart describes a temperament of the moment, never a verdict of fate; the true causes were speed, warnings ignored and too few boats. From the grief came the SOLAS convention of 1914, and maritime safety was never the same.