Titanic Conspiracy: Theories of a Pre-Meditated Plan to Sink the Titanic

Historic events have a way of attracting harmful myths and conspiracy theories, including great achievements like landing men on the moon, as well as great tragedies like Martin Luther King’s assassination, the 9/11 attacks and the sinking of the Titanic.

Late in the evening of April 14th, 1912, the R.M.S. Titanic struck an iceberg and sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic, killing 1,517 of her 2,223 passengers and crew. To make sense of such a random tragedy, people over the past century have spun elaborate conspiracy theories to mask the real reason the ship went down.

Wealth’s Part in Titanic Sinking

According to one theory, millionaire banker J.P. Morgan planned the Titanic disaster to kill off rival millionaires Jacob Astor, Isidor Straus and Benjamin Guggenheim, who all perished when the Titanic sank. The theory goes on to claim that Morgan wanted to kill them because they opposed the creation of the Federal Reserve, even though Astor and Guggenheim never publically expressed their opinion on the matter, while Straus actually supported the concept of the Federal Reserve.

Alternative versions of this theory claim that the Rothschild banking family were the ones who arranged for Astor, Straus and Guggenheim’s deaths on the Titanic, and as The Washington Post notes, invoking the Rothchilds as international conspirators is “a centuries-old anti-Semitic trope,” which has made them “a favorite target of conspiracy theorists ever since.”

Superstition Sinks Ships

Another myth recounts that Catholic employees at Harland and Wolff, the Belfast company that built the Titanic, were distressed that the ship’s hull number, 3909 04, seemed to say “no pope” when viewed in a mirror. The late Titanic historian Walter Lord wrote that he received letters from people in Ireland relaying this “no pope” story beginning in the mid-1950s, yet as Burns pointed out in his 1986 book, The Night Lives On, there was no such number attached to the Titanic. The hull number painted on the ship was 401, the same as its yard number at Harland and Wolff, and its Board of Trade number was 131,428.

Yet even if one of its numbers had read “no pope,” there weren’t any Catholic workers at Harland and Wolff for the made-up number to upset them, since the company had driven all Catholic employees away in the late 1800s, and by the twentieth century, Harland and Wolff had a reputation for employing only Protestants workers.