When the Titanic was launched on May 31st, 1911, it was, as everyone must know by now, the largest floating object in the world. It was inscribed, it is said, with the luckless registration number 3909 04, which, when written in a certain style and viewed in mirror image, can bear a certain resemblance to an infamous slogan used in certain parts: "No Pope".
The vessel was believed to be unsinkable because of the unique design of its 16 watertight compartments. But it wasn't; as Thomas Hardy wrote in his poem describing events a year later:
". . . as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace and hue, In shadowy silence grew the
iceberg too."
Those who claim to know about such things distinguish between two types of ice in the world's oceans. "Sea ice" is ice frozen from sea water. It is called "fast ice" where it forms a solid immobile cover of the kind often found during winter in the bays and fjords of northern latitudes.
When sea ice is broken up by winds and currents, it is called "drift ice", and drift ice which has been jammed together by the wind to form a more or less continuous rugged cover is often called "pack ice".
"Icebergs" on the other hand, are pieces of a glacier or large chunks of pack ice that have broken off and drifted away under the influence of winds and ocean currents. In the southern hemisphere, most icebergs are free-floating fragments of the great Antarctic ice-pack, and tend to be flat or "tabular" in shape. The icebergs of the North Atlantic, however, come mainly from the glaciers of Greenland, and are usually conical.
So it was in early 1912: From out of the desolation
of the north An iceberg took its way,
And from detaining comrades breaking forth, It travelled night and day.
And as we now know, it and the Titanic had a fateful rendezvous.
Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their
later history, 'Till the Spinner of the Years Said `Now!' And each one
hears, And consummation comes,
and jars two hemispheres.
Jar two hemispheres it did - and still does nearly a century later. The `Now!' was uttered near Cape Race, on the southern tip of the Canadian island of Newfoundland. Titanic sank within a few hours of that fateful consummation, and 1,500 people lost their lives.