I found this story on Drudge about a cruise in which they are going to recreate the voyage of the Titanic, minus the iceberg I hope. Actually there will be two cruises with some passengers wearing period costumes and the same menus for the passengers. They will even have descendants of some of the people who sailed on the Titanic.
Such is the interest in places on the MS Balmoral, the vessel retracing the journey of the maiden voyage of the Titanic, that a waiting list for cancellations has closed.
Some of those who have booked berths costing up to £5,995 are having costumes made to recreate the appearance of the original passengers, while there have also been requests from musicians to audition for places on the string quartet that played as the flagship of the White Star Line fleet began to list.
Miles Morgan, managing director of Titanic Memorial Cruises, the Bristol-based company organising the events, said places on the cruise from Southampton had sold out weeks after going on sale, with the second cruise likely to sell out by next month and interest in the commemorative journey remaining intense. He said: “We have been approached by news crews all over the world who want to film our recreation of the fateful voyage. We could probably have filled the entire vessel just with journalists wanting to be there. The interest has come from all over the globe – we’ve had people from 24 different countries booking.
The culmination of restaging the Titanic’s voyage – which will see the Balmoral, a chartered vessel belonging to the cruise line Fred Olsen, sail to the point off Newfoundland, Canada, where the ship collided with an iceberg – will be a memorial service at 2.20am on 15 April – the moment when what was then the world’s largest passenger ship sank.
A second vessel chartered by the cruise company to carry 694 people will also meet at the site of the sinking after sailing from New York en route to Southampton. And plans are being made for the wireless radio station at Cape Race in Newfoundland, which received the Titanic’s SOS in morse code, to repeat the message.
Among those on board the Balmoral will be relatives of victims and survivors of the Titanic, including Philip Littlejohn, the grandson of Alexander Littlejohn, who was a steward in the first-class section of the vessel and survived by rowing away one of the 16 lifeboats on board. The small number of lifeboats meant that barely a third of the ship’s complement of passengers and crew could ever have been saved.
The attention to detail for the recreated Titanic voyage means that passengers will dine on the same menus offered to the 1,514 people who died and the 710 who survived when the ship struck an iceberg at 11.40pm. Among the items from the 11-course first-class dinner to be offered will be oysters, roast squab and sautéed chicken Lyonnaise.
If you want to go, it’s too late, as all the spaces have been filled up. There are still limited spaces for a tour of the Titanic wreckage on a Russian submarine.
The booming demand for Titanic-related travel has led to another travel company offering the chance to explore the wreckage of the ill-fated vessel in a Russian-built submarine next summer at a cost of $59,000 (£37,000) per person. Places for that voyage are already “very limited”.
I think I’ll pass on that one.
Personally, I am not sure why there has been such interest in the Titanic. It is a tragic story, to be sure but I just don’t get it. I never even saw the movie by James Cameron. But, to each his own.
David's Commonplace Book 