such a time. But neither the film nor those who exposed it reached the
other side, and the record of the accident from the Titanic's deck has
never been thrown on the screen.

As we steamed down the river, the scene we had just witnessed was the
topic of every conversation: the comparison with the Olympic-Hawke
collision was drawn in every little group of passengers, and it seemed
to be generally agreed that this would confirm the suction theory
which was so successfully advanced by the cruiser Hawke in the law
courts, but which many people scoffed at when the British Admiralty
first suggested it as the explanation of the cruiser ramming the
Olympic. And since this is an attempt to chronicle facts as they
happened on board the Titanic, it must be recorded that there were
among the passengers and such of the crew as were heard to speak on
the matter, the direst misgivings at the incident we had just
witnessed. Sailors are proverbially superstitious; far too many people
are prone to follow their lead, or, indeed, the lead of any one who
asserts a statement with an air of conviction and the opportunity of
constant repetition; the sense of mystery that shrouds a prophetic
utterance, particularly if it be an ominous one (for so constituted
apparently is the human mind that it will receive the impress of an
evil prophecy far more readily than it will that of a beneficent one,
possibly through subservient fear to the thing it dreads, possibly
through the degraded, morbid attraction which the sense of evil has
for the innate evil in the human mind), leads many people to pay a
certain respect to superstitious theories. Not that they wholly
believe in them or would wish their dearest friends to know they ever
gave them a second thought; but the feeling that other people do so
and the half conviction that there "may be something in it, after
all," sways them into tacit obedience to the most absurd and childish