'Familiar[s] of the deep': Shipwreck and animal horror from The Wreck of the Titan to RMS Titanic

In Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novel Futility the author imagined the horror of the loss of an ocean liner in terms that variously intersect with animal tropes, including the depiction of hallucinated sea monsters that foreshadow the ship’s doom and the protagonist’s symbolic battle with a polar bear. These animal references serve several purposes: establishing a sense of scale that suggests human powerlessness, highlighting the dangers posed by aquatic or semi-aquatic creatures, and evoking a folkloric tradition of marine monsters. In 1912, in the wake of the sinking of RMS Titanic, Futility was republished as The Wreck of the Titan to capitalize on some of the eerie similarities between Robertson’s narrative and actual events. Taking Robertson’s text as its starting point, this article illuminates how the ship and iceberg are animalized—often figured as warring mythological sea beasts—and other forms of animal life spotlighted in diverse texts reflecting on the Titanic’s demise. These include Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain” (1912) and “In Memoriam: The Titanic Disaster” (1913) and they attest to the physical and psychological horrors of disaster at sea, the limits of the human imagination when conceiving of the seabed, and a renewed understanding of humankind’s fragility when confronted with the awesome forces of nature. It identifies in such writings a deployment of Gothic and weird tropes concerning animal presences in a post-Darwinian world that ultimately lend these writings some of speculative fiction’s unsettling power. That these texts straddle an uncomfortable boundary between fiction and non-fiction underscores the destabilizing impact of Titanic’s loss.