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I solved the century-old mystery of a shipwreck survivor
- mosdl 1y agoIts amazing how much and how little things have changed when it comes to media. Good reminder to always be skeptical about sensationalism.
- imglorp 1y agoA good tall tale has an element of plausibility. A 6km swim is a common workout for a college swimmer these days. If the river conditions were favorable, the story on its own was not suspect.
- clort 1y agoI mean, there is this Icelandic guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%C3%B0laugur_Fri%C3%B0%C3%BE%C3%B3rsson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%C3%B0laugur_Fri%C3%B0%C3%BE... who actually did swim 6km in freezing waters after his vessel sank in 1984..
- Simon_O_Rourke 1y agoYeah, but that guy was well insulated with blubber.
- LeifCarrotson 1y agoA 6km swim in a 78F pool is a common workout. I've repeatedly swum in Lake Michigan (looking online, it has comparable temps to the St Lawrence in Quebec) as early as Memorial Day. The water temp is often in the mid 50s, very cold even with a full wetsuit, hood, and prep, but feasible as a ritual with which to open the season and start the summer. This year, in May, it was 45F/7C. Insanely, painfully, shockingly, unsafely cold...I decided to break tradition. In July, a 6km swim could be fun! In May, depending on the climate that year and the swimmer's metabolism and subcutaneous fat levels, it might be survivable. You might lose a few extremities to frostbite. Or it might not be survivable. 1 in 800-something odds, with an athletic 29-year-old being the only survivor, seems reasonable enough. It is a good tall tale, out on the murky limits of credibility.
- pge 1y agoIt's pretty impressive (and not always widely known) how much cold water impairs swimming ability. There are some good videos on this site - coldwatersafety.org - of Coast Guard volunteers trying to swim in 45deg water. They lose motor function before making it 20m or so. Only one is able to make the short distance to shore, and he is one of the largest guys and a professional rescue swimmer. A 6km swim in 45F water for someone that is not wearing protective clothing or well acclimated to cold water is not realistic.
- relwin 1y agoOceanliner Designs has a great recreation of this accident: https://youtu.be/-9ZLZ8hiA5Y?si=ElcaIqEQhTHsElkM https://youtu.be/-9ZLZ8hiA5Y?si=ElcaIqEQhTHsElkM ...and of the last 10 minutes of this accident: https://youtu.be/N5CxSRsiUys?si=wS42xVXUb5Awb95U https://youtu.be/N5CxSRsiUys?si=wS42xVXUb5Awb95U
- hatthew 1y agoIf you liked this story, you might like the game Return of the Obra Dinn, which is kinda just this but for ~60 different people on a fictional ship.
- the_af 1y agoA very cool game by the author of the also interesting Papers, Please. I second this recommendation!
- polivier 1y agoWhen my wife was pregnant and had to stop working, she got bored so I got her this game. At first she said she didn't like it "because the graphics suck". A couple days later she was totally immersed in the game and had made spreadsheets to track the whereabouts of every character over time. It is a really well-made game.
- the_af 1y agoThe graphics are actually quite an impressive technical feat, Lukas Pope went into some detail in his blog/forums about the effort that went into making them. I remember lots of work went into getting the "dithering" right when the scene was in motion.
- nucleardog 1y agoNot only did a lot of work go in, but after much trial and error the breakthrough ended up coming from some random mathematician that happened to be following the thread and decided to take a crack at it. Mathematician's posting starts here: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg1212805#msg1212805 https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg121280... Next dev blog post from Lukas Pope mentioning this here: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg1217196#msg1217196 https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg121719...
- hermitcrab 1y agoI tried to play it. But I just didn't 'get it'.
- readthenotes1 1y agoTldr: 'Davidson stripped off his nightshirt and swam away from the ship. The suction took him down, and when he came up, he swam into a frenzied crowd. “They tramped me under three times before I got through them. I swam on a little farther, but the water was fearfully cold, and I was out of practice swimming,” he said. Davidson was picked up by a lifeboat and taken to the _Storstad_, which survived the collision.' The article was apparently edited to increase prolixity.
- hatthew 1y agoI thought the background was interesting and helpful to know
- fisherjeff 1y agoIt’s a book excerpt
- mnky9800n 1y agoI thought he would explain how he figured all this out but it was not clear from the article how he did so.
- Cipater 1y agoThank you for teaching me a new word. Prolixity - unnecessarily or tediously wordy
- jolt42 1y agoI prefer the almost comical sounding word, logorrhea.
- jolt42 1y agoI wondered about this suction. Is he talking about the ship sinking as suction. Mythbusters demonstrated IIRC that this "suction" doesn't happen.
- windowshopping 1y agoHe says near the beginning that only 832 people died on Titanic, which is plainly untrue and made me stop reading because I felt I could no longer trust anything the author was saying without fact checking it. I mean that's a really basic thing to get wrong.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anonymous_user9 1y agoThat's the number of passenger deaths, not total deaths. It's pretty close to the sum of passenger deaths in the wikipedia article on the Titanic [1], 818. According to that article, the total death count is unclear, so the discrepancy seems acceptable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic#Survivors_and_victims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic#Survivors_and_victims
- carlosjobim 1y ago> Every schoolchild knows the story of the Titanic, the luxury ocean liner that hit an iceberg and sank in 1912. So why did the Empress tragedy, which claimed even more passenger lives a little over two years later, fail to embed itself in our collective national consciousness? Because the Titanic was the biggest ship ever, it sunk on its maiden voyage, although it was said to be unsinkable. It's probably one of few stories from our time which will be remembered in a thousand years.
- DevelopingElk 1y agoThat, and there were survivors to tell the tale. Ships sinking with all on board lost was a reality. There was always the chance that one who went out to sea might not return. The Titanic's survivors made the story known and memorable.
- the_af 1y agoThe Titanic was thought to be unsinkable, so "there was always a chance" didn't apply in people's minds to this case.
- close04 1y agoThe Titanic was the largest ship at the time, "unsinkable", on its maiden voyage, carrying some of the richest people in the world, greatest maritime disaster at the time, still basically at #2 after more than a century, and the wreck lost for 70 years. The story is definitely more sensational and mysterious than other sinkings.
- chopin 1y agoThe 'Wilhelm Gustloff' had at least 4000 casualties in 1945. I believe the memorability of the Titanic is only loosely coupled to the number of casualties .
- close04 1y agoI included the casualty count as a response to the article quote in OP's comment: > So why did the Empress tragedy, which claimed even more passenger lives a little over two years later, fail to embed itself in our collective national consciousness? The Titanic sinking caused ~50-60% more casualties. But casualty numbers alone are probably not enough to make either of them memorable. But an "unsinkable" ship, biggest ever, carrying the worlds richest, inexplicably sinking on maiden voyage and disappearing for decades is a very powerful story.
- alexey-salmin 1y ago> On May 28, 1914, the Empress began her 192nd trip across the Atlantic, from Quebec City en route to Liverpool, carrying 1,056 passengers and a crew of 423. I have to say I'm surprised by the size of the crew, both from the economic perspective and from the fact that it's steam and not sails. I guess I'll need to read more on how these ships were run. > After a minute and a half, the boiler rooms were flooded with the equivalent of nine Olympic swimming pools of water. Oh for crying out loud
- Xss3 1y agoAnother ship struck it between the boiler compartment and the one next door.
- alexey-salmin 1y agoI wonder how big was that ship in terms of football fields
- PMunch 1y agoThe headline as I read the article was "How I Solved the Century-Old Mystery of a Miraculous Shipwreck Survivor", but it doesn't actually detail _how_ the mystery was solved. They talked to a couple different people, found an old newspaper clipping, but the crucial > Davidson was picked up by a lifeboat and taken to the Storstad, which survived the collision. The actual meat of the article, doesn't have any clear source. I guess it might've come from the mentioned piece in "St. Thomas Journal", but it's not exactly clear. Cool story, but not exactly the "How I solved a mystery" that you'd expect from the headline.
- hatthew 1y agoIt was structured a little oddly so it took a reread to understand, but I believe the wrong story was from the Vancouver Province, while the right story was from Davidson's letter in the St. Thomas Daily Times.
- Sprotch 1y agoThats because Davidson said so himself. This whole thing is a clickbait
- nickelpro 1y agoTo discover what Davidson said required tracking down an undigitized newspaper article from 1914, the existence of which was only known about by tracking down the living descendants of the man's brother. Hardly clickbait.
- madaxe_again 1y agoHi I’m from [outlet] news can we cite your piece about how he successfully fashioned an aeroplane out of scrap deck chairs and flew to safety?
- Sprotch 1y agoHe was picked up by a lifeboat. There is no mystery; he had made clear himself multiple times that this is how he was rescued.
- Neywiny 1y agoYeah I mean it was an ok article, and I understand we're all trying to make a living, but it could be summarized in one sentence. "The reporters made up a story and he couldn't convince them to report the truth: that he had been picked up in a lifeboat." Because yes the mystery is solved by knowing he was in a lifeboat, but it's also critical to determine how the falsehood originated.
- DFHippie 1y agoThe point of the article is not to solve deep problems but to entertain. It did that. If it were one sentence long it would not be entertaining.
- jolt42 1y agoBoth are clickbait both false, "man swims 6k to shore" versus "I solved the mystery".
- aa-jv 1y agoThis story is not about some dude in a lifeboat. This story is about how stories, themselves, do not always get told accurately. For me the most interesting aspect is that the original newspaper reporter altered the facts, and then some decades later, another researcher dug deeper and got the facts straight, long after the incident. Contextually - in light of recent insanity regarding state sanctioned mass murder - this is quite relevant to those of us observing the state of information warfare.
- chiffre01 1y agoClaiming the disaster was worse than the Titanic seems pretty thin just because more passenger lives were lost? Total Lives lost: Titanic: 1,500 Empress of Ireland: 1,012
- mattlondon 1y agoThere was also a suggestion that more people knew about the titanic because there were more upper-class people on the titanic and no one cares about poor people or some other social commentary like that, which I think is disingenuous. I suspect titanic is/was more well known is simply due to the sheer hubris of it all - a much-heralded and much-trumpeted "unsinkable ship" that sank on its maiden voyage. It was supposed to be this amazing new technical marvel and yet it did the very thing it that they were claiming was impossible on it's very first trip. Sticks in the mind somewhat, compared to the frequent "ordinary" ship sinkings that happen all the time (then and yes ships still sink now, although fewer passenger ships I expect but probably just down to their being fewer of them)