The Saboteur

I have to assume they finally found the Titanic, or you would not be reading this. Before my death, I left explicit instructions with my barrister to leave this letter sealed until the remains of the old girl had been located. Now I, Patrick Callahan, saboteur extraordinaire, will tell you how the ship sank, and it wasn’t done by a bloody iceberg.

I graduated first in my class at Imperial College, London. My passion was engineering. Making small objects work together with larger ones fascinated me. If I could fashion people to work together in the same way I created machines, life would be a true utopia. It was my quest to find symmetry in humans that led me to read Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. I found it interesting, but lacked a practical application. After leaving college, I attempted to secure an engineering position in London but was unsuccessful.

Upon returning to Belfast, I discovered the only job available to an educated commoner like myself was inspecting new rivets for quality and strength at the Youngstown Sheet and Tubing Company. After I inspected the rivets, I sent them to Harland and Wolff, shipbuilders for the White Star Line. It was a disappointing job, but I was confident I would work my way up the ladder. I was wrong!

My inspections showed a large concentration of slag in the rivets, which made them considerably weaker than the specifications required. When I brought the problem to George Wick, the owner, he summarily fired me for my diligence. It was a cruel lesson on how the rich handled business irregularities. I should have expected this treatment based on a childhood experience with the wealthy.

My family lived on the estate of Thomas Andrews, ship builder. Father was the manor house handyman, mother the cook. The Andrews had a daughter the same age as me and we were inseparable as children. As time passed, our childhood friendship blossomed into what we thought was true love. In proper British society, sons of laborers do not court or marry the daughters of aristocrats. To end the relationship, her parents dispatched my sweetheart to England for an arranged marriage with a nobleman’s son. They ordered the Callahan family to leave their estate. Social standing pushed my dreams of a happy life with their daughter into the gutter.

Life is full of strange twists. I eventually secured a job at Harland and Wolff, installing the identical substandard rivets that had caused my firing. I felt I had three choices. Option one was to remain silent and keep my job. The second option was to find Thomas Andrews, Titanic’s designer and the man that kicked my family off his property, and tell him what I knew. There was a third option that offered payback for all the wrongs I had suffered in my young life. This option offered the potential for financial gain.

White Star Line’s biggest competitor was Cunard Line. White Star’s ships were larger, but Cunard’s were faster. While White Star had the Titanic under construction, Cunard was building the Lusitania to rival its competitor’s ship. What if information concerning weak rivets and slapdash construction practices involving the Titanic were to leak out? How much would that information be worth to Cunard management?

It took time, but I finally got to meet with the managers of Cunard. To my surprise, they already knew about the slag riddled rivets because they were using the same product. The reason for using them was simple, they were cheap. It was no big deal if a few rivets failed as long as most of them held. My information was worthless to them, and they physically tossed me off Cunard’s property. That night, I decided enough was enough. It was time to put these bourgeoisie pigs in their place. Karl Marx was right, after all!

I went back to work at the shipyard with a new purpose. I no longer wanted to join the wealthy, I wanted to destroy them. Now, before installing the slag infused rivets, I would dip them in a glass jar filled with a solution of sulfuric acid. The acid would slowly dissolve the rivet. As a back-up, I mixed more acid in the paint used to cover the interior of the hull. If some of the paint blistered, management would ignore it like the rivets. All that mattered was profit.

A formal ball was scheduled for day four of the voyage. J. Bruce Ismay, the ship’s owner, along with John J. Astor and a cadre of wealthy and influential people attended the event. Opulence is too weak a word to describe the main dining room for first-class passengers aboard the Titanic. Crystal chandeliers swayed gently back and forth, illuminating the room. The light emanating from them danced playfully off gold-rimmed dinnerware. The diamond and sapphire jewelry adorning the ladies of wealth and position added to the splendor. Black tie and tails were the uniform of the night for the captains of industry. It was truly a demonstration of how the bourgeoisie lived.

All went as planned until the ship made a sharp turn to starboard, momentarily causing everyone to lose their balance. Ismay checked with the captain, then announced that all was well. The captain had turned to avoid an iceberg.

A short time later, the scraping and creaking of metal against metal echoed throughout the ship. Rivets snapped under the strain placed on them by the sudden turn, freeing steel hull plates. Several hours later, the aft section broke away, and the Titanic slipped beneath the waves.

How do I know it happened this way? I was on board, disguised as a waiter. I helped as many third-class passengers to safety as possible before I saved myself. After I returned to Belfast, I continued working in my chosen profession, saboteur. Although no one knew my real identity, my reputation grew. I received handsome payments for train derailments and mineshaft collapses. It’s ironic that disrupting the lives of the bourgeoisie made me as wealthy as them.