Photo: internet.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill began on the 20th April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP operated Macondo Prospect. Inset: The Exxon Valdez oil s pill occurred in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on March 24, 1989.
appeared, Titanic: The Ship That Never Sank?, authored by one Robin Gardiner, with the premise that the ship which sank in the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912, wasn’t the Titanic after all, but rather her sister ship, the Olympic. As Gardiner tells the tale, the two ships had their identi- ties switched in an elaborate (and apparently successful) insurance fraud. The starting premise of Gardiner’s
thesis is that the two ships, the Olympic and Titanic, were designed to be as identical sisters, as alike as two peas in a pod. On 20 September 1911, the Olympic, which was com- missioned before the Titanic, was involved in a collision with the Royal Navy’s light cruiser HMS Hawke in the Brambles Channel near South- ampton. A subsequent Court of Inquiry found that the Olympic was at fault, and the owners of the ship, the White Star Line and its parent company, International Mercantile
Marine, were liable for damages. This ruling had dire financial con- sequences for both White Star and IMM, as White Star’s insurers (Lloyds of London) refused to honor the insurance claim. To make matters worse, at least, so Gardiner tells us, the damage to the Olympic proved to be even more serious than was first believed, for after the ship was repaired and returned to service, she supposedly began experiencing se- vere engine problems which caused her to be returned to Harland and Wolff where the sister vessel the Titanic was being completed and delayed due to the repairs neces- sitated on the Olympic. The theory portrayed by Gardiner
is that in order to get at least one of the two liners to sea and earning money, the crippled Olympic was converted into the almost-com- pleted Titanic, the Titanic then assuming her older sister’s identity. Betraying an almost total ignorance
of ships and shipbuilding in general, Gardiner asserts that all that was necessary to accomplish this identity switch was exchanging those parts of the ships which bore the vessels’ names: name plates, bells, naviga- tion equipment, lifeboats, and any interior signing bearing the name Olympic or Titanic. We know what consequently
happened to the Titanic or is it Olympic? And the insurance claim of $15,000,000 in 1912 was paid out accordingly. One has to wonder though that this alleged switch took place in a shipyard where some 15,000 Irishmen worked and how on earth can anyone expect 15,000 Irishmen to keep a secret?
The Top Claims There have been some significant
marine insurance claims. One we can vividly remember is for example the Exxon Valdez disaster. The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in Prince
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