Children of the Titanic given first-class berths in Lucky and the Lost
Review of The Lucky and the Lost by John Boileau
My family went to Newfoundland for every vacation when I was a child. The six-hour drive to Cape Breton could be torturous, but the second leg of the journey, the six-hour ferry ride from North Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Port aux Basques, Newfoundland, was magical. My vacations never began on the Rock; they began on the high seas, watching Tom and Jerry in the theatre, begging for more quarters when I’d blown my budget in the arcade, or wandering the deck of the ship, watching the horizon and wondering what lie beneath the waves.
The Caribou wasn’t the Titanic (though there was some holiday romance to be had during the brief passage if you were young and foolish enough), but it held enough mysteries to teach me the allure of the ocean, and to help me understand why our mythos is rife with stories of lost sailors, from Jonah to Ahab. Those stories serve as fables. Their lesson: nature cannot be conquered. Do not tempt fate.
I often experienced a moment of dread when our car rattled over the steel, into the gaping maw of the ferry. We parked on the lower decks, in the belly of the beast that would carry us over hundreds of miles of merciless, icy ocean.
When I was a child, fighting with my sister in the back seat of the car, I didn’t think about Jonah when we boarded the Caribou. I thought about the “unsinkable” Titanic, who, on her maiden voyage, smashed into an iceberg that appeared from the darkness far off the coast of Newfoundland and shredded her hull, killing more than 1,500 people.
John Boileau understands why stories about the Titanic continue to fascinate. His new book, The Lucky and the Lost, written with Patricia Boileau Theriault, has been available from Nimbus Publishing since April 9. It follows the lives of the children who were aboard the Titanic when it sank on April 14 and 15, 1912.
“The book is about the children of the Titanic, but it’s written for adults,” Boileau said. “Although I know children will like it because … doing book signings, the kids would engage me in conversation. I could talk to these kids on an intellectual level about Titanic and their parents didn’t even know they had an interest in it.”
It’s a wonder that it took more than a century for somebody to write such a detailed account of the children aboard history’s most famous ocean liner. The cosmic themes at play in the maritime tragedy filled my head when I was kid, standing on the deck of the Caribou, staring into the snowy night, looking for the outline of an iceberg that would spell our doom. A reminder that pride goeth before the fall.
For Boileau, the children who survived the Titanic carried lost treasure.
“One thing we certainly gain is their very vivid memories,” Boileau said, “because they generally lived longer than the other survivors.”
Despite the innumerable publications and broadcasts about the Titanic across media, Boileau has found a fresh take in The Lucky and the Lost and packed it with emotional gravitas by following his own fascination with the Titanic to the children who experienced the catastrophe firsthand. Through rigorous research, Boileau has discovered the fate of every child who boarded the Titanic in 1912, except one.
“It gave us more representation across the classes,” Boileau said. “We were able to mine these stories and whittle them down to their core.”
The relevance of class among Titanic’s survivors is one of many surprises Boileau includes in his version of the story. The perspective of the survivors offers astonishing insights into the disaster. This is the kind of deep examination that will appeal to history buffs, disaster enthusiasts or anybody interested in experiencing the perspective of those who were aboard the Titanic when she went down a century ago.
The Lucky and the Lost is reminder for anyone who ever stared into the night aboard the deck of a ship and wondered if something terrible might appear from the darkness. The stories of Titanic’s children carry the terror I felt when I first read about the ill-fated ship, when I was the same age as those who became the lucky and the lost.
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