Nobody reads about the Mauretania. There’s no movie about a transatlantic crossing and the shuffleboard the passengers enjoyed en route. No, most ships whose name we can pluck out of thin air probably ran into a problem. Or an iceberg. The Lusitania was torpedoed. There’s a song about the Edmund Fitzgerald because it sank, not about the onboard pinochle tournament. The HMS Terror was frozen into the ice in Antarctica and if Dan Simmons’ historical horror fiction is to be believed, its crew was slowly picked off by a giant prehistoric polar bear. If your name is connected to a ship, there’s a solid chance you died on it.
Then there’s the RMS Titanic. The Mother of them all. The Titanic is part of our folklore – even before Kate and Leo stood on its prow. It hit an iceberg and the distress signalling was botched. (Read how the Marconi telegraph system used on the Titanic aided its demise here.) The White Star Line had skimped on lifeboats, which seems like the one thing you’d like to have enough of when crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Some men bravely stayed aboard, others evidently dressed as women to escape, the band played until the ship went under (though nobody knows the last song they played, I’d give anything if it was Freebird). Chief baker Charles Joughin was drunk on whiskey when the ship hit the iceberg and though it’s been long claimed that the alcohol helped him survive, in actuality he just did everything right. He got into the water as late as possible and instantly sought ways to get onto a lifeboat. Nevertheless, his survival via whiskey is now legend. Other legends include a heroic Newfoundland dog, premonitions, a nearby mystery ship, the captain’s drunkenness (no evidence of this at all, but it was 1912, he was a sailor, and he wasn’t around to dispute anything). Books have been written about the event for 121 years.
One of those books is Pig on the Titanic: A True Story, or the 100% untrue story of Maxixe, one of the lesser known porcine heroes of that fateful evening. Evidently, this small ‘musical’ pig made it from wherever pigs are kept on ships to a lifeboat full of children. It then sang songs to soothe the understandably upset kids, who not only had to cope with their ship sinking, being alone in the Atlantic, and their families dying, but also a pig who wouldn’t stop singing at them. Even if we suspend for a moment our disbelief that there are singing pigs who have yet to be berated by Simon Cowell, there’s still an awful lot to unpack with this ‘true’ story. Let’s start with 1. who would bring a pig on a luxury cruiser, 2. how would the pig manage to get one of the very limited spaces on a lifeboat, 3. and how did Maxixe the singing pig not end up in James Cameron’s movie? In actuality, no evidence points to a pig being aboard or surviving, let alone one with vocal range. By all accounts, the only pigs onboard were on first class dinnerplates. None of those were observed singing to children.
The very idea of being on a sinking ship in the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night is on its own horror layered over horror layered over horror. But at least many of the people were probably drunk when it was happening. Helping the passengers get through its planned week-long crossing – and cope with its unplanned bottom-of-the-ocean docking – was 20,000 bottles of Munich Lager beer, 850 bottles of gin, whiskey, vermouth, rum, and a shaved ice punch called Punch Romaine. Sure, much of this catered to first class passengers, but since they were paying today’s equivalent of $133,132 for a suite and $4,951 for a berth, booze was just a coping technique. So while the White Star Line skimped on lifeboats, they made sure there was enough booze that people didn’t seem to worry about it. Well, until the night of April 15, when it was no doubt a source of avid discussion.
Since the Minoans were sailing around the Aegean, people have been boozing at sea. The Phoenicians introduced wine to much of Europe and North Africa and influenced various cultures in wine-making processes. Among the key supplies during the age of exploration was wine or port. India Pale Ales were specifically developed to not spoil during long sea voyages. And a alcohol ration for sailors was a long tradition in navies around the world. So the sea and alcohol have had a long relationship. It’s probably for this reason that there’s so much of it found on the ocean’s floor. Some of the world’s oldest wine, beer, and champagne have been recovered from shipwrecks on beds of seas. Near the Åland islands in the Baltic Sea, a shipwreck relinquished 170-year-old champagne as well as the world’s oldest beer. In 1999, the Mary Celestia, a sunken confederate blockade runner which sunk in 1864, was uncovered by hurricanes. Archaeologists found wine onboard. In 1916 off the coast of Sweden, the Swedish cargo ship the Jönköping was delivering booze to Czar Nicholas II of Russia when it was torpedoed by a German U boat, or one of the ocean’s little hemorrhoids. The Jönköping’s alcoholic cargo was enormous – 17,000 barrels of burgundy, 3,000 bottles of champagne, and ‘tens of thousands’ of bottles of cognac. Czar Nicholas II was thirsty.
Some of this alcohol has not only survived at the bottom of the sea, but prospered. In 1999, 2,000 bottles of the champagne – a 1907 Heidsieck & Co. Monopole – were recovered from the Jönköping, tasted, and found to be delicious. The key appears to be the depth and temperature of the water the ship goes down in. The Jönköping and the Åland islands wreck were both in cold deep water. This means it was kept at a perfect temperature, constantly pressurized, and hidden from sunlight. Champagne has the best chance of surviving the constant pressure at the bottom of the ocean since it’s pressurized and bottled in thick glass to avoid exploding. Conversely, the wine found aboard the Mary Celestia was foul, probably because of the warmth of the Bermudan waters and their relative shallowness. Though it’s probably true that leaving future generations bad wine was probably the least of John Virgin’s concerns after his boat hit a reef and sped towards the bottom. The 170-year-old champagne from the Baltic wreck tasted like wet animal hair and cheese. But after oxygenation it improved and turned out ‘grilled, spicy, smoky, and leathery’. One researcher said it was ‘incredible’ adding that he’d ‘never tasted such a wine’ in his life. The aroma stayed in his mouth for three or four hours. No word if he’s since developed superpowers. Or still has a tongue. Or died. Nevertheless, bottles of the champagne fetched 100,000 euros.
Since the Titanic’s discovery in 1985, subsequent visits have found champagne from Moët and Heidsieck & Co. fully corked. This was eventually tried by some zillionaires who paired it with the unicorn steaks they’d sourced from Atlantis. If finding relics from a shipwreck brings us back in time, then drinking wine from the Titanic or the Jönköping brings you closer to those who would have drunk it. We know the Baltic wreck was heading for Russia because of the champagne’s high sugar content. All alcohol orders sent to Russia had high sugar content to accommodate the Russian’s major sweet tooth. When I asked a Russian student of mine about this, she said ‘it’s true, we are very sad people, we need sweets.’ In any event, we do not know people from a different era until we know what their hangovers were like.
Today we honor all Titanic passengers, lucky, unlucky, and porcine, by drinking Punch Romaine. This was created by famous French chef Georges Auguste Escoffier, who made it a noble goal to introduce the world to alcoholic shaved ices in the early 20th century. It was served to the first class passengers on the night of April 14. Since the original recipe call for you to hand-make lemon water ice and an Italian meringue and I’m going to assume you don’t have the time on your hands that might a dead French chef, we’re going to do a more reasonable version.
Ingredients
- 1 egg white
- 1 oz. white rum
- 1 oz. white wine
- 1/2 oz. simple syrup
- 1⁄2 oz. lemon juice
- 1 oz. fresh orange juice (or from a box)
- 2 oz. Champagne or sparkling wine
- Twist of orange peel, for garnish
Instructions
Fill a cocktail shaker with ice combine the egg white, rum, wine, simple syrup, lemon and orange juice; shake vigorously until both you and the mixture are frothy. Mound crushed ice in a large coupe glass and pour the drink around it. Top that with champagne and garnish with orange peel or nothing at all. Drink to those who did amazing things that night, to the ironic serenity of shipwrecks, and to Maxixe the pig, who, if she were here, would no doubt do a killer cover of Freebird.
Fun read. I like that as people are exploring sunken wrecks, there's always at least one diver asking "Where's the booze?"
Great piece, and great reference to an excellent novel.