The Titanic and the Moon - A verily nitpicky problem

At the time of the Titanic’s collision with the iceberg in the night of 14/15 April, the moon had not yet risen. Everybody who has read up on the sinking of the Titanic will have come across this information. Both the fact that it was a particularly dark night and that there was no swell meant that the sighting the iceberg was more difficult.

Now why am I writing about the Titanic and the moon? When I am reading historic novels, it is not just the big errors, mistakes and misconceptions that rub me the wrong way, but also the tiny ones, the things that probably never crossed the authors’ minds to check. As in a novel set in 1119 in which Swiss mercenaries are mentioned. The problem: there was no such thing as Switzerland yet.

When reading novels set on the Titanic, and there is a multitude of them, I noticed on several occasions that the moon is said to be shining, when it could not possibly have been visible. There are two ways to know that the moon could not have been visible in the evening of the night before the collision: a long one and a short one. Let’s take the scenic route, aka the long way, first. For this there are three factors that one needs to be aware of to know this.

1) How the date of Easter is determined. 2) How long after Easter the Titanic sank. 3) How moonrise changes from day to day. 1) Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon in spring. The start of spring in this context is the day of equinox, which in most years is 21 March, but sometimes, in the year after a leap year for example, on 20 March (as in 2025).

That is the reason why the Easter date changes every year and can be at any date between 23 March to 25 April. If spring starts on Friday 21 March and Saturday 22 March is the date of the full moon, Easter Sunday is on the 23 March. If the full moon is just before the beginning of spring, Easter Sunday can be more than four weeks later, depending on whether the next full moon is a Monday or a Saturday. For example, in 2025, equinox was on 20 March, the next full moon was on Sunday 13 April, ergo Easter Sunday was on 20 April.

2) Easter Sunday was 7 April 1912. Most authors are not aware of this fact. Though the plot of Giselle Beaumont’s On the Edge of Daylight begins on 6 April, Easter is not mentioned. Neither is it Sam McCarver’s The Case of Cabin 13 which begins on 8 April, that is Easter Monday. Christine Féret-Fleury’s S.O.S Titanic. Journal de Julia Facchini does include the fact that 7 April was a Sunday but not that it was Easter Sunday. I may never have realised either that Easter Sunday was three days before the Titanic set off on her maiden voyage, had I not read Susanne Störmer’s Good-Bye, Good Luck. The Biography of William McMaster Murdoch. She quotes a letter William Murdoch wrote to his sister Peg on 8 April. He mentions how difficult it was to hire men to work even at overtime rates because of the holidays. I was at first confused what holidays this could be, but as a student of history I had a helpful book (Hermann Grotefend, Taschenbuch der Zeitrechnung. - This was at a time when you could not simply look these things up online) and I discovered that in 1912 the date of Easter was 7 April.

3) Every night the moon rises quite a bit later than on the night before. Many, many years ago I was on holiday in Malta, on the island of Gozo to be precise. At the beginning of the holiday a wonderful full moon was shining as we sat on the roof terrace of our holiday home in the evening. Every night the moon rose later, and it did not take long before it rose so late, we had already gone to bed by the time. On the night of the new moon, when the moon shows us its dark side, the moon is between the Earth and the Sun, i.e. visible (or rather invisible) during the day. Fourteen and a half days later (or to be precise 14 days, 6 hours, 22 minutes, and 1.45 seconds), at full moon, the moon is behind the Earth when viewed from the Sun, its illuminated side facing Earth, i.e. visible during the night. The moon rises 12 hours later on full moon than on new moon. Roughly speaking the moon rises just under 50 minutes later each night to get from one side of Earth to the other. In reality it is a much more complex phenomenon. Not only does the time the moon rises speed up and slow down over the lunar month, just as the change of the time of sun rise slows towards solstice and speeds up towards equinox. It also depends on where you are on the globe, because of the tilt of the earth’s axis and no doubt other more complex matters.

I have not tried to find out when exactly the full moon was in 1912, but it was before 7 April. By the night of 14/15 April moonrise would have been at least around midnight (if the full moon had been on 6 April). There definitely was no moon visible at 8pm on 13 April, as described in On the Edge of Daylight (p. 250).1 This is the long way and rather complicated way to reach to this conclusion. The short route is to say, if the moon rose around 4 am on 15 April, it could not have risen by 8 pm the night before.

A long time ago, not long after Cameron’s Titanic was released, I was very amused that the goofs listed by the Internet Movie Database included such details as the fact that the jacket Jack borrows from ‘Molly’ Brown has anachronistic buttons or that “the bunks' pipes are joined together with Hollaender fittings (specifically "In line tee" type fittings with 3/16" hex head set screws). These types of fittings are very common in the film world for various departments including grip and set dressing; but they were not invented until 1930”. As it turns out I am just as nitpicky as these commentators.

1. Some other examples are: Sam McCarver, The Case of Cabin 13, p. 65; 11 April just after dinner, moon visible before 9pm (time mentioned on the following page). Jim Walker, Murder on the Titanic, p. 192 moon rising between 5:02 pm and 5:40 pm [!!] on 11 April.

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