The largest liner afloat, called the Titan, strikes an iceberg in the North Atlantic on an April night with too few lifeboats and goes down. Robertson published it in 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic; the tonnage, the length, the speed and the month are all close enough that people have argued about it ever since. Fifty-six plates, among them Winslow Homer and J. M. W. Turner, gather two centuries of open water, its light and its wrecks, to sound the note the story strikes.
