Titanic or Olympic: The Ship Renamed to Sink with Men Who Should Not Reach New York

On the night of April 14, 1912, the ship called Titanic struck a drifting iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank hours later, killing more than 1,500 people. The story opens on one huge question: was the ship on the sea floor really Titanic, or was it the Olympic under another name? Among the people who never reached New York were John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, and Isidor Straus, wealthy men with real standing in American finance and industry.

In this telling, White Star Line was in trouble after Olympic, Titanic's sister ship, collided with the cruiser HMS Hawke in 1911. Olympic was badly damaged and went back to the yard, and the accident left the company with heavy costs. Meanwhile the new Titanic, valuable and insured, was still being finished in Belfast. The story says the owners and their financial partners swapped the identities of the two ships. The damaged Olympic took the name Titanic, carried passengers out of Southampton, and was steered into the Atlantic to sink in an "accident" that ice could explain. The real Titanic went back to sea later, sailing as Olympic.