Titanic: One hundred years ago

As the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic approached, John Olson of Kalispell was taken back to his childhood in South Dakota and stories he heard of the death of his father’s cousin, Ole Martin Olson on the ship.

“It’s been a part of family history for a long time,” Olson said. “My father told me about it.”

A prophetic vision of doom remains part of the family lore. According to Olson, Ole’s mother, Anna, was overtaken by a powerful feeling that her son was in terrible danger and spent most of the night of April 14, 1912, pacing the floors.

“She had just given up the idea that she would ever see him again,” Olson said. “She didn’t even know that he was on the sea at the time.”

Some days later, John Olson’s grandfather Nels read of the disaster claiming 1,500-plus lives in the weekly newspaper. Even though Ole’s mother still did not know that he was on board the Titanic, she was positive he had perished when the fabled cruise ship hit an iceberg and sank.

“That later proved to be the case,” Olson said. “Ole’s body was never found.”

Olson, a retired Lutheran pastor in his late 80s, now lives at Buffalo Hill Terrace with his wife, Kathryn. The couple served numerous congregations in Wyoming, Montana and other locations before retiring to their cabin in Elmo, then moving to Kalispell four years ago.

His connection to passenger Ole M. inspired a lifelong interest in the Titanic.

“My father had a book in my younger years that told of the sinking of the Titanic, so that got me started,” he said. “I’ve read seven books on the Titanic. Several magazines such as the National Geographic and Smithsonian have had articles on it.”

According to Olson, he didn’t know a lot about his father’s cousin. He provided a bit of family history in a letter that he wrote to the Daily Inter Lake as a memorial to Ole Martin Olson.

“In 1883, my grandfather, Nels Olson, and several of his brothers, including Ole’s father, Ole B. Olson, emigrated from Etna, Norway, to homestead near Langford, South Dakota, on adjacent farms.”

When Ole Martin Olson came of age, he wanted to be his own man and get his own farm. Ole went north and homesteaded several quarter sections of land north of Broderick in Saskatchewan, Canada, in December 1904.

John Olson’s nephew Bryan Tastad provided a few more details in a story printed in a Canadian newspaper. According to Tastad, Ole built a house in 1906, became a naturalized citizen of Canada in 1907 and received title to his land in 1908.

A family history related that Ole usually spent winters with his parents in Langford but decided in the winter of 1911-12 to visit his grandmother and other relatives in Norway.

After an enjoyable visit, including sharing a gramophone he brought on the trip, Ole, then 27, headed home in early April to arrive in time for spring seeding.

Olson said Ole’s trip back to the United States was disrupted by a coal strike in England that caused many ocean liners to delay or cancel their departures.

Instead, he booked a third-class ticket on the vaunted Titanic’s maiden voyage to America, expecting to return home a few days earlier.

Then came the fateful encounter with an iceberg late on  April 14.

“The Titanic crunched along the iceberg, rupturing six forward watertight compartments along the starboard side out of the sixteen which the ship had,” Olson wrote. “The designer of the ship, Thomas Andrews, who was also aboard, dolefully commented, ‘If only four compartments had flooded, the ship would remain afloat; with six ruptured, she will sink.’”

About two and a half hours after hitting the iceberg, the ship sank more than two miles to the bottom.

Ole’s chances of survival were compromised as a young man with a third-class ticket. Only one-fourth of third-class passengers survived.

According to Olson, the gates to the third class section were locked for a time because the ship’s officials knew they were short of lifeboats.

“They figured that third class was more expendable. There being such a crowd, it was a matter of crowd control — it was chaotic,” Olson said. “Some figured, ‘This is an unsinkable boat — why get in a lifeboat?’ They wouldn’t believe that the boat would sink.”

Olson, who holds a degree in engineering, said several factors contributed to the deadly result. Along with not enough lifeboats, the Titanic scheduled no drills, so in the chaos the lifeboats left half full with 400 seats to spare.

In spite of four warnings of icebergs in the area, the captain never slowed the ship, expecting to steer around them. Olson said the captain and White Star ship line were determined to break a speed record while other ships in the area had stopped to avoid ramming an iceberg.

“There was always at the time competition for the fastest time,” Olson said. “The Queen Mary used to make it in a good four days. When my wife and I came back from Europe in ’49, it took us nine days.”

Through his research, Olson learned that a natural phenomenon may have played a role. Several ships in the area reported light refraction that causes mirages due to the nearby warm waters of the Gulf Stream.

“A false horizon above the true horizon may have kept the iceberg unseen until it was too close to miss,” he said. “Had the helmsman chosen to ram the iceberg head on, rather than try to miss it, the Titanic would not have sunk, and most aboard would have survived.”

Olson said people assumed for years that it slid down in one piece. When found on the sea floor, the Titanic was in two pieces with the forward section crumpled from the force.

“In fact, when the thing turned vertically, the boilers in the Titanic crashed through the ship’s hull and hit the bottom even before the ship got there,” he said.

One of the fascinating things to Olson was the “cocksure attitude” of the optimistic times that made people believe the Titanic was unsinkable. He said advances such as automobiles, radios and airplanes convinced people that utopian times lay ahead.

“The Titanic was the first crack in that optimism,” Olson said. “World War I, the Depression, World War II really took our optimism down and showed that man is not in control of society and the world as he thought.”

Although Ole met his end with the Titanic, his memory remains with Olson and the members of the family tree that grew large and strong after Nels Olson and his brothers arrived in America in 1883.

“In 1983, we had a 100th anniversary of their coming to this country,” John Olson said. “I think there were about 700 descendants including spouses and about 400 or 500 attended.”

Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at cchase@dailyinterlake.com.