I solved the century-old mystery of a shipwreck survivor | Hacker News Reader

I solved the century-old mystery of a shipwreck survivor

thewalrus.ca

94 pointsThevet53 comments

If you liked this story, you might like the game Return of the Obra Dinn, which is kinda just this but for ~60 different people on a fictional ship.

When my wife was pregnant and had to stop working, she got bored so I got her this game. At first she said she didn't like it "because the graphics suck". A couple days later she was totally immersed in the game and had made spreadsheets to track the whereabouts of every character over time. It is a really well-made game.

The graphics are actually quite an impressive technical feat, Lukas Pope went into some detail in his blog/forums about the effort that went into making them. I remember lots of work went into getting the "dithering" right when the scene was in motion.

Not only did a lot of work go in, but after much trial and error the breakthrough ended up coming from some random mathematician that happened to be following the thread and decided to take a crack at it.

Mathematician's posting starts here: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg121280...

Next dev blog post from Lukas Pope mentioning this here: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg121719...

A very cool game by the author of the also interesting Papers, Please.

I second this recommendation!

I tried to play it. But I just didn't 'get it'.

I can't say I commiserate, as I was hooked at the very first flashback.

    > Scene is black, you hear "Come out, so Johnny and I can flay your bones" / "Get out of -- *BANG!*"
    > Scene reveals, man is frozen in time, his body still in motion though he is clearly dead. 
    > A half-dressed man stands inside the ship's main cabin, gunpowder still billowing from his pistol.

    Now you play "Clue".

    Who killed whom with what, and where?

    > KILLER: What? I have no idea!. Why would I know?! I know literally nothing, why would I ... Oh, hang on, this is the Captain's cabin! Nobody but the captain would be half-dressed in the captain's cabin so... he must be... the captain! Ha!
    > VICTIM: At least one of these assailants is "Johnny"... not sure if the victim is, though. I'll hm... have to figure out how to write down "some unknown guy wearing pointy-toed boots and another guy with a scar on his shoulder were on the deck at 4pm, and one of them died to the captain's pistol, and uh... one of them is named johnny" hm...
    > WEAPON: Close range pistol shot. Yeowch.

...

Anyway. I totally dug it from the outset and only loved it more as I progressed.

I hope you'll give it another shot.

If you like, say... Myst-like games that blend puzzles and attention to detail with good storytelling, you'd like this game.

It and Outer Wilds are probably my two most-recommended games.

I thought the artwork was striking and original and I wanted to like it. But I think detective games aren't for me. Very subjective, obviously.

I tried it too after it was recommended but it's a detective game that requires you to take notes or cram a bunch of story line in your head. If you want to "just play a game", this isn't it because it will get real boring real fast.

Yeah, it's a game that's very easy to bounce off of. The first few hours can feel like a slog until you familiarize yourself with each scene enough to have a direction in your search rather than just wandering randomly.

He was picked up by a lifeboat. There is no mystery; he had made clear himself multiple times that this is how he was rescued.

Yeah I mean it was an ok article, and I understand we're all trying to make a living, but it could be summarized in one sentence. "The reporters made up a story and he couldn't convince them to report the truth: that he had been picked up in a lifeboat." Because yes the mystery is solved by knowing he was in a lifeboat, but it's also critical to determine how the falsehood originated.

The point of the article is not to solve deep problems but to entertain. It did that. If it were one sentence long it would not be entertaining.

This story is not about some dude in a lifeboat.

This story is about how stories, themselves, do not always get told accurately.

For me the most interesting aspect is that the original newspaper reporter altered the facts, and then some decades later, another researcher dug deeper and got the facts straight, long after the incident.

Contextually - in light of recent insanity regarding state sanctioned mass murder - this is quite relevant to those of us observing the state of information warfare.

Both are clickbait both false, "man swims 6k to shore" versus "I solved the mystery".

> Every schoolchild knows the story of the Titanic, the luxury ocean liner that hit an iceberg and sank in 1912. So why did the Empress tragedy, which claimed even more passenger lives a little over two years later, fail to embed itself in our collective national consciousness?

Because the Titanic was the biggest ship ever, it sunk on its maiden voyage, although it was said to be unsinkable. It's probably one of few stories from our time which will be remembered in a thousand years.

And popular media grabbed the story. Fame for shipwrecks is hugely dependent on that - if it’s going to live past its time.

Gordon Lightfoot ensured that people a hundred years from now will know the Edmund Fitzgerald but the thousands of other wrecks in those lakes will be known to locals and researchers only.

I understand 30,000 have died on the Great Lakes as a result of shipwrecks.

Also, the author could read himself and notice that final paragraph where he tells that "Empress" sunk right before the WWI. Which obviously made all other news mostly irrelevant

That, and there were survivors to tell the tale. Ships sinking with all on board lost was a reality. There was always the chance that one who went out to sea might not return. The Titanic's survivors made the story known and memorable.

The Titanic was thought to be unsinkable, so "there was always a chance" didn't apply in people's minds to this case.

The Titanic was the largest ship at the time, "unsinkable", on its maiden voyage, carrying some of the richest people in the world, greatest maritime disaster at the time, still basically at #2 after more than a century, and the wreck lost for 70 years. The story is definitely more sensational and mysterious than other sinkings.

The 'Wilhelm Gustloff' had at least 4000 casualties in 1945. I believe the memorability of the Titanic is only loosely coupled to the number of casualties .

I included the casualty count as a response to the article quote in OP's comment:

> So why did the Empress tragedy, which claimed even more passenger lives a little over two years later, fail to embed itself in our collective national consciousness?

The Titanic sinking caused ~50-60% more casualties. But casualty numbers alone are probably not enough to make either of them memorable. But an "unsinkable" ship, biggest ever, carrying the worlds richest, inexplicably sinking on maiden voyage and disappearing for decades is a very powerful story.

Titanic happened in peace time. In WW2 many ships went under with thousands on board.

And after 1945 people were encouraged to forget about everything and not ask any uncomfortable questions.

It was the biggest ship of its time, but we have much bigger ones now (both on tonnage and passenger capacity).

That's why I wrote it was the biggest ship ever, not that it is the biggest ship ever.

Its amazing how much and how little things have changed when it comes to media. Good reminder to always be skeptical about sensationalism.

A good tall tale has an element of plausibility. A 6km swim is a common workout for a college swimmer these days. If the river conditions were favorable, the story on its own was not suspect.

A 6km swim in a 78F pool is a common workout.

I've repeatedly swum in Lake Michigan (looking online, it has comparable temps to the St Lawrence in Quebec) as early as Memorial Day. The water temp is often in the mid 50s, very cold even with a full wetsuit, hood, and prep, but feasible as a ritual with which to open the season and start the summer. This year, in May, it was 45F/7C. Insanely, painfully, shockingly, unsafely cold...I decided to break tradition.

In July, a 6km swim could be fun! In May, depending on the climate that year and the swimmer's metabolism and subcutaneous fat levels, it might be survivable. You might lose a few extremities to frostbite. Or it might not be survivable. 1 in 800-something odds, with an athletic 29-year-old being the only survivor, seems reasonable enough.

It is a good tall tale, out on the murky limits of credibility.

It's pretty impressive (and not always widely known) how much cold water impairs swimming ability. There are some good videos on this site - coldwatersafety.org - of Coast Guard volunteers trying to swim in 45deg water. They lose motor function before making it 20m or so. Only one is able to make the short distance to shore, and he is one of the largest guys and a professional rescue swimmer. A 6km swim in 45F water for someone that is not wearing protective clothing or well acclimated to cold water is not realistic.

I mean, there is this Icelandic guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%C3%B0laugur_Fri%C3%B0%C3%BE...

who actually did swim 6km in freezing waters after his vessel sank in 1984..

Yeah, but that guy was well insulated with blubber.

The headline as I read the article was "How I Solved the Century-Old Mystery of a Miraculous Shipwreck Survivor", but it doesn't actually detail _how_ the mystery was solved. They talked to a couple different people, found an old newspaper clipping, but the crucial

> Davidson was picked up by a lifeboat and taken to the Storstad, which survived the collision.

The actual meat of the article, doesn't have any clear source. I guess it might've come from the mentioned piece in "St. Thomas Journal", but it's not exactly clear.

Cool story, but not exactly the "How I solved a mystery" that you'd expect from the headline.

It was structured a little oddly so it took a reread to understand, but I believe the wrong story was from the Vancouver Province, while the right story was from Davidson's letter in the St. Thomas Daily Times.

Thats because Davidson said so himself. This whole thing is a clickbait

To discover what Davidson said required tracking down an undigitized newspaper article from 1914, the existence of which was only known about by tracking down the living descendants of the man's brother.

Hardly clickbait.

Tldr: 'Davidson stripped off his nightshirt and swam away from the ship. The suction took him down, and when he came up, he swam into a frenzied crowd. “They tramped me under three times before I got through them. I swam on a little farther, but the water was fearfully cold, and I was out of practice swimming,” he said.

Davidson was picked up by a lifeboat and taken to the _Storstad_, which survived the collision.'

The article was apparently edited to increase prolixity.

I thought the background was interesting and helpful to know

Thank you for teaching me a new word.

Prolixity - unnecessarily or tediously wordy

I prefer the almost comical sounding word, logorrhea.

I wondered about this suction. Is he talking about the ship sinking as suction. Mythbusters demonstrated IIRC that this "suction" doesn't happen.

I thought he would explain how he figured all this out but it was not clear from the article how he did so.

It’s a book excerpt

Oceanliner Designs has a great recreation of this accident: https://youtu.be/-9ZLZ8hiA5Y?si=ElcaIqEQhTHsElkM

...and of the last 10 minutes of this accident: https://youtu.be/N5CxSRsiUys?si=wS42xVXUb5Awb95U

Claiming the disaster was worse than the Titanic seems pretty thin just because more passenger lives were lost?

Total Lives lost:

Titanic: 1,500 Empress of Ireland: 1,012

There was also a suggestion that more people knew about the titanic because there were more upper-class people on the titanic and no one cares about poor people or some other social commentary like that, which I think is disingenuous.

I suspect titanic is/was more well known is simply due to the sheer hubris of it all - a much-heralded and much-trumpeted "unsinkable ship" that sank on its maiden voyage. It was supposed to be this amazing new technical marvel and yet it did the very thing it that they were claiming was impossible on it's very first trip. Sticks in the mind somewhat, compared to the frequent "ordinary" ship sinkings that happen all the time (then and yes ships still sink now, although fewer passenger ships I expect but probably just down to their being fewer of them)

Hi I’m from [outlet] news can we cite your piece about how he successfully fashioned an aeroplane out of scrap deck chairs and flew to safety?

> On May 28, 1914, the Empress began her 192nd trip across the Atlantic, from Quebec City en route to Liverpool, carrying 1,056 passengers and a crew of 423.

I have to say I'm surprised by the size of the crew, both from the economic perspective and from the fact that it's steam and not sails. I guess I'll need to read more on how these ships were run.

> After a minute and a half, the boiler rooms were flooded with the equivalent of nine Olympic swimming pools of water.

Oh for crying out loud

Another ship struck it between the boiler compartment and the one next door.

I wonder how big was that ship in terms of football fields

He says near the beginning that only 832 people died on Titanic, which is plainly untrue and made me stop reading because I felt I could no longer trust anything the author was saying without fact checking it. I mean that's a really basic thing to get wrong.

That's the number of passenger deaths, not total deaths. It's pretty close to the sum of passenger deaths in the wikipedia article on the Titanic [1], 818. According to that article, the total death count is unclear, so the discrepancy seems acceptable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic#Survivors_and_victims

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