No, it didn’t. But while I have your attention, let me tell you about how the rumour got started. Surprisingly, there was quite the hullabaloo about the ancient Egyptians and one mummy in particular among the passengers of the upper crust.
The Curse of Princess Amun-Ra
A month after the Titanic sank, the Washington Post ran a story blaming the whole fiasco on an Egyptian mummy. As the rumour goes, the mummy of princess Amun-Ra brought misfortune on all who ever possessed her. The Englishmen who dug her up were all dead or bankrupt not long after they found her. After she moved to the British Museum, nightwatchmen reported hammering and wailing emanating from her coffin. Desperate to be rid of the cursed thing, the British Museum handed her over to an American archeologist who arranged for her passage across the ocean on the doomed liner.
It’s likely that William Stead, a first-class passenger aboard Titanic, was inadvertently responsible for the rumour. He was a disgraced but well-known liberal journalist heading to America for a peace conference, and a profound believer in spiritualism. The night the ship struck the iceberg, he sat in the dining room telling his compatriots the story of the cursed mummy.
The fabled Amun-Ra goes by another name—the Unlucky Mummy—and she still lives at the British Museum. No one has reported any more wailing since the ship went down. The so-called princess may have been pacified, but Titanic did sink with Egyptian gold in her cargo hold. How did it get there? Read on…
Wealthy Americans Took to the Egyptian Antiquities Market
Several wealthy Americans onboard Titanic lent their names to the hype of the ship’s maiden voyage. Chief among them were John Jacob Astor, his young bride, Madeleine, and the Unsinkable Molly Brown. Astor’s mother was the Mrs Astor—the woman who dictated who was who in the zoo. You weren’t considered a member of the Manhattan elite without an invitation by her hand. After all, the New York social register was called the 400 club precisely because that was the number of guests that could occupy her ballroom.
Despite his illustrious start in society, scandalous divorce and a hasty remarriage to a literal child bride in 1911 saw Astor effectively dumped on his rump. The newlyweds, desperate to escape the press, went to Egypt on an extended honeymoon. Molly—the only woman in New York who didn’t turn her nose up at their union—joined them. Molly had her own reasons for being in Egypt. She brought along her rebellious, free-spirited 22-year-old daughter Helen with a mind to snap some sense into her about matrimony. But her daughter’s spinster status wasn’t the only thing on her mind. She loaded up on artifacts intended for the Denver Museum. They would never arrive.
If the so-called princess Amun-Ra wreaked havoc in the lives of all who associated with her, Molly owed her own good fortune to the Egyptians. When she boarded a lifeboat, she took with her a turquoise ushabti figure that she had brought aboard in her carry-on luggage. For millennia, the Egyptians packed ushabti into the tombs of the dead. Aboard the Carpathia, she presented it to her rescuer, Captain Arthur Rostron. So, perhaps it was the luck of the Pharaohs after all that delivered Titanic’s passengers from the ocean that night.
Great story!