Today is an infamous day in history. The end of an age of innocence some say. Maybe just the end of an age of complacency...surely not. We are going to look at this event from a different angle than you might think. The following is a direct transcript from Paul Harvey.

I am innocent I tell you, now that you're noticing me all of a sudden. I am innocent! I was just minding my own business that night when he sneaked up on me. So it was self defense right? Or an accident, that's it, when without meaning to I killed Thomas C. Mudd. Anyway it was dark how could they know, the witnesses who hung the murder rap on me? Oh, I get it, the photograph. The picture somebody took the next day, the picture of me with the blood still on my hands. Well I fooled them all, high tailed it out of there, never been seen since. Even that photo got shuffled here and there and eventually into obscurity. Until...until somebody saw it hanging, framed, in a museum gift shop.

"Could the photograph be genuine" he asked the clerk? The clerk showed him a certificate authenticating the signature on the picture, that of a witness, Melvina Dean. Witness indeed considering young her age at the time but, anyway the admirer had bought it and brought it home, and hung it on his own wall. And as night fell and he stood there strangely chilled, gazing into the framed gray and black and white, I whispered to him of those long nights past, and that one in particular. And he seemed to comprehend as never before the rest of the story.

Did the inadvertently murdered Thomas C. Mudd get what was coming to him? I suppose not. It was an accident after all. But the man who purchased my mug shot from that museum shop, he's a writer, and he's rating on me now, he's telling you about me. But the life of a fugitive is not much of one. You see I died on the run, one moonless night under a cloudless sky full of stars. Just like that cold April night I killed Thomas C. Mudd and I killed the Rev. John Harper and I killed Charles Hayes and all of those others. The 1,500 others who froze or were dragged to their deaths beneath the calm glassy surface of the sea.

You'd forgotten all about me hadn't you? About the all important roll I played. About the one, without whom there would have been no saga made. Except for that solitary photograph of the blood on my hands. That picture which was taken in the morning's early light of April 1912. From the deck of a ship returning to the seen of the crime. That photograph of me with five stories of black paint scrapped on to my otherwise glistening white side.

For the life of a north Atlantic iceberg....for the life on an iceberg is undistinguished at best.  As we who roam that watery wilderness, ever smaller, seldom seen, ultimately melt to nothingness. But once...just once, a floating ice mountain made history. I, called assassin, quickly forgotten, while the world mourned and forever remembers my attacker.....the Titanic.

The next time you think of her as so often you do, remember the one that got away. Pleased to meet you...I am the rest of the story.
-Paul Harvey

© 2006 Michael W. Pocock
MaritimeQuest.com