RMS Empress of Britain (1905) transatlantic traffic, the ship was sometimes held in quarantine if a communicative disease was discovered amongst the passengers. Similarly, it would have been expected, for example, that the ship would notify authorities in Halifax that one passenger had died from pneumonia en route to Canada from Europe. Less than two weeks after disaster struck the RMS "Titanic" in the North Atlantic, "Empress of Britain" also struck an iceberg on 26 April 1912; but the reported damage was only slight. On 27 July 1912, "Empress of Britain" rammed and sank the British collier SS "Helvetia" in fog off Cape Magdelene in
RMS Titanic with the plot bearing a number of similarities to the "Titanic" disaster. In the novel the ship is the SS "Titan", a four-stacked liner, the largest in the world and considered unsinkable. And like the "Titanic", she sinks after hitting an iceberg and does not have enough lifeboats. Only recently has the significance of "Titanic" most notably been given by Northern Ireland where it was built by Harland and Wolff in the capital city, Belfast. While the rest of the world embraced the glory and tragedy of "Titanic", in its birth city, "Titanic" remained a taboo subject throughout the 20th