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 in popular culture romantic tragedies with personal heroism. It has inspired many moral, social and political metaphors and is regularly invoked as a cautionary tale of the limitations of modernity and ambition. The RMS "Titanic" has been commemorated in a wide variety of ways in the century after she sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1912. As D. Brian Anderson has put it, the sinking of "Titanic" has "become a part of our mythology, firmly entrenched in the collective consciousness, and the stories will continue to be retold not because they need to be retold, but because we need to tell them."