RMS Olympic "Titanic" to turn when it sighted the iceberg. "Olympic", like "Titanic", did not carry enough lifeboats for everyone on board, and so was hurriedly equipped with additional, second-hand collapsible lifeboats following her return to Britain. Towards the end of April 1912, as she was about to sail from Southampton to New York, 284 of the ship's firemen went on strike, for fear that the ship's new collapsible lifeboats were not seaworthy. 100 non-union crew were hastily hired from Southampton as replacements, with more being hired from Liverpool. The 40 collapsible lifeboats were transferred from troopships and put on "Olympic", and
RMS Titanic in popular culture Convergence of the Twain" (1912), his "Lines on the Loss of the "Titanic"", was a considerably more substantial work. His poem sets "Titanic" in a pessimistic post-Darwinian contrast between the achievements and arrogance of man and the humbling power of nature. The building of "Titanic" in its unprecedented scale is contrasted with the origins of its nemesis, following a familiar nineteenth-century notion of the double or "doppelgänger" (a theme most famously realised in "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"): <poem> And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg