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 Ismay and John Jacob Astor, reimagined as an English Lord, for control of the White Star Line. An equally fictitious young German First Officer, Petersen, warns against Ismay's reckless pursuit of the Blue Riband, calling "Titanic" a ship "run not by sailors, but by stock speculators". His warnings fall on deaf ears and the ship hits an iceberg. Several aspects of the plot are reflected in James Cameron's 1997 "Titanic": a girl rejects her parents' wishes to pursue the man she loves, there is a wild dancing scene in steerage and a man imprisoned in the ship's flooding prison is