Finns aboard the Titanic

Written by tuoMas Värjö

RMS Titanic, the newest passenger ship of the White Star Line, left Southampton for its maiden voyage on 10 April 1912. When the ship set sail at 15 minutes past noon, there were 64 Finns aboard the huge liner. The voyage across the northern Atlantic Ocean would take seven days. Standing on the deck of the newly built ship, a Finnish migrant was already past the half-point of their journey from Finland to America. From here on, it would be smooth sailing in fine conditions, the likes of which most passengers on board had hardly seen before. On the Titanic, even second and third class passengers had more room in their accommodation than first class passengers on older steamships that were plying the waves of the Baltic Sea. was on the Titanic, she would probably be one of these five. It is not known why the photo ended up in that house – perhaps the loved ones of one of these women were living there after the accident?

All the Finns aboard were indeed second or third class passengers. Their berths, while clean, modern and spacious by the standards of the day, were often on the lowest decks of the ship. There was no direct connection to the lifeboat deck. This was probably not a major concern for many of them at the time the ship left British waters. Four days later, it would become a matter of life and death.

On April 14, at 11.40 p.m., Titanic’s lookouts noticed an iceberg ahead, directly on the ship’s course. An attempt to avoid the collision by reversing the engines and turning was too late. A collision was unavoidable. The iceberg ripped a nearly 90-metre hole in the ship’s steel side, and water started rushing in. In 45 minutes, the ship sent out a distress call on the radio, to be first answered by the RMS Carpathia, 58 sea miles or, rather, four hours away.

The first lifeboats were lowered about an hour after the accident. As the bow of the ship began to fill up with water and the stern rose above the sea, the last lifeboats were able to escape shortly after 2 a.m. on April 15. After a quarter of an hour, the great ship sank under the waves. The Carpathia arrived nearly two hours later and started picking up survivors from the sea.

The exhibition features a framed photo of a serious young woman. Behind the photo, there is a handwritten text: Drowned with the Titanic 15/4.1912 on her way to America! Following 1635 people into oblivion.

Even if we know a lot about Titanic’s demise now, 111 years after the accident, many questions remain about the men and women from different countries who died on the legendary ship. Finns aboard the Titanic aims to find answers to some of them: how did the Finnish migrants see and feel about the long journey from the shores of the Baltic Sea to America, and how might they have experienced the sinking of the ship itself?

The new museum experience in Forum Marinum tells the tale of the 64 Finnish passengers on the Titanic. Unfortunately, most of them sunk with the ship, like so many others aboard. Only 21 survived to tell the tale.

The exhibition features a framed photo of a serious young woman. It was found in a house in Raisio’s Hahdenniemi near Turku, and on the opposite wall was a print depicting the sinking of the Titanic Behind the photo, there is a handwritten text: Drowned with the Titanic 15/4.1912 on her way to America! Following 1635 people into oblivion.

Five Finnish women, of whom we do not have photos, travelled on the Titanic: Wendla Heininen, Ida Strandberg, Ida Ilmakangas, Pieta Ilmakangas and Helena Rosblom. If the woman in the photo

Some stories and interviews of those who survived remain. Anna Turja was a young woman of eighteen travelling alone on the Titanic In 1974, at the age of 81, she gave an interview about her experiences on that fateful night. In the chaos on the ship, she made her way into a lifeboat and survived. More than six decades later, she still remembered how people’s cries for help pierced the darkness of the night, weighing on her mind for the rest of her life. She was lucky that the boat she was in had strong men rowing and that the sea was dead calm – otherwise, the water could easily have flown in and sunk the boat, heavily laden with passengers, with its gunwales just barely above the surface of the Atlantic.

Most others were not so lucky. As the ship sank, Maria Emilia Panula drowned with her five sons, from Ernesti, 17, to Eino, aged one. The Panulas were from Ylihärmä in Ostrobothnia, and on their way to reunite with the father of the family, Juho, in Daisytown near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The new exhibition brings to life the stories of those who perished and thus have no voices, with the help of students and teachers of creative writing at the University of Turku. They have created narrative stories from the point of view of the Finns on board, fictitious but based on research into the reality of the lives of Finnish migrants. The stories were then read by actors Akseli Kouki, Kirsi Tarvainen, Alexandra Oupornikova and Mikko Kouki, and you can listen to them in the museum and online. The audio stories are only in Finnish, but the texts on display are also in Swedish and English.

Finns aboard the Titanic was opened in January 2023, and it will be open all year round in the Kruununmakasiini building, along with Forum Marinum’s permanent exhibitions. The maritime centre’s museum ships are also open in the summer season from June 5 to August 20.

In between 1880 and 1930, altogether 400 000 Finns emigrated to the United States and Canada. For an ordinary worker, the voyage would cost a year’s earnings. Leaving for America wasn’t a decision one would make lightly at that time. Young men and women left their villages in the Finnish countryside to make their fortune across the ocean, where the streets were said to be paved with gold. In reality, building a life on the other side of the Atlantic would of course take a lot of hard work and also good luck. About one fourth of these Finnish migrants returned to their country of birth, and many of them brought back enough hard-earned money to buy their own home and farm in what was for most of this period still known as the Grand Duchy of Finland, an integral part of the huge Russian Empire.

Most of those who remained became Americans in earnest.

The Finnish migrant’s journey to America was long and included many stages. First, one had to reach the southwestern port town of Hanko, a gateway out of Finland, where the major shipping companies operated their passenger vessels from. This first leg of the journey was made by train from the inland to the rocky shores of the Baltic Sea.

In Hanko, many preparations for the journey still needed to be made. Official papers had to be put in order for leaving the Russian Tsar’s domains, and a medical examination was also necessary to ascertain that the would-be immigrant was in what at the time was considered perfect health. Vaccinations against smallpox were given as a matter of course. This is what the authorities across the Atlantic expected. Further examinations were organised in both Britain and the United States for those who had cleared this first hurdle in Finland.

From Hanko onwards, many migrants would take a Finnish Steamship Company (SHO) vessel to the British port of Hull, via Stockholm or Copenhagen. Since the 1890s, this Finnish company had a monopoly position on this route that carried the Grand Duchy’s main exports of the era: affordable Finnish butter to Denmark, and hardy Finnish workers onwards to America.

From Hull, there was a transit across Britain, again by train. After that, finally, in Liverpool or Southampton, the migrants boarded a trans-Atlantic liner bound for New York in the United States of America. There, Ellis Island awaited them, with facilities created for processing immigrants and placing them in medical quarantine before they were allowed to set foot on the mainland and start reaching for their lucky star in America. s

FORUM MARINUM

Linnankatu 72

Open www.forum-marinum.fi

Tue–Sun 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. (Closed 23.–25.6.)

The Exhibition buildings and the museum ship Bore are open all year round.

All the other museum ships will open in summer 5.6.–20.8.2023.

SEE ON MAP (PAGE 18).