We pack a lot into the pages of every issue of Kayak, but there’s always more great stuff we just can’t fit in. So join Teeka and Beau, our otter mascots, to find out more about the theme of each issue, or just pick up some random bits of Canadian history.

Titanic Trivia

There’s just so much fascinating stuff about Titanic that there literally wasn’t room for it all in Kayak. So here are the 10 best tidbits we couldn’t fit into the magazine.

1. Titanic was about the same length as three football fields end to end.
2. Montrealer Hudson Allison, who died in the sinking, had bought several horses while in Scotland. The animals travelled on a much slower ship across the Atlantic Ocean. You can imagine the surprise of Allison’s brother Percy when he learned there were 12 big Clydesdales waiting for him at the train station in Winchester, Ont., in June 1912.
3. Titanic was named for the Titans, mythical Greek god-giants.
4. Because information travelled so slowly in 1912, newspapers didn’t have much information for the first little while. Some early headlines were full of terrible mistakes such as “Titanic Taken in Tow” and “All Titanic Passengers are Safe.”
5. The most common way for a ship to signal for help in the early 1900s was to send the letters CQD. The C and Q didn’t stand for anything — it was just a general call to anyone listening. The D on the end meant “distress” or trouble. The term SOS was coming into use around the time the Titanic sank, but although the ship sent out an SOS, it was not the first to use the new call.
6. The Titanic had two sister ships, all owned by White Star Lines. The other two were the Olympic and the Gigantic, which was renamed the Britannic.
7. Each of the Titanic’s four engines was as big as a three-storey house.
8. Ottawa’s Château Laurier hotel has some odd connections to the Titanic. Charles Melville Hays, the head of a huge American railway company and the man behind the Château, was to have opened the beautiful hotel on April 25, 1912, but died in the sinking. The sculpture of Sir Wilfrid Laurier in the hotel lobby was done by Paul Chevré, who was also a passenger on the ship but survived.
9. Although the Titanic had four tall funnels, only three were needed to send smoke and steam into the sky. The fourth was purely for decoration.
10. The wreck of the Titanic was discovered in 1985. It lies about 600 km southeast of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, in an area the Canadian government named Titanic Canyon in 1996.

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