Today was the last of our sea days on this leg of the journey, as we’re now only 200 nautical miles north of French Polynesia and our first stop, Moorea.
We opt for a little bit of trivia this morning at 10am, scoring 13 out of 20. As always, the morning trivia is a fact-finding mission for the afternoon’s progressive trivia.
After general knowledge trivia, we stay on for a food and beverage trivia, a specific competition asking about culinary delights from around the world. We scored better in this, 14, than we did in general knowledge. I don’t know whether that makes us foodies or whether the questions were a little easier. Who knows?
Then it’s time for the final lecture from Mary Amanda Fairchild. Today she’s exploring the last song played on the Titanic. Before she gets to that, she opens by saying there are at least eight movies made about the sinking, and all of them get the last song wrong. She goes into detail about the film she believes has the best rendition of the sinking and the launching of the lifeboats, made by the Germans around the time of the Nazis. She explains that this footage was later used in the 1958 film A Night to Remember, and if you listen carefully it wasn’t dubbed properly, you can still hear German voices in the background. She then takes us through the final hours of the Titanic, what was happening, and the chaos on board.
Then she gets to the real mystery. For over a century, the legend has been that the band played “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as the ship went down, but the hymn existed in several completely different tunes, and which one was playing matters more than people realise. Most of the world knows the hymn to “Bethany,” the tune written by the American Lowell Mason in 1856, and that’s the version everyone hears in James Cameron’s 1997 film. But bandmaster Wallace Hartley was an English Methodist from Colne in Lancashire, not an American, and would almost certainly never have known “Bethany” at all. The tune Hartley grew up with was “Propior Deo,” Latin for “Nearer to God,” written in 1872 by Sir Arthur Sullivan, the same Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. Hartley’s own father was the choirmaster at his Methodist church and used that exact setting every week.
Mary Amanda’s point was that the evidence sits almost entirely on Hartley’s side. The opening notes of “Propior Deo” are carved into Hartley’s memorial stone, and it was the very tune played at his funeral after his body, still strapped to his music case, was recovered from the sea two weeks after the sinking. He’d once told a fellow musician that if he ever found himself on a sinking ship, he’d play either “Nearer, My God, to Thee” or “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” and everyone who knew him agreed he meant the Sullivan version. In 1998, her boss (she didn’t explain in what capacity) found a random piece of sheet music at the bottom of a cupboard in the back of an office. It was “Propior Deo,” confirming what the family had always maintained.
As usual, it’s a fascinating expose that Mary Amanda provides. She honours the people who died and the ongoing safety improvements and benefits we’re enjoying today on Celebrity Edge because of what those on the Titanic went through. She closes her lecture with a full rendition of the last song ever played on the Titanic, the Sullivan setting, not the one Hollywood keeps using. If you want to hear it yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwPkgoqaokk
We then head up to lunch. Mardi has a delicious hamachi (kingfish) sashimi plate and a burrata salad. I have the nice burrata salad too, but my roast turkey sandwich leaves a little to be desired.
After lunch we enjoy an afternoon in the Retreat lounge. The last few days it’s been very pleasant there, and today is no different, but as happens probably every second day, there’s someone on their phone. This time it was a gentleman watching sports from America, sounded like baseball. I approached him and suggested he use headphones. He said he didn’t have any, but agreed to turn the sound down.
A lady a couple of days ago in the club was sitting next to us watching videos on her phone, and I basically had to wave my hand in front of her, she was so focused and so fixed on the screen, completely unaware of the noise and disturbance it was causing others. This time she said she did have headphones, but they were in her cabin, and she went to get them.
At about 3:30 we leave the lounge and head down to progressive trivia. We’re still in the top 10, which is good, but I need another good day, because today’s questions are tough. We only scored 12 out of 20. Do you know the capital of Paraguay? We certainly didn’t. What was invented by Mr. Spencer in 1945? If you guessed microwave, you got it right.
After trivia we settle in our room and watch the sunset again, then head off to dinner at about 7:30. Dinner is a delicious combination of salmon sashimi and asparagus. Mardi also has some ocean trout. I try the cod but don’t like it, so I stick to the salmon sashimi.
We then head off to the casino. Our luck needs to change at some point, and tonight it certainly does. We play roulette for a couple of hours and win back some of the money the wolf has been stealing off us over the last couple of days. Our lucky numbers come up a number of times, and we walk away a couple of hundred dollars ahead.
I wouldn’t say we’re at break-even yet, but a couple more nights like that, you never know. It’s not about how much we win or lose, it’s a little bit of entertainment, doing something different that we don’t often do (well, never do, really, in Canberra). It’s fun watching the crowd, watching people, having a drink.
Tonight is the NRL Grand Final between the Roosters and the Knights, and Celebrity Edge has arranged to show the game on a large screen in the theatre. We head down at about 10:15 to see what the screen’s like and whether I can make it out. I grab a seat right down the front and it seems okay. I watch the first half in the theatre before heading to our room for the second.
History now shows the Roosters won 19-18 after Newcastle had a strong first half, leading 12-6 at the break. Many thought the Roosters would run away with it. It was good to see Newcastle put up a strong fight, but in the end the stronger side won the arm wrestle. It seems the Roosters have a habit of buying halfbacks to win grand finals, they did it in 2018 and 2019 with Cooper Cronk too.
The game finishes about 12:30am, so it’s time for bed. We arrive in Moorea tomorrow morning at 6am, and we have a short excursion planned.
