In 1886, a London editor published a story about a great liner going down in the mid Atlantic, with too few lifeboats for her people. Underneath it he printed a warning of his own: this is exactly what will take place if liners are sent to sea short of boats. Twenty six years later, he boarded the Titanic.

His name was William Thomas Stead, and he was the most famous journalist in England: the crusading editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, feared by governments and read by everyone. The mail steamer story appeared under his editorship in March 1886, a shipwreck told through the eyes of a survivor watching people drown for the want of boats. Six years later he did it again. In 1892 he published From the Old World to the New, in which a passenger with second sight, aboard the White Star liner Majestic, senses a ship sunk by an iceberg, and the Majestic steams through the ice to the rescue. The Majestic was a real White Star ship. And in the years after the story appeared, her real captain was Edward J. Smith: the man who, twenty years on, would command the Titanic.

Then the warnings turned personal. In 1911 Stead consulted the celebrated society palmist Cheiro, who read palms for kings. By the palmist's own account, he wrote to Stead that his only real danger lay in travel by water, in the middle of April, 1912, and that he saw more than a thousand people, Stead among them, struggling desperately in the water. In April 1912, President Taft invited Stead to New York, to address a great congress on world peace. The finest and fastest crossing available was the maiden voyage of the Titanic. He took it. On the night of April the 14th the ship found her iceberg, carrying lifeboats for barely half the souls aboard. Survivors remembered Stead helping women and children into the boats. Then he withdrew to the first class smoking room, sat back in a leather chair with a book, and went down with the ship, among more than fifteen hundred people in the water.

The palmist's letter you may believe or doubt. But the two stories are not legend. They sit in dated print, in the archives, under his own hand: the lifeboats, the iceberg, the White Star line, a quarter of a century early. He wrote the ending twice. Then he lived it.

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