Royal BC Museum

We started our sightseeing at the Royal BC Museum. Luckily for us it had the Titanic artifact exhibit. Here's how it went down. Each patron to the exhibit is given a replica Boarding Pass with the information of a passenger who was on the Titanic.



I was Colonel John Weir a 60 year old man living in Dundee, Scotland. Unlike most passengers I was travelling by myself to Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. I was a Quartermaster General in the Spanish-American War serving in the Philippines and was a long time resident of Utah. I originally booked passage aboard a different vessel but switched to the Titanic because of the coal strike that was occurring. I boarded the Titanic in Cherbourg, France on April 10th, 1912 as a first class passenger.

The exhibit was interesting and cool. The best part for me was the very end of the exhibit where they had some of the passengers personal effects and a little history behind why they were on the Titanic and whether or not they survived. I found this room to be the most interesting because it made me wonder what must have been going through their minds at that moment. In that same room there was the entire passenger manifest split into the group of survivors and non-survivors. Colonel John Weir did not make it off the Titanic. This made me wonder: did he help others onto the life boats and sacrficing his life for the sake of children and their mothers or was he trying to buy his way onto a life boat pushing people out of the way to try and save himself, or maybe he was asleep or too drunk to even know what was going on. I like to think the first scenario is the way things transpired.

The rest of the museum was interesting as well. I especially liked the first faces exhibit about the native Indian tribes of British Columbia and their art.