On the night between 14 and 15 April, 1912 the youngest passenger in 'Titanic', nine week old Elizabeth Gladys (later called Millvina) Dean, was lowered in a bag to a lifeboat. Her mother and older brother waited there. Her father was lost at sea.

The family was travelling third class to a new life in Kansas, U.S.A. Mrs Dean returned with her children to England, three of the 705 survivors. 1522 passengers and crew members perished before a rescue boat arrived. Millvina Dean died 31 May, 2009 aged 97, in a nursing home in Southampton, the port from which 'Titanic' had sailed. She was the youngest and the last living member of the original tragic cast.

The story of the ship has been well documented and re-enacted. It is the iceberg, hardly (no pun intended) the villain of the piece, that has always interested me. One cannot fault it for simply, like Mount Everest, being there. The floating mountain, hospitable to seal pups and sea birds, was on its own course to oblivion after being 3000 years in the making. By contrast, Keel 390904, laid in a Belfast shipyard and eventually launched as White Star liner 'Titanic', lived only four days after its departure from

Southampton where Lord Nelson's venerable flagship,'Victory', lies proudly under continual, respectful repair.

The story of the floating mountain of ice (German 'berg' = 'mountain') is told by Richard Brown of the Canadian Wildlife Service in a book, The Voyage of the Iceberg. The crystalline mass was compacted of snow upon snow that had fallen on Greenland since 1000 B.C., over two centuries before the founding of Rome. It was solidified by its own sheer weight and was two and a half kilometres deep before it began to move slowly down a valley towards the Davis Strait off Jacobshavn.

It lay there for some years like a great tongue lapping the salt water. As the winds and the ice floes born by ocean currents pummelled it the 'Eisberg' began to break into a number of ghostly galleons that set out on southerly courses. One of the largest of them would keep a midnight tryst with the supposedly invincible product of modern design and shipbuilding and with some of the world's wealthiest and most privileged people. And with the Dean family in third class.

Richard Brown enlivened his story by imagining sealing crews that marvelled at the hulk that sailed proudly in the distance echoing the tunk-tunk-a-tunk of their small motors. Early in the summer of 1911, just after the coronation of George V and Queen Mary and when 'Alexander's Ragtime Band' was the new 'hit' song, the mountain of ice was idling off Baffin Island between Pond Inlet and Cape Dyer.

Its scaly back and central peak reflected the sun's rays, the same sun that shone on the ceremony in which Marie Curie was awarded that year her second Nobel Prize - that time for her work on the radio activity of uranium which she called' radium'.

John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim had booked early their return from Britain to New York on the maiden voyage of the White Star Line's 'Titanic', due to sail from Southampton on April 10, 1912. So did Toronto business man and yachtsman Arthur Peuchen who had been a marshal of the coronation procession in London. He was vice-commodore of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club and owner of a craft that had crossed the Atlantic under sail. He would survive the coming tragedy.

The 'berg' had long been seen in its home waters between Baffin Bay and Davis Strait. It lingered there, waiting to move down into the Labrador Sea, when Scandinavian mariners landed in Canadian America in the 11th Century. William Baffin was battling those ice-choked waters when William Shakespeare lay dying in Warwickshire in 1616. John Davis who also discovered the Falkland Islands (and hence, Britain's claim to them) had been in that Arctic region in 1586.

The iceberg was below the tip of Greenland, 60 degrees north latitude, when Alexander Murray, a Scottish geologist passed that way in the 1860s. He produced maps of Newfoundland's interior and is said to have been the first European to deal with the aboriginals there as persons to be consulted rather than as savages to be exploited.

Those who look into Voyage of the Iceberg will follow it by March, 1912 down Newfoundland's coast, off places called Run by Guess, Joe Batt's Arm and others imaginatively named where Dr Wilfred Grenfell (later Sir Wilfred) was heroically providing medical services to the inhabitants of a vast territory. Innocently enough - icebergs, like some living things, are amoral rather than immoral - the great white mountain lay by that time about 160 kilometres south of the Grand Banks where all of Europe used to go fishing.

The winter of 1911-12 had been the most severe in 30 years. Large icebergs rarely make it as far south as the Banks but in early 1912 over a thousand 'big ones' had been reported. As a certain Mr Dean had closed the deal to sell his London pub and planned to emigrate to Kansas, U.S.A., the most famous iceberg of all time positioned itself just where at 20 minutes before midnight on 14 April it was sighted from 'Titanic'. The collision soon followed.

Two hours and 40 minutes later the unsinkable ship was swallowed by the Atlantic Ocean.

Those in the too few available lifeboats awaited rescue while others thrashed about in the frigid water. Wee Elizabeth Gladys Dean was, without knowing it, among those saved. Her father was not.

Wireless telegraphy was still seen as a novelty. Radar was as yet unknown. The greater tragedy of the 20th Century wars was still in the future. Europe and America, their mentalities still in endless progress mode, were traumatised. Then came that further indication that the leaders and experts to whom people entrust their safety can be fatally fallible. As Burns said, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley".

And the most beautiful and dangerous of Greenland's icy mountains are those that float.