RMS Titanic was built at the Harland and Wolff yard on Queen's Island in Belfast, today the Titanic Quarter. The story goes that her number, 3909 04, read in a mirror or from the back of the paper, spelled 'NO POPE', and that the workforce, which was predominantly Protestant, cursed Catholics in the rivets, so that God sank the ship.
The story is false. The hull number painted on the ship and her yard number at Harland and Wolff was 401, and her Board of Trade official number was 131,428. The number 390904 was not hers. The story spread by word of mouth; nothing from 1912 is known to support it, and the loss of the ship needed no sabotage. It is included here because it is one of the best-known pieces of Titanic folklore in Belfast, and because it shows how a story of the supernatural kind (a curse, an omen) can be built round a real tragedy after the fact. The people who died in the sinking were real, and their deaths were caused by a collision with ice.
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