Is the Queen Mary doomed? The Titanic’s reincarnated engineer thinks so

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY

It doesn’t take long for Bill Barnes to heat up. Standing in front of about 30 people aboard the Queen Mary, he rails about the Titanic, talking up the ship’s alternate history with dead-set conviction. In between points he jokes and has a calm affability that makes him look a lot like Kevin Smith—heavyset, spiked hair, glasses and well-kept goatee. But talk of the Titanic brings something else out of him. More precisely, it brings someone else out of him, as Barnes explains to the crowd that he’s the reincarnation of Thomas Andrews, one of the core designers of the Titanic and part of the unfortunate lot that sank with the unsinkable ship.

According to Barnes, he’s been Andrews’ conduit for years. When he was four, he drew a picture of a ship with four smokestacks and took it to his parents. The drawing was of one of those archetypal shapes that float through every kid’s mind: a misshapen metal mass dotted with tiny rivets and propelled by curled wisps of smoke. It was the kind of thing that everyone draws at that age. Regardless, Barnes says that his drawing held something more. When he showed it to his parents, he told them, “This was my ship, but she died.”

It was from that point on that Barnes supposedly began reaching into his past life. He explains that he has been plagued by nightmares for years, dreams of the Titanic cracking in two and the sounds of crunching metal and last-gasp screams. But nobody believed him. Barnes says that when he first told his parents about his ties to the Titanic, his father beat him. Decades later, still troubled by those nightmares, he finally began regressive hypnosis therapy to dig through his past life as Thomas Andrews.

Today, he sits off to the side in the Queen Mary’s Chelsea Restaurant, sipping tea and picking through the snacks from the buffet table. That lasts for about an hour, then door prizes are announced and everyone is corralled into a nearby room for Barnes’ presentation.

Barnes is preceded by Walter Semkiw, a doctor from San Francisco who studies reincarnation and believes himself to be the spiritual product of President John Adams. Semkiw sticks close to Barnes and offers what he deems proof of reincarnation: case studies involving children who spontaneously recall past lives and who can pick out their reincarnated relatives in old photos. All this is supported by the fact that, as Semkiw says, “children don’t lie.” He then explains how individuals who pick up on past lives tend to look like their forbears, endowed with the same facial features and even some of the same birthmarks. He ends by showing the crowd a picture of Bill Barnes next to one of Thomas Andrews—the two look nothing alike.

Barnes follows with an endlessly technical talk about the Titanic. His points are all about bulkheads, double-thick hulls and waves of magnetic resonance—the whole thing seems lost on the crowd. And, in fact, it doesn’t quite make sense. Barnes asks everyone to suspend any potential disbelief, however. “There’s a term for those in the Titanic community who don’t want to listen to what we have to say,” he says. “They’re called ‘rivet counters.’”

Despite the insistence that Barnes is the reincarnation of Thomas Andrews, Barnes never once channels Andrews in his presentation. To actually hear Barnes do so, you’ll have to listen to his regression therapies where Barnes slips into Andrews’ Irish brogue. And for that you’ll have to buy Barnes’ CD. Instead, the crowd is left to take Barnes at his word. It doesn’t take long for Barnes to extend his words to the Queen Mary.

“The Queen Mary is like the first cousin of the Titanic,” Barnes tells everyone. “It’s a living laboratory.”

With what must be his privileged past-life insight, Barnes then spells out trouble for our ailing ship. “I see some serious problems here,” he says, referring to the damage the Queen Mary sustained when it plowed through the HMS Curacoa over 60 years ago. “If they don’t get someone out here soon, I can’t give the ship more than five years.”

For now, the best we can do, according to Barnes, is trust in reincarnation. After all, Dr. Semkiw explains that with reincarnation, you can change religions and race and be recast as an entirely different person. And if people understood that, Semkiw says, “the Holocaust would never have happened, the Sunnis would stop fighting the Shia and there’d be peace in the world.” Which makes you think: Well, if it can save the world, maybe it could save the Queen Mary.

Tags: john adams, Queen Mary, reincarnation, titanic, walter semkiw, william barnes, world peace