Thrown Back To Sea: The True Story of Mr. Louis Auguste Dornier (Assistant Fish Cook on the Titanic)

Welcome to my new biography series: Real Life Stories of Ordinary People

Biography One - Thrown Back To Sea: The True Story of Mr. Louis Auguste Dornier

It was an unremarkably dreary October day in France. The year, 1891. Somewhere in the country, a baguette was bought and sold. Elsewhere, a person smoked a cigarette. And then later that day the same person smoked several more cigarettes. And in another place, a woman screamed as she gave birth to a baby. A boy baby.

Her and her husband (one assumes he was her husband), named the baby Louis. Louis had a relatively decent childhood in France where he obviously didn’t die of plague or whatever, and as a teen he likely smoked cigarettes and kissed girls. He could have been secretly gay, that happened a lot before it was okay to be openly gay. But we can’t be sure. At times in his life he experienced ennui and boredom, I think.

At some point, he took a liking to helping people make seafood and became an assistant fish cook.

He read or heard from someone, who knows how hiring got done back then, about a job on a cool and fancy new boat called the Titanic. He applied or told someone he wanted to work on the boat or the guy he assisted in fish-cooking was like, “hey I am going to work on this boat, can you assist me in my cooking of fish?” It was a wild and decadent time obviously since not only did this boat have a guy who only cooked fish but the fish man had an assistant too. Wow. Must be nice.

Anyway, one time while sailing the Titanic hit an iceberg and a lot of people died on it. Including, Louis August Dornier. He was probably eaten by the very same kinds of fish he cooked. Isn’t it ironic?

He was 20 years old.

The End.