[Grammar] A great ship vs The great ship

The great ship, Titanic, sailed for New York from Southampton on April 10th, 1912.

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cubezero3 said:

Hello, everyone.

I think here we should use the indefinite article instead of the definite article, for that in history there have been clearly more than one ship that have been considered as great.

To use the definite article, we will have to dispense with the two commas:

The great ship Titanic sailed for New York from Southampton on April 10th, 1912.

Would you agree with me?

Many thanks

Richard

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The great ship ,Titanic ,sailed for New York from Southampton on April 10th ,1912.She was carrying 1,316 passengers and a crew of 891 . Even by modern standards, the 46,000 ton Titanic was a colossal ship .At that time ,however, she was not only the largest ship that had ever been built, but was regarded as unsinkable, for she had sixteen watertight compartments. Even if two of these were flooded, she would still be able to float.

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cubezero3 said:

Hi, freezeframe.

The sentence was extracted from a two paragraph article and here is the best part of the first paragraph.

With the two commas, in my opinion, it seems the sentence literally means something like We are talking about the only great ship throughout human history that is the Titanic. If we get rid of the two commas and the definite article after the second comma, we will have The great ship Titanic ... . Here the great ship, in my opinion, justly modifies this famous ship.

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