Titanic (XV), The ("On the tenth day of April 1912") (Titanic #15)
DESCRIPTION: "On the tenth day of April 1912 her whistles they did sound, Her power of motion was released, her twin screws turned around." The ship gives little attention to the dangers of the sea. The ship sinks 400 miles from cape race
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1951 (MUNFLA/Leach)
KEYWORDS: sea ship wreck technology
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
April 14/15, 1912 - Shortly before midnight, ship's time, the Titanic strikes an iceberg and begins to sink. Only 711 survivors are found of 2224 people believed to have been aboard.
FOUND IN: Canada(Newf)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
ADDITIONAL: Eric West, _Sing Around This One: Songs of Newfoundland & Labrador Vol. 2_, Vinland Music, 1997, pp. 46-47, "The Titanic" (1 text, 1 tune, learned by Eric West from Frank Shea)
Roud #774
RECORDINGS:
Mrs. John Powers, "The Titanic" (on MUNFLA/Leach)
NOTES [20209 words]: Roud, following the Leach web site, includes this with "The Titanic (I)" ("It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down") [Laws D24] (Titanic #1). Clearly, though, it is a separate song; it lacks the chorus of Laws D24, has no lyrics in common that I can see, and includes a lot of details I haven't seen elsewhere, most though not all of them accurate.
Because this is one of the less inaccurate Titanic ballads, I'm going to use it as my basis for historical notes on the wreck.
I hesitated long before deciding to include a note on the Titanic disaster; after all, even though this is a very long note, there are many much fuller accounts elsewhere, which are the basis for this entry. I've included this relatively short history to document some of the features mentioned in the Titanic songs.
In what follows, I have included references to the various Titanic songs, in curly brackets for lack of a better notation. For example, the Titanic was, according to "The Loss of the Titanic (Titanic #13)," "The beauty of the White Star Line." The goal in building the Titanic was indeed to make a very ornate ship, so where I say White Star "would make their name on comfort," this is followed by the citation {#13}, meaning that this accords with "The Loss of the Titanic." Where the songs are wrong (as, e.g., in the claim that the band played "Nearer, My God to Thee"), the citation will be {contra #1, #2...}.
It might be noted that, although there seem to be more folk songs about the Titanic disaster than any twentieth century event except the Irish 1916 rebellion and its aftermath, they represent a relatively small fraction of total compositions on the subject. Ritchie, p. 205, estimates that there were "some 300 works about, or somehow associated with," the loss of the Titanic. Smithsonian, p. 36, declares that "112 different pieces of music inspired by the loss of the Titanic were copyrighted in America in 1912 alone."
The story of the Titanic, in a way, begins in 1870, when the Oceanic created the transatlantic passenger liner (Wade, p. 13) and made the White Star Line's reputation for luxury crossings (Brinnin, p. 241). You could argue for an even earlier date -- e.g. Brinnin, p. 4, begins his account with the James Madison of 1818, which was the first packet to keep a regular schedule. But the Madison was a sailing ship, and not very comfortable. Samuel Cunard and others had replaced the sailing ships with steamers in the following decades, but though Cunard ships were very safe in an era when wrecks were common on other lines (Brinnin, p. 245 notes that Cunard never lost a passenger in the entire nineteenth century!, and Fox, pp. 128-139, tells how the loss of the Arctic and Pacific doomed the rival Collins Line), Cunarders weren't particularly enjoyable to be aboard; the idea was simply to get across the Atlantic.
The Oceanic converted the trip "across the pond" from a burden to something to be enjoyed. Brinnin, p. 242, calls her "the eponymous instance of the modern ocean liner." The small White Star Line, a bankrupt company which had sailed ships to Australia, was taken over to use as a vehicle to promote this new class of ship (Fox, p. 239). It was a major change. Very long and narrow, Oceanic did not confine her passengers to the stern areas as so many earlier ships had done. Staterooms were made larger. There was steam heat. She was far from perfect; many changes had to be made after her first voyage (Brinnin, p. 243). But she had changed the whole nature of transatlantic travel.
It didn't take long for competition to become intense. Three British lines -- White Star, Inman (which was rapidly failing and would soon be taken over by American interests), and the more-established Cunard -- were joined by several German competitors and a few small fry from other countries. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was becoming almost impossible to make passenger traffic pay due to the cuthroat competition (Ramsay, p. 11). The various companies all formed alliances. The Germans had some government support. Cunard eventually turned to the government as well, offering to produce fast liners that the Royal Navy could take over as auxiliary cruisers as needed. Thus were born the Lusitania and her sister the Mauretania (Brinnin, p. 328fff., Ramsay, pp. 15-17; Paine, p. 330).
White Star had to respond, but its answer was different. Rather than turn their independence over to the British government (a deal with the devil that would in fact eventually pose great difficulties for Cunard during World War I), they were in effect taken over by J. P. Morgan (Wade, pp. 14-15; Butler-Unsink, p. 9), which already owned Inman and some smaller American lines and had a deal with the Germans (Brinnin, p. 325).
For all his deep pockets and his cartel-like control over several shipping firms, even Morgan had to field a competitive steamer line. (The other tricks were mostly a failure; the year after Morgan died in 1913, the whole mess came apart in a series of transactions that included some illegal deals; Davenport-Hines, p. 56.) So what should be White Star's answer to Cunard's "greyhounds"? The Lusitania was a fine, fast ship (capable, in ideal conditions, of sustained speeds of 26 knots), but her design was radical in many ways -- long, narrow (which made the idea of using her as a warship rather silly; she would have been a lousy gun platform), and driven by the newfangled turbines.
White Star, although historically more radical than the conservative Cunard, preferred not to be so daring in designing their answer. They didn't even rely on the more powerful turbine-driven screws (Wade, pp. 270-271) {#15 incorrectly claims she had turbines and twin screws, not three}. (Ironic, given that the Ismays, managers of White Star, had taken a ride on the world's first turbine-powered ship, Turbinia, on the day of her unveiling at Victoria's Diamond Jubilee; Turbinia at the time was the world's fastest ship, by a large margin; Brinnin, pp. 307-308.) The center screw used a turbine, but the port and starboard screws used the old, less efficient reciprocating engines (Butler-Unsink, p. 16). The major innovation was using expansion joints in the superstructure to let it flex (Matsen, p. 100), but that didn't affect the hull's strength or integrity. (Although Matsen, p. 240, claims that recent research shows that the hull *was* too weak; the owners had demanded that the thickness of the steel be reduced, leading Matsen and his sources to conclude that one reason the ship sank so quickly was that she wasn't strong enough and had her spine break.)
Rather than compete on crossing time {contra #2, #15}, White Star's ships would make their name on comfort {#13; cf. #16, which describes her one voyage as a "pleasure trip"}. White Star's new liners -- to become the Olympic, Titanic, and Britannic -- would be about three or four knots slower than Cunard's. That speed difference allowed a huge savings in engine weight; to get that three knot advantage, Lusitania needed 68,000 horsepower engines (Ramsay, p. 21) despite a gross tonnage of only 32,000 tons; Titanic, at 46,300 tons, had according to the advertisement reprinted in Ballard, p. 169, engines developing a mere 50,000 horsepower (a figure also quoted by Paine, p. 520; Ballard, p. 220, lists her as 46,000 horsepower; Barczewski, p. 3, as 55,000. Lord-Night, p. 174, says she was registered as 50,000 hp, but could reach 55,000. It is probable that the exact figure was never known; Titanic never once went up to full speed). Unlike the Lusitania and Mauretania, which had four propellers, she had only three screws {contra #15, which lists her as having two}.
The weight saved on the engines would all go into more ship -- and more comforts for the passengers. Olympic and Titanic were, for instance, the first liners to include swimming pools (Barczewski, p. 7); they also had Turkish baths (Brinnin, p. 362). The large size meant that passengers hardly even noticed that they were at sea; the ride was very smooth (Davenport-Hines, pp. 183-184). So large were the designs that builders Harland and Wolff of Belfast {#15} had to build new slips to hold the ships -- replacing three of their old slips with just two, one for Olympic and one for Titanic (Wade, p. 16).
First class was so fancy that it was simply expected that its occupants would bring their servants; there were separate facilities for first class passengers and the servants of those passengers (Butler-Unsink, p. 54). It is interesting to note that the Olympic ships significantly increased the space devoted to first class, so that it had room for about as many first class as third class passengers (Davenport-Hines, p. 67).
Over 3000 workers were involved in the construction of each ship (Barczewski, p. 214, who notes that the Belfast shipyard employed mostly Protestants, making Olympic and Titanic toys in the battle over Home Rule and the contest over relations between Ulster and the rest of Ireland. Little wonder that it was called "The Pride of Belfast" {#11}
At least give Lord Pirrie of Harland and Wolff this much credit: When Protestant shipbuilders tried to crowd out the Catholics, Pirrie threatened to fire the lot if they didn't let the Catholics back In; Davenport-Hines, p. 62. On the other hand, he made no efforts to improve the conditions in his company housing; Davenport-Hines, p. 64. Nor did he work hard to keep the yard safe; six men were killed in building Olympic, and three in building Titanic, with hundreds more hurt; dozens were injured badly enough that they could not return to shipyard work (Matsen, p. 124-125). On the evidence, Pirrie was an equal-opportunity robber baron.
The potential degree of luxury available seems almost obscene today. Butler-Unsink, pp. 36-37, lists the standard load of food and kitchen equipment. This included, among other things, 1000 pounds of hothouse grapes (from England, in April 1912, remember; there were no hybrid fruits that could last long enough to be shipped from a southern climate) and 100 pairs of grape scissors. According to Davenport-Hines, pp. 97-98, the whole thing was designed to imitate the luxury of accommodations at John Jacob Astor's St. Regis Hotel, built in 1904 at a cost of five and a half million dollars. The list of foodstuffs on Davenport-Hines, p. 250, shows that more than 100,000 pounds of fresh food were embarked, including 75,000 pounds of meat.
The cost of the two ships was on the order of a million and a half pounds each (see that advertisement in Ballard, p. 169). And that's 1908 pounds (I somewhere saw an estimate that it would take a half a billion 1990s dollars to build a replica). The builders were allowed to go all-out -- the White Star Line and Harland and Wolff had significant mutual ownership (Fox, p. 239; Davenport-Hines, p. p. 53 and Matsen, p. 72, says that Lord Pirrie, who controlled Harland and Wolff, was the #2 owner of White Star shares), so they didn't really contract for a price and specifications; rather, Harland and Wolff -- which did much of the design work as well as the building -- was paid their costs plus 4% (Fox, p. 240). The only real White Star input in the design was apparently to call for thinner steel in the hull in order to save money on coal (Matsen, p. 104).
It was a cozy relationship for the shipbuilders. Lord Pirrie was so secretive that his company, although it had other directors, was in effect a one man fief; his subordinates could not even manage the business after his death (Davenport-Hines, p. 39); he decided what he wanted, and that was what White Star got. Pirrie was also the one who induced Bruce Ismay to join the Morgan conglomerate (Matsen, p. 74).
Pirrie's self-absorption seems to have been almost total; he wanted a peerage, and wanted it so badly that he switched his financial support from Unionists to Liberals to another to get it -- and then betrayed the Liberals over Home Rule for Ireland (Davenport-Hines, pp. 40-41). He lived so extravagantly that he was thought to be one of the richest men in Britain -- but when he died, it was found that his assets were so mismanaged that he in fact was in debt by hundreds of thousands of pounds (Davenport-Hines, p. 44). *This* was the man who decided how the Olympic class of ships was to be built....
The Titanic was 882 feet long, her beam was 92 feet, and it was 60.5 feet from the waterline to the boat deck (she was eight decks tall), with the funnels rising another 115 feet (cf. Paine, p. 520, and the deck plans in Wade, pp. 174-183). Lord-Night, p. 174, puts this in down-to-earth terms: "11 stories high and four city blocks long." (Although those would be four very short city blocks -- 1/24 of a mile long. A standard American city block is 1/16 mile, and Titanic was as long as 2.67 of those, or just about exactly 1/6 of a mile.) Ballard, p. 219, reveals that Olympic and Titanic each were roughly two years on the slips before launching, and needed another year after that to complete.
Although there were four funnels, only three were real, because the ship had only three engines. The fourth funnel was added because Pirrie and Ismay didn't want passengers to think the ships were in some way inferior to the four-funneled Lusitania and Mauretania (Matsen, p. 94). So much for efficient design.... And the hull of the Olympic, the very first time she came up to speed, "panted" -- that is, vibrated in and out (Matsen, p. 119). Pirrie claimed that was normal (Matsen, p. 123), but it was perhaps an omen of what was to come. Olympic's hull also suffered extensive hull cracking (Matsen, pp. 131-132) -- evidence, perhaps, that the steel was not really up to the stress it was under. Titanic was strengthened in the area of the cracks, but was that really the only defective spot?
(Matsen, p. 261, says that when Britannic was built, significant changes were made to the design to cover up defects that caused the Titanic to sink faster, but hid the changes because Pirrie and Ismay didn't dare admit the poor design: "A public discussion of the weaknesses in their Ship of Dreams would have ruined them. They'd had no choice but to keep them secret." But this is all based on some allegedly-concealed modifications to the design. It's a lot of conspiracy for not much evidence.)
Was that an omen? Perhaps never in history has a class of ships been so ill-fated. Olympic was the lucky one; she stayed afloat until she was taken out of service in 1935 (though she had to be heavily rebuilt after the Titanic wreck, so that she became much harder to sink; Wade, p. 328). But in her two dozen years of service she had had *four* collisions with other ships: with the tug O. L. Hallenbeck and with the H.M.S. Hawke in 1911 (Lord-Lives, pp. 29-31; Ritchie, p. 97, points out that she was being maneuvered by a harbor pilot at the time, but in the legal cases that followed, the court blamed White Star, according to Matsen, p. 129; the conclusion was that Olympic literally sucked the smaller ship into a crash), with the Fort St. George in 1924 (Paine, p. 376), and with the Nantucket Lightship in 1934 (Paine, p. 349). When Cunard and White Star merged in 1934, Cunard promptly got rid of Olympic (Paine, p. 376; Wade, p. 329).
The Britannic never sailed as a liner; she was not finished at the start of World War I, and was converted to a hospital ship. In that capacity, she hit a mine in 1916 and sank in less than an hour (Paine, p. 81) -- another example of the inadequate internal subdivisions of the design.
As for the Titanic -- well, we're getting to that.
The Olympic was finished first, starting her maiden voyage to New York on May 31, 1911 (Wade, p. 17). The ship seemed to work well, but the designers learned a few things (mostly cosmetic) which caused the Titanic to be slightly modified, primarily to add more passenger accommodations (Wade, pp. 18-19); in the process, her displacement increased by about a thousand tons. Titanic could still be considered Olympic's sister, but she was heavier -- the largest ship in the world at the time {#15} -- and somewhat more luxurious.
The Titanic would set out on her maiden voyage on April 10, 1912 {#9, #15}. At noon, she left Southampton {#5, #9, #11, #13, #15, contra #6, which says she sailed from Liverpool, but Liverpool had been largely abandoned by the liners in the previous two decades because of its problematic tidal characteristics; Davenport-Hines, p. 10}. She reached Cherbourg that evening, left France just a couple of hours later, arrived at Queenstown {#11, #12} around noon the next day, and set out for New York {#6} around 2:00 p.m. on April 11 (Lord-Night, p. 175).
It was not an auspicious start, really; there had been coal strike (Wade, p. 23; Barczewski, p. 263, notes that the strike ended April 6, but of course coal was only just starting to go back "into the pipeline"; it hadn't reached Southampton yet), causing White Star to requisition coal from other vessels, cancel their voyages, and transfer the passengers to Titanic. In the process, they started a small coal fire that never was entirely put out; the coal smoked the entire time of the voyage (Butler-Unsink, p. 37). Meaning that, unknown to the passengers, there was always a slight danger of a coal dust explosion (which is the most likely explanation for why the Lusitania sank three years later).
Borrowing coal and shifting passengers was not unreasonable. Sailing the largest ship in the world with a raw crew was more of a problem. Titanic would be going on her maiden voyage with a crew that did not know the ship; at this time, crews were mostly hired on a by-the-voyage basis (Barczewski, p. 264; cf. Wade, p. 24) -- and, on a vessel her size, they wouldn't be able to learn their way around in a day or two! Even second officer Lightoller, a veteran seaman with much experience on White Star ships, said it took him two weeks to learn his way around (Barczewski, p. 5; Butler-Unsink, p. 46). Many of the crew didn't have that much time, and though a lot of them had done at least one voyage on the Olympic (Barczewski, p. 266), most didn't have his background to help them learn their way.
Even if you ignore their unfamiliarity with the ship, it turns out that only 83 of the crew were actual sailors, used to dealing with a ship at sea (Wade, p. 210). The rest were stewards and other specialists -- important for the passengers, but they couldn't really run the ship. The engine crew seems to have been particularly green; according to Davenport-Hines, p. 252, "Few of the engine crew of firemen, greasers, and trimmers who had delivered the ship from Belfast signed on again for the maiden voyage" -- presumably because of poor conditions in the engineering spaces.
Nor had Titanic completed anything like proper sea trials -- for instance, she had never once worked up to full speed, and done very little emergency maneuvering (Wade, p. 184). In a great irony, it is reported that, it was only as she arrived in the vicinity of the ice that she worked her way up to the fastest speed she had ever attained (Wade, p. 28). Apparently she never tested her turning radius at full speed (Lord-Lives, p. 56), and she only did one "emergency stop"; it took her three and a quarter minutes, and 3000 feet, to halt from a speed of 18 knots (Lord-Lives, p. 33) -- a speed less than her cruising speed on her voyage across the Atlantic.
And there had never been a true boat drill conducted. There had been one partial demonstration, inadequate in every regard (Wade, p. 211). Normally drills were conducted on Sunday, but on Titanic's maiden voyage, Captain Smith cancelled it to hold a religious service (Barczewski, p. 10). The passengers didn't know what to do should they need to get to the boats; worse, few of the crew knew how to lower them! (Lord-Lives, pp. 88). So, when the crisis came, the same few crewmen had to do all the work, meaning that the boats could not all be lowered at once (Lord-Lives, pp. 95-96; cf. {#9}, which says they lowered the lifeboats "one by one." It was actually one by one on each side, but close enough).
When the disaster struck, the handful of crewmen doing the lowering had to work so hard that, even on that cold night, they ended up sweating heavily; Officer Lightoller would take off his coat before the last boats were lowered, leaving him in dripping-wet pajamas (Lord-Night, p. 79).
Finally, the captain was not someone you'd be likely to pick to deal with an emergency situation. E. J. Smith had much experience, starting as a boy on a sailing passenger ship and quickly working his way up to mate and then captain (Barczewski, p. 162). Not satisfied with that, he transferred to the passenger liners and working his way up to command those as well. He had commanded over a dozen different liners (Lord-Lives, p. 28) when he was promoted to the pinnacle of the White Star line, the Olympic (Barczewski, p. 163). He was so well-liked that White Star made it a policy for him to break in new vessels (Barczewski, p. 165). On paper, he was the perfect captain for Titanic {#15}; his time on Titanic's sister Olympic meant that he was one of the handful who had some real idea how the new ship worked.
But Smith's resume sounded better than it was. He was a good manager and diplomat -- but he had never had to deal with real problems. In an interview, he once declared, "When anyone asks how I can best describe my experience in nearly forty years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales, and storms and fogs and the like, but in all my experience I have never been in any accident of any sort worth speaking about" (quoted in Barczewski, p. 185; Butler-Unsink, p. 48; Lord-Lives, p. 29; Wade, p. 38. Eaton/Haas, however, note on p. 77 that his command the Germanic had capsized in New York harbor in 1899. Plus there was the Hawke collision, described below).
"Smith also had a reputation for high-speed, flamboyant arrivals and departures in the tight confines of harbors. He grounded Coptic in Rio de Janeiro in 1891, ran Republic aground off Sandy Hook in 1899, and put Adriatic on a soundbar in Ambrose Channel, near New York, in 1909" (Matsen, p. 137). It's arguably not a bad safety record, but it isn't perfect, either.
Describing the Hawke accident, Smith said, "Anyhow, Olympic is unsinkable, and Titanic will be the same when she is put in commission. Either vessel could be cut in halves and each section would remain afloat" (Matsen, p. 129). This is probably true (although it wouldnt be much comfort to those in the sliced-open sections), but hardly relevant, because what ship would have a sharp enough bow to slice Titanic in two? It was a side-on collision that was the danger.
He didn't have a mind set suited to surprises. In 1906, aboard the Adriatic -- a ship no one ever claimed was unsinkable -- he said, "I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder" (Lord-Lives, p. 18; Tibballs, p. 227, gives a Boston Post story with the quote). By contrast, his second officer on the Titanic, Charles Lightoller, had already been through two shipwrecks! (Butler-Other, p. 58). Maybe Smith knew better, and was trying to encourage passengers -- but such statements surely encourage complacency.
He also seems to have been tired; he told a reporter before the Titanic sailed that he was ready to leave the sea (supposedly he even told that old story about wanting to carry an oar until he came to a place where no one knew what it was, and settle there -- Matsen, p. 135 -- although I strongly suspect this was journalistic exaggeration).
Even before the Titanic set sail, it was known that there were icebergs in the North Atlantic -- though {contra #11} she had not seen any herself. A warm year had caused many to break loose from the polar cap; another liner, the Niagara, in fact collided with one at about the time Titanic set out (Wade, p. 31), and at least two sailing ships, the Erna and the Maggie, seem to have been destroyed by the ice (Davenport-Hines, p. 3). What's more, although the Titanic's route was south of the normal extent of the ice pack in winter, it was in the northern part of the region where the charts declared icebergs to be seen regularly in spring (Mersey, p. 24).
No one in authority aboard Titanic seemed worried. Though several ships had been damaged by icebergs in recent years, all had survived (Wade, p. 32). And Titanic was much stronger than most of those ships. She was divided into 16 sections, designed to be watertight, with a central control on the bridge that could, in theory, instantly isolate the sections. She was designed to stay afloat if any two of the sections flooded, or if the front four (which were of course narrower) were breached (Ballard, p. 22).
This was not really such good protection as was claimed. Lord-Lives, pp. 20-22, discusses how early liners (notably the Great Eastern of 1858) had been designed to be unsinkable. Great Eastern had a true double hull (Titanic had a double bottom but not a full double hull; Barczewski, p. 4), a true set of partitions (15 bulkheads from front to back, as on Titanic, but with subdivisions within each cell, as on a battleship, so she was a true honeycomb), and her divisions reached all the way up to the upper deck. Water in one section simply could not work its way into another. But this had proved very inconvenient -- a steward or passenger in one section had to go all the way to the upper deck to move to another. Gradually, the partitions dividing port and starboard sides went out of ship designs, the bulkheads were lowered so that the upper decks were not partitioned, and doors were built into the bulkheads on the lower levels. And the decks of the Titanic were not watertight -- that is, if a particular deck filled with water, there was nothing at all to keep the water from rising up and starting to flood the next deck (Mersey, p. 8).
Mersey, p. 8, says that the various bulkheads on the Titanic reached either to the D deck (20 feet above the waterline) or the E deck (11 feet above the waterline) The diagram in Ballard (p. 22) purports to shows the bulkheads (compare p. 9 of Mersey). The six toward the stern reach two or three decks above the waterline -- an adequate distance, though higher would have been better. But those amidships and at the bow -- the ones most likely to suffer damage! -- are much lower; most reach only one deck above the waterline, and F and G are barely higher than the water (Lord-Lives, p. 22, says they rose only 10 feet above the waterline). If the ship went down by the nose -- as Titanic did -- the water could overtop the barriers, flooding at least eight to ten compartments. And the ship of course could not (and did not) survive *that*. What's more, only A, B, and P were entirely free of doors (Mersey, p. 9).
Finally, the Titanic's watertight doors were theoretically controlled from the bridge, and also had floats so they could automatically close if they detected water (Mersey, p. 9). In fact, some had to be closed manually, so making the ship watertight was *not* an instantaneous process.
Given the way the ship was built, Mersey, p. 35, suggests that the existence of the watertight bulkheads actually shortened the life of the ship, because it means that all the flooding was in the front of the ship, causing her to go down by the bow and overtop the bulkheads. Had the water been free to go throughout the ship, she still would have sunk -- but on a more even keel and somewhat later (which, although he does not say so, would likely have saved lives).
Lord-Lives, p. 23, comments acidly that Titanic was treated as unsinkable {#1, #2} not because she was properly built but because she looked too big to sink. "The appearance of safety was mistaken for safety itself."
Lynch/Marschall, p. 194, makes the interesting point that Titanic's near-sister Britannic sank when she hit a mine. That means that the damage was confined to a small area of the hull -- yet she sank anyway, and much faster than the Titanic. There really does seem to have been a problem with the partitioning in the Olympic class ships.
The Titanichad a near-disaster at the very beginning of her life; as the Olympic had sucked the Hawke into a collision, Titanic produced so much pull that she snapped the ropes of the New York. But, in this case, a collision was averted -- just barely (Lord-Lives, p. 26; Barczewski, p. 4; Tibballs, pp, 31-38).
One personal observation, based on looking at very many photos of the Titanic in the process of writing this article: It really doesn't appear to have been all it was cracked up to be. It was opulent, yes, in a heavy-handed Edwardian sort of way. But it didn't really appear all that well-built. There is a look to good construction, and it doesn't have it. Titanic had neither the hand-crafted strength of pre-nineteenth century construction, nor the technological veneer of the second half of the twentieth century. An illustration in Lynch/Marschall (p. 21) is perhaps relevant. It shows one of the Titanic's so-advanced anchors, forged by modern metallurgy -- but being hauled to the ship by horses.
(My opinion about the construction of these ships seems to be borne out by the stories of the leading liners of the time. Very many of the new ships had design problems. The Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse of 1897 had "lubberly propensities," according to Brinnin, p. 317, which caused her to be nicknamed "Rolling Billy." Cunard's flagship of the period, Lusitania, had had to be refitted due to excessive vibrations; see the notes to "The Lusitania." Titanic's record as the largest ship in the world would not last long; 14 months later, Germany's Hamburg-Amerika line would bring out the Imperator; Barczewski, p. 65. She was roughly 6000 tons heavier than Titanic, but top-heavy enough that she needed her funnels shortened and some of her fixtures replaced, plus they had to add 2000 tons of extra ballast; she also lost her figurehead due to her extreme rolling on just her third voyage; Brinnin, p. 388. After the war, Cunard took her over as Berengaria, but overhauled her again in 1921, and she suffered a series of fires in the late Thirties; Paine, p. 60. Luxurious the monster liners were, but they were perhaps too big for the designers of a pre-computer age.)
Interestingly, Titanic was nowhere near full on her maiden voyage. (Tibballs, p. xi, thinks this is because of the coal strike, which caused many people to postpone plans since they weren't sure the ship would sail, but most sources seem to think the real reason was that people didn't want to risk taking a new ship which hand't had a shakedown voyage.)
There were three classes of passengers: first class, which was incredibly luxurious; second class, which was also very comfortable (the gap between first class and second was much smaller than that between second and third; Davenport-Hines, p. 195) but where people were not expected to have servants and were not given complete freedom of the boat; and third class (steerage) -- down at the bottom of the ship, with relatively cramped spaces and no special restaurants. Steerage offered safe, clean accommodations and good food, but no special amenities and not much space. It was implicitly understood that first class was for the wealthy, second for the middle class, and third for the poor.
According to Wade, pp. 25-26, Titanic left Southampton on April 10, 1912 with only 46% of first class berth occupied, 40% of second class, and 70% of steerage space booked. (That's 337 first class passengers, 271 second class, and 712 in third class; cf. Barczewski, p. 51. Considering that Titanic was taking passengers from several liners, the totals are amazingly low. (Not that there was any shortage of money among them; #13 is right that there were "wealthy New York millionaires." Davenport-Hines estimates, p. 162, that the 337 first class passengers were worth $500 million. In 1912 dollars. First class passengers may not have been many, but they were certainly well-off!) She stopped at Queenstown the next day to take on a few more. That gives her 1320 passengers plus whatever the total was from Ireland -- comfortably more than the 1200 passengers mentioned in {#13}.
One song {#12} refers to 800 emigrants sailing from Ireland. This presumably refers to the total third class passengers; in all, only about 125 passengers boarded at Queenstown (now Cobh, or the Cove of Cork), of which number 113 (Barczewski, pp. 9, 281) or 114 (Lord-Night, pp. 207-209) were third class, and hence presumably emigrants. (It will tell you something about the size of Titanic that she could not even dock at Queenstown's pier; she had to anchor offshore and have passengers and cargo ferried aboard; Barczewski, p. 281).
Davenport-Hines, p. 225, gives an estimate that third class contained 118 British passengers, 113 Irish, 104 Swedes, 79 Lebanese, 55 Finns, 43 Americans, 33 Bulgarians, 25 Norwegians, 22 Belgians, 12 Armenians, 8 Chinese, 7 Danes, 5 Frenchmen, 4 Italians, 4 Greeks, 4 Germans, 4 Swiss, 3 Portuguese, 44 from the Habsburg Empire (mostly Slavs, with about half of them Croats), and 18 Russian subjects. Thus almost all of Europe, and some places beyond, were represented.
For the first four days of the voyage, everything of course went well; the ship maintained a good speed, sailed smoothly, and everyone apparently had a fine time. Then came the "Night to Remember."
Complete details of what happened on the night of April 14-15 probably cannot be known, because most of the key figures were lost. Captain Smith went down with his ship, as did his chief officer (second in command) Henry Wilde, who was almost invisible in the saga (except that Lightoller, who had reason to resent him, accused him of slowing the evacuation; Lynch/Marschall, p. 109). Ironically, Captain Smith had requested Wilde be transferred from the Olympic so he could have a second who knew the ship; Butler-Unsink, p. 44; Lynch/Marschall, p. 76. Fat lot of good it did; as Butler-Unsink, p. 90, comments, Wilde "demonstrat[ed] very little initiative of his own, seemingly content to pass on Captain Smith's [incomplete] instructions, but never expanding them or clarifying them... and rarely issuing any orders of his own."
Also lost was first officer William M. Murdoch, who was the officer in command on the bridge when the ship hit the iceberg and who also had charge of lowering the boats on one side (like Smith, he an officer brought over from the Olympic; Barczewski, p. 189. Sort of makes you wonder who was running the Olympic after they took all her officers). Chief Engineer Joseph Bell and almost all of the engineering crew, who kept several boilers running to maintain electricity for the lights and pumps (Ballard, p. 25; Butler-Unsink, p. 109), were lost as well.
Many witnesses pay well-deserved testimony to the bravery of the crew in the emergency which followed. (There were four officers senior enough to stand watches, Smith, Wilde, Murdoch, and second officer Charles H. Lightoller; Butler-Unsink, p. 53. Of these, only Lightoller survived, and he did not go off in a boat; he was washed away from the wreck as she went down and was able to make his way to an overturned "collapsible" lifeboat); as {#13} says, the crew stayed with the ship and sent the passengers off. Their problem lay not in courage but in intelligence.
Instead of information from her senior officers about what went wrong, what we have is the testimony of junior officers (including second officer Lightoller, who however was in his cabin at the time of the collision, and fourth officer Joseph G. Boxhall, responsible for plotting of icebergs as the warnings came in and for fixing the ship's position when she hit the iceberg). We also have accounts from the junior wireless operator, of some of the lookouts, and of course numerous passengers, none of whom, however, had any part in the ship's decision-making. Plus we have the information derived from Ballard's exploration of the sunken hull (which was not very helpful, however, since the part of the starboard bow which was damaged seems to be almost entirely buried in the mud; Ballard, p. 196).
The Titanic did not go to its fate unwarned. One crucial safety feature she had was a wireless, and two wireless operators, allowing one to be on duty at all times. (This wasn't just for safety; many of the first class passengers were sending messages all over the place. Barczewski, p. 11, notes that this was how the Marconi company earned its money; they didn't get paid for talk between ships.) Just on April 14, many ice warnings had come through -- one at 9:00 a.m. from the Caronia, one at 11:40 from the Noordam, two almost simultaneously around 1:45 from Amerika and from White Star's own Baltic, one from the Californian at 7:30, and one at 9:40 from Mesaba -- this one for the very region in which the Titanic was already sailing (Ballard, pp. 13-20; Lord-Lives, pp. 48-49). And, finally, one more from the Californian, which was almost next door and had been stopped by ice.
How many of these warnings were actually read by the senior officers is not clear. Ballard claims that some never reached the top officers. Understand that wireless operators were not a proper part of the ship's crew. The shipping lines hired them from the Marconi company or one of its competitors. (This was common; many of the "staff" on the Titanic were in fact employees of other companies. The restaurant staff, for example, worked for organizations such as Gatti which had bought concessions on the Titanic -- Lord-Night, p. 68.)
When one of Titanic's radiomen received an ice warning, he could do little except hand it to an officer, who might pay attention or might just slip it in his pocket. To add to the problems, the apparatus had broken down on April 14 -- it was unusually powerful for the time (1500 watts -- Butler-Unsink, p. 62), but probably cantankerous as a result. Senior operator Jack Phillips had repaired it (radiomen at the time had intense training in electronics and such, and Phillips, though only 25, was one of the best; Butler-Unsink, p. 61), but was far behind on commercial traffic and had at times brushed off messages from other ships in order to get it out (Wade, pp. 143-144, 254) -- the more so since that final and most important ice warning, from the Californian, had not been sent as a priority message (Wade, p. 255). Plus, as Lord-Lives, pp. 51-52, points out, the radiomen were not navigators; they really had no idea which messages were most important.
So we don't know how much the crew knew about ice conditions. What is clear is that Captain Smith did not adjust her course significantly in response to the warnings, and the ship did not slow down.
Based on the reports from the Californian on the day of April 14, and from the Carpathia and the Mount Temple the following day, it appears that there was an almost-solid ice barrier across the Titanic's path. There would have been almost no way through without encountering ice (cf. Lord-Lives, p. 130; Lord-Night, p. 147, and the diagrams in Ballard, pp. 198-200). Under the circumstances, the decision to proceed full speed ahead was very dangerous.
The ship had no hope of setting a record {contra #7}; Fox, p. 413, declares that "the Titanic did not charge through that iceberg field with any hope of establishing a new record; she only wished to prove herself not too much slower than the Mauretania." But many captains, as a matter of pride, hated to slow down (Davenport-Hines, p. 85), and it is possible that Captain Smith was pressured to try to make the first crossing faster than the Olympic had made hers the year before (Butler-Unsink, p. 249; on p. 59, he speculates that Smith did this under pressure from White Star boss J. Bruce Ismay, who was aboard. Eaton/Haas, p. 9, however, argue that this is unlikely; if they arrived that early, they couldn't enter the harbor! And the coal supply was limited).
The fact that a record crossing was impossible might not have stopped Ismay from wanting to try, though; Fox, p. 393, calls Ismay, the son of White Star founder Thomas Ismay, a "doofus," and says that the Morgan takeover of White Star was partly maneuvered by other shareholders to keep Bruce Ismay from gaining too much control of the line. A contemporary called Ismay "a calamity; possibly not quite sane"; Fox, p. 395.
Whatever Ismay wanted, though, he was not the man in charge. If there is a fault, it's Captain Smith's for treating the ice messages utterly cavalierly. (According to Barczewski, p. 190, junior officers did not even have authority to reduce the ship's speed, though she cites no source for this statement.) The warnings needed to be studied; it was only when the messages were combined that they showed a wide band of ice all across the ship's path (Lord-Lives, p. 53). The officers did worry about the cooling of the air and sea -- but, apparently, their chief concern was that it might freeze the fresh water supply! (Ballard, p. 19; Butler-Unsink, p. 63; Lynch/Marschall, p. 77).
Captain Smith, in fact, was asleep at the time of the collision {#3}; he was content to let junior officers take him through the ice zone, though he did tell them to call him in the event of doubtful conditions (Ballard, p. 19). He was, after all, a fairly old man by the standards of the time -- 59, and planning to retire after Titanic made her maiden voyage (Lord-Lives, p. 32; Lord-Night, p. 27, says that he might not even have made this trip, except that he made a habit of captaining ships on their maiden voyages. It says something about how much the company respected him -- and about how fortunate he had been in avoiding accidents.).
The claim of {X} that "Captain Smith... must have been a-drinking" is, however, quite certainly wrong. White Star regulations forbid it (Lynch/Marschall, p. 77), and even if he were fool enough to risk his pension on his very last voyage (which he was not), he was with a party that would have spotted it had he touched liquor.
Conditions for spotting icebergs were horrible. (Lynch/Marschall, p. 79, has the interesting note that a lookout on an earlier shift had *smelled* ice -- not as strange as it sounds, since most icebergs calved off glaciers carrying soils and sometimes lichens; the wet earth would not smell like salt water. But though that lookout smelled ice, he never saw any.) It was, of course, dark, and there was no moon (Lord-Lives, p. 47) {#16}. And observers agree that the sea was very calm, with hardly any waves at all -- and one of the best ways to spot an iceberg was to see the waves lapping at it. Easton/Haas, p. 19, states as a fact (though this cannot be known) that the iceberg had recently flipped over, making the upper surface dark and harder to see. To top it all off, the lookouts in the crow's nest did not have any binoculars (Wade, pp. 169-170; Butler-Unsink, p. 44, explains how they came to be missing).
The British inquiry would conclude that binoculars are no help in spotting icebergs (Lord-Lives, pp. 59-60) -- which is sort of true, but only sort of. Yes, as any birdwatcher can tell you, it's almost always easier to spot things with bare eyes. But shifting between eyes and binoculars keeps you alert, and using the binoculars sometimes causes you to see things you wouldn't otherwise see.
It is now thought the solution to the Binoculars Problem is known: The key to the locker containing the optics was in the hands of an officer who was on the Titanic from Belfast to Southampton, but was bumped in the latter city to make room for the completely ineffectual Chief Officer Wilde (the man dropped was David Blair, who was second officer until Wilde came aboard; he lost his post and Lightoller was demoted to second officer; Eaton/Haas, p. 72. According to Davenport-Hines, p. 248, Wilde was brought over because the Olympic couldn't sail due to the coal strike). The bumped officer accidentally took the key to the locker with him, so the binoculars were left locked up. The key was auctioned off in 2007.
(Lord-Lives, p. 129, makes the interesting note that, when the Carpathia was steaming toward the Titanic, she dodged half a dozen bergs -- and all of them were spotted from the bridge, not the crow's nest. Apparently, on that dark and calm night, the lookouts aloft were at a severe handicap. It's not clear whether this is due to their angle or, perhaps, just the weather -- on a ship making 20+ knots, or even 17 as the Carpathia was doing, looking straight ahead into the wind of the ship's passage would have been very painful on that cold night.)
Very little is known about the actual iceberg. No other ship saw it with certainty (Butler-Unsink, in an illustration facing page 149, and Lynch/Marschall, pp. 92-93, have a photo of a berg taken by the Prinz Adelbert that may have been it, but the only evidence was some red that might have been paint, which is hardly proof). Even Titanic saw it for only minutes. But the statement {#13} that it was a growler (small berg) seems to have been false, since it was big enough for chunks of ice to fall onto Titanic's boat deck, more than sixty feet above the water. According to Ballard, p. 21, most witnesses stated that the berg reached only to about boat deck level. That's still pretty big.
The testimony of Frederick Fleet, who had been on lookout that night, was perhaps not as helpful as it might have been; when called before an investigating committee, he was nervous, his Cockney talk almost unintelligible, and at one point he actually said, "I ain't got no judgment" in response to a question about distances. (He would eventually commit suicide in 1965, though probably not over the Titanic; Tibballs, p. 516.) But he did say that he spotted the iceberg around 11:40 on the night of April 14 (Wade, pp. 166-167) {#5; contra #6, which gives the date as April 17, and Lomax's #3, which says April 13; #15 has the right date, but gives the time as an hour before the dawn}.
(Incidentally, Fleet wasn't the only person aboard to eventually kill himself; so did surviving passenger Jack Thayer, in 1945; Butler-Unsink, p. 231. And wireless operator Harold Bride retired from his job in 1913 and literally vanished; Butler-Unsink, p. 234, says that he assumed a new identity and no one knew where he went until decades after his death in 1956.)
Fleet called the bridge the moment he spotted the berg off the starboard bow. There was little time to react. What we know of the events comes mostly from helmsman Robert Hitchens -- not the most reliable witness; he ended up in command of Molly Brown's lifeboat, and his record in that job was of petty tyranny, lies, and panic; Lynch/Marschall, pp. 152-154, 161-163; in the end, White Star found him a job in South Africa, allegedly to silence him; Lynch/Marschall, p. 223)
According to Hitchens, First Officer Murdoch ordered the engines stopped and the ship turned to port. It was too late; moments later (Lord-Lives, p. 59, says 37 seconds later), the iceberg hit the Titanic on the starboard side (Wade, pp. 171-172; Ballard, pp. 20-21). A post-mortem found that Murdoch's actions, while they seemed the natural thing to do, in fact were unwise -- better a head-on collision, which would have destroyed the first few compartments but left the rest intact, than a glancing blow which opened many (Wade, pp. 182-183).
But many ships have hit icebergs and survived. Indeed, there hadn't been a major disaster on a passenger ship since the Atlanic wreck of 1873 (Butler-Unsink, p. 73; for background on that, see "The Loss of the Atlantic (I)"). Why did Titanic go down?
It is widely stated that the iceberg opened her front five (or even six) compartments. This has not, to my knowledge, ever been proved; all took on water, but it's not clear that anyone saw the leaks in all the compartments. What is certain is that it opened the fourth and fifth compartment, and at least two compartments before that. As the water rose, it went over those low bulkheads, and finally overcame the ship's buoyancy (Lord-Lives, p. 64).
In a way, it was lucky the ship stayed afloat as long as it did. The fifth compartment contained some of the boilers, which were of course running when water started coming in. Stokers had to work like mad in the rising waters to shut down the boilers and keep them from exploding (Lord-Night, pp. 19-21; Barczewski, p. 18).
Ballard's findings strongly support the hypothesis that the ship sank because the bulkheads between the allegedly-watertight sections were overtopped. The most notable finding was that Titanic snapped in two on her way down (diagrams in Ballard, pp. 204-205). The stern still had enough buoyancy to float when the bow wanted to sink, and the strain was too much for the ship's structure. The conclusion at the time, based on what testimony was available from belowdecks and the rate the ship filled, was that the iceberg had opened a gash about 250 feet long and less than an inch high on average (Lord-Lives, p. 64).
A modern guess is that the gash itself was not so big as was thought at the time, but that the impact caused the cold steel (which would be brittle) to pop rivets and start to weep water. This is supported by the fact that recovered hull samples have a high sulfur content, which would make the steel brittle and fracture-prone (Eaton/Haas, pp. 156-157, though they try to argue away the finding -- unsuccessfully, it seems to me). It wasn't a hole; it was a slow leak -- but a very large slow leak, or rather, a very large number of them (Ballard, pp. 196-197). It is also possible that the collision damaged the watertight bulkheads, so that compartments which were still watertight with respect to the ocean were not tight relative to the interior of the ship and could take in water from the compartments next to them; there was evidence of this in boiler room four (Lord-Lives, p. 65).
She picked a bad place to get hit, too. {#6} says she was off Newfoundland, {#4} claims the ship was only 90 (so McNeil's version) or 98 miles from shore (Randolph's version), but the 500 mile estimate in {#10, #16} is much closer; Titanic's broadcast distress call stated her position as 41 degrees 46 minutes north, 50 degrees 14 minutes west (Ballard, p. 22). This was Boxhall's dead reckoning fix (Lynch/Marschall, p. 108), but this may have involved as many as three errors: Boxhall may have assumed a higher speed than the ship actually managed (Butler-Other, p. 62, notes that her screws used a different pitch from Olympic's, on which Boxhall probably based his speed estimate); ignoring the local current (Eaton/Haas, p. 20); and failed to correct the chronometer for distance covered (Butler-Unsink, p. 242). Ballard, p. 199, moves the ship some 13.5 miles east southeast of her reported position.
But the error in the estimate hardly matters in reckoning her distance from land; in round numbers, she was 400 miles from the closest land at Cape Race {#13 -- which is from Newfoundland -- says she was heading for Cape Race, which is wrong, but she was communicating with Cape Race at the end; #15 accurately puts her 400 miles from Cape Race but gives the wrong distance to Boston}, 450 miles from St. John's (the nearest significant port), 800 miles from Halifax (the closest port truly suitable for large ships), and 1200 from her destination in New York. She was beyond the continental shelf, even though the shelf (the Grand Banks) extends unusually far out to sea in this area.
It would be some time before it was determined that the ship was in danger. The impact felt slight. Frederick Fleet, the man who spotted the berg, initially thought the ship had merely had a "narrow shave" (Wade, p. 173). (Hence, perhaps, the report in some versions of {#1} that the ship "began to reel and rock" at 1:00 on Monday, which would have been April 15. The impact was on Sunday, April 14, but evacuation began the next day. The April 15 date is also found in {#2}.)
There was no single source which reported the damage {contra #2, which credits "Bill" with reporting the problem}, although there is some uncertainty as to just who said what. Fourth Officer Boxhall was sent on an inspection tour (Butler-Unsink, p. 70), which revealed some water coming in. Carpenter Jim Hutchinson may have reported significant water below (Barczewski, p. 16, though Tibballs, p. 496, lists Hutchinson as a joiner, and Tibballs, p. 51, says that the carpenter, unnamed, who was sent to sound the ship never reported; Butler-Unsink, p. 70, and Lynch/Marschall, pp. 91-92, say that Hutchinson was sent to sound the ship, and came back reporting water below). A postal clerk probably reported at about the same time.
Soon the instruments showed a significant list. Butler-Unsink, p. 71, cites the testimony of Officer Boxhall, who reports that the commutator listed the ship as listing five degrees to the right and down two degrees at the head. This appears to have been what convinced Captain Smith that the ship was in trouble; Boxhall claims he muttered "Oh, my God" upon seeing that value.
The casualties might have been greater had not Thomas Andrews (1873-1912), the managing director of the shipyard that built Titanic, been aboard (he wanted to inspect her performance; Barczewski, p. 147). Captain Smith called on him to inspect the damage and estimate the situation (Butler-Unsink, p. 71). Andrews -- who seems to have been both a good people person and a highly competent engineer -- quickly realized the ship was doomed (Barczewski, p. 148; Butler-Unsink, pp. 71-72; Lord-Night, pp. 22-23, 26).
Smith, to his credit, accepted Andrews's estimate and started evacuation procedures, himself going to give instructions to the wireless crews (Lord-Night, p. 27). Andrews helped with the evacuation as best he could (Lynch/Marschall, p. 99), then was said to have gone to the first class smoking room; he reportedly was not wearing a lifebelt, and apparently had no intention of trying to save himself; his body was never found (Barczewski, p. 149).
But it is clear that there had been absolutely no planning for an evacuation. Passengers apparently weren't even told to get their lifejackets and go on deck; many of them went to the purser to reclaim their valuables, as if they were threatened with a stock market drop rather than a sinking ship (Lynch/Marschall, p. 99).
According to Wade, p. 144, the first wireless distress call went out 35 minutes after the collision -- just a few minutes too late; the wireless operator on the nearby Californian had gone to bed. (This may perhaps be the origin of the comment in some versions of {#1} that the wireless or wireless lines were on fire: Titanic was unable to communicate with the Californian. Or perhaps the reference is to Titanic's brush-off of Californian's earlier ice warning. I suspect, though, that the reference to the wireless being on fire is just an error.)
Incidentally, the wireless distress call is said to have been the first "SOS" call at sea {#9, #11}; at first, the operators send "CQD" messages, which were the original distress code. But "SOS" had been sent recently adopted as the emergency call -- it's much easier to transmit in Morse -- and eventually the operators decided to send that; Lord-Night, p. 52. The distress call went out not long after midnight {contra #9, which says it was "about the break of day," probably confusing the beginning of the day with daybreak}.
No one thought to send up rockets until a quartermaster at the stern of the ship noticed lifeboats leaving (he had not been told the ship was in danger!) and called the bridge. That aroused someone enough to order him to bring up the rockets (Lord-Night,p. 47). But, obviously, it took him some time to get them and bring them to the bridge of the big ship.
The statement in {#9} that the ship would "hold on to the last" does not appear to be based on an actual message from the Titanic; it sounds more like a message sent three years earlier when the Republic was sinking: "Ship's sinking, but will stick to the end" (Ritchie, p. 177). Still, many crew did stay on duty very late -- e.g. the engineers kept the lights on until just seconds before the final plunge, and senior wireless operator Jack Phillips stayed at his key even after Captain Smith told him that it was "every man for himself." The Virginian recorded a last faint "CQD" message at 2:17 (I'm not sure by whose clock; Butler-Other, p. 81, says that the Carpathia last heard a signal at 1:50, and it by then was the closest ship other than the Californian by a wide margin); that last signal was interrupted in mid-transmission (Butler-Other, p. 77). The ship is considered to have gone down at 2:20 (Butler-Other, p. 122). From then on, all that was left was the controversy.
Perhaps the biggest controversy came because survival rates for the different groups on board were very different. Because women and children were given priority {#3, #9, #11}, they of course had a higher survival rate than men -- but the first class men did almost as well as the third class women and children.
There were even two dogs rescued from first class (Lynch/Marschall, pp. 100-101). This being the era of the Filthy Rich, it was -- even more than today -- the era of the Completely Useless (and frequently disagreeable) Pet Dog. The Titanic had kennels, and even had crew members whose task was to walk the animals. In the early stages of the evacuation, when the boats were lowered half-empty, the two First Class Pooches were given spaces that could have gone to human beings. (Davenport-Hines, p. 174n., says that three dogs survived -- but since he lists 11 or 12 dogs belonging to first class passengers, their survival rate wasn't particularly high. Merely higher than that of, say, third class men.)
Much of the difference in casualty rates was due to the layout of the ship. The passengers in First Class were around the level of the boat deck, and were the first to reach the boats (the boats, absurdly, were at the very top of the ship, well above the main deck, which meant that there was less room for boats and that they were far above nearly every passenger on the ship).
As a result, 94% of first class women and children were saved (there is a table of casualty rates in Wade, p. 67, and a graph in Lord-Lives, p. 82). Only one first-class child went down with the ship, and that because she would not leave her mother, who in turn would not leave her husband; (Ballard, p 149; Lord-Lives, p. 83). Indeed, there was eventually a woman who turned up claiming to he a grown-up Loraine Allison, the little girl who was lost, but she was pretty clearly trying to get her hands on the money the child would have inherited had she lived (Lynch/Marshall, p. 214). Lord-Night, p. 105, notes that only four first class women died, and three of them decided to stay with their husbands. 31% of first class men were saved. In all, 60% of first class passengers survived.
Of second class passengers, 44% lived. In steerage, the figure was only 25% -- 47% of the women and 14% of the men. The survival rate for the crew was comparable to that for third class -- 24% (212 out of 890 crew members, according to Lord-Lives; note that {#15} says with fair accuracy there were 900 crew). Some initial news reports apparently claimed that no one in third class survived (Tibballs, p. 237).
It should be remembered that the third class passengers were physically blocked off from the upper decks due to quarantine regulations (steerage passengers were subjected to a physical examination before they could even board; Butler-Unsink, pp. 39-40), and in any case were many decks below the boats. (Hence the statement in {#1} that they "left the poor below.") And they had previously been strictly told to stay in their areas -- as more and more emigrants came from Eastern Europe, the steerage passengers came to be treated more and more as undesirables to be separated from the good Anglo-Saxons of the upper decks (Fox, pp. 330-331, who points out that steerage accommodations had actually gotten worse in the late nineteenth century, simply because steerage passengers were viewed as being of an "inferior race").
There were, in fact, only seven doors connecting third class to areas with access to boats (Butler-Unsink, p. 106), and of course the steerage passengers didn't know how to find those doors or get to anywhere useful if they did find them. And although they were not actually confined to their cabins at night, all the outside amenities shut down at 10:00 p.m. (Davenport-Hines, p. 272), so they had nowhere else to be.
Based on testimony from the survivors, they were not blocked from going to the boat deck (with some exceptions -- and of course there could have been major exceptions which simply weren't reported; see Wade, pp. 276-277, Lord-Lives, pp. 84-88). But the crew -- which obviously had to tell them what to do and guide them to the boats -- were mostly concentrated on the upper decks. By the time the third class passengers knew of the disaster and could reach the boat decks, the boats were mostly away -- one witness told of a great flood of third class passengers swarming the boat deck at the very end.
Butler-Unsink, p. 105, has perhaps the best summary: "[Steward John] Hart's efforts [which helped many female passengers escape the lower decks] underscored the fact that... there really was no deliberate policy of discrimination against Third Class. What there was, and what may have been all the more insidious by being purely unintentional, was that simply no policy or procedure for looking after the Third Class passengers existed.... Somewhere in the chain of command communications had broken down, and... when Captain Smith had given no specific instructions, Chief Officer Wilde seemed incapable of initiating any action himself. The other officers [who were lowering the boats] were already thoroughly occupied and had little time to spare for wondering about what or who the captain and chief officer might have overlooked."
This had an interesting side effect: although the rule was "women and children first," or where Second Officer Lightoller was in charge, "women and children only," because of the way passengers made their way to the boats -- or, rather, didn't -- the *number* of men to survive actually was larger than the number of women: 338 adult men, compared to 316 adult women, according to Lord-Lives, p. 82. The reason a higher percentage of women survived was because there were a lot more men than women aboard -- 1667 men, 425 women.
The male survivors even included J. Bruce Ismay, the man in charge of running White Star; he had crowded into a boat at the last minute. Widely blamed for causing the disaster -- after all, he had allowed the ship to go to sea without enough lifeboats or a trained crew -- he lived another 25 years, mostly as a recluse; Lord-Lives, pp. 180-181. (To be fair, the wreck was a disaster for him in many ways; not only did it damage his firm's reputation and his finances, it also cost him the life of the two personal employees who sailed with him; Matsen, p. 172. So if he was even nuttier after that than he had been before, little wonder.)
(Reading the histories, I don't think Ismay should be blamed for the disaster as such -- he didn't run the ship; Captain Smith did. Ismay did bear significant blame for the lack of boats, though, which at the very least demonstrates that he hadn't properly researched the ship's capabilities. Plus he was a busybody who did nothing but get in the way during the evacuation -- one of the officers had to force him away from the boats. And, on a more individual note, when the ship's musicians were subjected to a pay cut and harsher working conditions, he pretty well blew them off; Barczewski, p. 129. One of the female stewards reported being required to work seventeen hours a day; Davenport-Hines, p. 257. So my verdict is: Criminal, not guilty; Jerk, guilty.)
The Titanic myth of men standing aside to let the women live did create some problems for adult male survivors, many of whom felt pressure to justify their continued existence. Biel, pp. 28-29, notes how Lawrence Beesley, a second class male survivor, later tried to get a part in a Titanic movie so he could be seen going down with the ship this time. (He was denied the role of an extra because he wasn't a member of Actor's Equity. Ironic to note that his daughter-in-law would write One Hundred and One Dalmatians; Davenport-Hines, p. 206.)
One final observation on casualties: All numbers are slightly imprecise, because the lists of those aboard are slightly imperfect. (At least one man who was lost cannot ever be identified, because he went aboard using another man's stolen identification; Eaton/Haas, p. 72.) In round numbers, 1500 were lost {#9}. Lord-Night, p. 176, says that the American inquiry put the figure at 1517, the British Board of Trade came up with 1503, and the British Enquiry 1490. Lord-Night inclines toward the middle figure. The figure of 1600 in {#1, #4, #5, #7, #16} is certainly too high, though not by much. One suspects the songs citing this figure were composed very soon after the wreck, before the enquiries had sorted things out. The other possibility is that it refers to the number of people actually on the ship when the last boats pulled away, estimated by Lord-Lives (p. 2) to be 1600. But a few of these survived, being hauled out of the water by the boats.
For the most part, the evacuation was orderly. Women and children were put in the boats, and men generally accepted it. Still, it appears that a few shots were fired. The shots did not {contra #3} wake Captain Smith, who of course was awake to order the evacuation. The officers had pistols, and fifth officer Lowe at one point fired a few rounds to prevent a rush on the boat (Lord-Night, p. 75; Lord-Lives, p. 99). This ended the rush, and no one was hurt in the incident. First officer Murdoch may also have used his pistol (Lord-Lives, p. 100; cf. Lord-Night, p. 76), but again, he fired in the air. So at most one passenger was killed by an officer to prevent chaos, and even this is relatively ill-documented (Lord-Lives, pp. 101-102).
The real tragedy of the Titanic, of course, is that everyone could have been saved had there been enough lifeboats. British Board of Trade regulations said merely that any ship over 15,000 tons had to have at least sixteen lifeboats. And the regulations were enforced; Butler-Unsink, p. 38, tells of the officers getting very upset with the Board of Trade inspector because he was so thorough. Titanic in fact had twenty (counting the four collapsible lifeboats that were not on davits and so were much harder to lower; two in fact were on a roof near one of the funnels and almost inaccessible; Lord-Lives, p. 97) -- but she was 46,000 tons, or three times the size envisioned when the regulation was written.
Adding more lifeboats would not have been a great hardship. More boats would have added some weight, of course, but they did not need more space; Titanic's davits were designed to carry multiple boats. Only two boats were actually designed to be lowered and then raised again (Davenport-Hines, p. 278); the rest were true lifeboats. Had she been fitted with a suitable number of lifecraft, and had crew competent to lower them, there was time to get everyone off. But there were boats for only 1178 people (Lord-Lives, p. 72). It was fortunate, in a way, that the ship was only half full; had she carried her full complement of 3547, there would have been boat space for only a third of them.
Making the matter worse, the lifeboats that did go out weren't full. This was not callousness or over-excitement; the lifeboat officers were not certain that fully-loaded boats could survive the drop after being lowered the long distance from the Titanic's decks (Wade, pp. 132-133), or that the crew were competent to lower full boats. (There had been a recent incident where a lifeboat from the Oceana had overturned, killing nine passengers, so many people were afraid of the boats; Davenport-Hines, p. 279.) Plus, with the ship going down, they were trying to get every boat down before she was swamped -- meaning they didn't wait to bring in as many people as possible.
(The farce of the lifeboats may not have ended there. The boats were supposed to be equipped with oars, sails, and survival supplies. An eyewitness testified that most of these were lacking; Eaton/Haas, p. 36. It was fortunate that the sea was calm; if anyone had been thrown out of a boat, it might have been hard to rescue the lost person. And two of the "collapsible" boats were effectively useless, because they were in places from which they could not be lowered! -- Davenport/Hines, p. 279.)
So most of the boats that were sent off in the first hour or so were lowered half-empty -- and apparently no one ever considered using one or another boat as an elevator to send down more passengers. Toward the end, the officers were willing to put more people aboard, but with most of the passengers at the stern, there was no one around near the bow when the last boats at that end were lowered (Lord-Lives, pp. 94-95). As a result, about 400 seats in the boats that could have been filled instead were left empty.
That was not the end of the mishandling. Though the Titanic did not have enough boats, she did have enough lifebelts to keep everyone afloat -- if they were rescued quickly enough from the chill waters. In fact, a few people who did not make it off the sinking ship were rescued by the boats, though many of the boats rowed away from the wreck as fast as they were able (Wade, pp. 233-235; Lynch/Marschall, p. 129, claims that Captain Smith tried to call some of the half-full boats back, but I have not seen this claim elsewhere, and in any case, none of them obeyed).
We note that many bodies would eventually be discovered, still afloat in their lifebelts {#4}, carried northward by the current; most seem to have died of the cold (Wade, pp. 273-274; according to Lynch/Marschall, p. 176, one of the rescue ships found 17 bodies in the sea, and only one had water in the lungs, i.e. had drowned. The rest all died of hypothermia). Had more of the boats come to their rescue, it is probable that at least a few hundred more people would have survived.
When the song calls it a "cold and icy sea" {#6}, it was only the truth; the waters were at 28 degrees F, and Second Officer Lightoller, who spent time in the water before reaching an overturned lifeboat (he was one of a number of men who survived by swimming to Collapsible A or Collapsible B, the lifeboats that the officers were still trying to get down when the ship sank), said that it felt like being stabbed with "a thousand knives" when he went into the sea (Barczewski, p. 29; Lord-Night, p. 114). In several cases, it took only a few minutes to kill; Barczewski, on the same page, relates the testimony of several people who pulled passengers into the lifeboats only to find them already dead, or to watch them die even after they were pulled from the water. Even some people who were never in the water suffered severely from the cold (Eaton/Haas, p. 41).
A recovery ship called the MacKay-Bennett (chartered by White Star in one of their few recorded instances of voluntary compassion; Butler-Unsink, p. 199) brought in at least 306 bodies (Barczewski, p. 41), mostly unhurt except for sea and cold, and many more were seen by other ships (Wade, p. 274); 22 more bodies were brought in by other vessels (Barczewski, p. 42), some also charted by White Star (Eaton/Haas, pp. 99-100); the last body was picked in mid-May (Eaton/Haas, p. 105). Many recovered bodies went unidentified (Eaton/Haas, p. 105, says that 128 were buried without their names being known; Barczewski, p. 45, notes the case of a baby whose identity was not firmly established until DNA testing was used in 2002). Eaton/Haas, p. 105, calculates that 1314 bodies were never brought back to land.
Most of the grief could have been spared had another ship arrived quickly. And there was another ship in the vicinity, the freighter Californian. The Californian had been one of the ships sending ice warnings; she had halted for the night in the face of the ice barrier -- her commander Stanley Lord was still fairly new to command, and had not faced ice before. (He was only 34 years old, according to Eaton/Haas, p. 128. Butler-Other, p. 50, says that he had commanded his first ship in 1906, but he had not moved to the Californian until early 1912.)
Since the Californian was carrying freight only (there was some passenger space on the ship, but it was not occupied; the ship had been designed as a pure freighter, with the passenger space added as an afterthought late in her construction, according to Butler-Other, pp. 42-43), there was no real urgency about arriving at his destination (as witness the fact that the ship had sailed April 5, according to Eaton/Haas, p. 39). This was not a boat trying for a fast crossing -- though Butler-Other, p. 51, says that she had had a rough voyage the trip before and had to be hurried through the preparations for her current voyage. So Lord decided to sit tight (Butler-Unsink, p. 159).
The Californian's behavior inspired much controversy. Californian's crew certainly saw a second ship not far from them -- though most of the observers thought it too small to be the Titanic. (Butler-Other, p. 55, thinks this was because they saw it only under poor viewing conditions or after it had turned; Smithsonian, p. 37, offers a technical explanation -- "super refraction" -- for why the distances seemed off.) The Californian's crew saw a series of rockets fired, at times roughly corresponding to when the Titanic was sending off distress signals. They saw the ship to the south seemingly turn off most of its lights, and then disappear. These things happened soon after midnight. It was not until 4:00 a.m. that an officer really attempted to learn what was happening (Ritchie, pp. 32-33). The key questions are, Was this ship the Titanic, should the Californian have done something, and could it have done something had it tried?
According to Ballard's calculations, Californian was not more than 21 miles from where Titanic went down, and probably closer due to drift (Ballard, pp. 200-201, following the work of Jack Grimm; cf. Butler-Unsink, p. 243). Captain Lord would later give the distance as 17-19 miles (Ritchie, p. 33). Some estimates -- including Lord Mersey's official British inquiry (Ritchie, p. 33) -- have placed the two ships within five to ten miles of each other (Eaton/Haas, p. 151, though on p. 150 they argue for the 20 mile figure); Mersey had no doubt that the ship seen from the Titanic was the Californian (Mersey, p. 41 and elsewhere).
There is also suspicion that Californian's log was "cleaned up"; the official log has no record of seeing any rockets (although the accounts of the crew make it clear that she did) -- and the "scrap log," which usually contains information to be cross-checked before being entered into the official log, is missing for that time period, even though it is usually preserved (Butler-Unsink, pp. 243-244). Butler-Unsink, p. 244, argues that the course she was on would have left her south of her official position when stopped -- i.e. closer to the Titanic.
Butler-Other, p. 136, also notes the curious fact that Captain Lord had his officers swear out statements about the disaster even before they reached port, which he then locked in his safe. What's more, Lord would refer to his navigation data, which most captains made public, as "state secrets" (Butler-Other, p. 137).
At the heart of the problem was the fact that the Californian had only one wireless operator, who went off duty before the Titanic started sending distress signals. The officers of the Californian certainly saw Titanic's emergency rockets -- but ignored them until too late (Paine, p. 87). She didn't even have the excuse that she had to protect her passengers; since she was carrying only cargo (Lord-Lives, p. 134). Her inaction was at the instigation of her captain, Stanley Lord, who was trying to sleep and whose only response to the rockets was to tell his officers to try to contact the other ship by searchlight.
It's not clear why there was no response to the lights -- Lord's defenders often claim there was a third ship between the two of them and the Californian never saw the Titanic (Eaton/Haas, p. 127) -- but the ghost ship has never been identified (proposals have been made; none are convincing). From what I can tell, it sounds as if any ghost ship in that spot would have crashed straight into the ice barrier, so it is most unlikely that there was such a ship. The likely explanation for the lack of response to the Morse lamp is that the officers of the Titanic had other things on their minds than sending lamp signals. Titanic's wireless operators could stay at their posts; they had no other duties -- but the ship's officers were busy evacuating. (Fourth officer Boxhall had tried signaling the mystery ship; according to Lynch/Marschall, p. 109, Captain Smith's words were "Tell him to come at once. We are sinking" -- the exact words quoted in {#9}, though they are there credited to the wireless officers.)
Butler, p. 156, notes an interesting argument made by a hydrographer at the time, which said that the maximum distance at which Titanic could see a ship on the horizon at night was 16 miles, and the maximum distance her boats could see one was seven miles. Since the Californian, based on stated positions, was certainly more than seven miles away, and probably more than 16, and since Titanic and Californian both unquestionably saw a ship, then either the two were closer together than Captain Lord claimed or there was a ship between the two. This, of course, was the heart of the argument.
Captain Smith did order the boats to head for the ship on the horizon, which by every reckoning but Captain Lord's was the Californian (Barczewski, p. 168), but she was too far away for the disorganized rowers to reach in any reasonable time. (None of the Titanic's boats were powered. They had sails -- or at least they were supposed to, though they may have been among the emergency stores not packed -- but only a couple of sailors on the Titanic knew how to sail a boat, so that was no help.)
Stanley Lord claimed that the Titanic was too far away to reach in time (Eaton/Haas, p. 129). But Californian had a top speed of 13.5 knots (Paine, p. 87; Eaton/Haas, p. 44). If he had reacted as strongly as the Carpathia, he would certainly have arrived at least half an hour before the Titanic went down (that based on the ships' official positions; it would have been sooner if, as suspected, the two ships were closer together than the Californian's official position indicated), allowing for much more complete rescue efforts. Condemnation of Californian's skipper Stanley Lord has not been universal -- Butler-Unsink, p. 241, notes that some maritime unions have a strong interest in not having him condemned -- but it is widespread; if the Californian was the mystery ship, there can be little doubt that Lord's behavior caused hundreds of avoidable deaths.
It is ironic to note that the Californian was owned by the Leyland Line, which was owned by International Merchant Marine, which also owned White Star and the Titanic (Butler-Other, p. 44). It was IMM, in fact, which had put the passenger space on Californian.
Of the books I have read, only Lynch/Marschall and Eaton/Haas can be considered Lordite; on pp. 190-191, the former argues, first, that the Californian's reported position and the Titanic's actual position were too far apart to allow easy visual contact; second, that it took the Californian two hours to reach the Titanic's death site (so also Eaton/Haas, p. 44, but they note that she initially steamed at a mere six knots), so she couldn't have gotten there quickly even had she responded to the pleas; third, that there may have been a third ship (this would be the alternate explanation for why witnesses on the Titanic thought that there was a moving ship within five or six miles of them -- Eaton/Haas, p. 37); fourth, that many on the Californian did not think the ship was big enough to be the Titanic, fifth, that the witnesses on both ships thought the other ship was moving even though both were stopped.
The first objection is meaningless, since it is based on one actual and one estimated position; the second is also meaningless, because the Californian headed for the reported position, not the actual position (when the Carpathia and the Californian actually rendezvoused, it was at 41 degrees 33' N, 50 degrees 01' W, or about 15 nautical miles from where the Titanic broadcast as the site of the disaster); the third is vitiated by the fact that, if there had been a third ship, the Carpathia or the Mount Temple should have seen it (Butler-Other, p. 158), and never did, and no ship is logged as being in the area; the fourth may have been an illusion of distance; and the fifth may also have been an illusion, or it may have been caused by the drift of the two vessels, which would have responded to ocean currents differently.
Butler-Other, pp. 171-176, describes Lord's testimony before the British investigatory tribunal; it is confusing and sounds like the account of a man trying to cover his guilt. On the other hand, he was being badgered by several questioners about events which happened in the middle of the night. I would allow the possibility that he simply didn't remember that well.
But not one of these objections in any way overcomes the basic flaw in the Lordite position: That Captain Lord saw distress rockets and ignored them. We don't know if Lord could have helped the Titanic. We *do* know that he ignored an obvious cry for help.
Ritchie, p. 33, notes that the bad publicity forced Captain Lord to quit the Leyland Line. He found another job, but it was with the Nitrate Producers Steamship Company, which cannot have been as prestigious. His record there is said to be unblemished.
We should stress: Stanley Lord was not guilty of murder. He did not know what was happening. Even if he had responded immediately to the first distress rocket, he might not have been able to reach Titanic in time to save everyone (Butler-Other, pp. 191-194, attempts to calculate what Californian could have done had she responded at once, and estimates that he might have saved 300 more lives. I would consider this number somewhat low, because the evacuation of Titanic might have been more orderly had there been word that a ship would arrive soon. But Butler is likely right that some would still have died). And if he had known with certainty that a ship was sinking near him, he would have surely done more than he did.
To repeat: All authorities agree Lord is innocent of deliberate murder. What he is guilty of is negligence and indifference. And, to be fair, his junior officers must bear part of the blame. To give Lord his due, he had gone to bed before the distress calls started. The junior officers made very little effort to wake him (Eaton/Haas, p. 151). There is certainly plenty of blame to spread among the Californian's officers.
Still, Butler-Unsink, pp. 191-194, 241-245, accuses Stanley Lord of terrorizing his officers until they couldn't act without his permission. Butler-Other, p. 199, offers as his verdict that "circumstances unconsciously conspired to reveal that Stanley Lord was a man without conscience: Stanley Lord was a sociopath." I do not think Butler proves this -- he says he consulted experts, and even lists them on p. 243 -- but he doesn't give details of their analysis, or of what information they used to reach their conclusions. Nor would I wish to trust a therapist who would reach such a posthumous conclusion. I'm not sure a diagnosis at this distance is even meaningful. Still, it would explain a lot.
However, the diagnosis is very problematic, because "sociopath" is not even a proper clinical term these days (it's not even mentioned in the index to the DSM-IV-TR); those who were once deemed sociopaths and psychopaths are now a considered a subset of those who suffer Antisocial Personality Disorder (although there are those who argue vehemently that psychopathy, at least, is a distinct condition). And Lord does not seem to fit that diagnosis. The DSM-IV-TR criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder (p. 706) require that the person have shown signs of Conduct Disorder before age 15, and the only sign of this in the discussion of his life on p. 47 of Butler-Other is "willfulness."
As an adult, someone with Antisocial Personality Disorder must meet at least four of seven criteria. Butler would certainly argue that Lord met criterion (5), "reckless disregard for safety of self or others," and also criterion (7), "lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another." But that is only two criteria, and it appears to me that he certainly does not meet (1), "failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors," (3) "impulsivity or failure to plan ahead" (Butler-Other, p. 54, shows just how Lord managed everything in nitpicky detail; he showed no impulsivity at all); (4) "irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults" (Lord was irritable, but he didn't get into fights!); and (6), "consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations." The whole reason Lord had command of a ship was his demonstrated responsibility!
So Lord was not, clinically at least, a sociopath; if I had to assign a diagnosis, I'd be much more tempted by Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which requires five traits (DSM-IV-TR, p. 717), of which Lord had (1), "a grandiose sense of self-importance," probably (5), "a sense of entitlement," (6), "is interpersonally exploitative," (7), "lacks empathy," and (9), "shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes." He also shows hints of some of the other criteria.
It should be remembered that Lord was called upon to make his choice in the middle of the night. He might simply have made a mistake because he was tired -- if he had been as alert a sociopath as Butler would make him, he would likely have gone to rescue the Titanic for the fame it would bring him. His real faults were that he intimidated his officers so much that they did not dare push him, and he never admitted his error. These failings are both consistent with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. But this too is diagnosis at a distance; it's merely a diagnosis that actually fits....
Whatever Lord's mental state, The Lordite controversy is covered in detail in almost every book on the Titanic; see e.g. Barczewski, p. 35 and after; Lord-Lives, p. 135ffff.; Eaton/Haas, pp. 150-152; Ritchie, pp. 31-34; it is the primary subject of Butler-Other. Nonetheless, it seems not to have been mentioned much in the songs, perhaps because the Californian did not show up in the news stories until some time after the disaster.
Not every ship and captain was so inert. Captain Arthur Roston of the Carpathia heard the distress call, and at once turned ship {#9, #11; cf. #15, which implies that people on the ship were awaiting the Carpathia specifically, which surely isn't true}. His was by far the most decisive and effective action of the night. Unfortunately, his ship was roughly 60 miles from the Titanic, and the Carpathia, though only nine years old, had a normal top speed of just 14 knots (Paine, p. 96 Butler-Other, pp. 22-23, notes that she was not really intended to be a liner in the usual sense -- as built, she had large cargo holds and no first-class accommodations at all, just second class and steerage. In 1905, according to Butler-Other, p. 26, she was rebuilt to take first class passengers, and her third class space was expanded at the expense of the cargo space, but of course she was stuck with her old engines.)
Captain Roston and crew gave it everything they had, and supposedly got Carpathia going at 17 knots (Lord-Night, p. 141, though others have argued that she could not possibly have gotten above 16 knots; Butler-Other, p. 70. Since the ship never went that speed at any other time, we really cannot know). Despite her efforts, it took her some three and a half hours to reach the site of the Titanic, meaning that the larger liner had gone down about an hour before. Carpathia rescued such survivors as she could find, taking the first survivors aboard at 4:10 (Butler-Other, p. 105) and reaching the last boat at 8:30 (or about six hours after Titanic sank); by then of course the only survivors were those who had been in the boats. Indeed, some even of those pulled from the water by the boats had died; the cold and the shock (and, in a few cases, the effort of keeping a half-flooded boat afloat) proved too much.
After picking up every survivor, Captain Roston turned his ship about. Her destination was Europe, but he knew he had to get the survivors to land quickly. The only question was whether to head for New York (the passengers' intended destination) or Halifax (the nearest major port). After some consideration, he headed for New York {#11} (Lord-Night, pp. 160-161). It was to prove a difficult trip, both because of the crowding and because storms made some passengers fear that the Carpathia too was in danger (Lynch/Marschall, p. 163).
Lord-Night, pp. 189-209, gives the official passenger list, with those lost and saved, though he notes (Lord-Lives, pp. 36-38) that there were some errors in the list. Tibballs, pp. 483-506, gives a list which includes the crew, though some are miscategorized. Many books list only the "celebrity" passengers -- e.g. the very wealthy Isidor and Ida Strauss (just two of several millionaires {#6}), and American President Taft's advisor Archie Butt. (Several others big names booked passage but did not actually sail. J. P. Morgan, who ultimately owned the ship, was too ill to sail. Alfred W. Vanderbilt changed his mind so late that there wasn't even time to get his luggage off the ship; Ballard, p. 14; according to Eaton/Haas, p. 73, a servant stayed with the baggage and was lost with the ship. Some of Morgan's amazing antiquities collection was also supposed to go with the ship; by sheer luck, it didn't; Davenport-Hines, p. 13)
The Strausses are mentioned in the Cowboy Loye version of {#16}; they were an "elderly philanthropist" and his wife (Lord-Lives, p. 35) who owned the Macy's department store (Ballard, p. 14). They reached the deck early on, but Isador Strauss, being a man, was denied a place in the lifeboats (Butler-Unsink, p. 109, and Eaton/Haas, p. 26, in fact say that he refused to enter a boat when given a chance). His wife could have left, but she declared that she would share his fate ("We have been living together for many years; where you go, I go"), went back aboard the ship, and of course died in the wreck (Wade, p. 61 -- a story that came out in the American hearings).
But if Ida Strauss gets the award for Most Romantic Gesture, no passenger was given more publicity than John Jacob Astor (1864-1912) {#5; probably the "Jacob Nash" of Lomax's #3}. He was probably the richest man aboard, though he had inherited rather than earned most of the money. He kept 18 automobiles, and had raised a regiment for the Spanish-American War, allowing him to take the title of Colonel (Barczewski, p. 58), even though he had no military training (and probably less aptitude, except for the mercilessness that came from his financial background).
As the boats went off, Astor apparently asked if he could go aboard with his (much younger trophy) wife, who was pregnant. (No, they didn't have the phrase "trophy wife" in 1912, but they had the idea, and Astor was largely cast out of society; Barczewski, p. 58.
Barczewski adds that the girl was visibly pregnant even though they had been married only four months. It is perhaps revealing that Madeleine Force Astor would remarry in 1918 even though it meant giving up about seven million dollars in money from a prenuptial agreement. (Astor doesn't seem to have had much taste in women; his first wife was very beautiful but completely incompatible with him; they had little to do with each other although they didn't get divorced until after Astor's mother died; Davenport-Hines, p. 163.
The flip side is, at least Astor married his New Cookie; other rich men pretended to be faithful and took mistresses. Benjamin Guggenheim, another of the ultra-rich passengers, had left his wife in New York to travel with his girlfriend; Butler-Unsink, p. 28.
Second officer Lightoller, who survived but only by swimming to a boat, flatly refused Astor's request to join her in the boat (Barczewski, p. 25).
Astor allowed her to go in the boat without him, but said that he would meet her in the morning (Barczewski, p. 60); either he expected the ship to survive (unlikely by then) or he expected to find another boat.
Quite a few legends arose about Astor immediately after the wreck, generally very positive {#5 says "all the women he tried to save"}; Biel, p. 41, reports an account in which he is credited with saying "Not a man until every woman and child is safe in the boats." Not one of these accounts is from from an actual beneficiary of his kindness, or even a reliable witness; all were reports of people who claimed they saw something he did (Barczewski, p. 63); we cannot in any instance prove that Astor was actually the man involved.
(This "men stepped aside" legend is found, e.g., in {#4};Biel, pp. 23-25, documents that this arose in the first hours after the sinking, before any of the survivors had told their tale; the stories weren't exactly false, but it was the ship's officers, not the passengers, who controlled access to the boats, and in the end, many men did survive.)
Astor's body was one of those found by the MacKay-Bennett; it was in very bad shape, but he could be identified by the monograms on his clothing (Barczewski, p. 40). Lord-Lives, p. 172, observes that the Astor family did not even file any claims for damages over his death -- something that obviously would not have happened in today's litigious society.
There were, to be sure, lawsuits filed -- a lot of them, totaling about $16 million. This led to interesting problems in dealing with British and American law (after all, it was a British ship owned by an American conglomerate.) In the end, White Star paid out $664,000 (Lord-Lives, pp. 172-177).
The fate of Captain Smith, mentioned in folklore, is in fact uncertain, except that he definitely did not survive. Wade, p. 58, and Barczewski, pp. 169-171 list several reports, from suicide to rescuing other passengers at the expense of his life. (Barczewski suggests that most of the more heroic stories stemmed from some deep British urge to make him look good, and reports on p. 172 that those responsible for building his memorial were mostly passengers who had enjoyed sailing with him on other vessels.)
Butler-Unsink, pp. 251-252, examines his decisions in the ship's last hours, and (with the concurrence of a psychologist) suggests that the mental blow was so strong that he largely lost the power of decision -- we might informally say that he was in shock. (Lynch/Marschall, p. 137, says he "seemed almost in a daze, a strangely passive figure.") If so, he probably didn't do anything especially noteworthy in the last moments of the ship's life.
(Incidentally I can't help but note that Smith doesn't seem to have been the only one. There was little panic on the Titanic -- but very little ingenuity once Andrews gave the bad news. Did the engineers try to rig more pumps to lengthen the ship's life? Seemingly not. Did the carpenter use the wood furnishings to try to make coracles or something to keep a few more people afloat? There is no evidence of it, though we do hear of a baker throwing deck chairs overboard in hopes people could cling to them; Lynch/Marschall, p. 134. Did anyone counterflood, to try to keep the water from overtopping the forward bulkheads? Certainly not. The sinking ship saw much heroism and very little intelligence.)
The likeliest scenario is that Smith went into the water with so many other passengers (so, e.g., explicitly Lynch/Marschall, p. 137), and -- like them -- died of exposure. It was probably an easier death than that suffered by the engineers and stokers in the lower parts of the ship, who stayed down there to keep the electricity going; they would have asphyxiated or drowned or both.
Smith somehow became a hero -- legend had it that one of his last orders was, "Be British!" In other words "Keep a stiff upper lip (even though you're about to die an agonizing death)"; it became a legendary command and inspired various poems and non-folk songs.
There is some irony in noting that the memorial to Smith cites his "great heart," "brave life," and "heroic death" (the last of which, as noted, cannot be proved) -- but does not include the name of the Titanic (Barczewski, p. 180).
First officer Murdoch, the officer on watch when the ship hit the berg, also had various ends ascribed to him, including suicide (Barczewski, p. 193). Apparently Hollywood threw in some even worse charges (Barczewski, p. 199). But the best evidence is that he simply ended up in the water like everyone else, and the citizens of his home town eventually won an apology, including some cash, from the studio (Barczewski, p. 198, 202).
Surviving officers such as Lightoller, however, found their careers blighted. Wade seems to think that Lightoller was evasive before the investigating committees, and similarly Matsen, pp. 204-205, but Lord considers him a decisive and capable officer, noting that he served in the Royal Navy in World War I and, as an old man, took his private boat to assist in the evacuation of Dunkirk. He also had a compelling life story, having lost his mother as an infant and then having his father leave the country (Davenport-Hines, p. 79); he had spent most of his life at sea. But he was never given a ship to command (Lord-Lives, pp. 192-193). The junior officers did no better, even though they surely could not be blamed for the outcome.
The survivor who earned the most publicity (other than Ismay) was probably "Unsinkable" Molly Brown: Margaret Tobin Brown, 1867-1932. Born poor, her husband, a mining supervisor, discovered gold in the Little Johnny Mine (Barczewski, p. 85). Molly, suddenly rich, then became active in a variety of social causes -- and became a world traveller after she and her husband drifted apart. (According to Davenport-Hines, p. 166, her husband's temper had changed after he suffered a stroke, and they legally separated in 1909.) She was in Europe when her grandson became ill, so she hurried back to the United States on the Titanic (Barczewski, p. 86). When the ship hit the iceberg, she gathered some of her things (fortunately not all; no spartan, she abandoned 25 gowns, 14 hats, and 13 pairs of shoes purchased in Paris; Barczewski, p. 87).
Hustled into a lifeboat, she distributed some of the seven pairs of socks she was wearing to those who had come aboard less well-supplied (Barczewski, p. 89), and also tried to convince the quartermaster in charge of the boat to rescue those left behind. If the account in Barczewski, pp. 88-89, is even vaguely correct, his was one of the most despicable stories on that night; he refused to go back, and refused even to hand over the tiller, instead leaving it to the middle-aged Brown and one other woman to row.
Aboard the Carpathia, Brown tried to send out messages on behalf of poorer passengers who could not pay for wireless messages (Barczewski, p. 90). She also tried to comfort some of the grieving survivors (her skill in several languages helped), and set up a subscription to make up for their losses. It added up to a legend -- which was confirmed in 1925, when she survived a hotel fire and helped others escape the building (Barczewski, p. 92). But Barczewski says that the popular accounts which made her legendary were largely fictionalized.
Brown was active in relief causes in World War I, but after that fell into quarrels with her children and grandchildren, and her money dried up after her husband died in 1922 (Barczewski, p. 91)
There was one small consolation out of the Titanic wreck: The British and Americans toughened regulations for liners. They had to have enough lifeboats, the crew had to know how to deal with them, they had to have full-time wireless officers, etc. (Wade, pp. 302-303). These would not prevent future disasters, as the Lusitania would demonstrate just over three years later, but they made them less inherently deadly -- the loss of life on the Lusitania was mostly because she sank in twenty minutes. Had she stayed afloat for more than two hours, as the Titanic did, nearly everyone aboard would have survived.
Wade, p. 318, notes the additional irony that this disaster did not strike one much-oppressed community: There were few Blacks aboard the ship as she sank -- Biel, p. 112, says none; Daveport-Hines, p. 200, says there was one, a Joseph Laroche, a Haitian who had been living in France but was returning to Haiti because of racism. A second class passenger, he did not survive, although it appears his family did. Of course, this eliminates the whole plot of "Shine and the Titanic" {contra #14}.
That's just as well for Shine, given the report in the song that Captain Smith's daughter offered him her body if he would rescue her. Smith had only one child, a daughter, Helen Melville Smith -- and she was still just a girl, born in 1902 (Barczewski, p. 163); imagine what would have happened had Shine so much as touched a child that age! In any case, her name isn't in the passenger list in Lord-Night, and she was alive to dedicate a memorial to Smith in 1914 (Barczewski, p. 179).
"Shine and the Titanic" is also ruled out by the fact that Shine could not have swum to safety; the water, as noted, was just too cold.
Racism also tinged the stories about the people who tried to rush the boats; they were usually labelled Asian or Italian or otherwise less than Anglo-Saxon. There is absolutely no evidence for this, and much reason to think it false (Barczewski, pp. 55-56). There is one documented instance of a crewman trying to steal another crewman's life vest; since there were no Blacks aboard, he cannot have been Black, and in fact the surviving witnesses never said he was -- but one press report calls him a Negro (Biel, pp. 50-51). (There was at least one Japanese man, Masabumi Hosono, in second class, according to Davenport-Hines, p. 200. He did survive, but I find no charges against him specifically. Incidentally, Blacks weren't the only subject of prejudice; the Slavs of eastern Europe also suffered from discrimination and segregation, according to Davenport-Hines, p. 226, although it wasn't quite as severe. But the liners tried to see to it that they boarded at only a few ports.)
The story of boxer Jack Johnson is more complicated; it appears that Leadbelly's song on the topic ({#8}: "Jack Johnson want to get on board, Captain said, "I ain't haulin' no coal") conflates two incidents. Lyle Lofgren tells me that Johnson was in Chicago at the time Titanic sank, but according to Barczewski, p. 64, Johnson was refused passage on a liner due to his skin color on another occasion. This was not a new problem. Cunard in the 1840s twice carried Frederick Douglass across the Atlantic, but on one occasion forced him to stay in steerage rather than among the first class passengers; on the other, it gave him a cabin but refused to let him mingle with the passengers (Fox, p. 200).
According to Lord-Lives, p. 8, no books on the Titanic were published from 1913 to 1955. In the publishing business, A Night to Remember started a Titanic boom (Biel, p. 149, calls the 1955 publication of A Night to Remember the biggest date in Titanic history other than 1912 itself.). But the songs on the subject hardly stopped -- indeed, some time around 1970, they taught us a comic parody of {#1} ("Oh, they built another ship Called the S.S. 92... And they christened it with beer, and it sank right off the pier, Wasn't it sad when that great ship went down") in elementary school. Ironically for the parody, the Titanic was never formally christened (Lord-Lives, p. 11).
In the late twentieth century, of course, the movie "Titanic" was released. I have not seen it, but the reports I've read (e.g. in Barczewski) say that it contains many historical inaccuracies. Perhaps it will be starting a new round of Titanic folklore.
Another irony is the effort which White Star went to to suppress the memory of the ship -- which obviously failed. After Carpathia dropped off the lifeboats at White Star's dock in New York, White Star stripped off all identifying markings; we don't even know what became of the boats (Lynch/Marschall, pp. 166-168; Easton/Haas, p. 49, thinks they were stripped by souvenir hunters and then rotted away at the dock; Butler-Other, in the photographs section, thinks they were used on other White Star ships, but of course without anyone knowing where they came from). They would probably be worth millions today.
Which brings us to one of the most vexed of all questions about the Titanic: What the band played on that last night.
There are a lot of misconceptions about the performance that night. For starters, the musicians were not a band as properly so understood -- they did not have a brass section. Their instruments were strings and piano.
In fact, the eight performers weren't even a group in the usual sense. They rarely if ever played together as an eight-piece ensemble (Lord-Lives, pp. 96-97). The musicians consisted of a string quartet with piano (the primary group, led by newly-engaged violinist Wallace Hartley, which played the main evening concerts and Sunday religious services), and a violin/'cello/piano trio which played mostly at receptions and in the cafes (Barczewski, pp. 130-131). They can't have been very loud (especially away from a piano), and in an emergency situation, with the ship listing and sheet music not usable, they would have to rely on things everyone knew -- and even for that, they might not have parts properly assigned. (Eaton/Haas, p. 94, claims they had all 352 pieces in the White Star music collection memorized. This is patently absurd, though presumably they could play them all.)
Incidentally, they played for tips (Davenport-Hines, p. 258), which tells you how poor their regular pay was.
I can't help but note the irony that two of them had been lured away from the Carpathia to serve on the Titanic (Lord-Night, p. 44). Though Butler-Unsink, p. 122, reports that Hartley was once asked what he would do on a sinking ship, and he had answered, "I would gather the band together and begin playing."
We don't even know how long they played (Lord-Lives, pp. 107-108). Going down with the ship was not part of their job. Although musicians on German ships actually doubled as ship's stewards (Brinnin, p. 312; this had the ironic effect that German ships, unlike English, *did* play "Nearer My God to Thee" on Sundays), English ships employed specialist musicians who were not formally employees of White Star. (In fact, White Star's passenger list shows them as second class passengers.) Shortly before the Titanic voyage, White Star had started contracting with an agent to supply musicians. The hiring agents booked most of the same musicians the liner companies had always employed -- but inflicted a large pay cut on them and used the difference to make their profits (Lord-Lives, pp. 114-116). White Star refused even to pay death benefits to the musicians (Lord-Lives, p. 117). However long they played, it was above and beyond the call of duty. In the end, all eight of them went down with the ship (Ballard, p. 24 -- a page which also shows a poster for the band).
Whether the musicians made attempts to save themselves cannot be known; some passengers stated that they quit playing about half an hour before the ship sank (Barczewski, p. 132) -- perhaps when the last boats left? But it is touching to quote the remark of Steward Edward Brown, who, when asked when they ceased playing, said "I do not remember hearing them stop" (Lord-Lives, p. 108). Hence, perhaps, the statement that the music "played as they went down" {#9}.
In a minor folkloric touch, Hartley's body was recovered; the face was almost beyond recognition, but he still was wearing his uniform, and his violin case was on his back, allowing identification (Barczewski , p. 139); he was buried in his home town of Colne (which he had left 17 years before) in a rosewood casket (Lord-Lives, p. 118).
Interestingly, though most reports say the musicians played either hymns or ragtime on that last night, neither was the Hartley quintet's specialty; their primary clientele was the first class passengers (worth, according to Barczewski, over $500 million in 1912 dollars!), who apparently preferred classical music -- on the night the boat went down, the evening concert included Wagner, Dvorak, and Puccini, according to Lord-Lives, pp. 43-44. Apparently some of the listeners felt the band not quite up to the task (Lord-Lives, p. 43) -- but imagine five musicians trying to play Wagner!
We might add that ship's bands of this period played largely for charity (Preston, p. 141) -- though it seems that few passengers were particularly generous.
When the ship hit the iceberg, Captain Smith apparently roused the musicians to play during the evacuation (Barczewski, p. 132). At first, they seem to have played in the first class lounge; later, they moved toward the boats (though the piano players would have been unable to play on the boat deck itself, and without the piano the group would have been quiet indeed. Perhaps -- personal speculation only -- one of the piano players took over conducting, to try to keep the group together without the piano playing rhythm?).
As for what they played, most reports agree that the band started out by playing ragtime tunes (or at least "Alexander's Ragtime Band," which had been a big hit the year before but which critics have indignantly charged isn't ragtime), mixed with other light pieces (Lord-Lives, p. 109). Butler-Unsink, p. 91, apparently based on the report of Lawrence Beesley, mentions "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "Great Big Beautiful Doll," "Can't You Hear Me Caroline," "A Little Love, A Little Kiss," and "Moonlight Bay."
According to Wade, pp. 61-62, it was a Mrs. Vera Dick who started one of the most enduring false stories. She was the one who reported that the band played "Nearer, My God, to Thee" as the ship went down {#1, #2, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #16}. Obviously, if she had been near enough to hear the band, she would have been sucked down with it; Lord-Lives, p. 109, says she was at least a quarter of a mile away. Of course, one newspaper account claimed that the sound of the hymn continued *after* the ship sank! (Barczewski, p. 137).
Lord also observes that "Nearer, My God, To Thee" has different tunes in Britain and America -- yet passengers from both sides of the ocean claim to have heard it played. Odds are that someone, probably Mrs. Dick, started the story, and it sounded so appropriate that people thought they remembered it. Or maybe it was a transferred memory from the memorial services; "Nearer, My God, To Thee" *was* played at some of the funerals (Barczewski, p. 44), including Hartley's (Barczewski, p. 139, though Eaton/Haas, p. 32, says that the tune used at Hartley's burial was "Proprior Deo," which few would have known as "Nearer, My God, to Thee").
The single most reliable account is that from junior wireless operator Harold Bride: "The water was then coming into our cabin. From aft came the tunes of the band. It was a ragtime tune. I don't know what. Then there was 'Autumn.' Phillips [the senior wireless operator] ran aft, and that was the last I ever saw of him alive" (Tibballs, p. 97; cf. Wade, p. 63).
This statement has frequently been taken to refer to the lively hymn "Autumn." "Autumn" was considered extremely appropriate, since it contains the line "Hold me up in mighty waters." But Lord-Lives, p. 110, offers very strong evidence against this suggestion; it is unlikely the band knew it or that passengers would recognize it. Lord-Lives, p. 112, suggests that Bride's reference was in fact to Archibald Joyce's "Songe d'Autumne," popular in 1912. We cannot possibly know; the evidence is too thin. But at least this piece is a reasonable suggestion, unlike "Nearer, My God, to Thee." Eaton/Haas, p. 32, mention a suggestion by Gavin Bryars that Bride actually said "Aughton," and was misquoted.
Still, there are authorities who stand by "Nearer, My God, to Thee" -- e.g. Butler-Unsink, p. 131, and tentatively Eaton/Haas, p. 32. I have to think this is wishful thinking; though Butler-Unsink addresses the counter-claim for "Autumn," he does not acknowledge the various problems with the claim for "Nearer...."
(It is ironic to note that the sinking does seem to have inspired a publishing boomlet -- Lycnh/Marschall, p. 213, shows three editions of "Nearer, My God, to Thee" with the Titanic on the cover.)
(I will add a minor speculation of my own here. Tibballs, p. 320, prints a report that a single violinist played "Nearer..." "[a]fter all his fellow musicians had been washed away." Speaking only for myself, if I were in a situation where I knew death was coming soon, I'd haul out one or another instrument and start playing -- it would be the best distraction and farewell I can think of. And Butler-Unsink, p. 57, says that there were many musicians among the third class passengers, who staged their own dances along the way. We also have tales of hymn-sings and such; Lynch/Marschall, p. 77. Could it be that one of the passengers played "Nearer..."?)
The report Tibballs cites (from the Western Daily Mercury) was an extensive one, printed two weeks after the accident, and it seems to have contained nearly every inaccuracy contained in the Titanic songs:
A. That Murdoch shot himself (pp. 320, 326, 333 in the Tibballs reprint)
B. "Explosions" (pp. 320, 325, 326, 328, 335; an exploding boiler is mentioned in Bessie Jones's version of {#3}, but in fact the Titanic crew shut down the boilers early to prevent an explosion, and Ballard saw no evidence of any such thing; if there were explosions, they were simply of compressed air and probably occurred far below the surface). To be charitable, the process of shutting down the boilers did involve venting steam, which was a noisy process (it even made it hard for the wireless operators to work; Lynch/Marschall, p. 108) which someone might have interpreted as an explosion. Or, perhaps, a passenger below-decks might have heard the launching of the distress rockets and thought that was an explosion (cf. the description of the sound in Butler-Unsink, pp. 97-98; Lynch/Marschall, p. 99, calls it an unearthly roar which forced passengers to shout in order to be heard over the sound.)
C. An attempt to cross the ocean in "record time" (p. 324; cf. {#7}), when the Titanic had no chance whatsoever to cross faster than the Mauretania's record
D. Sundry claims to have been on "the last boat" (p. 324), when in fact the last boat was Lightoller's, which hadn't even been launched when the water rolled over it, and its passengers are well known
E. A claim that Titanic's "plates were ripped open from a dozen feet in from the bow to the second funnel" (p. 327) or "from the forecastle to the bridge (p. 335), which of course would have sunk her much faster
F. Two "Italians" trying to rush the boats; one "Dago" (yes, that was the word used, which will tell you the quality of this particular report) had to be shot (pp. 329, 338)
G. Plus, of course, several stories of the "last musician" (pp. 320, 326)
Even if no one played "Nearer, My God, to Thee," there was at least one hymn directly associated with the sinking: Philip Paul Bliss's "Pull for the Shore." This was sung aboard one of the lifeboats as they rowed away from the scene of the wreck (Wade, p. 236). There was bitter logic in the words:
Pull for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore!
Heed not the rolling waves, but bend to the oar;
Safe in the life boat, sailor, cling to self no more!
Leave the poor old stranded wreck, and pull for the shore.
Harland & Wolff, which built the Titanic, continued to prosper into the Twenties, but the partition of Ireland and the decline of the shipping fleet cost it much business. From a peak in the tens of thousands of employees, it now has only a few hundred (one of the biggest factors in the decline of the Belfast economy), and is now Norwegian-owned; the land on which Titanic was built was sold off in 2003 (Barczewski, p. 245).
Southampton, the Titanic's home port, suffered more immediate losses; the larger part of the ship's crew came from there, meaning that hundreds of families lost a loved one. The Daily Graphic printed a report headed "Stricken Southampton" (Tibballs, pp. 239-240). Barczewski, p. 248, says that there was one school in the town where no fewer than 125 students had lost a close relative. On p. 264, she notes that the population in 1912 was around 120,000, meaning that more than one Southampton resident in 200 was aboard the Titanic and more than one in 250 died aboard the ship (p. 266 says that 699 of 898 crewmembers lived in the Southampton area, while, Butler-Unsink, p. 172, says that 80% of the crew came from the city. Davenport-Hines, p. 249, agrees that 699 of 898 crew had "Southampton addresses," although some had moved there from Liverpool or elsewhere when White Star changed its base of operations).
Many of the Titanic songs of course stress the theme of hubris and how the ship had to be punished somehow. {#10 is the most extreme, but we also find this e.g. in versions of #1}. This bit of theology did not originate with the songwriters; Biel, pp. 59-63, and at other points in the chapter labelled "Mammon," shows how preachers of the time offered this argument (which is at best dubiously Biblical -- Jesus in fact quite explicitly said that special punishments did not come to special sinners; see e.g. Luke 13:4). Biel cites {#10} as an example of how this doctrine became entrenched. Butler-Unsink, pp. 222-223, also discusses the mass religious outpouring on the theme of "God did it to show that humans are incompetent worms."
There were a number of goofy ideas proposed over the years to, well, raise the Titanic {#7}. Most are pre-Ballard -- the first was proposed in 1914 (Lord-Lives, p. 194) -- so they didn't realize the ship was in two pieces, and most were unworkable even with an intact ship; it seems unlikely that anything will ever come of this (though Arthur C. Clarke produced some ideas that might actually work). Nor did anyone really have any idea what to do with the ship once raised; the idea of a museum was proposed, but one wag calculated that it would be economically unviable just because of the amount of paint required for the ship (Lynch/Marschall, p. 201).
It is sad to report that scavengers *have* recovered some scrap metal -- and, reportedly, are turning it into wrist watches. Other artifacts have definitely been recovered. Sadly, the Gods have not seen to strike these grave-robbers with the sort of punishment they deserve.
The wreck of the Carpathia, which had been sunk by a U-boat on July 17, 1918, was discovered in 2002 (Butler-Other, pp. 210-211), so no doubt it too has been visited by scavengers since then. (The Californian was also lost to a U-boat, in November 1915, but it has not been found; Butler-Other, pp. 214-215)
The last survivor of the Titanic, Elizabeth Gladys "Millvena" Dean, died at the end of May 2009, more than 97 years after the sinking. (Davenport-Hines, pp. 231-232. She was only a few weeks old when the ship sank, the child of a family trying to emigrate to America.) The legend, it seems clear, will survive much longer. - RBW
Bibliography- Ballard: Dr. Robert D. Ballard, The Discovery of the Titanic (Warner, 1987). The standard work on the story of the Titanic herself after the last survivors left her, with many photos both of the ship as she sailed and of her as was found on the bottom. But most of the material is modern and does not come into the Titanic songs.
- Barczewski: Stephanie Barczewski, Titanic: A Night Remembered (Hambledon Continuum, 2004). One of the few books I've seen that is properly footnoted, though the author seems to have a fascination with people stories (it's perhaps revelatory that she dedicates the book to her dogs). And large sections seem to be taken almost verbatim from Lord-Lives. On the other hand, it's very useful as a counterweight to the "Titanic" movie.
- Biel: Steven Biel, Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster (1996; I use the 1997 Norton edition). Not really a history of the ship, but of people's reactions to the sinking. Of course, the reactions are what inspired the songs.... A caution about his accuracy, though: He calls Kirsty MacColl (Ewan's daughter, unless there are two of them) "Irish"!
- Brinnin: John Malcolm Brinnin, The Sway of the Grand Saloon: A Social History of the North Atlantic (1986; I use the 2000 Barnes & Noble edition). A history of transatlantic liners, regrettably lacking footnotes, but useful for background.
- Butler-Other: Daniel Allen Butler, The Other Side of the Night (Casemate, 2009). Unlike Butler's other book, this has no footnotes, but it's an interesting twist on the Titanic story, giving its attention to the other ships in the area on the "Night to Remember."
- Butler-Unsink: Daniel Allen Butler, "Unsinkable": The Full Story (Stackpole, 1998). Properly footnoted, for once. Occasionally it's off the wall (e.g. it claims the band did in fact play "Nearer, My God, to Thee), but for the most part it is a clear and readable summary, and it has interesting insights into some of the key players in the tragedy.
- Davenport-Hines: Richard Davenport-Hines, Titanic Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew, HarperPress, 2012
- DSM-IV-TR: American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision, American Psychiatric Association, 2000 (I use the 2007 sixth printing of the hardcover edition)
- Eaton/Haas: John P. Eaton and Charles A. Haas, Titanic: Destination Disaster, The Legends and the Reality, revised edition, Norton, 1996. Over-dramatic, it seems to me (it treats as fact much that can only be speculation), but with many interesting photos and lists I have not seen elsewhere. On the other hand, it seems to approve of the grave-robbing expeditions to the site, and it is Lordite. I frankly did not like this book at all. And the photos are sometimes dubious -- one shows a ship with smoke coming out of all four funnels, even though one of Titanic's funnels was fake. Either the photo has been doctored or it is another ship.
- Fox: Stephen Fox, Transatlantic: Samuel Cunard, Isumbard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships, Harper Collins, 2003. Like Brinnin, a weakly-documented but interesting history of the transatlantic liners
- Lord-Night: Walter Lord, A Night to Remember (1955; I use the 1997 Bantam edition). The classic book, pre-Ballard; it is unfortunately not footnoted though widely regarded as reliable.
- Lord-Lives: Walter Lord, The Night Lives On (1987; I use the Avon paperback edition). Like Lord-Night, it is not footnoted. Whereas A Night to Remember is about the sinking itself, The Night Lives On gives much more detail about events before and after -- and, in some cases, corrects Lord's earlier book, based in part on research he himself helped inspire.
- Lynch/Marschall: Titanic: An Illustrated History, text by Don Lynch, paintings by Ken Marschall, introduction by Robert D. Ballard, 1992; I use the 1998 Hyperion edition. A few too many illustrations, and an inconvenient format, but if a graphic can explain something, it probably has it.
- Matsen: Brad Matsen, Titanic's Last Secrets, Twelve Books, 2008. About an examination of the wreck site, with a rather different axe to grind, and frankly too dramatic for my taste.
- Mersey: Shipping Casualties (Loss of the Steamship "Titanic") [The Mersey Report, or the Report of the Commissioner of Wrecks on the Loss of the Titanic], His Majesty's Stationary Office, 1912
- Paine: Lincoln P. Paine, Ships of the World (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). A general reference, used mostly to find data on the other ships (Olympic, Carpathia, etc.) involved in the Titanic story.
- Preston: Diana Preston, Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy (Walker, 2002; I use the 2003 Berkley edition). Obviously another book about the Lusitania rather than the Titanic, but it is properly footnoted and has useful background about the liners of the era.
- Ramsay: David Ramsay, The Lusitania: Saga and Myth (Norton, 2001). Used primarily for the information it gives on competition in the transatlantic trade in the early twentieth century.
- Ritchie: David Ritchie, Shipwrecks: An Encyclopedia of the World's Worst Disasters at Sea, 1996 (I use the 1999 Checkmark paperback edition). Not specific to the Titanic, of course, but it has many pages on the subject, with special attention to the Californian affair.
- Smithsonian: Smithsonian magazine, March 2012 issue, article "Shadow of the Titanic" by Andrew Wilson
- Tibballs: Geoff Tibballs, editor, The Mammoth Book of the Titanic (Carroll & Graf, 2002). A selection of statements by survivors and witnesses, plus press accounts. Unfortunately, it has no index, and a minimal table of contents, so it contains a lot of useful information I couldn't cite because I couldn't find it when I was writing the relevant portions of this essay.
- Wade: Wyn Craig Wade, The Titanic: End of a Dream (revised edition, Penguin, 1986). This calls itself a Titanic book. It's more a book about William Alden Smith and an American post-mortem on the ship's sinking. Wade seems to think Smith was a great man. He really sounds more like a demagogue populist to me, though the legislation he introduced certainly made liners safer. Wade also views the sinking of the Titanic as ending some sort of Great Romantic Era. Most would consider World War I more important in that regard.
- ALSO: I should probably also mention Arthur C. Clarke's fictional The Ghost from the Grand Banks (1990), the last solo novel from the last of the great titans of Science Fiction, and the one who always gave the most attention to the science. It's not one of Clarke's great works, and the background comes almost entirely from Ballard and Lord (which made it rather pointless to cite it), but it is gives some genuine life to some of Ballard's more clinical descriptions of the dead hulk -- and also gives some actually useful ideas about how to raise the ship.
Last updated in version 4.4
File: RcTita15
Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List
Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography
The Ballad Index Copyright 2024 by Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle.