by Brad Matsen
Ismay answered 849 questions. He denied any involvement in the navigation of the ship. He denied getting into the lifeboat while there were any other passengers—men, women, or children—nearby. He denied any participation in drawing up the specifications for the ship, including the number of lifeboats it would carry.
Harold Sanderson followed Ismay, testifying for the better part of two days. The thrust of his testimony, guided by several inquisitors, was that the White Star Line equaled or exceeded the rules of the Board of Trade relating to construction of their ships and lifeboat capacity.
Alexander Montgomery Carlisle, Pirrie’s brother-in-law and a former Harland and Wolff director, showed up looking dazed and exhausted. He testified that he had argued for more lifeboats. His original specifications for Titanic had called for forty-eight. He knew that the rules required only sixteen lifeboats on all ships over 10,000 tons. But Titanic was five times bigger. His original specifications for lifeboats, with which Thomas Andrews concurred, had been overruled by Ismay.
Isaacs tried to discredit Carlisle by pointing out that Carlisle had been a member of the board’s committee that made the rules for lifeboats. Carlisle had signed the committee’s recommendations in 1911, which required not more but fewer lifeboats. The Board of Trade and everyone else in the world believed that ocean liners had become virtually unsinkable.
Carlisle, gray-bearded and haggard, shook visibly as he stood at the witness lectern. “I regret having signed a report with which I did not concur,” he said, sounding as though he were about to begin sobbing. “I must have been soft.”
Edward Wilding answered 1,113 questions on three consecutive days, from eight different commissioners and lawyers. In painstaking detail, referring to the builder’s model and the profile of the ship, Wilding spoke for hours about the construction of Titanic, the dimensions of its steel, watertight compartments, deck gear, rigging, engines, and lifeboats. He told the commission that he had calculated that the iceberg had made holes in the ship totaling twelve square feet, between the bow and Boiler Room 5, possibly as far aft as Boiler Room 4. Titanic had remained afloat for a long time, considering that catastrophic amount of damage. Wilding said he was sure the ship had gone down in one piece.
A week later, at the request of a lawyer representing a seamen’s union, Wilding was recalled to the witness podium. The lawyer asked how Wilding had calculated the strength of the ship to ensure that it could survive the worst sea conditions it might encounter on the North Atlantic. A big ship, the lawyer reasoned, had to span more waves than a small ship, which would place far greater loads on the hull. He read a letter from the Board of Trade, written in November 1910, asking Wilding to submit detailed calculations of the strength of the ship. Wilding had replied that reproducing those calculations would take three months and asked the board not to press for that information.
“And, in fact, they did not press for it?” the union’s lawyer asked.
“They did not,” Wilding replied.
One of White Star’s lawyers jumped to his feet and asked permission to address the witness.
“Is there any foundation at all for saying that you defied the Board of Trade?”
“I really know of none,” Wilding said.
“Or that the ship was allowed to be built by the officials of the Board of Trade in violation of their rules?” the White Star lawyer asked.
“We have to comply with all their rules, and we make some sacrifices to do so,” Wilding replied.
The day after Wilding finished testifying, he wrote to Pirrie to say that he was going back to Belfast himself the next day unless Pirrie ordered him to stay in London. The last paragraph of Wilding’s one-page letter was an account of his fending off the barrage of questions about strength calculations from the seamen’s union lawyer, after which Mersey had not pursued the subject. Their secrets were safe.
Pirrie knew about Wilding’s testimony before he received the letter. He had stayed away from the Drill Hall but received daily reports as the hearings ground on into July. Pirrie had decided that Wilding was finished at Harland and Wolff. He had avoided the big questions, but he had talked way too much.
Ultimately, the British Wreck Commission agreed with the Americans. Titanic sank because its captain chose to speed through a field of ice about which he had been warned. The iceberg Titanic struck ripped a three-hundred-foot-long gash in the starboard side, flooding five watertight compartments. The ship did not break in two. As the bow sank, its stern rose out of the water to a fifty- or sixty-degree angle before making its final plunge. Mersey’s report specifically stated that Titanic had been constructed by Harland and Wolff in accordance with Board of Trade rules.
The biggest ship Pirrie had ever built had taken 1,504 people to their deaths. His shipyard was still alive.
Endings
When Bruce Ismay arrived in Liverpool aboard Adriatic at the end of April 1912, a small crowd on the dock broke into applause as he descended the gangway. Six months later, Morgan and his directors forced Ismay out as president of International Mercantile Marine. At the same time, he resigned as chairman of the White Star Line. Ismay remained as a director of both IMM and White Star until 1916, when he severed all connections with the combine and his family company. He continued to work as an adviser to British insurance companies and was active in maritime charities. He donated money to build the cadet training ship Mersey and gave £11,000 to a fund for widows of lost seamen. Ismay divided his time between London and Ireland, where he had a fishing lodge and was known among his guides as a good companion. He died after suffering a stroke on October 17, 1937, leaving an estate worth £693,305, approximately the equivalent of $52 million today.
The White Star Line settled $16 million in claims arising from the Titanic disaster for $664,000. The next year was the most profitable in its history. In 1913, 2.5 million passengers crossed the Atlantic between Europe and the United States, setting a record that has never been broken. White Star carried 200,000 of them, Cunard about the same number. In 1927, White Star was bought by the Royal Mail Group, which soon defaulted on its Admiralty loans, leaving Great Britain as its majority stockholder. In 1934, the government merged White Star and Cunard in return for financing the 80,000-ton, 965-foot Queen Mary. Britannic III, the last ship to carry the crimson-and-white burgee of the White Star Line, was taken out of service in 1960.
RMS Olympic, refitted with a double hull, became known as “Old Reliable.” On the night of May 15, 1934, it rammed and sank the Nantucket lightship off Cape Cod, killing seven of its eleven crewmen. After picking up survivors, Olympic steamed into New York under its own power. A year later, it was sold for scrap.
In March 1913, J. P. Morgan died in the royal suite of the Grand Hotel in Rome. At the end, he was suffering from hypertension, dementia, and the pain of having had all his teeth pulled and replaced by dentures. After a decade of bank panics and stock market crashes, Americans had realized that giant private trusts were not the way to manage the wealth of the nation. Morgan had been living in Cairo and Rome because lawyers, congressional committees, and the press made life at home miserable for him. His body was shipped back to New York City aboard the S.S. France and taken by train to Hartford, Connecticut, where he had been born, for burial.
Even after Titanic, Morgan believed that International Mercantile Marine would prosper. He was certain America’s future depended upon its presence in international markets. A year after his death, IMM defaulted on its bonds and went into bankruptcy. The Wall Street Journal concluded, “The ocean was too big for the old man.” The shipping boom during World War I saved IMM, after which it sold off its European holdings and reorganized as the United States Lines. It went bankrupt again in 1937, reorganized as a holding company, and disappeared for good in 1986.
William Pirrie built two hundred ships after finishing Britannic, the largest of them only two-thirds the size of the Olympic sisters. He recovered fully from his prostate surgery to lead Harland and Wolff through the
wartime boom; the company set records for profits every year in the following decade. He continued to expand, enlarging the Belfast shipyard and buying three others in Scotland and England. He invested heavily in oil exploration and production and built a new factory to manufacture diesel engines.
Pirrie died of pneumonia aboard a ship he had built, RMS Ebro, in the Panama Canal on June 7, 1924. Twelve days later, his body was put aboard Olympic in New York for the voyage home to Belfast, where he was buried with a state funeral. The inscription on his coffin read: “William James, First Viscount Pirrie, K.P., Born Quebec 31st May, 1847. Died at sea. ‘Deeds not words.’ ”
After Pirrie’s death, the Harland and Wolff board of directors appointed Margaret Pirrie as president of the company. She erected a monument over her husband’s grave; on it were two bronze panels, one depicting Venetian, the first steamship he built, the other Olympic. Margaret Pirrie died at home in London on June 19, 1935. She was buried next to Pirrie under his monument in Belfast City Cemetery.
John Chatterton and Richie Kohler had begun their investigation into Titanic hoping to discover evidence that might explain how the iceberg had damaged the ship so badly that it could not survive. Like millions of other people, they believed that Titanic had been a heroic ship, a testament to the power of the industrial age that had been undone by bad luck.
Roger Long’s low-angle breakup, Tom McCluskie’s revelation of the cover-up by Harland and Wolff, and what Chatterton and Kohler found on Britannic proved that Titanic had not been a heroic ship. It had been a deeply flawed testament to hubris and greed that killed 1,504 people. Chatterton and Kohler were infuriated because there was no way to punish the men who had sent a ship to sea not knowing if it was strong enough to survive.
Until they decided to tell the world what really happened to Titanic.
Acknowledgments
In Memoriam
Robert C. Blumberg
John Chatterton, Richie Kohler, and I worked together on Titanic’s Last Secrets every step of the way. They were tireless, inquisitive, and always available. They brought key insights to difficult parts of the narrative, plunged wholeheartedly into the research, and carefully edited the book for accuracy. Their investigation into the wreck of Titanic illuminates a new understanding of what transpired on a terrible night almost a century ago, and honors the memory of the 1,504 people who died in the disaster. I am forever indebted for the pleasure and privilege of sharing this work with them.
Heather Schroder at International Creative Management saw the potential in our story, and held back nothing as its champion. More than anyone else, she is responsible for bringing the truth about Titanic to light.
Together, we thank the members of the joint American-French team that discovered the wreck in 1985, and all the explorers who followed them. They worked under dangerous and difficult conditions to add to our understanding of Titanic, without which our own exploration would never have been possible.
Thanks to Dr. Anatoly Sagalevich and the crew of the R/V Akademik Mstislav Keldysh, who made our discoveries possible, especially the courageous Mir pilots who routinely risk their lives with incredible grace.
Thanks to Jacques-Yves Cousteau and the crew of Calypso, who found and explored HMHS Britannic in 1975, making our exploration of the wreck possible thirty-one years later.
Thanks to Carla Chatterton and Carrie Kohler for their inspiration and patience.
Many other people gave generously of their time, insights, and secrets.
I am grateful to Tony of FonaCab in Belfast, who took me in his taxi to the remains of Harland and Wolff and introduced me to his city. In Belfast, I also met Una Reilly; Tom and Sylvia McCluskie; and Ian Montgomery, Ian Farr, and the rest of the staff at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. To all of them I offer thanks.
Paul Louden-Brown told me about the White Star Line with charm and wit, drawing me into the history of that fascinating company. Paul’s terrific book The White Star Line is indispensable for anyone trying to understand the golden age of ships on the North Atlantic.
Many dedicated people work to document and preserve what is known about the building, voyage, and loss of Titanic. I am grateful to all of them, especially David G. Brown, Simon Mills, and Parks Stephenson. Their willingness to share their knowledge in interviews, e-mails, and phone calls was essential to writing this book. Ken Marschall’s superb drawings and his knowledge of the ship contributed immensely to my understanding of the new evidence we found on the bottom. Thanks, too, to Edward and Karen Kamuda at the Titanic Historical Society.
I’m grateful to Grainger Lanneau, M.D., for his account of his dive to Titanic in 2000; to Harry W. Herr, M.D., for his paper on the treatment of prostate diseases a hundred years ago and an e-mail correspondence on that topic; and to Clifford Ismay, who shared his family history.
David Concannon granted me many hours of interviews and shared his notes and articles on his own exploration of Titanic.
Bill Lange provided fabulous images, a great moment during the expedition in 2005, and the details of his life and work. Cinematographer Ralph White was a great guide and inspiration on the Titanic dives.
During the exploration of the wreck of HMHS Britannic off the island of Kéa, Greece, expedition members were generous and patient in their explanations of the intricacies of technical diving. Thank you, Mike Barnette, Leigh Bishop, Mark Bullon, Petar Denoble, Mike Etheridge, Mike Fowler, Evan Kovacs, Martin Parker, Frankie Pellegrino, Mike Pizzio, and Carl Spencer. Thanks also to Joe Brunette, Jonathan Wickham, Tom Eichler, Roz Lunn, and Tina Tavridou.
Bob Blumberg brought his gigantic spirit with him on the expeditions to Titanic and Britannic. None of us who spent time with him will ever forget the air of kindness he lent to every day. His work on the Titanic treaty is a lasting legacy. Bob died on August 25, 2007.
Joe Porter, the editor of Wreck Diving Magazine, was the topside photographer during both the Titanic and the Britannic expeditions. He took many of the pictures in this book and went out of his way to make sure I had them when I needed them.
Heeth Grantham, diver and logistical ringmaster at Lone Wolf Documentary Group, was a steady, reliable presence during the expeditions. Later, he helped find historical photographs and secure permission to reproduce them. Thanks also to his many colleagues at Lone Wolf who shared material from their library.
Roger Long created the theoretical core of this book with his open-minded interpretation of the new evidence from the wreck of Titanic. He spent many hours explaining the different scenarios of the sinking and reviewed the manuscript for accuracy. Roger was a tireless, good-humored, brilliant collaborator whose contribution cannot be overstated.
Without Kirk Wolfinger and Rush DeNooyer at Lone Wolf, this book would not have happened. They never stopped contributing to its success, solving problems in the narrative, and reviewing the manuscript. They were also wonderful company.
Thank you, Jonathan Karp, for bringing Titanic’sLast Secrets to Twelve, and for nourishing this book with your superb understanding of storytelling. Working with an editor as gifted as you is the dream of a lifetime for a writer. I am also indebted to Nate Gray, the brilliant copy editor Bonnie Thompson, production editor Dorothea Halliday, and the rest of the bookmakers at Twelve for tending to the many details along the way.
To Richard Abate, my agent at Endeavor, I can only say: I like the two guys in the ball. Your support of my work is matched by no other. I’m grateful for you every day.
The MacDowell Colony and Theodore W. Kheel’s Nurture Nature Foundation provided me with crucial support and affirmation, for which I am deeply grateful.
In Seattle, Kay Wilson and Kurt Esveldt have given me a sweet, safe refuge for the past fifteen years. Thank you for all of it.
At home, Laara, Jonas, Milo, Diane, Eva, and Nyta made sure I was never really alone during the months of solitude required for a job like this one. Without you, my family, I simply could not have done it.
> Brad Matsen
Vashon Island, Washington
January 2008
Notes
The contemporary and historical characters, action, and situations in this book are re-created as accurately as possible from research conducted over two and a half years. I drew on facts from reliable sources, checked them thoroughly, and here share them with you. Conversations and dialogue that were not recorded or transcribed verbatim but were reconstructed from reports of meetings, public records, diaries, biographies, interviews, and correspondence are presented as plain text. Verbatim conversations are denoted by quotation marks. Correspondence, contracts, logs, and other records are denoted by italics.
CHAPTER ONE. HISTORY
The phone conversation in which David Concannon proposes an expedition to Titanic to find the ribbons of steel is built on recollections by him and John Chatterton, from interviews in the fall of 2006 and the winter of 2007.
David Concannon’s description of his descent to the wreck of Titanic in 2000 is based on interviews on March 7 and March 20, 2007.
The navigational coordinates of the ribbons of steel were recorded in Concannon’s private notebook, provided to me in the spring of 2007.
Biographical information on producer Kirk Wolfinger, and the reconstruction of his inciting phone call with Chatterton, are from several interviews in fall 2006 and winter 2007.
Biographical information on Richie Kohler is from several interviews in the fall of 2006 and the winter of 2007.
CHAPTER TWO. RIBBONS OF STEEL
The financial arrangements for the charter are from interviews with Chatterton and Kohler, winter 2007.
The technical details about the Mir submersibles are from a brochure on the subs, published by Deep Ocean Expeditions, the company that brokers Keldysh and Mir charters.