Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 - Genesis
CHAPTER 2 - Sailing Day
CHAPTER 3 - Maiden Voyage
CHAPTER 4 - Ten Seconds
CHAPTER 5 - A Slow Comprehension
CHAPTER 6 - Partings and Farewells
CHAPTER 7 - Desperate Exodus
CHAPTER 8 - “She’s Gone!”
CHAPTER 9 - The Lonely Sea
CHAPTER 10 - Watching Eight White Rockets
CHAPTER 11 - Homecoming
THE NEW TITANIC STRIKES ICEBERG AND CALLS FOR AID VESSELS RUSH TO HER SIDE
CHAPTER 12 - Inquests and Judgments
CHAPTER 13 - Requiem
CHAPTER 14 - Resurrection
CHAPTER 15 - Revelation
EPILOGUE
APPENDIX I
APPENDIX II - The Titanic, the Californian, and the Culpability of Captain Lord
APPENDIX III - The Conundrum of Captain Smith
AUTHOR’S NOTE
GLOSSARY
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Copyright @ 1998 by Stackpole Books
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.
Composition by Doric Lay Publishers
Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
First Da Capo Press edition 2002
ISBN-10: 0-306-81110-3 ISBN-13: 978-0-306-81110-4
eISBN : 97-8-078-67310-3
This Da Capo Press paperback edition is an unabridged republication of the English-language edition first published in 1998. It is reprinted by arrangement with Stackpole Books.
Published by Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group http: / /www.dacapopress.com
Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142, or call (800) 255-1514 or (617) 252-5298, or e-mail [email protected].
To Eleanor, who believed.
INTRODUCTION
IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT “TITANIC” IS THE THIRD MOST WIDELY RECOGNIZED word in the world, following “God” and “Coca-cola.” True or not, what is undeniable is that even though more than eighty-five years have passed since she went down, the Titanic still possesses a compelling power. Rarely does a tale so completely combine the elements of tragedy, drama, morality play, and social statement. Few events sum up their times as decisively as the loss of the Titanic, and it is a rare man or woman who is left unmoved in some way, great or small, by her story.
It is a story of heroism, self-sacrifice, and noblesse-oblige; nobility and prejudice; class and egalitarianism. No writer of fiction, no matter how gifted, would dare present the story of the Titanic as a product of the imagination : it would be too unbelievable. Even as fact it often stretches the bounds of credibility—yet it is all true.
No other disaster in history could have been more easily avoided or was more inevitable, and it is this apparent contradiction that runs through the entire story. A chain of events and decisions that began years before the Titanic was even built, and ending only seconds before she struck the iceberg, led to that deadly “convergence of the twain.” And had any one of them been altered, the whole disaster, or at least the appalling loss of life, might have been averted. Nevertheless, each event, each decision relentlessly led to the next until the ship lay at the bottom of the ocean and had taken fifteen-hundred lives with it. The Titanic’s second officer, Charles Herbert Lightoller, would testify later how a once-in-a-lifetime combination of weather and sea conditions came together to make the iceberg nearly invisible to the ship’s lookouts. Yet by the time she struck the berg, the Titanic was deep inside an icefield she had received no less than six warnings about that same day—the last one, which was rudely cut off, had come less than an hour before the collision. The ship complied with every safety regulation on the books, but carried enough lifeboats for only half the people on board her that night—only a third of her total capacity—and many of those left the ship only partially filled, due mainly to the belief held by so many passengers, even when the Titanic was already sinking, that she was unsinkable. The officers in charge of the lifeboats were instructed that women and children would have first priority in the boats, yet almost half of the survivors would be men.
Nor would the ironies and contradictions end in 1912. Forty-four years later, when the Andrea Doria, another ship widely regarded as “unsinkable,” was rammed by the Stockholm on July 25, 1956, the Swedish ship dealt the Italian liner a mortal blow, breaching two adjacent watertight compartments. The list caused by the inrushing sea led to uncontrollable flooding, and the ship was pulled under as inexorably as the Titanic had been. In a grim twist of fate, had the Andrea Doria’s watertight construction been similar to the Titanic’s, she would have remained afloat, for the Titanic had been designed to survive that very type of accident.
Over the years, myths have sprung up around the story of the Titanic, myths about the ship itself—how and why she sank, and how certain individuals, classes, and nationalities conducted themselves the night she went down. Disturbingly, in the past decade a strong undercurrent of revisionism has swept into the telling of the tale, as motion pictures, novels, television productions, and even purported histories have adopted adversarial or confrontational attitudes toward entire classes or even the whole of the era in which the Titanic existed.
Among many of those who would tell us of the Titanic, it has become popular to color the story from unusual or unnatural perspectives. Social historians, engineers, psychologists, political writers, and garden-variety journalists have all attempted new recountings of the tragedy of that cold April night. Often they have much to say that is useful or intriguing, but usually one hears in the background some particular axe being ground—social, political, moral—as they deliver their judgments on the deeds done that night; at times, it seems that the Titanic is of almost secondary importance to whatever grievance they are airing.
Just as disturbing is a growing tendency among some of those same writers to present the story of the Titanic as if it were a wholly isolated incident that happened in a temporal vacuum, without foreshadowing or consequence, and as though the moral, ethical, and economic structure of society when the disaster occurred was fundamentally the same as that of the present day. To do so not only deceives the reader but distorts the actions and reactions of the builders, crew, and passengers of the Titanic by asking them to be held responsible by unreasonable standards.
But the most unsettling are those sensationalized accounts of the sinking, which from their beginnings are little more than thinly disguised witch hunts, hinting at dark conspiracies that range from insurance-fraud schemes by the Titanic’s owners to deliberately defective construction by her builders. An excellent example of this type of writing is the article that appeared in a popular scientific publication in late 1994, which reported that the quality of steel used in the Titanic’s hull plates did not meet the modern minimum standards for shipbuilding materials—standards not established until 1948—then inferred that the builders had knowingly used an inferior grade of steel.
/>
This sort of revisionism has created the need for a new, straightforward telling of the Titanic story, one without the trappings and baggage of latter-day moralizing, social leveling, mythmaking, or finger pointing. The blame for a disaster of such magnitude cannot be placed on any one individual or group. If the builders, owners, and officers of the Titanic were complacent and overconfident, they were simply reflecting the attitude of every shipping line in the North Atlantic trade. If the passengers believed that the Titanic was indeed unsinkable, it wasn’t because they had succumbed to the blandishments of the shipping line’s advertisements or the pronouncements of the experts: in the forty years prior to the Titanic’s maiden voyage, only four lives had been lost on passenger ships on the North Atlantic trade. Imagine how blithely air travel would be regarded by present-day travelers, who usually seem to express little enough trepidation about the hazards of commercial flying, if the major airlines possessed a similar safety record. Never had any form of transportation been so safe and hazard free.
Fingerpointing apparently comes very easily to the society of the 1990s, and all too often those who take it upon themselves to record history indulge the public’s passion for scapegoating. There is something horribly hypocritical about passing judgment on another human being’s actions from the comfort and safety of an armchair. Even more hypocritical is making moral pronouncements on others’ actions after having judged them by moral standards that they neither knew nor could conceive.
At the same time, there are some individuals, whose actions or inactions that night contributed decisively to the large loss of life, who have suddenly found legions of eloquent supporters determined to remove any onus of blame. Despite the evidence that has withstood eight decades of scrutiny, the verdict of guilt passed by his peers on the captain of the ship that stood still just ten miles from the sinking Titanic is for some historians no longer valid, if only for the reason that it was a verdict not reached by present-day, self appointed experts and judges. Similarly, the owner of the Titanic, who managed to find a seat in a lifeboat and was ruined professionally and socially as a result, has lately been perceived as a victim in his own right, and an object of unfair persecution, at least in the eyes of modern critics, who have little or no understanding of the workings of the highly structured society of the Edwardian Era and its rigid standards of conduct.
It must be remembered that the Titanic was lost at a time when prejudices were an accepted fact of life, class distinctions were sharply drawn and sharply enforced, “egalitarianism” was just an obscure word in the dictionary, the “white man’s burden” was still being shouldered, and the sun of the Pax Britannica hadn’t yet set. Whether the beliefs, attitudes, and ideas of this era were ultimately right or wrong is immaterial: what is essential is to remember that at the time they were accepted as valid, and people’s actions were determined by that validity.
Some things, though, never change. Courage, selflessness, meeting death with dignity are immutable. So are cowardice, arrogance, and stupidity. These qualities were all present in those aboard the Titanic the night she sank. It is true that the story of the Titanic contains its share of blunderers, incompetents, cowards, and even a villain or two. But more important is the story of the heroes, the men and women who rose above themselves by word or deed, who deserve to be remembered.
This is that story.
PROLOGUE
IT WAS A FORCE OF NATURE. FIVE THOUSAND YEARS IT HAD WAITED. IT WAS born in the midst of that vast sheet of ice that one day men would call the Greenland Glacier, when the Celts were migrating across Europe, the Babylonians were building their first cities in Mesopotamia, and tribes of Picts barely out of the Stone Age were populating Britain and Ireland. In three hundred years it had achieved its full stature and begun its slow migration to the arm of the Atlantic Ocean that would become known as the Labrador Sea. It was halfway there when the first Norse adventurers, setting out in their longboats, encountered its siblings. Huge and impregnable they seemed, like vast fortresses of the gods Odin and Thor. The Norsemen called them “mountains of ice”—icebergs.
Undisturbed by human affairs, the iceberg continued its slow procession to the sea, while empires were being created and plagues were sweeping across entire continents. Neither malevolent nor benevolent, it had no way of knowing that a ten-second encounter with another moving object would make it the most notorious iceberg in all the ages of the world.
Sometime in the early weeks of 1912, with a series of deafening cracks, it broke off from its parent glacier and thundered into the cold waters of the Labrador Sea, and began its slow drift southward toward the North Atlantic....
CHAPTER 1
Genesis
There go the ships, and Leviathan....
—Psalm 104:26
IT WAS JUST A FEW MINUTES BEFORE NOON ON MAY 31, 1911. SHE STOOD proud in the bright late-spring sunshine, and she was ready. In a matter of moments she would become the largest moving man-made object in the world. The dignitaries, reporters, and workmen standing on the concrete apron that supported her gazed in awe at the wall of steel before them. Towering cliff-like over their heads for more than ten stories, she stretched away for almost a sixth of a mile. She was a ship unrivaled in size by any that had come before her, the epitome of the shipbuilder’s art, the most luxurious ocean liner that would ever be built, destined to become the most famous ocean-going vessel. in history. Today was her launching, and she was ready. She was the Titanic.
She was conceived, along with her two sisters, on a warm summer evening in 1907. A large Daimler-Benz towncar with elegant Roi-de-Belge coach-work stopped at the front entrance of 27 Chelsea Street in the fashionable Belgravia district of London. A gold-and-green liveried chauffeur ushered Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Bruce Ismay into the automobile, then drove them the short distance to Downshire House, Belgrave Square, home of Lord and Lady Pirrie. The Ismays were to be the dinner guests of Lord and Lady Pirrie that evening. Bruce Ismay was the managing director of the White Star Line; Lord Pirrie was the senior partner and chairman of the board of Harland and Wolff, a Belfast shipyard.
After dinner the ladies withdrew, as was the custom of the day, leaving Ismay and Lord Pirrie to their Napoleon and Havanas, the social occasion becoming an impromptu business meeting. A special relationship existed between the two firms these men represented, had done so for nearly forty years, and would continue for another quarter century. But the consequences of this informal meeting would be the high—and low—points of that relationship.1
Joseph Bruce Ismay was the eldest son of Thomas H. Ismay, one of the great shipping magnates of the last half of the nineteenth century and himself the son of a small Mayport boatbuilder. Thomas Ismay acquired the flag of the White Star Line in 1867, then promptly reorganized it as the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company, Ltd. The White Star Line was the successor to a line of wooden sailing ships that plied the profitable Australian emigrant trade in the middle of the nineteenth century, but Ismay was a perceptive businessman, and rewarding as the Australian trade was, he was shrewd enough to realize that there were far greater profits to be made on the transatlantic passenger run—the North Atlantic Ferry as it became known—bringing immigrants from the Old World to the New and shuttling wealthier passengers back and forth between the two. Almost immediately the White Star Line created a niche for itself by sailing liners that were fast and, by the standards of the day, luxurious. In 1870 Ismay formed a partnership with William Imrie and created a holding company called Ismay, Imrie and Company, one of the first business transactions of which was to contract with Harland and Wolff of Belfast to build a fleet of iron steamships for the White Star Line. It was to be a happy union.
The origins of Harland and Wolff dated back to the 1840s, when dredging of a deep-water passage in the section of the River Lagan known as the Victoria Channel created Queen’s Island in the middle of the channel. Robert Hickson built a shipyard on the new island and began the construction of iron ships there in
1853. Edward J. Harland came to the yard, which was known as Hickson and Company, as a manager in 1854 and bought it outright from Hickson in 1859. Gustav Wolff was a silent partner when he first joined Harland in 1861, but by 1862 the yard was known as Harland and Wolff.
Gustav Wolff was the nephew of Gustavus Schwabe, a Hamburg financier who had relocated to Liverpool some years before. It was Schwabe who had loaned Harland the £5,000 he needed to buy Hickson’s shipyard, and because Schwabe also owned a substantial interest in the Bibby Line, a small North Atlantic steamship company, he was in a position to assure himself that his investment in Harland paid off. It is a matter of record that of the more than 1,500 orders for ships on Harland and Wolff’s books in the yard’s 139-year history, the first three were for ships for the Bibby Line.
While it was true that being the nephew of Gustavus Schwabe had much to do with Harland’s decision to take Wolff on as a partner, the yard itself bore the unmistakable stamp of one man only—Edward Harland. His talent for engineering, which bordered on genius, led Harland to make three lasting contributions to shipbuilding. One was purely aesthetic, but the other two were revolutionary. First he eliminated the unnecessary clutter of sailing ships from steamship design: bowsprits, jib booms, figureheads, and their associated rigging. This made the ships cleaner and more distinctive in appearance. Next he squared off the bilges on the ships’ hulls, at once making them more efficient in cutting through the water so that engine size would not need to be increased to increase speed, and also enlarging the carrying capacity of any given hull size. Finally, Harland replaced wooden upper decks with iron, which turned the hull into a giant box girder of immense strength, allowing far larger hulls than ever before to be built.
Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic Page 1