At 3:30 P.M., April 18, Smith, the other six members of the subcommittee, and two U.S. Marshals boarded the Congressional Limited at Union Station in Washington, D.C., and arrived in New York just in time to be rushed across the city to Cunard’s Pier 54 and meet the Carpathia as she tied up. While the Titanic’s survivors were making their way down the gangway, Smith, followed by the rest of the committee, rushed up it, and immediately asked the whereabouts of Bruce Ismay. Escorted to Dr. McGhee’s cabin, Smith brushed aside Philip Franklin’s protests that Ismay was “too ill” to see anyone and informed the chairman of the White Star Line that he would be expected to testify before the subcommittee at the soonest opportunity.
Ismay calmly assured Smith that he would cooperate fully with the investigation, and would appear promptly at 10:00 the next morning, when the subcommittee would begin hearings in the Waldorf Astorias East Room. Ismay was as good as his word, for when Senator Smith entered the East Room next morning, Ismay was already seated and waiting for him, apparently recovered from his ordeal.3
At 10:30 A.M. Smith opened the proceedings and began by inviting Ismay to tell the committee what had happened, “as succinctly as possible.” Ismay responded by giving the figures for each day’s run on the crossing, then gave his version of the events of Sunday night: “I was in bed myself, asleep, when the accident happened. The ship sank, I am told, at two-twenty. That, sir, is all I think I can tell you.”
Smith didn’t believe that was all Ismay could tell him, so he began a lengthy and grueling cross-examination that eventually totaled some fifty-eight pages of testimony. Ismay found himself in the unenviable position of being both a hostile witness and a scapegoat. The faint smile that he wore during the entirety of his testimony seemed to many observers a bit condescending, although Ismay believed, and indeed declared in his opening statement, that he would cooperate fully with the committee. Senator Smith harbored some deep suspicions about Ismay, and the wireless message that Ismay had sent to New York holding up the Cedric so that he and the surviving Titanic crewmen could immediately sail back to England seemed to Smith a deliberate attempt to evade American jurisdiction. Ismay attempted to explain that he really had the surviving crewmen’s best interests at heart when he tried to get them aboard the Cedric to return to England. Many of these men had families, and since their pay stopped as soon as the Titanic sank, the only way they could support their families was to find a berth on another ship.
Ismay, though, did little to help his case. In addition to the smug air he held about himself while testifying, after being excused by Senator Smith, Ismay complained loudly to several reporters that he questioned the legality of the hearings, whether the American government had jurisdiction over the White Star Line, and the right of the U.S. Senate to subpoena foreign nationals. That the Titanic was owned and operated by an American shipping conglomerate, Ismay well knew, since he had sold the White Star Line to Morgan’s IMM himself, so there never should have been any doubt in Ismay’s mind about jurisdiction, nor should he have questioned the right of the committee to issue subpoenas to British subjects. Smith had made sure he was on solid legal ground before he left New York, receiving assurances from the attorney general that the committee had just such subpoena powers.
The result, in the United States at least, was that Ismay began to look a bit petulant. However much he thought his complaints were justified, he was only hurting himself: the public image of Bruce Ismay was undergoing an ugly transformation, and soon some very pointed questions were being asked in the press about how Ismay, of all people, managed to find a place in a lifeboat. Brooke Adams, a Boston historian of considerable repute, summed up the rapidly growing groundswell of feeling about Ismay when he wrote to Senator Francis Newlands, who sat on the committee:Ismay is responsible for the lack of lifeboats, he is responsible for the captain who was so reckless, for the lack of discipline of the crew, and for the sailing directions given to the captain which probably caused his recklessness. In the face of all this he saves himself, leaving fifteen hundred men and women to perish. I know of nothing at once so cowardly and so brutal in recent history. The one thing he could have done was to prove his honesty and his sincerity by giving his life.4
It was at this time that a particularly devastating cartoon appeared in the Nèw York American showing Ismay cowering in a lifeboat, while a liner could be seen sinking in the background. The caption read “Laurels for J. Brute Ismay.” During his testimony before the committee, Ismay had taken great pains to place the full responsibility for the running of the ship, and hence the collision, on Captain Smith, maintaining that he had been nothing more than an ordinary passenger. But the Titanic’s surviving officers and passengers such as Mrs. Ryerson were to testify that Ismay had played a far different role throughout the voyage, and no matter how hard he tried to shift the blame onto Captain Smith, a cloud of nagging questions of responsibility and cowardice hung over Ismay.5
Senator Smith’s inquiry lasted nearly six weeks, during which time eighty-two witnesses were called, including all of the Titanic’s surviving officers, as well Captain Rostron, the officers of the Californian, and the wireless operators of both the Titanic and the Carpathia. When Harold Bride sat before the committee, he created a sensation, not only with his testimony, but also by his appearance: brought into the hearing room in a wheelchair, his frostbitten feet still swathed in bandages, Bride’s complexion was pale, his voice weak. There seemed to have been a certain measure of stage managing to this, for Guglielmo Marconi was to appear before the committee when Bride finished his testimony, and Marconi wanted to generate as much sympathy for himself and his company as he could.
The rumor that Cottam and Bride had deliberately withheld details of the Titanic’s sinking from the press at large in order to sell their story to the New York Times as an exclusive rankled Senator Smith. He probed deeply into the ties that existed between Marconi and the Times, and questioned if not the legality then at least the propriety of Cottam’s and Bride’s actions, as well as Marconi’s personal part in setting up the deal. This was dangerous ground for Smith to tread on, and he knew it, for there had been a worldwide outpouring of gratitude to Marconi for the lifesaving capability that his invention of wireless now offered. But William Alden Smith was quite firm in his belief that Marconi’s popularity should not render him immune from scrutiny. In the end, Smith concluded that there had been nothing illegal in the deal that Marconi had made on behalf of the two young wireless operators, but it was ethically questionable and sorely abused the public’s trust. Marconi took the implied warning seriously and amended company policies accordingly.6
The Titanic’s officers collectively and individually created their own sensations. Lightoller, as senior surviving officer, was the first to sit before the committee, and he did what by all accounts was an admirable job in mitigating the White Star Line’s responsibility for the accident. Carefully emphasizing the unusual conditions that existed that night, he described how the Titanic went down, recounting in thrilling detail how he had made his escape, then successfully conned Collapsible B through the night until the Carpathia arrived. Lightoller was able to deflect the Senator’s questioning away from the navigational procedures on the bridge, where he might have had a difficult time explaining how six separate warnings of approaching ice could have been so thoroughly ignored; similarly, he was never called upon to explain how or why the lookouts in the crow’s nest were never issued binoculars. The tall, sun-bronzed seaman with the deep, manly voice saved White Star from considerable embarrassment.7
Significantly, of the eighty-two witnesses called, twenty-one of them were passengers, although, reflecting in part the social prejudices of the day, only three were from Third Class, giving an unbalanced picture of the plight of the steerage passengers as the ship was sinking. But Smith was determined from the start to find out what really happened on the night of April 14-15, and he knew that the passengers, who owed no loyalty to the White Star Line and so
would have no reason to hide, alter, or shade facts, would go far in helping his committee form a complete and balanced picture of the sinking of the Titanic. Moreover, and in this he was probably acting on the advice of Senator Burton, who had considerable experience with maritime matters, Smith was determined that the investigation would not degenerate into an endless round of technical discussions, which would only leave matters more confused, and by introducing the passengers’ testimony he was able to avoid that pitfall.
There were admittedly times when Senator Smith’s ignorance of nautical matters seemed to lead him to ask some remarkably odd questions, since the answers seemed perfectly obvious. At one point in the course of Lightoller’s testimony, when the second officer was describing how the Titanic’s forward funnel had collapsed, falling on a knot of swimmers, Smith asked “Did it kill anyone?” Later, when he was pursuing the subject of watertight compartments, he asked Lightoller if he were able to say “whether any of the crew or passengers took to these upper watertight compartments as a final, last resort?” Lightoller, not believing that Smith had actually asked such a question, replied that he wasn’t sure. Still later, he asked one witness if the ship sank by the bow or by the head, and when the feisty Fifth Officer Lowe was testifying, Smith asked him if he knew what an iceberg was made of. “Ice,” was Lowe’s reply.8
It was apparent gaffes like these that were making Smith a laughingstock in Great Britain. At first furious over the sheer effrontery that the committee should think that it possessed the authority to subpoena and detain British subjects, the British press soon began mocking Smith, lampooning him mercilessly, calling him “a born fool.” His naivete, his earnest manner, his persistence, and most of all, the questions he asked, all provided a near-endless source of material for the British satirical press and music-hall comedians. The Hippodrome publicly offered him $50,000 to appear there and give a one hour lecture on any subject he liked, while the music hall stages began to refer to him as Senator “Watertight” Smith.
More dignified but no less upset was the legitimate British press. That the Titanic had been the property of an American shipping combine was ignored by a majority of the editors of Britain’s dailies. Soon their editorial columns were running over with repetitious protests about Americans overstepping their authority, the general or specific ignorance of things nautical of Senator Smith, the affront to Britain’s honor by the serving of subpoenas to the surviving crewmen, and so on. The magazine Syren and Shipping questioned the Senator’s sanity, while the Morning Post declared that “A schoolboy would blush at Mr. Smith’s ignorance.” It was the position of the Daily Mirror that “Senator Smith has ... made himself ridiculous in the eyes of British seamen. British seamen know something about ships. Senator Smith does not.” The Daily Telegraph summed up the British attitude best when it declared: The inquiry which has been in progress in America has effectively illustrated the inability of the lay mind to grasp the problem of marine navigation. It is a matter of congratulation that British custom provides a more satisfactory method of investigating the circumstances attending a wreck.9
In other words, this inquiry was something best left to the British Board of Trade, and the Americans had no business conducting such an investigation. The senator was accused of sullying the good name and reputation of the United States Senate, of political opportunism, and of hindering the process of discovering the truth about what happened to the Titanic. The outpouring of indignation was so righteous, so consistent, so loud, and so prolonged that the British press was beginning to give the impression that it feared what Smith’s investigation might reveal about the British merchant marine.10
But not all of the British press joined in the chorus of jeers and condemnation of Smith, while extolling the virtues of a British investigation. G. K. Chesterton, writing in the Illustrated London News, was blunt in pointing out the differences:It is perfectly true, as the English papers are saying, that the American papers are both what we would call vulgar and vindictive ; they set the pack in full cry upon a particular man [Ismay]; that they are impatient of delay and eager for savage decisions; that the flags under which they march are often the rags of a reckless and unscrupulous journalism. All this is true. But if these be the American faults, it is all the more necessary to emphasize the opposite English faults. Our national evil is exactly the other way: it is to hush everything up; it is to damp everything down; it is to leave the great affair unfinished, to leave every enormous question unanswered.11
The editor of John Bull agreed:We need scarcely point out that the scope of such an inquiry [by the Board of Trade] is strictly limited by statute, and that its sole effect will be to shelve the scandal until public feeling has subsided. What a game it is! 12
The Review of Reviews, which had lost its founder, William Stead, on the Titanic, issued the most stinging rebuke to the rest of the British papers: “We prefer the ignorance of Senator Smith to the knowledge of Mr. Ismay. Experts have told us the Titanic was unsinkable—we prefer ignorance to such knowledge!”13
In truth, Senator Smith was far from being the bumbling incompetent or the complete rube the British depicted him to be. When he asked, “Did the ship go down by the bow or the head?”, he was effectively depriving the Titanic’s officers and owners of one of their more useful defensive ploys, that of falling back on technical jargon and nautical terminology in their answers and hoping to confuse the hapless landlubber. When the Senator asked Fifth Officer Lowe what an iceberg was made of, it was to seek an explanation for those who wondered how an object that was merely frozen water could inflict a mortal wound on a ship with steel sides nearly an inch thick. Fourth Officer Boxhall, when asked the same question, saw what Smith was getting at and replied that he believed that some icebergs did contain rock and such debris, but nothing large enough to matter. Similarly, when asking Lightoller if any of the passengers and crew might have sought refuge in one of the ship’s watertight compartments, Smith was not asking for his own enlightenment. In 1911, he had been given a tour of the Olympic, conducted by Captain Smith himself, and the Senator had seen firsthand what watertight compartments were on a ship. But there were many thousands of Americans who had never seen an ocean liner and had no idea what a watertight compartment was, who had horrible visions of some huddled knot of survivors trapped at the bottom of the ocean, slowly suffocating in the darkness. Smith had asked a question that he knew to be slightly ridiculous simply to allay those fears.
Nor was Smith above taking steps to educate himself on subjects about which he knew little or was unfamiliar. On May 25 the senator, along with Rear Admiral Richard Watt, chief constructor of the U.S. Navy, and a navy stenographer boarded the Olympic in New York harbor. Instructed by P. A. S. Franklin to extend the senator’s party every courtesy, the Olympic’s skipper, Capt. H. J. Haddock had a crew standing by to demonstrate, at the Senator’s request, the method for loading and lowering one of the lifeboats. Smith and his party then made a trek down to Boiler Room 6, where they met Fireman Fred Barrett, who was a survivor from the Titanic. In the course of giving his deposition, Barrett showed the senator how the watertight doors worked, and gave a vivid description of what the collision was like in the boiler room that cold April night. 14
Admittedly, Smith’s inquiry was not perfect. Its most obvious flaw was Smith’s difficulty in delegating authority to his fellow members, preferring to do most of the cross-examination himself. This territoriality made him enemies both on and off the committee, since it looked like a deliberate attempt on his part to seize and retain control of the limelight. But Smith had approached the investigation with a missionary’s zeal, and he wasn’t about to let crucial information slip past another member. But his control also created problems, especially as the investigation continued; some members of the committee began attending the hearings only infrequently, and Smith himself, feeling the strain, began to ask some witnesses the same questions more than once.
Nevertheless, Smith discovered som
e startling information. During the course of his questioning Fourth Officer Boxhall, he learned that there had been another ship nearby, which had not responded to the Titanic’s wireless or rockets. Other witnesses confirmed the testimony and Smith became determined to find that ship and find out why. In that he was lucky, for he found her entirely by accident. 15
The Californian had docked in Boston harbor on April 19, the same day that the hearings began in New York. Rumors began flying almost immediately that she had been near enough to the Titanic on the night of April 14-15 to watch the ship go down. The newspapers jumped on this immediately, but Captain Lord assured them that his ship had been nearly twenty miles distant from the Titanic’s position, well beyond visual range, and had neither seen nor heard anything unusual until the wireless operator came on duty that morning, when the Californian then heard of the disaster. When asked about the rumors that some of the crew had seen the Titanic’s rockets, Lord smiled and shook his head, saying, “Sailors will tell anything when they’re ashore.” The reporters took Lord at his word, and the story was buried on the inside pages of the handful of papers that carried it.16
One man in Lord’s crew was not so easily dispatched. After reading his captain’s remarks in the Boston papers, Ernest Gill, one of the Californian’s assistant engineers, took a reporter and four fellow engineers to a notary public and swore out a lengthy affidavit, in which he maintained that he personally had seen a ship firing rockets just after midnight on April 15. Moreover, he claimed that the ship firing the rockets was no more than ten miles away, and that he had heard the Californian’s second officer saying that he too had seen the rockets, and that the ship’s captain had been told about them.
Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic Page 28