The Great Titanic Conspiracy

by Robin Gardiner

  Californian’s apprentice officer, James Gibson, joined Groves and Stone on the bridge at about 12.15am. He too tried to attract the stranger’s attention with the Morse lamp, again without result. Then he saw a flash of light on the deck of the mystery ship as she fired a rocket, but, even though they were only 5 miles away, the watchers on Californian’s bridge did not hear any explosion as the rocket burst to release a shower of white stars. (Titanic did not fire ordinary rockets but used socket signals, a sort of mortar that fired a shell 800 feet into the air from the bridge, not from the deck. These shells exploded with an ear-splitting report that should have been clearly audible on a still, clear night at a distance of 5 miles.) Gibson studied the mystery ship through his binoculars and thought that she had only the one masthead light. He also saw both her red and green lights, which were on opposite sides of the ship, and thought that the red (port side) light was higher out of the water than the green, indicating that the vessel had a pronounced list to starboard. Like Stone, Gibson thought they were watching a cargo ship, not a liner.

  At about 12.35am Captain Lord, resting in the chart room, blew up the voice-pipe connected to the bridge, sounding the whistle. When Stone answered Lord asked whether the mystery ship had moved. Stone told him that it had not and that, despite repeated attempts with the Morse lamp, they had not been able to make contact. Ten minutes later Stone saw a flash of light in the sky in the direction of the mysterious steamer, which might have been another rocket, or might have been just another shooting star. As we already know, there had been a number of shooting stars visible in the heavens that night. Shortly afterwards he saw another flash of light directly above the stranger. However, Mr Stone did not think that this was a rocket from the mystery ship but that the light came from a good distance beyond. Between then and about 1.15am Stone saw another three flashes in the sky, which might have been rockets although he didn’t think that they were. He was sure that they were all white in colour. As we shall shortly see, Titanic fired an assortment of red, white and blue rockets, not just white ones. This is an important point to bear in mind when we come to what Captain Lord had to say when, still half asleep, he was informed that the officers on the bridge had seen rockets at all.

  The Second Officer thought he saw five rockets in all, the last at about 1.10am. Gibson obviously didn’t see the earlier rockets because he said that Mr Stone told him about them, and that the last one he saw was at 12.55am. Stone was still of the opinion that the rockets, if they were rockets, had not come from the ship they had in view but from a much greater distance away. The signals only rose to half the stranger’s masthead height, so if they did come from that vessel then they could not be rockets, only Roman candles. Roman candles were regularly used for signalling between ships at night and usually only to establish the identity of the vessels involved. These small pyrotechnic devices fired a succession of coloured fireballs to a height not exceeding 50 feet. They could never be mistaken for distress rockets.

  Soon after 1.00am the stranger began to move away towards the southwest. The Second Officer whistled down the speaking tube to the Captain’s cabin. Lord, dozing in the chartroom next door, must have heard the whistle and went into his cabin to answer. Stone told the captain about the signals they had seen. Captain Lord asked if they were private signals, meaning Roman candles. Stone replied, ‘I don’t know, but they are all white.’ Lord then ordered Stone to keep trying to signal the stranger with the Morse lamp, saying ‘... when you get an answer let me know by Gibson.’ Stone continued, without success, to attempt to contact the mysterious ship while the captain returned to the chartroom settee. Clearly Lord was making an effort to stay awake by resting on the relatively uncomfortable settee even though he would have been more easily reached by voice-pipe if he had gone to his own cabin. However, he would have been well aware that to have stretched out on his bed in the warmth of his cabin after spending any length of time out in the bitterly cold conditions of the bridge would have invited sleep. Anyone who spends time out of doors in winter will know exactly what happens when they later sit down in a warm room. They are asleep within minutes.

  By 2.00am the mystery ship was still heading away from them. Since they had first seen her the stranger had moved between 5 and 8 miles, so she was only making a couple of knots. Nevertheless she had moved sufficiently far that her side lights could no longer be seen - only her stern light remained visible. Only then did the Second Officer remember his instructions about keeping the Captain informed.

  ‘I told Gibson to go down to the master and be sure and wake him up and tell him that altogether we had seen eight of these white lights, like white rockets, in the direction of this other steamer; that this steamer was disappearing in the south-west, that we had called her up repeatedly on the Morse lamp and received no information whatsoever.’

  Captain Lord was dozing on the chartroom settee when Gibson put his head around the door. The apprentice must have thought the master was wider awake than he actually was when he delivered his message, as instructed by the Second Officer. He later said that the Captain acknowledged his report by saying, ‘All right. Are you sure there were no colours in them?’ The master then asked the time. Gibson then returned to the bridge and reported the conversation to Stone.

  The fact that Captain Lord had not gone to bed that night and had ordered the ship’s engineer to maintain steam pressure so that the engines were ready for instant use tells us that he was expecting something to happen. He was expecting to have to get under way at short notice. Also, the Captain’s repeated questions about the signals seen from his ship, as to whether they had any colour in them or were private signals (also usually coloured), tells us that he was expecting to see coloured signals that night. All of these facts point towards a carefully planned event taking place, an event in which Captain Lord was supposed to play an active part. Lord was doing his level best to be ready when he was needed. As we know, there was an event that night in which Captain Lord and his vessel might well have played an important part, an event in which coloured rockets were indeed sent up. Unfortunately that event took place almost 20 miles from where Californian lay drifting with the ice, too far away for pyrotechnic signals to be seen.

  Both Titanic and Californian were equipped with wireless and it would normally have been a simple matter for them to contact one another at a distance of only about 20 miles. Unluckily for those aboard the White Star liner, Captain Lord considered wireless an insecure means of communication, so Californian’s wireless operator was not privy to that night’s plans. Even so, all might have been well but for an unlucky sequence of events that was nobody’s fault. Cyril Evans had turned in for the night at shortly after 11.30pm and, as is to be expected after working a 16½-hour day, had no difficulty in falling asleep. Third Officer Groves had finished his stint on duty at midnight but had not left the bridge until at least 10 minutes after that time. Instead of going straight to his own cabin and turning in for the night, Groves stopped off at the wireless room. Evans was in bed and half asleep when the Third Officer entered the room. We must assume that his knocking on the cabin door had at least partly woken Evans. Groves had more than a passing interest in the new electronic marvel, wireless, and took whatever opportunity presented itself to learn as much as he could about it. He had even gone to the trouble of teaching himself the Morse code, although he was not up to the standards required by the Marconi company. Nevertheless, the Third Officer could understand the code well enough to get the gist of whatever he heard and had spent a considerable amount of time in the wireless room listening to the traffic. Evans was used to these nocturnal visits.

  Groves asked the operator what ships he had made contact with. ‘Only the Titanic,’ replied Evans, and went on to say that judging by her signal strength the liner was about 100 miles away from them at 11 o’clock. If Evans had been wider awake he might have reminded Groves to wind up the mechanical signal detector, but he didn’t. Groves put on the headphones and s
witched on the receiver, but because of the disabled signal detector he heard nothing. He listened for a few minutes, then switched off the set and left Evans in peace. If only Groves had wound up the signal detector it is almost certain that he would have heard Titanic’s distress call and alerted Captain Lord.

  Cargo ships at that time usually only carried a single wireless operator, so not a lot of traffic passed between them after about midnight. At the British Inquiry, Captain Lord was asked why he didn’t have the wireless operator wakened when rockets were first reported to him. ‘When? At 1 o’clock in the morning?’ Lord clearly knew that it was all but useless to wake the wireless operator in order to make contact with another relatively small cargo ship at that time of night. Even Marconi operators had to sleep sometimes.

  Stone and Gibson remained on the bridge watching the stranger. They had already noticed that she had a list to starboard. (After the collision Titanic developed a list to port.) They watched as the mystery vessel moved away, its stern light slowly fading. Stone did not believe that the way the light disappeared resembled in any way a vessel sinking. Then, at exactly 3.40am, Gibson saw another white rocket a long way off to their south. He was sure of the time because it was just before dawn, and anyway he was due to go off duty at 4am. However, despite his certainty as to timing, Gibson may have been mistaken. According to Second Officer Stone the apprentice told him that he had just seen a white light in the sky at 3.20am. Stone watched through his binoculars for a little while where the light had been seen, and after a short while he too saw a white light in the sky, quickly followed by two more. He did not think that the lights were rockets and therefore did not report them to Captain Lord. (It has been suggested that the rockets, if they were rockets, were those fired by Carpathia as she came to the rescue. Unfortunately that cannot be true, as the Cunard liner came up from the south and was therefore even further from Californian than was Titanic, too far away for rockets to have been seen, but we will look at Carpathia a little later.)

  First Officer Stewart came onto the bridge at about 4.00am to begin his watch. Stone and Gibson told him about what they had seen during the night. In his opinion the vessel the other two officers had been watching had been firing rockets in reply to yet another vessel even further away. Stewart looked towards the southwest and saw a four-masted steamer.

  ‘There she is,’ he said, believing that he was looking at the same ship that had been visible earlier and had moved off. ‘There is that steamer. She looks all right.’ Stone said, ‘That’s not the same steamer. She has two masthead lights.’

  As it began to grow light, at about 4.30am, the Chief Officer left the bridge to wake up Captain Lord, who was still dozing in the chartroom. As soon as the Captain seemed to be fully awake, Stewart told him that the vessel that had been firing rockets was still in view to the south of them. Three senior ships’ officers, including the Captain, and Gibson the apprentice, had been aware of the rockets but had attached no importance to them, believing them to have been nothing more than company signals. Given that weight of expert opinion, it is fairly safe to assume that the lights seen were indeed nothing more than company signals (Roman candles) being exchanged between the ship seen from Californian and another vessel beyond their horizon.

  Events on the bridge of the Californian on the night of 14/15 April are important for two reasons. First, they establish the presence of at least one steamer, possibly two, between the Leyland Line vessel and the Titanic. Second, they establish that Captain Lord was expecting something to happen that night, something involving coloured rockets and the necessity for him to move his ship at short notice. As far as we are aware only one event that night fits these conditions, and that was happening almost 20 miles to the south and out of sight of the Californian.

  Chapter 18

  The view from the Carpathia

  Aboard Titanic things were going from bad to worse. It seems that preparations to stage a controlled sinking had come back to bite them. The senior officers involved in the original scheme to scuttle the ship were so blinkered by what they had planned to do that they could not react rationally now that things had gone horribly wrong. The mere fact that there was a plan already in place to scuttle the ship condemned many of those aboard the liner to death.

  If a good percentage of the forward pumps were useless, and they may well have been, there was relatively little that could be done to extend the life of the ship. Sails - all ships then carried sails for use in an emergency -could have been dropped overboard in the vicinity of the hull breach where the inrushing water would carry them into the hole and help block it up, but it would appear that nobody thought of trying that. This emergency measure was as close to a standard response as there could be in what were, after all, exceptional circumstances. It had been tried just three years earlier when the White Star Line’s 15,378-ton Republic had been rammed by the 5,118-ton Lloyd Italiano liner Florida, just a little south of the Nantucket lightship. About 30 feet of Florida’s bow was crushed in the collision, killing three crewmen asleep in the forecastle. A huge hole reaching from the promenade deck to well below the waterline and more than 20 feet wide had been torn in the Republic’s side. (This gives us some indication of the sort of damage that even the unarmoured bow of a ship of that size could do to another ordinary commercial vessel. Florida was roughly the same size as HMS Hawke, so imagine the sort of damage we could expect to see on Olympic when the armoured ram bow of the warship crashed into her side.)

  A canvas sheet was soon stretched across the crumpled bow of the Italian ship as she stood by to take off the passengers and crew of the Republic. The White Star liner was severely damaged and clearly sinking, but even so, in an attempt to extend the life of his vessel, Captain William Inman Sealby had a sail stretched over the yawning hole in his ship’s side. It worked and the flow of water into the stricken liner was reduced to the point where it was thought possible to tow her to shore and beach her. The attempt failed and Republic foundered while under tow, almost 15 hours after the collision. Had a similar effort been made with the Titanic it is certainly possible that she might have remained afloat long enough for help to reach her.

  Instead of trying even this simple emergency measure to keep his ship afloat for a little longer, Captain Smith elected to do nothing except signal for assistance and try to get some of those aboard into the lifeboats. Even with many of the people who had been berthed in the forward third-class accommodation locked securely below and under armed guard, and with all but one of Mr Gatti’s Italian restaurant employees confined to the second-class dining room, there was still nowhere near enough lifeboat space for those supposedly remaining. Of course, if there were not as many people aboard the liner as were shown on the passenger lists, the problem would automatically be somewhat reduced. Allowing that there was already a plan in place to dispose of the liner on this voyage, it would have made good sense to reduce the numbers aboard to manageable proportions. It is much easier to take a thousand people off a ship at sea than to rescue two thousand. There is some quite compelling evidence to suggest that there were nowhere near the numbers aboard the ship as is usually believed, as we shall see.

  Titanic carried no life rafts, but some of these useful articles could have been easily improvised by lashing together anything that could be found which would float, such as deckchairs, tables and other furniture. Even if these failed to save any lives, the construction of them would help keep both passengers and crew members occupied and stave off the onset of panic. It is curious that at least one surviving experienced seaman did describe in detail seeing a purpose-built life raft after the liner had sunk. In fact, he described how the lifeboat he was in stopped to pick up the people on the raft. As we know that Titanic did not carry life rafts, we must assume that this one came from another ship - but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

  About 25 minutes after the accident Captain Smith ordered his officers to prepare the boats. Chief Officer Wilde was to uncover them whil
e Sixth Officer James Moody fetched the list of boat assignments. Like today, people had lifeboat accommodation assigned to them so that they were supposed to know where to go in an emergency, another measure designed to help minimise panic; unfortunately the passengers had not been told what these arrangements were. There had been no lifeboat drill aboard Titanic even though this simple precaution was usual practice aboard White Star liners. First Officer Murdoch was to begin mustering passengers ready for loading the boats. While waiting for Moody to reappear with the list of lifeboat assignments, Murdoch assisted, with the help of some crew members, in uncovering the boats. Second Officer Lightoller, Fourth Officer Boxhall and Third Officer Pitman had been off duty but were summoned to help with the boats. As it was to turn out, those awaiting an escape from the doomed ship might have been better off if one of those officers had remained in his cabin. It is a curious circumstance with the Titanic that those officers who showed little efficiency in saving the lives of others somehow managed to save themselves.

  At 12.15am the first wireless distress calls were sent out from the liner, but gave the wrong position for the sinking ship. Ten minutes later, after the Navigating Officer, Mr Boxhall, had calculated the true position of the ship, this error was rectified and from then onwards the correct coordinates were transmitted. The signal was received by the lone wireless operator aboard the Cunard liner Carpathia, who was just getting ready for bed and had, luckily for Titanic, not got around to switching off his equipment. At the British Inquiry into the sinking the wireless operator from the Canadian Pacific liner Mount Temple testified that he heard Titanic and Carpathia exchanging signals earlier that evening, at 11.35pm. Either Carpathia’s operator, Harold Cottam, had fortunately left his wireless tuned to the same frequency, or the earlier exchange had forewarned him to expect another call. Carpathia was supposedly almost 60 miles away from Titanic when the distress call was received, a long way for a ship with an advertised top speed of only 14 knots.