The Great Titanic Conspiracy

by Robin Gardiner

  As he had moved on to the aft boats before Murdoch, one would have expected Mr Lightoller to have been first to get one of them away, No 10 at 1.20am, with 55 persons in it, but no. Murdoch lowered No 9 at exactly the same time with 56 people aboard. It is already apparent that Murdoch was very much more efficient than Lightoller when it came to loading and lowering lifeboats, not that either of them would have won any prizes. Boats 11 and 12 were lowered simultaneously at 1.25am. Murdoch had slightly overloaded 11 and had squeezed 70 people in, while Lightoller had settled for just 43 in boat 12. Curiously, according to eyewitness testimony, a Frenchman leapt into this boat from B Deck as it was being lowered. B Deck, at this point, should have been completely enclosed, not a promenade, lined with locked cabins - yet another indication that the B Deck layout was not as it should have been. Port-side boat 14 was next away at 1.30am, almost fully loaded with 60 people in it. Fifth Officer Lowe assisted in the loading of No 14 and intended to take command of it when it was lowered. He obviously thought that 60 was as many people as the boat could handle as, in order to make room for himself, he ordered a 14-year-old boy to get out of the boat at gunpoint. Boats 13, 15 and 16 were next, all at 1.35am. Sixth Officer Moody appears to have dealt with boats 13 and 15. No 13 left the ship almost fully laden with 64 persons, and No 15 had 70 aboard. Again according to eyewitness evidence, boat 13 was loaded from A Deck where potential passengers had to climb over the ship’s rail to get into it. No 16 also appears to have been dealt with by Mr Moody, but with Mr Lightoller in attendance; it left Titanic with 56 people in it.

  Mr Murdoch now moved back to the forward end of the boat deck to see what could be done with the collapsible boats still there. He managed to get collapsible C away at 1.40am with 39 people before turning his attentions to boat A. He had some problems in getting A off the roof of the officers’ quarters, so much so that it was, according to the received version of events that night, still there when the ship sank, when it floated free. However, Steward E. Brown testified that there were no real problems encountered in getting A off the roof and under the davits vacated by one of the forward lifeboats. August Wennerstrom, a third-class passenger, later said that boat A went into the water the right way up, which argues that it was launched in the usual way, and that it was only capsized after the liner had foundered by people in the water trying to climb aboard. Both Brown and Wennerstrom survived by making use of the waterlogged collapsible as a makeshift life raft along with about 13 others.

  With the last of the aft boats gone, Mr Lightoller came forward again to deal with the remaining port-side boats. He found boat 2, which for some unaccountable reason he had failed to load and lower earlier, even though it was one of the emergency boats that was always kept swung out and ready for instant use, full of what he described as ‘Dagoes’. He cleared these interlopers out of the boat at gunpoint and began embarking a few more deserving individuals, almost all first-class passengers or crewmen. No 2 was launched at 1.45am with 25 people. Boat 4, which had been delayed because of the projecting spar below it, was next and went into the water at 1.55am with just 40 aboard, almost all either first-class passengers or crew members. Lightoller next turned his attentions to collapsible boat D. He had some problems getting the boat under the davits, so it wasn’t until about 2.05am that the boat got away with 44 people in it. By this time it was obvious to all aboard the ship that she could not remain afloat for many more minutes. Lightoller started to prepare boat B and tried to get it down from the roof of the officers’ quarters, but there was no more time.

  Even as the boats were being prepared and lowered there were other things going on aboard the stricken liner. Armed junior officers were sent below to lock the steel mesh doors leading to the forward third-class accommodation, cutting it off from the rest of the ship. This part of the vessel, it will be recalled, housed mostly single male third-class passengers who didn’t take being locked in at all well. Some of these passengers tried to open the doors and force their way out, but the ship’s officers were prepared for this and opened fire. On the wreck the area around those doors, which are still locked, shows evidence of scarring where it appears some of the bullets struck. With a high proportion of the third-class male passengers effectively prevented from occupying valuable lifeboat spaces, the crew turned their attentions to the Italian restaurant staff. These, it seems, were also deemed unworthy of lifeboat space and had been rounded up and locked in the second-class dining saloon. After all, there were a lot of first-class passengers and crew members who could make use of the all too few lifeboat places. It seems that at least some of the third-class passengers from the forward part of the ship were later released, but they did not reach the boat deck until after the last boats had gone. The unfortunate Italians don’t seem to have escaped from the dining saloon at all.

  According to the received version of events, in the wireless room Jack Phillips and Harold Bride continued to send out distress calls and exchange signals with various vessels. They stayed at their posts until told by Captain Smith that they had done their duty and were free to attempt to save themselves, or so Harold Bride was to say at both later Inquiries. Bride also said that shortly before they were relieved by Captain Smith a stoker had come into the wireless room. The stoker, half crazed with fear, had attempted to remove Phillips’s life jacket while the wireless man was engrossed in sending out distress calls. Phillips was so intent on what he was doing that he didn’t even notice the stoker’s presence. Harold Bride promptly struck the stoker over the head with a convenient spanner, rendering him unconscious at the very least. When the wireless operators were released from duty, Bride testified that they vacated the wireless room, leaving the comatose stoker on the floor, still without a life jacket. Once outside, the operators parted company; Bride made his way forward towards where the last remaining boats were still aboard, while Jack Phillips headed aft.

  However, there is compelling evidence to show that Bride’s story was something less than the whole truth. The last wireless signals from the sinking liner were received by the Virginian at 2.17am. The signals were blurred and weak, as if the transmitter was running on reduced power, and ended abruptly as if the power had suddenly and completely failed, which indeed it had. By that time Titanic’s bow, and the wireless cabin, were under water and the liner’s stern was high in the air. Survivors in the boats saw the ship’s lights flicker and go out at precisely that time, 2.17am. If Harold Bride had been telling the truth about Phillips and himself having left the wireless room about 10 minutes before that last signal was sent out, whose hand could it have been on the Morse key? There seems to have been nobody else aboard the ship who could have sent that signal except Jack Phillips, and if he had left the cabin and gone aft he could not have returned as the cabin was submerged. There can only be one believable explanation - that Bride had deserted his post, leaving his fellow operator to his fate before anyone had officially told him it was time to leave. While such action might have been reprehensible, it is also understandable. Bride was a young man, just 22 years old, two years younger than Phillips. What is inexcusable is what Bride had to say about Phillips later.

  As the bows of the ship went under and water swept back across the decks, Second Officer Charles Lightoller was washed overboard, he said. After swimming about for a little while he came across collapsible boat B, which was floating upside down and acting as a life raft for between 25 and 30 people. According to Lightoller there was nobody actually on the boat when he reached it but there were a lot of people in the water around it. He promptly boarded the upturned boat and took command.

  When boat B had been washed overboard wireless operator Bride had gone with it and finished up underneath the collapsible lifeboat where he remained for between a half and three-quarters of an hour. He then swam away from the already heavily laden boat for the best part of an hour before returning and being taken aboard. By that time Bride thought that there were between 30 and 40 people on the boat, Jack Phillips a
mong them. According to Bride, Phillips died later that night from cold and fear. (We already know that Phillips could not have made it to boat B, being still in the wireless cabin when the ship foundered. Water rushing into the vessel would have carried him deeper inside if he had attempted to leave the cabin after it was submerged. There a number of eye-witness accounts of the sinking that tell of people being sucked into the ship through open doors, windows and portholes as she filled with water, which is exactly what one would expect.)

  Colonel Archibald Gracie was another who made good his escape from the sinking ship on boat B. His story is even more unbelievable than most. According to Gracie he was on the opposite side of the ship from B when he was dragged under as the bow sank. Swimming furiously he swam underwater for a period of minutes before breaking surface and spotting the upturned lifeboat. He reached the boat but was unable to climb completely aboard and had to remain partly in the water.

  Baker Charles Joughin also made an extraordinary escape. As the aft part of the ship reared up until it was almost perpendicular he climbed up the outside of the hull until he was standing on the very stern. Here he patiently waited until the ship sank beneath him, when he casually stepped off and began swimming. According to Joughin he didn’t even get his hair wet. He swam about for 2 hours, or so he thought, before coming across boat B and clambering to safety.

  In all about 15 people survived the disaster by escaping aboard boat B. At one point there may have been as many as 40 persons clustered on the upturned lifeboat and probably many more in the water close by it. Not one of those that survived could have been telling the truth about how they swam to the boat, climbed aboard, and got through the night by standing huddled together on the bottom planking, as we shall shortly see.

  The nine or ten people who survived the disaster aboard collapsible boat A are in the main as mendacious as those from boat B. If we are to believe the official version of events that night, collapsible A, like B, was washed overboard as the ship sank. The boat floated the right way up but the people who managed to clamber into it could not get the canvas sides up or bale out the water in it. They were obliged to sit in the partly submerged craft, in freezing cold water up to their waists, in saturated clothes.

  There was nobody in the boat when it first went into the water and we do not know who reached it first. P. D. Daly, O. Abelseth and Rosa Abbott, all passengers, were pulled into the boat from the sea, Abelseth after he had been swimming about for 20 minutes or so. In fact, all of the people in boat A had supposedly been in the sea for varying lengths of time, just like those on boat B.

  It will be recalled that it was a very cold night, with both sea and air temperatures well below freezing. It is impossible for anyone to have survived for more than a couple of minutes in sea that cold, and being wet through they would have been no better off aboard either boat A or B. Therefore all of these people who supposedly survived the night on or in these two collapsible boats must have been lying. The question is, why?

  By far the most likely explanation is that boats A and B were launched in the usual way and that they were capsized or otherwise disabled once they were in the water. There is some evidence to suggest that this might have indeed been the case. August Wennerstrom, the third-class passenger, said that boat A was overturned by people in the water after the ship had sunk. Steward Edward Brown said that they had no difficulty in getting boat A down off the roof of the officers’ quarters, where it was usually stowed. When boat B was found a few days after the sinking it was surrounded by floating corpses, buoyed up by their life jackets. Many of these corpses were clearly not people who had been prepared to swim far in an effort to survive. Some of them were quite heavily dressed in pyjamas, a couple of shirts, two pairs of trousers, two vests, two jackets and an overcoat. Some pockets were stuffed with meat and biscuits. Quite clearly these people had been given ample time to prepare to leave the stricken liner in a lifeboat. One of the bodies recovered was later identified as that of John Jacob Astor, the wealthiest of the many millionaires aboard the ship. Crew members’ bodies found there had pockets full of tobacco and matches. We are all aware that wet matches are useless and that waterlogged tobacco doesn’t make much of a smoke. These crew members obviously had not intended to go into the water. The only reasonable explanation for these bodies being discovered in close proximity to boat B is that they were originally its crew and passengers, which argues that the boat was lowered in the usual manner and only upset later. It is quite possible that boat B went into the mass of people struggling in the water after the ship sank and was overturned there. Perhaps the millionaire passengers on B forfeited their lives in an attempt to save others. Or perhaps those struggling in the water, unimpressed by the occupants’ first class status, overturned the boat in an attempt to save themselves.

  Whatever happened, it should be clear that the evacuation of the sinking ship was not the orderly affair usually described but the horrific panic-stricken scramble that one would have expected. Of course those that survived in boats A and B kept quiet about how they managed to do so if they were responsible for the deaths of many others who had previously occupied those boats. As it was, many of the men who survived the disaster were later ostracised for saving themselves while women and children died.

  During her final moments, as her bow sank ever deeper, Titanic’s stern lifted out of the water until the aft part of the hull was standing almost vertically. The ship’s lights, which had continued working throughout the time the vessel was slowly settling in the water, remained on until just before the hull reached the perpendicular, when they flickered and went out, only to flash on again briefly before failing completely. As mentioned earlier, we know exactly what the time was because the last wireless signal to come from the ship at 2.17am was cut off as the power failed. As soon as the lights failed those on the boats and in the water were left in total darkness, unable to see anything at all. Nobody actually saw the ship sink.

  Fifth Officer Lowe, in boat 14, determined to go to the assistance of the people he could hear struggling in the water, but he was not such a fool as to do so straight away. He knew that the mass of people would try to board his lifeboat if he went too close too soon and would almost certainly overturn it. He waited until the cries of those in the water had all but died away as the cold killed them before heading back towards where the liner had sunk. He had waited too long, and found only four people still alive. Nevertheless it was the best effort to save people from the water that night, with the possible exceptions of boats A and B.

  Next Mr Lowe turned his attention to rounding up as many of the lifeboats as possible and collecting survivors from the two half-sunken collapsible boats. His own boat was almost loaded to capacity so he transferred most of his passengers to other lifeboats. Most of the other boats already had barely enough crewmen aboard to row and steer them, but Mr Lowe took as many competent seamen from them as possible to make his own, now relatively lightly loaded, more manageable. He then set off towards collapsible boats A and B, and collected the people that were still alive from them. Somewhere along the way Lowe encountered what seaman Joseph Scarrott described as a life raft, which seemed to be constructed of ‘air boxes’. ‘It was not a collapsible,’ Scarrott was positive. As Titanic did not carry any life rafts we are left wondering where this one had come from.

  By the time Lowe had picked up everyone from the two damaged collapsibles and had distributed the people in the other boats he had collected as evenly as he was able, there was nobody left alive in the water. For some little while passengers in the boats had been seeing lights in the sky, away to the southeast. Most of them were aware that Carpathia would be coming to their rescue from that direction and were heartened to see what they correctly believed to be rockets fired from that ship. However, it does seem a little odd that people sitting in small boats only just above sea level could see any indication at all of the approaching rescuer. It was a pitch-black night and they were surrounded by hug
e icebergs like floating mountains. From as low down as the survivors were, even growlers would have looked pretty impressive and would have interfered with their line of sight. This is a recurring problem with Titanic’s survivors: either they could see in total darkness and through icebergs or there were many fewer bergs than there should have been according to other accounts.

  As dawn approached Carpathia arrived on the scene and prepared to pick up survivors. For the people from Titanic the first, and worst, part of their ordeal was over.

  Chapter 20

  Too many survivors

  Captain Rostron continued to navigate Carpathia at high speed all the way to the position given to him by his wireless operator, as indicated in Titanic’s distress signals. He arrived at that position at just before 4.00am. Several times during his mad dash to the rescue Rostron had to take violent evasive action to avoid running into icebergs and growlers that had loomed up out of the darkness. The Captain never explained how his lookouts managed to spot these hazards on a pitch dark night in time for his vessel, moving at something like 17½ knots, to avoid them. However, avoid them they did, and at 4 o’clock Carpathia stopped engines. About 300 yards ahead could be seen a green light - they had the first lifeboat in sight.

  Slowly Captain Rostron eased his ship closer to the lifeboat, intending to bring it alongside on his port side where it would be sheltered from what little wind there was. Suddenly a large iceberg loomed up out of the darkness, directly ahead of Carpathia. Captain Rostron was obliged to make an emergency alteration to his course and had to bring the small boat in on his starboard side. Had Carpathia not been manoeuvring very slowly this berg alone would have ended the rescue attempt. Rostron was no fool and fully appreciated the risks he had been taking with his ship and the lives of all aboard her. He later said he was ‘devoutly thankful’ that the race to the boats was over. ‘Every moment had brought its risk - a risk that only keen eyes and quick decisions could meet.’ We already know that there was nothing indecisive about Captain Rostron.