The Loss of the S. S. Titanic - Its Story and Its Lessons (16 page)

Instructions to commanders

Commanders must distinctly understand that the issue of regulations
does not in any way relieve them from responsibility for the safe and
efficient navigation of their respective vessels, and they are also
enjoined to remember that they must run no risks which might by any
possibility result in accident to their ships. It is to be hoped that
they will ever bear in mind that the safety of the lives and property
entrusted to their care is the ruling principle that should govern
them in the navigation of their vessels, and that no supposed gain in
expedition or saving of time on the voyage is to be purchased at the
risk of accident.

Commanders are reminded that the steamers are to a great extent
uninsured, and that their own livelihood, as well as the company's
success, depends upon immunity from accident; no precaution which
ensures safe navigation is to be considered excessive.

Nothing could be plainer than these instructions, and had they been
obeyed, the disaster would never have happened: they warn commanders
against the only thing left as a menace to their unsinkable boat—the
lack of "precaution which ensures safe navigation."

In addition, the White Star Line had complied to the full extent with
the requirements of the British Government: their ship had been
subjected to an inspection so rigid that, as one officer remarked in
evidence, it became a nuisance. The Board of Trade employs the best
experts, and knows the dangers that attend ocean travel and the
precautions that should be taken by every commander. If these
precautions are not taken, it will be necessary to legislate until
they are. No motorist is allowed to career at full speed along a
public highway in dangerous conditions, and it should be an offence
for a captain to do the same on the high seas with a ship full of
unsuspecting passengers. They have entrusted their lives to the
government of their country—through its regulations—and they are
entitled to the same protection in mid-Atlantic as they are in Oxford
Street or Broadway. The open sea should no longer be regarded as a
neutral zone where no country's police laws are operative.

Of course there are difficulties in the way of drafting international
regulations: many governments would have to be consulted and many
difficulties that seem insuperable overcome; but that is the purpose
for which governments are employed, that is why experts and ministers
of governments are appointed and paid—to overcome difficulties for
the people who appoint them and who expect them, among other things,
to protect their lives.

The American Government must share the same responsibility: it is
useless to attempt to fix it on the British Board of Trade for the
reason that the boats were built in England and inspected there by
British officials. They carried American citizens largely, and entered
American ports. It would have been the simplest matter for the United
States Government to veto the entry of any ship which did not conform
to its laws of regulating speed in conditions of fog and icebergs—had
they provided such laws. The fact is that the American nation has
practically no mercantile marine, and in time of a disaster such as
this it forgets, perhaps, that it has exactly the same right—and
therefore the same responsibility—as the British Government to
inspect, and to legislate: the right that is easily enforced by
refusal to allow entry. The regulation of speed in dangerous regions
could well be undertaken by some fleet of international police patrol
vessels, with power to stop if necessary any boat found guilty of
reckless racing. The additional duty of warning ships of the exact
locality of icebergs could be performed by these boats. It would not
of course be possible or advisable to fix a "speed limit," because the
region of icebergs varies in position as the icebergs float south,
varies in point of danger as they melt and disappear, and the whole
question has to be left largely to the judgment of the captain on the
spot; but it would be possible to make it an offence against the law
to go beyond a certain speed in known conditions of danger.

So much for the question of regulating speed on the high seas. The
secondary question of safety appliances is governed by the same
principle—that, in the last analysis, it is not the captain, not the
passenger, not the builders and owners, but the governments through
their experts, who are to be held responsible for the provision of
lifesaving devices. Morally, of course, the owners and builders are
responsible, but at present moral responsibility is too weak an
incentive in human affairs—that is the miserable part of the whole
wretched business—to induce owners generally to make every possible
provision for the lives of those in their charge; to place human
safety so far above every other consideration that no plan shall be
left unconsidered, no device left untested, by which passengers can
escape from a sinking ship. But it is not correct to say, as has been
said frequently, that it is greed and dividend-hunting that have
characterized the policy of the steamship companies in their failure
to provide safety appliances: these things in themselves are not
expensive. They have vied with each other in making their lines
attractive in point of speed, size and comfort, and they have been
quite justified in doing so: such things are the product of ordinary
competition between commercial houses.

Where they have all failed morally is to extend to their passengers
the consideration that places their lives as of more interest to them
than any other conceivable thing. They are not alone in this:
thousands of other people have done the same thing and would do it
to-day—in factories, in workshops, in mines, did not the government
intervene and insist on safety precautions. The thing is a defect in
human life of to-day—thoughtlessness for the well-being of our
fellow-men; and we are all guilty of it in some degree. It is folly
for the public to rise up now and condemn the steamship companies:
their failing is the common failing of the immorality of indifference.

The remedy is the law, and it is the only remedy at present that will
really accomplish anything. The British law on the subject dates from
1894, and requires only twenty boats for a ship the size of the
Titanic: the owners and builders have obeyed this law and fulfilled
their legal responsibility. Increase this responsibility and they will
fulfil it again—and the matter is ended so far as appliances are
concerned. It should perhaps be mentioned that in a period of ten
years only nine passengers were lost on British ships: the law seemed
to be sufficient in fact.

The position of the American Government, however, is worse than that
of the British Government. Its regulations require more than double
the boat accommodation which the British regulations do, and yet it
has allowed hundreds of thousands of its subjects to enter its ports
on boats that defied its own laws. Had their government not been
guilty of the same indifference, passengers would not have been
allowed aboard any British ship lacking in boat-accommodation—the
simple expedient again of refusing entry. The reply of the British
Government to the Senate Committee, accusing the Board of Trade of
"insufficient requirements and lax inspection," might well be—"Ye
have a law: see to it yourselves!"

It will be well now to consider briefly the various appliances that
have been suggested to ensure the safety of passengers and crew, and
in doing so it may be remembered that the average man and woman has
the same right as the expert to consider and discuss these things:
they are not so technical as to prevent anyone of ordinary
intelligence from understanding their construction. Using the term in
its widest sense, we come first to:—

Bulkheads and water-tight compartments

It is impossible to attempt a discussion here of the exact
constructional details of these parts of a ship; but in order to
illustrate briefly what is the purpose of having bulkheads, we may
take the Titanic as an example. She was divided into sixteen
compartments by fifteen transverse steel walls called bulkheads.
If a hole is made in the
side of the ship in any one compartment, steel water-tight doors seal
off the only openings in that compartment and separate it as a damaged
unit from the rest of the ship and the vessel is brought to land in
safety. Ships have even put into the nearest port for inspection after
collision, and finding only one compartment full of water and no other
damage, have left again, for their home port without troubling to
disembark passengers and effect repairs.

The design of the Titanic's bulkheads calls for some attention. The
"Scientific American," in an excellent article on the comparative
safety of the Titanic's and other types of water-tight compartments,
draws attention to the following weaknesses in the former—from the
point of view of possible collision with an iceberg. She had no
longitudinal bulkheads, which would subdivide her into smaller
compartments and prevent the water filling the whole of a large
compartment. Probably, too, the length of a large compartment was in
any case too great—fifty-three feet.

The Mauretania, on the other hand, in addition to transverse
bulkheads, is fitted with longitudinal torpedo bulkheads, and the
space between them and the side of the ship is utilised as a coal
bunker. Then, too, in the Mauretania all bulkheads are carried up to
the top deck, whereas in the case of the Titanic they reached in some
parts only to the saloon deck and in others to a lower deck
still,—the weakness of this being that, when the water reached to the
top of a bulkhead as the ship sank by the head, it flowed over and
filled the next compartment. The British Admiralty, which subsidizes
the Mauretania and Lusitania as fast cruisers in time of war, insisted
on this type of construction, and it is considered vastly better than
that used in the Titanic. The writer of the article thinks it possible
that these ships might not have sunk as the result of a similar
collision. But the ideal ship from the point of bulkhead construction,
he considers to have been the Great Eastern, constructed many years
ago by the famous engineer Brunel. So thorough was her system of
compartments divided and subdivided by many transverse and
longitudinal bulkheads that when she tore a hole eighty feet long in
her side by striking a rock, she reached port in safety. Unfortunately
the weight and cost of this method was so great that his plan was
subsequently abandoned.

But it would not be just to say that the construction of the Titanic
was a serious mistake on the part of the White Star Line or her
builders, on the ground that her bulkheads were not so well
constructed as those of the Lusitania and Mauretania, which were built
to fulfil British Admiralty regulations for time of war—an
extraordinary risk which no builder of a passenger steamer—as
such—would be expected to take into consideration when designing the
vessel. It should be constantly borne in mind that the Titanic met
extraordinary conditions on the night of the collision: she was
probably the safest ship afloat in all ordinary conditions. Collision
with an iceberg is not an ordinary risk; but this disaster will
probably result in altering the whole construction of bulkheads and
compartments to the Great Eastern type, in order to include the
one-in-a-million risk of iceberg collision and loss.

Here comes in the question of increased cost of construction, and in
addition the great loss of cargo-carrying space with decreased earning
capacity, both of which will mean an increase in the passenger rates.
This the travelling public will have to face and undoubtedly will be
willing to face for the satisfaction of knowing that what was so
confidently affirmed by passengers on the Titanic's deck that night of
the collision will then be really true,—that "we are on an unsinkable
boat,"—so far as human forethought can devise. After all, this
must
be the solution to the problem how best to ensure safety
at sea. Other safety appliances are useful and necessary, but not
useable in certain conditions of weather. The ship itself must always
be the "safety appliance" that is really trustworthy, and nothing must
be left undone to ensure this.

Wireless apparatus and operators

The range of the apparatus might well be extended, but the principal
defect is the lack of an operator for night duty on some ships. The
awful fact that the Californian lay a few miles away, able to save
every soul on board, and could not catch the message because the
operator was asleep, seems too cruel to dwell upon. Even on the
Carpathia, the operator was on the point of retiring when the message
arrived, and we should have been much longer afloat—and some boats
possibly swamped—had he not caught the message when he did. It has
been suggested that officers should have a working knowledge of
wireless telegraphy, and this is no doubt a wise provision. It would
enable them to supervise the work of the operators more closely and
from all the evidence, this seems a necessity. The exchange of vitally
important messages between a sinking ship and those rushing to her
rescue should be under the control of an experienced officer. To take
but one example—Bride testified that after giving the Birma the
"C.Q.D." message and the position (incidentally Signer Marconi has
stated that this has been abandoned in favour of "S.O.S.") and getting
a reply, they got into touch with the Carpathia, and while talking
with her were interrupted by the Birma asking what was the matter. No
doubt it was the duty of the Birma to come at once without asking any
questions, but the reply from the Titanic, telling the Birma's
operator not to be a "fool" by interrupting, seems to have been a
needless waste of precious moments: to reply, "We are sinking" would
have taken no longer, especially when in their own estimation of the
strength of the signals they thought the Birma was the nearer ship. It
is well to notice that some large liners have already a staff of three
operators.