Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic

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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.

 

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To Eleanor, who believed.

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.