Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (875 page)

But there was no dive, and I returned to earth (after an hour and twenty minutes) without having felt “bored” for a single second.  I descended (by the ladder) thinking that I would never go flying again.  No, never any more — lest its mysterious fascination, whose invisible wing had brushed my heart up there, should change to unavailing regret in a man too old for its glory.

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC — 1912

It is with a certain bitterness that one must admit to oneself that the late
S.S. Titanic
had a “good press.”  It is perhaps because I have no great practice of daily newspapers (I have never seen so many of them together lying about my room) that the white spaces and the big lettering of the headlines have an incongruously festive air to my eyes, a disagreeable effect of a feverish exploitation of a sensational God-send.  And if ever a loss at sea fell under the definition, in the terms of a bill of lading, of Act of God, this one does, in its magnitude, suddenness and severity; and in the chastening influence it should have on the self-confidence of mankind.

I say this with all the seriousness the occasion demands, though I have neither the competence nor the wish to take a theological view of this great misfortune, sending so many souls to their last account.  It is but a natural
reflection
.  Another one flowing also from the phraseology of bills of lading (a bill of lading is a shipping document limiting in certain of its clauses the liability of the carrier) is that the “King’s Enemies” of a more or less overt sort are not altogether sorry that this fatal mishap should strike the prestige of the greatest Merchant Service of the world.  I believe that not a thousand miles from these shores certain public prints have betrayed in gothic letters their satisfaction — to speak plainly — by rather ill-natured comments.

In what light one is to look at the action of the American Senate is more difficult to say.  From a certain point of view the sight of the august senators of a great Power rushing to New York and beginning to bully and badger the luckless “Yamsi” — on the very quay-side so to speak — seems to furnish the Shakespearian touch of the comic to the real tragedy of the fatuous drowning of all these people who to the last moment put their trust in mere bigness, in the reckless affirmations of commercial men and mere technicians and in the irresponsible paragraphs of the newspapers booming these ships!  Yes, a grim touch of comedy.  One asks oneself what these men are after, with this very provincial display of authority.  I beg my friends in the United States pardon for calling these zealous senators men.  I don’t wish to be disrespectful.  They may be of the stature of demi-gods for all I know, but at that great distance from the shores of effete Europe and in the presence of so many guileless dead, their size seems diminished from this side.  What are they after?  What is there for them to find out?  We know what had happened.  The ship scraped her side against a piece of ice, and sank after floating for two hours and a half, taking a lot of people down with her.  What more can they find out from the unfair badgering of the unhappy “Yamsi,” or the ruffianly abuse of the same.

“Yamsi,” I should explain, is a mere code address, and I use it here symbolically.  I have seen commerce pretty close.  I know what it is worth, and I have no particular regard for commercial magnates, but one must protest against these Bumble-like proceedings.  Is it indignation at the loss of so many lives which is at work here?  Well, the American railroads kill very many people during one single year, I dare say.  Then why don’t these dignitaries come down on the presidents of their own railroads, of which one can’t say whether they are mere means of transportation or a sort of gambling game for the use of American plutocrats.  Is it only an ardent and, upon the whole, praiseworthy desire for information?  But the reports of the inquiry tell us that the august senators, though raising a lot of questions testifying to the complete innocence and even blankness of their minds, are unable to understand what the second officer is saying to them.  We are so informed by the press from the other side.  Even such a simple expression as that one of the look-out men was stationed in the “eyes of the ship” was too much for the senators of the land of graphic expression.  What it must have been in the more recondite matters I won’t even try to think, because I have no mind for smiles just now.  They were greatly exercised about the sound of explosions heard when half the ship was under water already.  Was there one?  Were there two?  They seemed to be smelling a rat there!  Has not some charitable soul told them (what even schoolboys who read sea stories know) that when a ship sinks from a leak like this, a deck or two is always blown up; and that when a steamship goes down by the head, the boilers may, and often do break adrift with a sound which resembles the sound of an explosion?  And they may, indeed, explode, for all I know.  In the only case I have seen of a steamship sinking there was such a sound, but I didn’t dive down after her to investigate.  She was not of 45,000 tons and declared unsinkable, but the sight was impressive enough.  I shall never forget the muffled, mysterious detonation, the sudden agitation of the sea round the slowly raised stern, and to this day I have in my eye the propeller, seen perfectly still in its frame against a clear evening sky.

But perhaps the second officer has explained to them by this time this and a few other little facts.  Though why an officer of the British merchant service should answer the questions of any king, emperor, autocrat, or senator of any foreign power (as to an event in which a British ship alone was concerned, and which did not even take place in the territorial waters of that power) passes my understanding.  The only authority he is bound to answer is the Board of Trade.  But with what face the Board of Trade, which, having made the regulations for 10,000 ton ships, put its dear old bald head under its wing for ten years, took it out only to shelve an important report, and with a dreary murmur, “Unsinkable,” put it back again, in the hope of not being disturbed for another ten years, with what face it will be putting questions to that man who has done his duty, as to the facts of this disaster and as to his professional conduct in it — well, I don’t know!  I have the greatest respect for our established authorities.  I am a disciplined man, and I have a natural indulgence for the weaknesses of human institutions; but I will own that at times I have regretted their — how shall I say it? — their imponderability.  A Board of Trade — what is it?  A Board of . . . I believe the Speaker of the Irish Parliament is one of the members of it.  A ghost.  Less than that; as yet a mere memory.  An office with adequate and no doubt comfortable furniture and a lot of perfectly irresponsible gentlemen who exist packed in its equable atmosphere softly, as if in a lot of cotton-wool, and with no care in the world; for there can be no care without personal responsibility — such, for instance, as the seamen have — those seamen from whose mouths this irresponsible institution can take away the bread — as a disciplinary measure.  Yes — it’s all that.  And what more?  The name of a politician — a party man!  Less than nothing; a mere void without as much as a shadow of responsibility cast into it from that light in which move the masses of men who work, who deal in things and face the realities — not the words — of this life.

Years ago I remember overhearing two genuine shellbacks of the old type commenting on a ship’s officer, who, if not exactly incompetent, did not commend himself to their severe judgment of accomplished sailor-men.  Said one, resuming and concluding the discussion in a funnily judicial tone:

“The Board of Trade must have been drunk when they gave him his certificate.”

I confess that this notion of the Board of Trade as an entity having a brain which could be overcome by the fumes of strong liquor charmed me exceedingly.  For then it would have been unlike the limited companies of which some exasperated wit has once said that they had no souls to be saved and no bodies to be kicked, and thus were free in this world and the next from all the effective sanctions of conscientious conduct.  But, unfortunately, the picturesque pronouncement overheard by me was only a characteristic sally of an annoyed sailor.  The Board of Trade is composed of bloodless departments.  It has no limbs and no physiognomy, or else at the forthcoming inquiry it might have paid to the victims of the
Titanic
disaster the small tribute of a blush.  I ask myself whether the Marine Department of the Board of Trade did really believe, when they decided to shelve the report on equipment for a time, that a ship of 45,000 tons, that
any
ship, could be made practically indestructible by means of water-tight bulkheads?  It seems incredible to anybody who had ever reflected upon the properties of material, such as wood or steel.  You can’t, let builders say what they like, make a ship of such dimensions as strong proportionately as a much smaller one.  The shocks our old whalers had to stand amongst the heavy floes in Baffin’s Bay were perfectly staggering, notwithstanding the most skilful handling, and yet they lasted for years.  The
Titanic
, if one may believe the last reports, has only scraped against a piece of ice which, I suspect, was not an enormously bulky and comparatively easily seen berg, but the low edge of a floe — and sank.  Leisurely enough, God knows — and here the advantage of bulkheads comes in — for time is a great friend, a good helper — though in this lamentable case these bulkheads served only to prolong the agony of the passengers who could not be saved.  But she sank, causing, apart from the sorrow and the pity of the loss of so many lives, a sort of surprised consternation that such a thing should have happened at all.  Why?  You build a 45,000 tons hotel of thin steel plates to secure the patronage of, say, a couple of thousand rich people (for if it had been for the emigrant trade alone, there would have been no such exaggeration of mere size), you decorate it in the style of the Pharaohs or in the Louis Quinze style — I don’t know which — and to please the aforesaid fatuous handful of individuals, who have more money than they know what to do with, and to the applause of two continents, you launch that mass with two thousand people on board at twenty-one knots across the sea — a perfect exhibition of the modern blind trust in mere material and appliances.  And then this happens.  General uproar.  The blind trust in material and appliances has received a terrible shock.  I will say nothing of the credulity which accepts any statement which specialists, technicians and office-people are pleased to make, whether for purposes of gain or glory.  You stand there astonished and hurt in your profoundest sensibilities.  But what else under the circumstances could you expect?

For my part I could much sooner believe in an unsinkable ship of 3,000 tons than in one of 40,000 tons.  It is one of those things that stand to reason.  You can’t increase the thickness of scantling and plates indefinitely.  And the mere weight of this bigness is an added disadvantage.  In reading the reports, the first reflection which occurs to one is that, if that luckless ship had been a couple of hundred feet shorter, she would have probably gone clear of the danger.  But then, perhaps, she could not have had a swimming bath and a French café.  That, of course, is a serious consideration.  I am well aware that those responsible for her short and fatal existence ask us in desolate accents to believe that if she had hit end on she would have survived.  Which, by a sort of coy implication, seems to mean that it was all the fault of the officer of the watch (he is dead now) for trying to avoid the obstacle.  We shall have presently, in deference to commercial and industrial interests, a new kind of seamanship.  A very new and “progressive” kind.  If you see anything in the way, by no means try to avoid it; smash at it full tilt.  And then — and then only you shall see the triumph of material, of clever contrivances, of the whole box of engineering tricks in fact, and cover with glory a commercial concern of the most unmitigated sort, a great Trust, and a great ship-building yard, justly famed for the super-excellence of its material and workmanship.  Unsinkable!  See?  I told you she was unsinkable, if only handled in accordance with the new seamanship.  Everything’s in that.  And, doubtless, the Board of Trade, if properly approached, would consent to give the needed instructions to its examiners of Masters and Mates.  Behold the examination-room of the future.  Enter to the grizzled examiner a young man of modest aspect: “Are you well up in modern seamanship?”  “I hope so, sir.”  “H’m, let’s see.  You are at night on the bridge in charge of a 150,000 tons ship, with a motor track, organ-loft, etc., etc., with a full cargo of passengers, a full crew of 1,500 café waiters, two sailors and a boy, three collapsible boats as per Board of Trade regulations, and going at your three-quarter speed of, say, about forty knots.  You perceive suddenly right ahead, and close to, something that looks like a large ice-floe.  What would you do?”  “Put the helm amidships.”  “Very well.  Why?”  “In order to hit end on.”  “On what grounds should you endeavour to hit end on?”  “Because we are taught by our builders and masters that the heavier the smash, the smaller the damage, and because the requirements of material should be attended to.”

And so on and so on.  The new seamanship: when in doubt try to ram fairly — whatever’s before you.  Very simple.  If only the
Titanic
had rammed that piece of ice (which was not a monstrous berg) fairly, every puffing paragraph would have been vindicated in the eyes of the credulous public which pays.  But would it have been?  Well, I doubt it.  I am well aware that in the eighties the steamship Arizona, one of the “greyhounds of the ocean” in the jargon of that day, did run bows on against a very unmistakable iceberg, and managed to get into port on her collision bulkhead.  But the
Arizona
was not, if I remember rightly, 5,000 tons register, let alone 45,000, and she was not going at twenty knots per hour.  I can’t be perfectly certain at this distance of time, but her sea-speed could not have been more than fourteen at the outside.  Both these facts made for safety.  And, even if she had been engined to go twenty knots, there would not have been behind that speed the enormous mass, so difficult to check in its impetus, the terrific weight of which is bound to do damage to itself or others at the slightest contact.