The Loss of the S. S. Titanic - Its Story and Its Lessons (15 page)

It would have been well to have noticed the wonderful state of health
of most of the rescued, their gratitude for their deliverance, the
thousand and one things that gave cause for rejoicing. In the midst of
so much description of the hysterical side of the scene, place should
be found for the normal—and I venture to think the normal was the
dominant feature in the landing that night. In the last chapter I
shall try to record the persistence of the normal all through the
disaster. Nothing has been a greater surprise than to find people that
do not act in conditions of danger and grief as they would be
generally supposed to act—and, I must add, as they are generally
described as acting.

And so, with her work of rescue well done, the good ship Carpathia
returned to New York. Everyone who came in her, everyone on the dock,
and everyone who heard of her journey will agree with Captain Rostron
when he says: "I thank God that I was within wireless hailing
distance, and that I got there in time to pick up the survivors of the
wreck."

One of the most pitiful things in the relations of human beings to
each other—the action and reaction of events that is called
concretely "human life"—is that every now and then some of them
should be called upon to lay down their lives from no sense of
imperative, calculated duty such as inspires the soldier or the
sailor, but suddenly, without any previous knowledge or warning of
danger, without any opportunity of escape, and without any desire to
risk such conditions of danger of their own free will. It is a blot on
our civilization that these things are necessary from time to time, to
arouse those responsible for the safety of human life from the
lethargic selfishness which has governed them. The Titanic's two
thousand odd passengers went aboard thinking they were
on an absolutely safe ship, and all the time there were many
people—designers, builders, experts, government officials—who knew
there were insufficient boats on board, that the Titanic had no right
to go fast in iceberg regions,—who knew these things and took no
steps and enacted no laws to prevent their happening. Not that they
omitted to do these things deliberately, but were lulled into a state
of selfish inaction from which it needed such a tragedy as this to
arouse them. It was a cruel necessity which demanded that a few should
die to arouse many millions to a sense of their own insecurity, to the
fact that for years the possibility of such a disaster has been
imminent. Passengers have known none of these things, and while no
good end would have been served by relating to them needless tales of
danger on the high seas, one thing is certain—that, had they known
them, many would not have travelled in such conditions and thereby
safeguards would soon have been forced on the builders, the companies,
and the Government. But there were people who knew and did not fail to
call attention to the dangers: in the House of Commons the matter has
been frequently brought up privately, and an American naval officer,
Captain E. K. Boden, in an article that has since been widely
reproduced, called attention to the defects of this very ship, the
Titanic—taking her as an example of all other liners—and pointed out
that she was not unsinkable and had not proper boat accommodation.

The question, then, of responsibility for the loss of the Titanic must
be considered: not from any idea that blame should be laid here or
there and a scapegoat provided—that is a waste of time. But if a
fixing of responsibility leads to quick and efficient remedy, then it
should be done relentlessly: our simple duty to those whom the Titanic
carried down with her demands no less. Dealing first with the
precautions for the safety of the ship as apart from safety
appliances, there can be no question, I suppose, that the direct
responsibility for the loss of the Titanic and so many lives must be
laid on her captain. He was responsible for setting the course, day by
day and hour by hour, for the speed she was travelling; and he alone
would have the power to decide whether or not speed must be slackened
with icebergs ahead. No officer would have any right to interfere in
the navigation, although they would no doubt be consulted. Nor would
any official connected with the management of the line—Mr. Ismay, for
example—be allowed to direct the captain in these matters, and there
is no evidence that he ever tried to do so. The very fact that the
captain of a ship has such absolute authority increases his
responsibility enormously. Even supposing the White Star Line and Mr.
Ismay had urged him before sailing to make a record,—again an
assumption,—they cannot be held directly responsible for the
collision: he was in charge of the lives of everyone on board and no
one but he was supposed to estimate the risk of travelling at the
speed he did, when ice was reported ahead of him. His action cannot be
justified on the ground of prudent seamanship.

But the question of indirect responsibility raises at once many issues
and, I think, removes from Captain Smith a good deal of personal
responsibility for the loss of his ship. Some of these issues it will
be well to consider.

In the first place, disabusing our minds again of the knowledge that
the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, let us estimate the
probabilities of such a thing happening. An iceberg is small and
occupies little room by comparison with the broad ocean on which it
floats; and the chances of another small object like a ship colliding
with it and being sunk are very small: the chances are, as a matter of
fact, one in a million. This is not a figure of speech: that is the
actual risk for total loss by collision with an iceberg as accepted by
insurance companies. The one-in-a-million accident was what sunk the
Titanic.

Even so, had Captain Smith been alone in taking that risk, he would
have had to bear all the blame for the resulting disaster. But it
seems he is not alone: the same risk has been taken over and over
again by fast mail-passenger liners, in fog and in iceberg regions.
Their captains have taken the long—very long—chance many times and
won every time; he took it as he had done many times before, and lost.
Of course, the chances that night of striking an iceberg were much
greater than one in a million: they had been enormously increased by
the extreme southerly position of icebergs and field ice and by the
unusual number of the former. Thinking over the scene that met our
eyes from the deck of the Carpathia after we boarded her,—the great
number of icebergs wherever the eye could reach,—the chances of
not
hitting one in the darkness of the night seemed small.
Indeed, the more one thinks about the Carpathia coming at full speed
through all those icebergs in the darkness, the more inexplicable does
it seem. True, the captain had an extra lookout watch and every sense
of every man on the bridge alert to detect the least sign of danger,
and again he was not going so fast as the Titanic and would have his
ship under more control; but granted all that, he appears to have
taken a great risk as he dogged and twisted round the awful
two-hundred-foot monsters in the dark night. Does it mean that the
risk is not so great as we who have seen the abnormal and not the
normal side of taking risks with icebergs might suppose? He had his
own ship and passengers to consider, and he had no right to take too
great a risk.

But Captain Smith could not know icebergs were there in such numbers:
what warnings he had of them is not yet thoroughly established,—there
were probably three,—but it is in the highest degree unlikely that he
knew that any vessel had seen them in such quantities as we saw them
Monday morning; in fact, it is unthinkable. He thought, no doubt, he
was taking an ordinary risk, and it turned out to be an extraordinary
one. To read some criticisms it would seem as if he deliberately ran
his ship in defiance of all custom through a region infested with
icebergs, and did a thing which no one has ever done before; that he
outraged all precedent by not slowing down. But it is plain that he
did not. Every captain who has run full speed through fog and iceberg
regions is to blame for the disaster as much as he is: they got
through and he did not. Other liners can go faster than the Titanic
could possibly do; had they struck ice they would have been injured
even more deeply than she was, for it must not be forgotten that the
force of impact varies as the
square
of the velocity—i.e., it
is four times as much at sixteen knots as at eight knots, nine times
as much at twenty-four, and so on. And with not much margin of time
left for these fast boats, they must go full speed ahead nearly all
the time. Remember how they advertise to "Leave New York Wednesday,
dine in London the following Monday,"—and it is done regularly, much
as an express train is run to time. Their officers, too, would have
been less able to avoid a collision than Murdock of the Titanic was,
for at the greater speed, they would be on the iceberg in shorter
time. Many passengers can tell of crossing with fog a good deal of the
way, sometimes almost all the way, and they have been only a few hours
late at the end of the journey.

So that it is the custom that is at fault, not one particular captain.
Custom is established largely by demand, and supply too is the answer
to demand. What the public demanded the White Star Line supplied, and
so both the public and the Line are concerned with the question of
indirect responsibility.

The public has demanded, more and more every year, greater speed as
well as greater comfort, and by ceasing to patronize the low-speed
boats has gradually forced the pace to what it is at present. Not that
speed in itself is a dangerous thing,—it is sometimes much safer to
go quickly than slowly,—but that, given the facilities for speed and
the stimulus exerted by the constant public demand for it, occasions
arise when the judgment of those in command of a ship becomes
swayed—largely unconsciously, no doubt—in favour of taking risks
which the smaller liners would never take. The demand on the skipper
of a boat like the Californian, for example, which lay hove-to
nineteen miles away with her engines stopped, is infinitesimal
compared with that on Captain Smith. An old traveller told me on the
Carpathia that he has often grumbled to the officers for what he
called absurd precautions in lying to and wasting his time, which he
regarded as very valuable; but after hearing of the Titanic's loss he
recognized that he was to some extent responsible for the speed at
which she had travelled, and would never be so again. He had been one
of the travelling public who had constantly demanded to be taken to
his journey's end in the shortest possible time, and had "made a row"
about it if he was likely to be late. There are some business men to
whom the five or six days on board are exceedingly irksome and
represent a waste of time; even an hour saved at the journey's end is
a consideration to them. And if the demand is not always a conscious
one, it is there as an unconscious factor always urging the highest
speed of which the ship is capable. The man who demands fast travel
unreasonably must undoubtedly take his share in the responsibility. He
asks to be taken over at a speed which will land him in something over
four days; he forgets perhaps that Columbus took ninety days in a
forty-ton boat, and that only fifty years ago paddle steamers took six
weeks, and all the time the demand is greater and the strain is more:
the public demand speed and luxury; the lines supply it, until
presently the safety limit is reached, the undue risk is taken—and
the Titanic goes down. All of us who have cried for greater speed must
take our share in the responsibility. The expression of such a desire
and the discontent with so-called slow travel are the seed sown in the
minds of men, to bear fruit presently in an insistence on greater
speed. We may not have done so directly, but we may perhaps have
talked about it and thought about it, and we know no action begins
without thought.

The White Star Line has received very rough handling from some of the
press, but the greater part of this criticism seems to be unwarranted
and to arise from the desire to find a scapegoat. After all they had
made better provision for the passengers the Titanic carried than any
other line has done, for they had built what they believed to be a
huge lifeboat, unsinkable in all ordinary conditions. Those who
embarked in her were almost certainly in the safest ship (along with
the Olympic) afloat: she was probably quite immune from the ordinary
effects of wind, waves and collisions at sea, and needed to fear
nothing but running on a rock or, what was worse, a floating iceberg;
for the effects of collision were, so far as damage was concerned, the
same as if it had been a rock, and the danger greater, for one is
charted and the other is not. Then, too, while the theory of the
unsinkable boat has been destroyed at the same time as the boat
itself, we should not forget that it served a useful purpose on deck
that night—it eliminated largely the possibility of panic, and those
rushes for the boats which might have swamped some of them. I do not
wish for a moment to suggest that such things would have happened,
because the more information that comes to hand of the conduct of the
people on board, the more wonderful seems the complete self-control of
all, even when the last boats had gone and nothing but the rising
waters met their eyes—only that the generally entertained theory
rendered such things less probable. The theory, indeed, was really a
safeguard, though built on a false premise.

There is no evidence that the White Star Line instructed the captain
to push the boat or to make any records: the probabilities are that no
such attempt would be made on the first trip. The general instructions
to their commanders bear quite the other interpretation: it will be
well to quote them in full as issued to the press during the sittings
of the United States Senate Committee.