The Sinking of the RMS Titanic and other ships.

[louisa]

I can't help believing that if Captain Smith HAD survived he would have done the honourable thing and faced whatever punishment the Board of Inquiry dictated. He was an English gentleman and in those days that really meant something.

The only way he could have got to Lima was to hitch a ride from a ship going that way and we know from history the names of the ships in the vicinity - bearing in mind that somebody would only be able to last in the freezing waters for a maximum of 4 minutes.

[Adam Went]

You'd think somebody would have spotted him, wouldn't you? He wasn't the most inconspicous of characters. Ismay would have called him out anyway if he had survived, to direct attention away from himself.

By the way, for anybody with Facebook, there's an interesting page up and running on there called "Lovers of Ocean Liners" - some people I know have posted Lusitania related photos up there just in the past couple of days. Worth a look.

Cheers,
Adam.

[Phil H]

I think Smith DID the honourable thing - he went down with his ship.

I see two possible motivations:

a) he recognised that his glorious career was over and that his planned retirement was no ruined. He would have known that all the opprobrium would have been heaped on him (indeed, I suspect that he may well have recognised that Bruce Ismay would pass the buck, or if the latter went down, Smith would have to face the music alone. Maybe prison would have beckoned. I don't think he would have wanted that.

Andrews the architect/designer went down with the ship and I don't think Smith would have wanted to do otherwise - even if some argued to him that he could tell the whole story and save the log etc. He would have known whether the account he could tell would be blameworthy.

b) I am however minded to think that Smith was not entirely himself from the moment he was told the ship would go down. He is strangely absent from most accounts - even of crew members, where one would have expected activity, ensuring the life boats were fully loaded etc. One would expect the captain to take command - after all, he had little else to do. But he is oddly absent - I have always wondered whether he was suffering from some sort of shell-shock (career in ruins etc, all his responsibility, knew loss of life would be huge). In those circumstances, I wonder whether escape just never occured to him, and there is no mention I have ever seen of him discussing alternatives with any of his officers 9at least those who survived).

I recognise that Smith may have been most concerned with signalling to other ship and in seeking rescue, but somehow i just don't see that as his priority. He crops up in the radio shack and has a conversation, but that should have been only one of his port of calls, surely?

Phil

[sdreid]

I didn't say that the delusional man in Lima was Smith, I was just asking if anyone had heard the stories. This fellow had some tattoos that should be fairly conclusive one way or the other. As I understand, the yarn was in the February 12, 1940 issue of Life.

[louisa]

Hi Phil

"Andrews the architect/designer went down with the ship and I don't think Smith would have wanted to do otherwise"

There can be no way that Captain Smith would have known that Andrews was to go down with the ship.

Maybe the Captain did indeed decide to go with the Titanic but I suspect that he hoped for rescue. I suspect that everyone who was left on the Titanic hoped for rescue, right up until the freezing waters closed over them.

The instinct to survive is very strong and I think that Captain Smith probably would have hoped to make it to a lifeboat - if only to be able to account for his actions.

[Phil H]

There can be no way that Captain Smith would have known that Andrews was to go down with the ship.

Louisa - I don't know. We know that they were together earlier when Andrews gave his estimate of how long the ship had. I don't see it as impossible that Andrews said then that - idf the ship sank - he would go with it.

People then were much more consciously "melodramatic" than we are today. They considered their position and how things would look in a much more studied way.

Phil

[louisa]

"People then were much more consciously "melodramatic" than we are today. They considered their position and how things would look in a much more studied way".

I'm not so sure about that, Phil. There are far more drama queens around these days. Some women are 'devastated' if they so much as break a fingernail, and young men are all cry babies nowadays. Lord knows how they would have coped if they'd been on the Titanic!

In 1912 there was much more of the 'stiff upper lip' going on. Captain Smith was even quoted in some books as having called out "Be British" to the passengers.

[Mayerling]

Hi Stan and Louise,

Possibly while hiding in Lima, Ohio he kept in touch with Butch Cassidy, who supposedly survived his death in Bolivia and lived into the 1930s in California. Or contacted lawyer Finis Bates about his mummified remains of one David E. George of Enid , Oklahoma, who commmitted suicide in 1903, and who Bates insisted was John Wilkes Booth. And in his final months of life in Lima ("Life in Lima" - it sounds like a second rate novel) he pondered what was the real fate of author Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared in the Mexican Revolution of 1913-14, or of Dorothy Arnold the New York socialite who vanished on Fifth Avenue in 1910.

Jeff

[Adam Went]

Stan:

Meh. It's also been reported before that Adolf Hitler died in Argentina in 1989 at the ripe old age of 100. Sometimes there's a slow news day...

Phil is quite right that people - particularly those of the fairer sex - were also much more melodramatic in the Edwardian era as well as previous to that. There were exceptions to that rule, of course, as with anything, but one only needs to read contemporary material to see that it is the case. Women in the 21st century don't faint or go into a swoon nearly as much as their female ancestors did.

Cheers,
Adam.

[louisa]

Jeff - Sounds plausible to me.


Adam - ladies went into a swoon and fainted in those centuries because their corsets and stays were too tight.

[Phil H]

Louisa, you wrote:

"People then were much more consciously "melodramatic" than we are today. They considered their position and how things would look in a much more studied way".

I'm not so sure about that, Phil. There are far more drama queens around these days. Some women are 'devastated' if they so much as break a fingernail, and young men are all cry babies nowadays. Lord knows how they would have coped if they'd been on the Titanic!

In 1912 there was much more of the 'stiff upper lip' going on. Captain Smith was even quoted in some books as having called out "Be British" to the passengers.

You mistake my meaning of melodramatic. I am talking about the way the Victorians (and the people we're discussing were essentially that - born well before 1901) were influenced by melodrama in theatre, and in novels such as Dickens, Scott and so on, where people lived by certain rules and expounded things. The outward was, in a way, much more important than the inward.

Thus, just as Guggenheim and his secretary dressed up to die - melodrama; I believe that men like Andrews might well have declared (in an understated way, of course) his decision/determination to go down with his ship. It would have been a quiet declaration that he was living by his gentlemanly principles. This was an era when men communicated in such ways. I think it entirely possible that he might have spoken of this to Smith, even to Ismay.

Phil

[sdreid]

Since Smith was knowledgeable regarding steam propulsion, perhaps he hoped to find work at the Lima Locomotive Works, the Cadillac of locomotives. ALCO and Baldwin were the Ford and the Chevy.

[louisa]

I never know if Stan is being serious or not.

[Mayerling]

Since Smith was knowledgeable regarding steam propulsion, perhaps he hoped to find work at the Lima Locomotive Works, the Cadillac of locomotives. ALCO and Baldwin were the Ford and the Chevy.

Hi Stan,

Maybe he had a love for Lima beans. Or he waned to be near Peru, Indiana because he heard of a talented piano and song writer named Cole Porter (remember that Wallace Hartley's band knew "Alexander's Ragtime Band" by Irving Berlin).

Jeff

[Adam Went]

Louisa:

Saw an interview with the girls out of "Downton Abbey" not so long ago where they were saying that they had a new appreciation for Edwardian era women, having to wear their outfits for the filming. So you might be on to something!

Phil:

Not convinced about the Dickens comparison - some of his work, yes, perhaps, but he also often expressed some pretty unconventional (at least at that time) views on social and moral issues in his work.

Cheers,
Adam.