The Sinking of the RMS Titanic and other ships.

[jason_c]

There was also an account of Captain Smith clinging to the upturned lifeboat for a while before succumbing to exhaustion or hypothermia.

[louisa]

Here's a rather interesting website. (Apologies to members who already know all about it).

http://www.titanic1.org/articles/titanicmyths.asp

[Errata]

As for Captain Henry Kendall of the Empress of Ireland, he to remained on board his ship to the end but survived. He was not pilloried for the collision (which sill remains murky), but after all, Captain Kendall did help catch Dr. Crippen and Ethel Le Neve ("Mr. and Master Robinson") on the Montrose only four years earlier, so he was already a public hero of sorts.

Jeff

Also, any mistake he might have made to cause the collision probably paled in comparison the decision of the Captain of the Storstad to try and plug the hole he had just made in the Empress of Ireland with his own boat. I mean, whatever else happened, that's really the shining star of errors.

[Adam Went]

Hey all,

Jason:

It's quite possible that the lady passenger was mistaken in what she heard, or that she lied outright, but it just has a certain ring of truth to it I think....Smith wouldn't have been overly hard to sway, he had been known to state in the months leading up to the Titanic's maiden voyage that: "I cannot conceive a situation which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that." Furthermore, it was his last voyage, the first voyage of Titanic, the jewel in the crown of White Star Line, the icing on the cake would have been a record arrival time in New York City and a challenge for the coveted Blue Riband....

I don't think that they deliberately sailed too fast without considering the safety of those on board, just that they allowed themselves to believe that the threat of a bit of ice was nothing to a mammoth ship like Titanic with all of her safety features.

Phil:

Yes, as others have outlined, Smith could be seen as being accident prone. But he was also known as the "Millionaire's Captain" and was incredibly popular with those sorts of passengers, the big names who the WSL were trying to lure with their fame and big dollars.

And it worked too - the list of first class passengers is a roll call of everybody who was somebody in Edwardian society.

As for the story of Smith swimming to a lifeboat with a child, it's plausible but perhaps not that likely - Smith went down with the ship but it's possible he was thwarted by a sudden lurch or something similar which threw him off the bridge, which is what happened to William Turner, Captain of the Lusitania a few years later....except he survived.

Cheers,
Adam.

[kensei]

How plausible does anyone think Smith's end as depicted in Cameron's "Titanic" was? Goes into a daze, walks into the bridge, shuts the door behind him, stands there at the helm until the water pours in and kills him.

I just had the captain of the Andrea Doria- Piermo Calamai- occur to me in comparison. In that sinking over 40 years later, which took many hours before the ship went under, I remember hearing that Calamai felt so terrible about what had happened that he was determined to go down with his ship. But there was so much time for people to evacuate that he found himself one of the very last people on the ship with people in rescue boats imploring him to come with them, so he finally caved and just kind of went, "Oh, very well then."

[louisa]

I've been trying to think of the name of the cruise liner that collided with something and the passengers on board became extremely worried when they noticed the captain and crew in a lifeboat busily rowing away from the disaster.

It was in fairly recent times.

[jason_c]

Hey all,

Jason:

It's quite possible that the lady passenger was mistaken in what she heard, or that she lied outright, but it just has a certain ring of truth to it I think....Smith wouldn't have been overly hard to sway, he had been known to state in the months leading up to the Titanic's maiden voyage that: "I cannot conceive a situation which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that." Furthermore, it was his last voyage, the first voyage of Titanic, the jewel in the crown of White Star Line, the icing on the cake would have been a record arrival time in New York City and a challenge for the coveted Blue Riband....

I don't think that they deliberately sailed too fast without considering the safety of those on board, just that they allowed themselves to believe that the threat of a bit of ice was nothing to a mammoth ship like Titanic with all of her safety features.

Phil:

Yes, as others have outlined, Smith could be seen as being accident prone. But he was also known as the "Millionaire's Captain" and was incredibly popular with those sorts of passengers, the big names who the WSL were trying to lure with their fame and big dollars.

And it worked too - the list of first class passengers is a roll call of everybody who was somebody in Edwardian society.

As for the story of Smith swimming to a lifeboat with a child, it's plausible but perhaps not that likely - Smith went down with the ship but it's possible he was thwarted by a sudden lurch or something similar which threw him off the bridge, which is what happened to William Turner, Captain of the Lusitania a few years later....except he survived.

Cheers,
Adam.

Adam,

The Titanic could not challenge for the Blue Riband. It was a slower ship than the Lusitania and other liners. It was no match in terms of speed. Thats why her size and grandeur were her selling points. Other companies had faster ships than the White Star line.

Smith may have been overly-confident in his ship. The entire industry was overconfident in modernity. It had been decades since a modern liner had sunk.

[jason_c]

I've been trying to think of the name of the cruise liner that collided with something and the passengers on board became extremely worried when they noticed the captain and crew in a lifeboat busily rowing away from the disaster.

It was in fairly recent times.

I vaguely remember hearing about this.

[Errata]

I've been trying to think of the name of the cruise liner that collided with something and the passengers on board became extremely worried when they noticed the captain and crew in a lifeboat busily rowing away from the disaster.

It was in fairly recent times.

Are you thinking of the Oceanus? The captain and crew abandoned ship leaving the entertainers to organize the passengers in escaping. Sank off South Africa about 10 years ago.

[louisa]

Errata - Yes I think that was the one. I'll Google it to make sure.

Thanks!

[Mayerling]

Are you thinking of the Oceanus? The captain and crew abandoned ship leaving the entertainers to organize the passengers in escaping. Sank off South Africa about 10 years ago.

Hi Errata and Louis,

I think it was the Oceanus, which was also one of the few major ship disasters that was taped going down. However, if my memory is correct, the demoralized Captain was one of the last crew people to leave the ship - but he still did not do much to assist the passengers from leaving.

An even worse case was the 1965 burning of the cruise ship Yarmouth Castle in the Carribean, which had an extensive fatality list of passengers and crew (though nothing like the Titanic or Lusitania or Empress of Ireland or General Slocum or Eastland). In that case the Captain did abandon ship very early. He has never agreed to any interviews since that disaster.

Jeff

[Mayerling]

Hey all,

Jason:

It's quite possible that the lady passenger was mistaken in what she heard, or that she lied outright, but it just has a certain ring of truth to it I think....Smith wouldn't have been overly hard to sway, he had been known to state in the months leading up to the Titanic's maiden voyage that: "I cannot conceive a situation which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that." Furthermore, it was his last voyage, the first voyage of Titanic, the jewel in the crown of White Star Line, the icing on the cake would have been a record arrival time in New York City and a challenge for the coveted Blue Riband....

I don't think that they deliberately sailed too fast without considering the safety of those on board, just that they allowed themselves to believe that the threat of a bit of ice was nothing to a mammoth ship like Titanic with all of her safety features.

Phil:

Yes, as others have outlined, Smith could be seen as being accident prone. But he was also known as the "Millionaire's Captain" and was incredibly popular with those sorts of passengers, the big names who the WSL were trying to lure with their fame and big dollars.

And it worked too - the list of first class passengers is a roll call of everybody who was somebody in Edwardian society.

As for the story of Smith swimming to a lifeboat with a child, it's plausible but perhaps not that likely - Smith went down with the ship but it's possible he was thwarted by a sudden lurch or something similar which threw him off the bridge, which is what happened to William Turner, Captain of the Lusitania a few years later....except he survived.

Cheers,
Adam.

Hi Adam,

I don't think Ismay and Captain Smith really thought they could achieve a Blue Riband, but they probably wanted as fast an early a crossing as a sign of better things for the new ship.

One thing about the cream of society image. Yes Titanic had John Jacob Astor IV and Isidor Strauss (owner of Macy's) and Benjamin Guggenheim (of the Copper Smelting fortune) on board, along with Ismay, and the journalist Stead, the mystery novelist Futrelle, the artist Frank Millet, and the military attache to Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, Major Butt. But it lacked any major members of Britain's aristocracy (not Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon or the Countess of Rothe) or an major normal novelists (no Conrad or Wells or Bennett or Anatol France type) or politicians (no Asquith, Lloyd George, or Churchill or Edward Grey). Also a number of names pulled out of the first sailing:

J. P Morgan was in France but decided against going on the first trip - despite his creation of White Star's new parent company I. M. M.

Henry Clay Frick of the Pittsburgh steel fortune (and later the creator of the charming Frick collection museum in New York and a similar art collection museum in Pittsburgh) cancelled because his new cook got ill, and he was bringing the cook with him to the U. S.

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt I cancelled for personal reasons - he was far less lucky three years later returning to England in May 1915 in the Lusitania.

Henry Adams, in the midst of writing his last major works of history and autobiography, had tickets for the returning voyage (the first New York to Southampton trip) when the disaster occurred. Adams was always finding symbolism in thngs - he compared the disaster to the current Taft Administration (which seemed headed for disaster at the polls). Adams had a mild stroke in the later spring.

Somehow those names with the earlier ones might justify the "cream of society" idea a bit more, especially Morgan and Frick. There was, by the way, a first class gentleman named Martin Rothschild who died too,but he was not from the international banking family. I believe he came from Brooklyn.

Jeff

[louisa]

This is a link about the ill-fated Yarmouth Castle. Another case of anything that could go wrong did go wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Yarmouth_Castle

[Errata]

I grew up on that one. My grandfather said that at that time Coast Guard aviators were joking that it would be the perfect place for a ship to to need rescuing, because there as far as he could tell, all of them were bunched up in the Caribbean in empty planes and helicopters waiting for the next Cuban boat lift or airlift to be called. The whole area was completely littered with Coast Guard.

But they were rendered useless by the the fact that no distress call was sounded until the Finnpulp saw the blaze, and the reason they couldn't get through to USCG Nassau was because there was a boat lift that night. They got Miami, who sent out two planes, and Puerto Rico I think sent out two as well, and by the time they got there there was nothing to be done. The rescue boats had as much support as they could ever ask for, but the Yarmouth Castle and whoever was onboard were lost. Evidently the pilots had a hell of a time staying over the site because the heat from the ship was so intense it was knocking the planes out of the sky. My grandfather was escorting the boat lift, so all he could do was listen. There's a story that the first Coast Guard aviator to land on the Finnpulp was from Louisiana and walked right up to the Captain and hexed him... and while I love the sentiment, it would seem more likely that if there was a confrontation, it would have been a fist meets face thing. But they were all furious. That rescue should have been like shooting fish in a barrel, but because no one bothered to sound any alarm to anyone, it was a slaughter.

[Adam Went]

Kensei:

Yes that's right, Calamai was determined not to leave the Andrea Doria - it would have been a painful ship to go down with, given she took 11 hours to sink. He never, ever forgave himself for what happened that night. There wasn't a huge amount of casualties in that sinking (well under 100, IIRC) and many of those who died were either trapped or killed outright by the impact with the Stockholm.

Jason:

Ok, perhaps I got a bit carried away with the challenge for the Blue Riband, but the point is that an early arrival in port would have been the icing on the cake for the maiden voyage, and that combined with a bit of over-confidence might have assisted in the eventual demise of the ship.

I just did a check, and it was Cunard Line's Mauretania (sister to Lusitania and my favourite four-funnelled steamer, the Aquitania) which held the Blue Riband at the time of the Titanic sinking.

Jeff:

I agree with you that there's some big Edwardian names who didn't make the crossing but obviously everybody couldn't be on the ship at the same time. Those who were on board were right at the top of the list and they brought scandal with them too in some cases, like J.J. Astor and his pregnant young bride.

The Titanic voyage had everything that a major Hollywood event of 2011 would have.

Churchill wasn't that big of a deal at the time - what was he in 1912? I know he was First Lord of the Admiralty when the Lusitania sunk....

Don't forget the movers and shakers of society at the time as well - aside from W.T. Stead -the likes of Molly Brown and Helen Churchill Candee.

Cheers,
Adam.