Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (878 page)

One lives and learns and hears very surprising things — things that one hardly knows how to take, whether seriously or jocularly, how to meet — with indignation or with contempt?  Things said by solemn experts, by exalted directors, by glorified ticket-sellers, by officials of all sorts.  I suppose that one of the uses of such an inquiry is to give such people enough rope to hang themselves with.  And I hope that some of them won’t neglect to do so.  One of them declared two days ago that there was “nothing to learn from the catastrophe of the
Titanic
.”  That he had been “giving his best consideration” to certain rules for ten years, and had come to the conclusion that nothing ever happened at sea, and that rules and regulations, boats and sailors, were unnecessary; that what was really wrong with the
Titanic
was that she carried too many boats.

No; I am not joking.  If you don’t believe me, pray look back through the reports and you will find it all there.  I don’t recollect the official’s name, but it ought to have been Pooh-Bah.  Well, Pooh-Bah said all these things, and when asked whether he really meant it, intimated his readiness to give the subject more of “his best consideration” — for another ten years or so apparently — but he believed, oh yes! he was certain, that had there been fewer boats there would have been more people saved.  Really, when reading the report of this admirably conducted inquiry one isn’t certain at times whether it is an Admirable Inquiry or a felicitous
opéra-bouffe
of the Gilbertian type — with a rather grim subject, to be sure.

Yes, rather grim — but the comic treatment never fails.  My readers will remember that in the number of
The English Review
for May, 1912, I quoted the old case of the
Arizona
, and went on from that to prophesy the coming of a new seamanship (in a spirit of irony far removed from fun) at the call of the sublime builders of unsinkable ships.  I thought that, as a small boy of my acquaintance says, I was “doing a sarcasm,” and regarded it as a rather wild sort of sarcasm at that.  Well, I am blessed (excuse the vulgarism) if a witness has not turned up who seems to have been inspired by the same thought, and evidently longs in his heart for the advent of the new seamanship.  He is an expert, of course, and I rather believe he’s the same gentleman who did not see his way to fit water-tight doors to bunkers.  With ludicrous earnestness he assured the Commission of his intense belief that had only the
Titanic
struck end-on she would have come into port all right.  And in the whole tone of his insistent statement there was suggested the regret that the officer in charge (who is dead now, and mercifully outside the comic scope of this inquiry) was so ill-advised as to try to pass clear of the ice.  Thus my sarcastic prophecy, that such a suggestion was sure to turn up, receives an unexpected fulfilment.  You will see yet that in deference to the demands of “progress” the theory of the new seamanship will become established: “Whatever you see in front of you — ram it fair. . .”  The new seamanship!  Looks simple, doesn’t it?  But it will be a very exact art indeed.  The proper handling of an unsinkable ship, you see, will demand that she should be made to hit the iceberg very accurately with her nose, because should you perchance scrape the bluff of the bow instead, she may, without ceasing to be as unsinkable as before, find her way to the bottom.  I congratulate the future Transatlantic passengers on the new and vigorous sensations in store for them.  They shall go bounding across from iceberg to iceberg at twenty-five knots with precision and safety, and a “cheerful bumpy sound” — as the immortal poem has it.  It will be a teeth-loosening, exhilarating experience.  The decorations will be Louis-Quinze, of course, and the café shall remain open all night.  But what about the priceless Sèvres porcelain and the Venetian glass provided for the service of Transatlantic passengers?  Well, I am afraid all that will have to be replaced by silver goblets and plates.  Nasty, common, cheap silver.  But those who
will
go to sea must be prepared to put up with a certain amount of hardship.

And there shall be no boats.  Why should there be no boats?  Because Pooh-Bah has said that the fewer the boats, the more people can be saved; and therefore with no boats at all, no one need be lost.  But even if there was a flaw in this argument, pray look at the other advantages the absence of boats gives you.  There can’t be the annoyance of having to go into them in the middle of the night, and the unpleasantness, after saving your life by the skin of your teeth, of being hauled over the coals by irreproachable members of the Bar with hints that you are no better than a cowardly scoundrel and your wife a heartless monster.  Less Boats.  No boats!  Great should be the gratitude of passage-selling Combines to Pooh-Bah; and they ought to cherish his memory when he dies.  But no fear of that.  His kind never dies.  All you have to do, O Combine, is to knock at the door of the Marine Department, look in, and beckon to the first man you see.  That will be he, very much at your service — prepared to affirm after “ten years of my best consideration” and a bundle of statistics in hand, that: “There’s no lesson to be learned, and that there is nothing to be done!”

On an earlier day there was another witness before the Court of Inquiry.  A mighty official of the White Star Line.  The impression of his testimony which the Report gave is of an almost scornful impatience with all this fuss and pother.  Boats!  Of course we have crowded our decks with them in answer to this ignorant clamour.  Mere lumber!  How can we handle so many boats with our davits?  Your people don’t know the conditions of the problem.  We have given these matters our best consideration, and we have done what we thought reasonable.  We have done more than our duty.  We are wise, and good, and impeccable.  And whoever says otherwise is either ignorant or wicked.

This is the gist of these scornful answers which disclose the psychology of commercial undertakings.  It is the same psychology which fifty or so years ago, before Samuel Plimsoll uplifted his voice, sent overloaded ships to sea.  “Why shouldn’t we cram in as much cargo as our ships will hold?  Look how few, how very few of them get lost, after all.”

Men don’t change.  Not very much.  And the only answer to be given to this manager who came out, impatient and indignant, from behind the plate-glass windows of his shop to be discovered by this inquiry, and to tell us that he, they, the whole three million (or thirty million, for all I know) capital Organisation for selling passages has considered the problem of boats — the only answer to give him is: that this is not a problem of boats at all.  It is the problem of decent behaviour.  If you can’t carry or handle so many boats, then don’t cram quite so many people on board.  It is as simple as that — this problem of right feeling and right conduct, the real nature of which seems beyond the comprehension of ticket-providers.  Don’t sell so many tickets, my virtuous dignitary.  After all, men and women (unless considered from a purely commercial point of view) are not exactly the cattle of the Western-ocean trade, that used some twenty years ago to be thrown overboard on an emergency and left to swim round and round before they sank.  If you can’t get more boats, then sell less tickets.  Don’t drown so many people on the finest, calmest night that was ever known in the North Atlantic — even if you have provided them with a little music to get drowned by.  Sell less tickets!  That’s the solution of the problem, your Mercantile Highness.

But there would be a cry, “Oh!  This requires consideration!”  (Ten years of it — eh?)  Well, no!  This does not require consideration.  This is the very first thing to do.  At once.  Limit the number of people by the boats you can handle.  That’s honesty.  And then you may go on fumbling for years about these precious davits which are such a stumbling-block to your humanity.  These fascinating patent davits.  These davits that refuse to do three times as much work as they were meant to do.  Oh!  The wickedness of these davits!

One of the great discoveries of this admirable Inquiry is the fascination of the davits.  All these people positively can’t get away from them.  They shuffle about and groan around their davits.  Whereas the obvious thing to do is to eliminate the man-handled davits altogether.  Don’t you think that with all the mechanical contrivances, with all the generated power on board these ships, it is about time to get rid of the hundred-years-old, man-power appliances?  Cranes are what is wanted; low, compact cranes with adjustable heads, one to each set of six or nine boats.  And if people tell you of insuperable difficulties, if they tell you of the swing and spin of spanned boats, don’t you believe them.  The heads of the cranes need not be any higher than the heads of the davits.  The lift required would be only a couple of inches.  As to the spin, there is a way to prevent that if you have in each boat two men who know what they are about.  I have taken up on board a heavy ship’s boat, in the open sea (the ship rolling heavily), with a common cargo derrick.  And a cargo derrick is very much like a crane; but a crane devised
ad hoc
would be infinitely easier to work.  We must remember that the loss of this ship has altered the moral atmosphere.  As long as the
Titanic
is remembered, an ugly rush for the boats may be feared in case of some accident.  You can’t hope to drill into perfect discipline a casual mob of six hundred firemen and waiters, but in a ship like the
Titanic
you can keep on a permanent trustworthy crew of one hundred intelligent seamen and mechanics who would know their stations for abandoning ship and would do the work efficiently.  The boats could be lowered with sufficient dispatch.  One does not want to let rip one’s boats by the run all at the same time.  With six boat-cranes, six boats would be simultaneously swung, filled, and got away from the side; and if any sort of order is kept, the ship could be cleared of the passengers in a quite short time.  For there must be boats enough for the passengers and crew, whether you increase the number of boats or limit the number of passengers, irrespective of the size of the ship.  That is the only honest course.  Any other would be rather worse than putting sand in the sugar, for which a tradesman gets fined or imprisoned.  Do not let us take a romantic view of the so-called progress.  A company selling passages is a tradesman; though from the way these people talk and behave you would think they are benefactors of mankind in some mysterious way, engaged in some lofty and amazing enterprise.

All these boats should have a motor-engine in them.  And, of course, the glorified tradesman, the mummified official, the technicians, and all these secretly disconcerted hangers-on to the enormous ticket-selling enterprise, will raise objections to it with every air of superiority.  But don’t believe them.  Doesn’t it strike you as absurd that in this age of mechanical propulsion, of generated power, the boats of such ultra-modern ships are fitted with oars and sails, implements more than three thousand years old?  Old as the siege of Troy.  Older! . . . And I know what I am talking about.  Only six weeks ago I was on the river in an ancient, rough, ship’s boat, fitted with a two-cylinder motor-engine of 7.5 h.p.  Just a common ship’s boat, which the man who owns her uses for taking the workmen and stevedores to and from the ships loading at the buoys off Greenhithe.  She would have carried some thirty people.  No doubt has carried as many daily for many months.  And she can tow a twenty-five ton water barge — which is also part of that man’s business.

It was a boisterous day, half a gale of wind against the flood tide.  Two fellows managed her.  A youngster of seventeen was cox (and a first-rate cox he was too); a fellow in a torn blue jersey, not much older, of the usual riverside type, looked after the engine.  I spent an hour and a half in her, running up and down and across that reach.  She handled perfectly.  With eight or twelve oars out she could not have done anything like as well.  These two youngsters at my request kept her stationary for ten minutes, with a touch of engine and helm now and then, within three feet of a big, ugly mooring buoy over which the water broke and the spray flew in sheets, and which would have holed her if she had bumped against it.  But she kept her position, it seemed to me, to an inch, without apparently any trouble to these boys.  You could not have done it with oars.  And her engine did not take up the space of three men, even on the assumption that you would pack people as tight as sardines in a box.

Not the room of three people, I tell you!  But no one would want to pack a boat like a sardine-box.  There must be room enough to handle the oars.  But in that old ship’s boat, even if she had been desperately overcrowded, there was power (manageable by two riverside youngsters) to get away quickly from a ship’s side (very important for your safety and to make room for other boats), the power to keep her easily head to sea, the power to move at five to seven knots towards a rescuing ship, the power to come safely alongside.  And all that in an engine which did not take up the room of three people.

A poor boatman who had to scrape together painfully the few sovereigns of the price had the idea of putting that engine into his boat.  But all these designers, directors, managers, constructors, and others whom we may include in the generic name of Yamsi, never thought of it for the boats of the biggest tank on earth, or rather on sea.  And therefore they assume an air of impatient superiority and make objections — however sick at heart they may be.  And I hope they are; at least, as much as a grocer who has sold a tin of imperfect salmon which destroyed only half a dozen people.  And you know, the tinning of salmon was “progress” as much at least as the building of the
Titanic
.  More, in fact.  I am not attacking shipowners.  I care neither more nor less for Lines, Companies, Combines, and generally for Trade arrayed in purple and fine linen than the Trade cares for me.  But I am attacking foolish arrogance, which is fair game; the offensive posture of superiority by which they hide the sense of their guilt, while the echoes of the miserably hypocritical cries along the alley-ways of that ship: “Any more women?  Any more women?” linger yet in our ears.