Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (41 page)

The affidavit was printed in its entirety on the morning of April 23 by the Boston American, which also wired a complete copy to Senator Smith in New York. Smith immediately sent his marshals to Boston, to serve Gill, Lord, and the
Californian’s
officers with subpoenas to appear on Friday, April 25, in Washington, where the hearings were being moved. The press picked up the scent of a good story in the making, and Friday morning the hearing room was packed.

Smith had a brief private interview with Gill before the engineer appeared before the committee. At one point the Senator asked Gill outright how much he had been paid for the story. Gill replied $500, but then explained that he would most likely lose his job after his testimony was made public (he did), and he had to do something to secure an income as he had a family to support. But when pressed by Smith about the veracity of his affidavit, Gill budged not an inch—it was all true, he said, and he just wanted to set the record straight about what went on aboard the Californian that night. Grateful for the man’s candor, Smith had Gill testify to the whole committee. He was taken step by step through his entire affidavit, clarifying some points and expanding on others, with an emphasis placed on the ship firing the rockets. “I am of the general opinion that the crew is,” Gill concluded in his testimony, “that she was the
Titanic.”
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Captain Lord was the next to testify. Before leaving Boston he had told the Boston Journal, “If I go to Washington, it will not be because of this story in the paper, but to tell the Committee why my ship was drifting without power, while the Titanic was rushing under full speed. It will take about ten minutes to do so.” It took a good deal longer than ten minutes. Lord maintained that he never saw the other ship and that the ship his officers saw, which didn’t appear to be in any danger, was too small to have been the Titanic. Instead, that unknown ship stopped some ten to twelve miles from the
Californian
about twenty minutes before midnight, then had steamed off around half past two. That was the ship the Titanic saw, and not the
Californian,
which was too far away to be seen. Lord also told the Senator that his officers had reported to him only once that the other ship was firing rockets. Why that ship should be sending up rockets Lord had no idea, but he was quite convinced that they weren’t distress signals, and that the vessel was in no danger. After letting Lord explain the events of April 14-15 in his own words, Smith began a careful cross-examination that tore Captain Lords defense to shreds.
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Smith drew attention to the fact that any reference at all to the
Californian’s
officers seeing any rockets had been omitted from the ship’s log, and that the pages for the early morning of April 15 were missing from the scrap log (an informal log in which entries are kept before their formal entry into the ship’s official log), while the rest of the scrap log was intact. He examined Lord on the nature of rockets used as distress signals, causing Lord to describe distress rockets in terms very much like those spotted by his officers that night—that is, white rockets without any colored stars. He then confirmed that Lord had actually seen the other ship as it steamed up over the horizon around 11:00 P.M., had been told three times that a ship nearby was firing white rockets, and that Lord hadn’t even bothered to wake up the wireless operator. Smith had even gone so far as to request that the U.S. Navy’s Hydrographer’s Office supply the committee with all the information it had about ships in the vicinity of the
Titanic’s
final position, and the Navy Hydrographer had found nothing to indicate that there might have been a ship between the
Californian
and the Titanic, despite what Lord maintained. All of this could have been overlooked or regarded as simply the accepted practice, given the extremely lax state of regulations for passenger liners and the absence of any requirement for a round-the-clock wireless watch. But while Captain Lord and his officers were testifying, Senator Smith found himself wondering what Arthur H. Rostron would have done in similar circumstances.
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Rostron had gone before the committee immediately after Bruce Ismay, and had instantly impressed everyone with his courage, his clear-headedness, his thoroughness, and his compassion. Rostron’s dignified and disciplined bearing affected everyone on the committee, and when he described the memorial service held aboard the
Carpathia,
as well as the funeral for four survivors who died shortly after they were rescued, there were tears in his eyes. At the obvious sorrow of this sunburnt seaman, many in the hearing room openly wept.

One point that Senator Smith had wanted Rostron to clarify immediately was whether or not Ismay’s position as chairman of the White Star Line would have allowed him to override Captain Smith’s authority in matters concerning the handling and navigation of the ship, as rumors suggested. Rostron assured the senator that no one possessed the authority to overrule a captain on board his ship, under any circumstances. This testimony was a singular victory for Ismay, who had maintained that he had taken no part in how Captain Smith ran his ship. Later, Captain Inman Sealby, retired from the White Star Line, would confirm Rostron’s assertion of a captain’s autonomy. The only other person who could have irrefutably contradicted Captains Rostron and Sealby, and told the committee that Ismay had, in fact, been giving Captain Smith orders was, of course, Captain Smith. Ismay had gotten away with that one.

Senator Smith then asked Rostron to recount the events of the night of April 14-15, and how the
Carpathia
responded to the
Titanic’s
distress call. During the course of describing the
Carpathia’s
frantic dash north to the aid of the Titanic, Rostron was asked what preparation he had made to handle the survivors. Almost as if he had anticipated the question, Rostron drew a typewritten list from his coat pocket, on which he had written down all the orders he had given to ready the
Carpathia
for a rescue operation. The alacrity with which Rostron had responded to the Titanic, the comprehensive preparation he made, and the courage he had shown by steaming full speed into the ice field to pick up the survivors left an indelible impression on Smith and the other committee members, making Rostron the yardstick by which other ship’s captains would be measured. By such a standard, Captain Lord of the Californian was found to be woefully inadequate.
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In truth, even Captain Smith was found wanting. The senator had discovered that there had been no clear-cut procedure for handling wireless messages on the bridge, so that most of the warnings the Titanic had received on April 14 had gone unnoticed. He found that although Captain Smith was aware of some danger of ice ahead of his ship, he had no idea of the magnitude of the ice field stretching across the
Titanic’s
course, and so took no precautions to avoid it. The general attitude of “get on or get out” that prevailed in the North Atlantic steamship lines created an atmosphere that caused ships’ captains to maintain high speeds in order to hold to their schedules in even the most dangerous conditions. That no serious accident or incident had yet happened caused a certain air of complacency to surround the navigational practices of the passenger liners. What Senator Smith discovered was that although Captain Smith had handled the Titanic no differently than he had every other ship under his command and had followed the accepted practices on the North Atlantic, “standard operating procedure” had been a disaster waiting to happen.

Similarly, the outdated Board of Trade regulations with its absurd formula for computing lifeboat requirements was hopelessly out of touch with the realities of shipping on the North Atlantic. The solution was painfully obvious, though no one had seen the necessity until now: there would be lifeboats for everybody.

Likewise, wireless couldn’t be treated as just another business anymore, for there were now too many lives at stake. The instantaneous communications capability that wireless bestowed on ships at sea now meant that it could no longer be treated as a mere toy for the amusement of a handful of passengers or ignored by officers who didn’t understand it. The need for a round-the-clock wireless watch was driven home as no argument could have done by the public image of Cyril Evans sleeping peacefully in his bunk while the Titanic sank just a few miles away, because his captain never thought—or refused—to wake him up.

With the last witness heard on May 9, Senator Smith began sifting through the testimony and trying to arrive at some conclusion about who was responsible for the Titanic disaster. To his utter astonishment, he found that despite the lax and almost reckless way most of the transatlantic liners were run, under the existing laws no one—not IMM, not the White Star Line, not the
Titanic’s
officers and crew—could be found negligent (in the legal sense), so the whole tragedy fell into the category of an “Act of God.” To William Alden Smith, it was unthinkable that 1,500 men, women, and children should lose their lives because of carelessness and bureaucratic inertia and no one could be called to account for it. Very well, then—it wouldn’t happen again.

When Senator Smith presented his report to the full Senate on May 18, 1912, the gallery was packed and every senator was present to hear Smith’s summation. Smith gave one of the best speeches of his career, reasoned yet filled with emotion. He outlined the events leading up to the collision, retold the tale of the sinking liner, and described how the
Carpathia
had rushed at her own peril to come to the survivors’ rescue. Then he presented his conclusions.

As much as he admired Captain Smith, William Alden could not hold him blameless. The years of safe navigation had caused the captain to become complacent, he said, just when he needed to be his most cautious. The Titanic had been going too fast, with inadequate precautions taken, when she entered the area where the ice was known to be waiting. While Senator Smith would not go very far in criticizing the man who had paid for his mistakes with his life, he hoped that the lesson was clear—accepted practice on the North Atlantic shipping lanes was no longer acceptable. Ships should be required to reduce speed and post extra lookouts when conditions became hazardous, and strict procedures for bringing wireless messages to the bridge and posting them properly once there would need to be implemented.

Lifeboats were dealt with summarily: there would be no more formulas or computations. Ships would carry enough lifeboats to hold every passenger and crewman aboard. Similarly there would be a requirement for twenty-four hour wireless watches to be maintained on all ships equipped with a wireless set.

For all his supposed ineptitude and incompetence, Senator Smith had correctly divined the causes of the disaster and suggested intelligent measures to prevent a similar tragedy in the future. His recommendations, along with his suggestion to create an international patrol of the North Atlantic areas commonly threatened by ice hazards, were seen on both sides of the Atlantic as clearheaded and reasonable. Even the British press was generally approving in tone, although a few papers, refusing to moderate their hostility, suggested that the recommendations had actually come from other members of the committee, implying that the investigation had been productive in spite of Senator Smith.

On the subject of Bruce Ismay, Smith was remarkably restrained. That Smith had little respect for Ismay was evident throughout the hearings, but without solid evidence that Ismay had usurped Captain Smith’s authority—and Captains Rostron and Sealby had made it quite clear that legally no one had that prerogative on any ship in the North Atlantic—Smith was not about to make such an accusation. He didn’t let Ismay off the hook entirely, though, stating, “I think the presence of Mr. Ismay and Mr. Andrews stimulated the ship to a greater speed than it would have made under ordinary conditions, although I cannot fairly ascribe to either of them any instruction to this effect. The very presence of the owner and builder unconsciously stimulates endeavor....”

There was little hesitation when Smith addressed the subject of Captain Lord and the Californian. After extensively reviewing all the testimony of Lord and his officers, of Assistant Engineer Gill, of the
Titanic’s
officers concerning the unknown ship they saw, and the expert findings of the U.S. Navy’s Hydrographers’ Office, Smith came to a devastating conclusion:

Smith soundly condemned Captain Lord for failing to come to the
Titanic’s
assistance “in accordance with the dictates of humanity, international usage, and the requirements of law,” and he called upon Great Britain to take action against the owners and master of the Californian; then by way of emphasizing his point, he loudly praised Captain Rostron of the Carpathia for his heroism, eventually introducing a resolution to award Rostron a Medal of Honor, which Congress passed by acclamation.

His investigation complete, the committee’s findings duly entered into the Congressional Record, and his recommendations codified in Senate Bill 6976 (which would quickly pass both houses of Congress), Senator William Alden Smith now faded from the scene. His investigation had run for four weeks, called eight-two witnesses, including fifty-nine British subjects, and collected testimony, affidavits, and exhibits totalling 1,198 pages.
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