Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (52 page)

It was that refusal that would consign Stanley Lord in the world’s memory to always being the captain who did nothing, and the
Californian
as being, in historian Leslie Reade’s words, “the ship that stood still.”

The actions of two of the captains whose names have become inseparably linked to the sinking of the Titanic have presented history with what is probably a unique set of contrasts. On one hand is the captain who did everything—or nearly everything—right, Arthur Rostron of the Carpathia; and on the other is the skipper who did everything—or nearly everything—wrong, Stanley Lord of the Californian. Lately, though, the name of a third captain has begun to crop up in discussions about who did what the night the Titanic went down and whether his actions were right or wrong—Edward J. Smith.

At the time, the overwhelming majority of the British press, along with quite a few American newspapers, portrayed Captain Smith’s conduct as utterly heroic and ultimately self-sacrificing, especially when contrasted with the actions of Bruce Ismay. Smith’s reputation, aided by popular books and movies, endured for three quarters of a century. Yet in the past few years questions have begun to be raised, not about Captain Smith’s courage, but rather about his judgement and abilities, and how errors he may have made led to the disaster. One noted author specifically suggested that the Titanic (along with her sister Olympic) were simply too big for Captain Smith to competently handle; other writers have suggested that Smith had become increasingly complacent, even reckless, as year after year of uneventful crossings of the Atlantic went by; while still others marvel at the fact that after the Titanic hit the iceberg and the certainty of her doom was made clear by Thomas Andrews, Smith, who had been portrayed time after time as being such an outstanding leader, should be so ineffective in his efforts to get the passengers into the lifeboats.

Had Captain Smith been given command of a vessel that, because of its immense size, demanded ship-handling and navigational skills he didn’t possess ? Had he grown complacent, even careless, because in his forty years at sea he had never been in a serious accident, let alone had a ship sink while he was serving on board? Why did Smith give the appearance of being controlled, decisive, and very much in command until Thomas Andrews informed him that the Titanic was going to sink and take half the people on board with her, then from that moment seemed to almost be reduced to being a mere spectator as the tragedy unfolded? Ultimately, was Captain Smith a seaman who had been lucky for forty years, and suddenly had no idea what to do when he realized his luck had run out?

To conclude that Captain Smith bore a considerable share of the responsibility for the collision itself is inescapable. By early evening on April 14, he was fully aware that the Titanic was proceeding at high speed into a section of the North Atlantic where ice was known to be about, and had already altered the
Titanic’s
course to take her some twelve to fifteen miles farther south of the normal shipping lane in order to avoid what he thought to be the worst concentration of ice. What he didn’t know was that the icefield ahead of the Titanic was far larger than he believed. Had all of the six wireless messages concerning ice been properly posted on the bridge or in the chartroom, the extent of the ice floe the Titanic was steaming toward would have been much clearer, so that Captain Smith could have radically altered his course in order to avoid it. The problem was that there was no clear-cut procedure for handling wireless messages of this sort, so Phillips and Bride did with them what they thought best: at times sending the messages up to the bridge immediately, at others handing them to the nearest officer, at still others letting them sit in the wireless office while they worked on the passenger’s traffic. Unfortunately this resulted in the six messages being scattered across the ship, one (from the Baltic) even winding up in Bruce Ismay’s pocket.

Critics of Captain Smith have been quick to point out that this admittedly haphazard handling of wireless messages deprived the captain and his officers of vital information affecting the safe navigation of the ship. But the fault was not so much Captain Smith’s as it was that of the prevailing attitude of captains and officers of passenger ships on the North Atlantic run in the early years of the twentieth century. The technology of wireless was still relatively new to many of these men, and as a consequence most of them hadn’t thought out the implications of the increased communication capabilities wireless offered: very few had realized that wireless gave them the opportunity to virtually look over the horizon and anticipate danger before it hove into view. Even fewer had worked out set procedures for the wireless operators to follow when they received messages affecting the navigation of the ship. At the same time, the wireless industry itself had very few regulations or conventions to guide the operators in such a situation. Attempting to blame Captain Smith for the inept way in which the ice warnings were handled rings a little hollow, since the conditions that existed on the Titanic were the same as those on most of the ships on the North Atlantic. If Captain Smith failed to appreciate the potential that wireless communications had to improve the safe navigation of his ship, it was not due to willful ignorance, for it was a shortcoming shared by nearly all of his colleagues.

Nevertheless, because Captain Smith was aware from the one or two messages he had seen that ice lay across the
Titanic’s
course, there were some precautions he could have taken but didn’t, and for that he was clearly responsible. While he did alter the
Titanic’s
course farther south to avoid the ice and issued orders for the lookouts to be alert for ice ahead, he failed to post extra lookouts. That this would have been a wise precaution was amply demonstrated by Captain Rostron aboard the
Carpathia,
when as she was beginning her frantic dash north to come to the
Titanic’s
aid, he posted no fewer than seven additional lookouts to watch for ice. Significantly, four of them were posted on the foredeck, rather than up in the crow’s nest or on the bridge, since it was a well-known fact that it was easier to spot ice from deck level than from higher up. Smith’s failure to post extra lookouts may have been the most serious mistake he ever made.

Another mistake was the decision to maintain a speed of 22 knots, the fastest the ship had ever gone. This though may have been an error committed out of ignorance: if Captain Smith, having already altered course to the south, wasn’t aware of the full extent of the ice floe spreading across the
Titanic’s
course—and the evidence is that he wasn’t—then he wouldn’t have seen the necessity of reducing speed. To some degree, Bruce Ismay, with his obsession with bettering the Olympic’s time on her maiden voyage, may have contributed to this. Captain Smith, impending retirement or no, would have been less than human if he hadn’t been susceptible to the urge to carry out his employer’s wishes, and so was inclined to not reduce speed.

Of course, the speed the Titanic was making as she approached the iceberg had a direct effect on the time and distance it took her to respond to the movement of her rudder. No one will ever know for sure just how familiar Captain Smith was with the turning radius and response time of the Titanic, though there is little reason to believe that they would have differed significantly from those of the Olympic, which Smith had commanded for nearly a year. Smith had an outstanding reputation among professional seamen as an expert ship handler; but, the question persists as to whether or not Smith knew just how clumsy and heavy these new ships were. Yet asking the rhetorical question, “Had ships gotten too big for Captain Smith?” implies that there were other captains who had the ability to better handle ships the size of the Olympic and Titanic. In plain truth there weren’t. The two White Star sisters were the largest ships in the world, fully a third larger than the next largest ships, the
Lusitania
and
Mauretania,
and no one had any more experience with them than Captain Smith. The handling characteristics of the Olympic class ships were uncharted territory, and if Smith overestimated the maneuverability of those vessels, there was nobody with the credentials to gainsay him.

Simply put, the decisions Captain Smith made about navigation and shipboard procedures on the Titanic right up to the moment of the collision, while in hindsight frighteningly casual in some respects, were in fact singularly unremarkable when put in perspective: his actions were very much in line with the standard practices on board most Atlantic liners of the day. To expect him to radically depart from those practices—and it should be kept in mind that for the forty years he had been at sea those same practices had never gotten him involved in serious accident or emergency—would be to demand a foresight, even a prescience, that is beyond the ability of most mortals.

It is after the collision occurs that Captain Smith’s behavior and decision-making becomes far more questionable. For the first twenty or twenty-five minutes after the impact, the captain was very much the embodiment of command, instantly giving orders to ensure the safety of the ship, having the carpenter ascertain the damage, putting Ismay (who always seemed to be underfoot at the worst possible times) firmly in his place, conferring with Thomas Andrews about the effect the damage would have on the ship. But just about midnight, his powers of decision and command seemed to desert him. For the next two hours and twenty minutes, he would be only a shadow of his former self, isolating himself on the bridge, failing to pass on critical information to his officers and senior seamen, acting and reacting slowly to reports and rapidly changing circumstances, and giving half-hearted orders, some of which the crew would openly defy. Clearly something had happened ; the question is what?

The answer lies in what passed between Thomas Andrews and Captain Smith when they had finished their inspection and returned to Andrews’s cabin, A-36. The absolute certainty with which Andrews pronounced the
Titanic’s
doom must have been like a body blow to Smith, but worse was to come: when Andrews confirmed that the ship carried enough lifeboats to hold only half the people on board, it must have seemed like Smith’s worst nightmare had come true. The safety of the ship and every person on board her, regardless of how many regulations were complied with, no matter how many Bruce Ismays were aboard, were the sole responsibility of the ship’s captain, and now Captain Smith had failed that responsibility. All of Smith’s superb seamanship, his forty years at sea without a serious accident, his twenty-seven years of command without ever having lost a single life entrusted to his care, his unqualified confidence in the capabilities of modern shipbuilding, had all been swept away in the ten seconds it took for the iceberg to open up the
Titanic’s
starboard side.

From that moment on, Smith would exhibit all the characteristics of someone suddenly overwhelmed by circumstances. What orders and instructions he would give would often be incomplete or impractical: after Smith had ordered the lifeboats uncovered, he had to be prodded by Second Officer Lightoller to have them swung out and begin loading the passengers; when he wanted to load the boats from the Promenade Deck, he completely forgot that the forward half of the deck was enclosed, making loading from there impossible; and his idea for filling the half empty boats from the gangways on D Deck made no sense at all.

He also failed to make it clear to his officers and senior seamen—the quartermasters, bosun’s mates, and able-bodied seamen—that the ship was in mortal danger, and so didn’t impart any real sense of urgency to them. One of the most remarkable aspects of the
Titanic’s
sinking is that very few people on board regarded the situation as serious for more than an hour after the collision—in fact it was nearly 1:15 before Fourth Officer Boxhall was told the ship was going to sink. While no doubt Smith wanted to avoid a panic among the passengers, and quite possibly the crew as well, not letting his officers know just how serious the emergency was may well have contributed to a false sense of security among them, which in turn caused them to allow a number of the boats to leave the ship less than half full.

It is almost certain that only Bruce Ismay, Thomas Andrews, and Captain Smith knew for sure that there were far too few lifeboats on the Titanic to hold all the people aboard her. Again, by not informing the officers of this discrepancy, Smith may have unwittingly caused an even greater loss of life, because so many of the lifeboats left the ship only partially filled. Certainly, the knowledge that the number of boats was inadequate was not something to be shared with the passengers, but it isn’t difficult to believe that the
Titanic’s
officers would have acted differently had they realized the truth. Nor did Smith give any instructions on how “Women and children first!” was to be interpreted. This led to Lightoller taking it to mean women and children only, while Murdoch was more flexible, allowing some married couples into the boats, and a few single men when there weren’t any women immediately nearby.

Finally, Captain Smith isolated himself on the bridge, leaving it only occasionally to walk a few yards aft to the wireless office, to inquire of Bride and Phillips if there were any ships coming to the
Titanic’s
aid. He never made his way down the Boat Deck to observe how the loading and launching of the lifeboats was proceeding, never bothered to ascertain if his orders were being carried out, never inquired as to whether all the passengers and crew had been roused and were accounted for.

What had happened to Captain Smith? Dr. Dorothy Mihalyfi a clinical psychologist from Boca Raton, Florida, who specializes in crisis counseling, reviewed Smith’s actions and behavior at the author’s request. In her opinion, Smith was in a state of mental shock, as she put it, “a temporary disfunctionality.” Smith had believed that the ship was unsinkable, had believed in his abilities as a ship’s captain, had believed that he had taken all the necessary precautions. Now the entire edifice around which his authority was built had come crashing down. Completely dumbfounded by the situation, he was in a blank state of immobility, a mental void similar to that of a boxer who has taken too many punches, and though he refuses to go down, can no longer defend himself or fight back. In such a case the referee would step in to stop the fight, but there was no referee on April 15, 1912.