The Night Lives On (3 page)

This bit of debunking has now led the inevitable band of
Titanic
revisionists to go much further. “I can find no contemporary evidence that the
Titanic
was regarded as virtually unsinkable until after she had sunk,” wrote journalist Philip Howard in the London
Times
in 1981. “With hindsight we have created the myth because it makes a more dramatic metaphor.”

He should have looked a little harder. On June 1, 1911, along with its account of the
Titanic’s
launch, the
Irish News and Belfast Morning News
ran a follow-up story headlined
TITANIC DESCRIBED.
This included a detailed account of the ship’s 16 watertight compartments and the electrically controlled doors that connected them. “In the event of an accident, or at any time when it may be considered advisable, the captain can, by simply moving an electric switch, instantly close the doors throughout, practically making the vessel unsinkable.”

Later that June the prestigious magazine
Shipbuilder
also described these miracle doors, explaining how they could be closed by merely flicking a switch on the bridge, making the ship “practically unsinkable.”

Captain Smith himself believed it. As he explained when he brought over the much smaller
Adriatic
in 1906:

I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.

So the “unsinkability” of the
Titanic
was not the product of some slick advertising copywriter, nor was it a myth later invented to improve the story. It was the
considered opinion of the experts at the time, and it worked its greatest mischief neither before nor after the event, but during the hours of agonizing uncertainty while the tragedy was still unfolding.

“We place absolute confidence in the
Titanic.
We believe that the boat is unsinkable,” declared Philip A. S. Franklin, Vice-President of the White Star Line in New York, as the first alarming reports began to drift in around 8
A.M
. on April 15.

The
Titanic
could certainly float two or three days, he elaborated around noon. Other experts seemed to agree. Captain Johnson of the American Liner
St. Paul
declared that it was practically impossible for the
Titanic
to sink, because her 15 bulkheads would keep her afloat indefinitely. Actually, the
Titanic
had by now been at the bottom of the sea a good 12 hours.

“I want to say this,” Franklin later testified at the U.S. Senate investigation. “During the entire day we considered the ship unsinkable, and it never entered our minds that there had been anything like a serious loss of life.”

How close to “unsinkable” really was the
Titanic
? Did she embody the latest engineering techniques? Was she as staunch as man could make her? Did she at least represent what we have now come to call “the state of the art”?

The answer is “No.” Far from being a triumph of safe construction, or the best that could be done with the technology available, the
Titanic
was the product of a trend the other way, a trend that for 50 years had seen one safety feature after another sacrificed for competitive reasons.

In 1858 a ship had been built that really did come
close to being unsinkable. This was the
Great Eastern,
a mammoth liner of 19,000 tons and nearly 700 feet in length. She proved a commercial disaster—unwieldy, under-powered, uneconomical, and unlucky—but in one respect she was superb. She brilliantly incorporated every safety feature that could be devised.

The
Great Eastern
was really two ships in one. Two feet, 10 inches, inside her outer hull was a wholly separate inner hull, the two joined together by a network of braces. Like the
Titanic,
she was divided into 16 watertight compartments by 15 transverse bulkheads, but on the
Great Eastern,
the bulkheads ran higher and had no doors. To get from one compartment to another, it was necessary to climb to the bulkhead deck, cross over, and go down the other side. The bulkhead deck was also watertight, with a minimum of hatches and companion-ways. Finally, the
Great Eastern
had two longitudinal bulkheads extending the whole length of her boiler and engine rooms. This honeycomb of walls and decks gave her a total of some 40-50 separate watertight compartments.

The acid test came on the night of August 27, 1862, two years after she began her trans-Atlantic service. Steaming for New York with 820 passengers, the
Great Eastern
was off Montauk Point, Long Island, when she scraped an uncharted rock, ripped a gash in her outer skin 83 feet long and 9 feet wide. Considering her size, the hole was comparable to the damage that sank the
Titanic.

But the
Great Eastern
did not go down. She sagged to starboard, but the inner skin held and the engine rooms remained dry. Next morning she limped into New York Harbor under her own steam.

Her survival was a tribute to the engineering genius of her builder, Isambard Kingdom Brunel—and to the mood of the times. The mechanical engineer was the western world’s new hero—and no wonder. Twenty years before the building of the
Great Eastern
, the only way to cross the Atlantic was by sailing packet. Slow, cramped, and unpredictable, the trip could take a month. Then, almost overnight it seemed, came these absurd-looking floating “teakettles.” Their pistons hissing and clanking, their tall chimneys belching smoke and sparks, their paddle wheels thrashing the waves, they quickly cut the trip to less than ten days. The men who wrought this miracle—the engineers who made steam do their bidding—were deferred to on every question involving the design and construction of these new contraptions. If Brunel wanted his “leviathan” to be the best in every way—size, speed, strength, and safety—that was the way it would be, regardless of cost.

But the engineers did not have the last word for very long. The speed and reliability of the new steamships meant a great surge in trans-Atlantic travel, with profits further fattened by the growing emigrant trade and generous mail contracts. The stakes were high, and by 1873 eleven major lines were fighting for their share. Entrepreneurs and promoters moved in, and the perfect ship was no longer the vessel that best expressed the art of the shipbuilder. It was the ship that made the most money.

Passengers demanded attention; stewards could serve them more easily if doors were cut in the watertight bulkheads. A grand staircase required a spacious opening at every level, making a watertight deck impossible.
The sweep of a magnificent dining saloon left no room for bulkheads that might spoil the effect. Stokers could work more efficiently if longitudinal bulkheads were omitted and the bunkers carried clear across the ship. A double hull ate up valuable passenger and cargo space; a double bottom would be enough.

One by one the safety precautions that marked the
Great Eastern
were chipped away in the interests of a more competitive ship. There were exceptions of course—the
Mauretania
and
Lusitania
had to meet Admiralty specifications—but the
Olympic
and
Titanic
were more typical. When the “unsinkable”
Titanic
was completed in 1912, she matched the
Great Eastern
in only one respect: she, too, had 15 transverse watertight bulkheads.

But even this was misleading. The
Great Eastern’s
bulkheads were carried 30 feet above the waterline; the
Titanic’s
bulkheads, only 10 feet. Even her vaunted system of watertight doors that could be closed from the bridge “by simply moving a switch” fell short of its promise. Only 12 doors at the very bottom of the ship could be closed this way. The rest (some 20 or 30) had to be closed by hand. On the night of the collision some were; some weren’t. Some were even closed, then opened again to make it easier to rig the pumps.

Why, then, was such a vulnerable ship considered by the owners themselves to be virtually unsinkable? Partly, it was because the
Titanic
would indeed float with any two compartments flooded, and the White Star Line couldn’t imagine anything worse than a collision at the juncture of two compartments. But there was another reason, too, why the owners were lulled into complacency. This was because the ship
looked
so safe. Her
huge bulk, her tiers of decks rising one atop the other, her 29 boilers, her luxurious fittings—all seemed to spell “permanence.” The appearance of safety was mistaken for safety itself.

The
Titanic
was indeed a magnificent sight as she left Belfast on April 2, 1912, and headed for Southampton, where she would begin her service on the North Atlantic run. At 46,328 tons, she was the largest ship in the world—only a trifle bigger than her sister ship
Olympic,
but 50% larger than any other liner afloat. With ships increasing in size so dramatically, her vast bulk inevitably led to still more legends: that she had a golf course…that she carried a small herd of dairy cows to supply fresh milk…that she was a half-mile long. The
Titanic
boasted none of these features; in fact, she was quite similar to the
Olympic,
which had already been in service for a year. White Star’s problem was how to give the new ship a little extra glamour when both vessels had basically the same structure.

The company solved this problem brilliantly with two new amenities that required a minimum of structural change. First, a set of 28 splendid staterooms were installed on B Deck, more lavish than any on the
Olympic
and complete with large windows (not portholes) that looked out directly on the sea. Most of these rooms were interconnecting and could be turned into suites of any size. Each was painstakingly decorated in a different period style—Louis XVI, Early Dutch, Regency, and so on. Two suites even had private promenade decks done in half-timbered Tudor.

The second innovation was even more arresting. A section of the Second Class Promenade Deck was appropriated for a dazzling new First Class attraction: a
genuine French “sidewalk” café, complete with genuine French waiters. By now the veteran Atlantic traveler was bored by mere paneled magnificence—one more ornate lounge would have made no impression—but the addition of this bright, airy café with its Continental chic (especially on a staid British ship) was sensational.

As a final touch, the forward half of the Promenade Deck was glassed in, giving the First Class passengers extra shelter in bad weather and, incidentally, marking the
Titanic
as a step ahead of her sister ship
Olympic.

Both the Café Parisien and the new “special staterooms” stirred great attention as the
Titanic
prepared to sail on her maiden voyage, April 10. They stamped her as the most luxurious ship on the Atlantic—at least until next year, when an immense new German liner, already taking shape at Hamburg, would enter the unending struggle for maritime supremacy.

A
S
I
RECALL, ON
the day it sailed, all England was merry in the celebration of a holiday for the occasion. Flags flying in the breeze in every city and hamlet. There was the inevitable speech-making. That gloriously martial air, “Britannia Rules the Waves,” was the mighty theme-song of the day….

So the Reverend Wilfred G. Hurley described the
Titanic’s
maiden sailing, April 10, 1912, in a little pamphlet published 37 years later by the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle. It is a familiar picture, handed down by countless writers through the years.

Actually, the White Star Line made very little of the
Titanic’s
departure. There were no bands, no speeches, no flag-waving. The only touch out of the ordinary was an immense crowd. Southampton was a seafaring town, and it seemed that the whole city wanted to watch the greatest ship in the world start off on her maiden voyage. But it was a knowledgeable crowd, almost
professionally observant, and not at all given to singing or cheering.

Yet, the departure did have its excitement. While the
Titanic
was casting off, promptly at 12 noon, seven members of the “black gang,” as the stokers and firemen were called, came racing down the dock hoping to scramble aboard. They had gone ashore for a last pint and somehow lingered too long. Now they stood by an open ship’s gangway, arguing with the officer on duty there. He clearly wanted no part of them—they were too late, and that was that. Frustrated, the little group melted into the crowd, cursing this rotten turn in their luck.

Imperceptibly, the gulf widened between the
Titanic
and the dock; she was under way at last. Assisted by six tugs, she slowly crept out of the slip and into the channel of the River Test. Here her enormous bulk was maneuvered to the left, toward open water and ultimately the sea.

As she moved down the channel, now under her own power, the
Titanic
came abreast of two smaller liners moored to the quay on the left. These were the White Star’s
Oceanic
and the American Line’s
New York,
idled by a coal strike that had paralyzed most of British shipping for weeks. Warped side by side, with the
New York
on the outside, they made the narrow channel even more narrow.

The
Titanic
glided on, steaming at about six knots. As she drew opposite the
New York,
there was a sudden series of sharp cracks, like pistol shots. One after another, all six of the lines tying the
New York
to the
Oceanic
snapped. Drawn by some inexorable force, the American Liner began drifting toward the huge
Titanic.
For a moment a collision seemed certain, as the stern of the
New York
swung to within three or four feet of the port quarter of the
Titanic.

Quick thinking saved the day. The tug
Vulcan
, one of the small fleet escorting the
Titanic
, darted to the danger spot. Her skipper, Captain Gale, passed a line to the
New York’s
stern, and with much puffing and straining, the
Vulcan
managed to slow the vessel’s drift. At the same time Captain Smith on the
Titanic’s
bridge nudged his port engine forward, creating a wash that helped push the
New York
clear. There was still plenty of danger, for the American Liner was completely adrift without any steam up, and she slid at an angle down the narrow corridor of water between the
Titanic
and the
Oceanic
with only inches to spare. Miraculously there was no contact, and finally the errant
New York
was corralled and towed to another berth, safely out of the way. The channel was clear at last, and the
Titanic
headed for open water.