RMS Titanic

“ There were no beacon torches on crag and cliff; no shouts in the pauses of the storm to tell them there was hope; nor deep-toned bell with its loudest peal sending cheerily, o’er the deep, comfort to these wretched souls in their extremity. There were, however, lights forward and on the port side to be seen all the time until the Carpathia appeared. These lights were only those of the Titanic’s other lifeboats, and thus it was, as they gazed with eager, anxious eyes that
“Fresh hope did give them strength and strength deliverance.” ”

“ There was a certain number of men in the boat and the officer called and asked if there were any more women, but there was no response. There were no passengers left on the deck, and as the boat was in the act of being lowered away he got into it. The Titanic was sinking at the time. He felt the ship going down. He entered because there was room in it. Before he boarded the lifeboat he saw no passengers jump into the sea. The boat rubbed along the ship’s side when being lowered, the women helping to shove the boat clear. This was when the ship had quite a list to port. ”

“ Each one more fantastically chiselled than its neighbor. The floe glistened like an ever-ending meadow covered with new-fallen snow. Those same white mountains, marvellous in their purity, had made of the just ended night one of the blackest the sea has ever known. And near them stood the ship which had come in such quick response to the Titanic’s call for help. The man who works over hours is always the worthwhile kind, and the Marconi operator awaiting a belated message had heard the poor ship’s call for help, and we few out of so many were saved. ”

“ Again and again was it repeated, "This ship cannot sink; it is only a question of waiting until another ship comes up and takes us off." Husbands expected to follow their wives and join them either in New York or by transfer in mid-ocean from steamer to steamer. Many passengers relate that they were told by officers that the ship was a lifeboat and could not go down; one lady affirms that the captain told her the Titanic could not sink for two or three days; no doubt this was immediately after the collision. ”

“ The master said: "You had better advise the Titanic we are stopped and surrounded with ice." This Evans did, calling up the Titanic and sending: "We are stopped and surrounded by ice." The Titanic replied: "Keep out." The Titanic was in communication with Cape Race, which station was then sending messages to her. The reason why the Titanic answered "keep out" was that her Marconi operator could not hear what Cape Race was saying, as from her proximity the message from the Californian was much stronger than any message being taken in by the Titanic from Cape Race, which was much farther off. ”

“ Perhaps, they said, other boats might have put off in another direction. They strove, though none too sure themselves, to convince the women of the certainty that a rescue ship would appear.
In the distance the Titanic looked an enormous length, her great bulk outlined in black against the starry sky, every port-hole and saloon blazing with light. It was impossible to think anything could be wrong with such a leviathan, were it not for that ominous tilt downwards in the bows, where the water was now up to the lowest row of port-holes. ”

“ Then, too, in the Mauretania all bulkheads are carried up to the top deck, whereas in the case of the Titanic they reached in some parts only to the saloon deck and in others to a lower deck still,—the weakness of this being that, when the water reached to the top of a bulkhead as the ship sank by the head, it flowed over and filled the next compartment. The British Admiralty, which subsidizes the Mauretania and Lusitania as fast cruisers in time of war, insisted on this type of construction, and it is considered vastly better than that used in the Titanic. ”

“ His conclusion expressed on the Carpathia is now strengthened, and he says that there was no explosion of the boilers and that the great noise which was mistaken for it was due to “the boilers leaving their beds” on E Deck when the ship was aslant and, with their great weight, sliding along the deck, crushing and tearing through the doomed vessel forward toward the bow. Third Officer Pitman also gave his testimony on this, as well as the next point considered. Before the Senate Committee he said: “Then she turned right on end and made a big plunge forward. The Titanic did not break asunder. ”

“ Yet the fate of that ship and her precious freight of human life hung upon the mere chance of sighting an obstruction in time to avoid collision by a quick turn of the helm. The question of hitting or missing was one not of minutes but of seconds. A ship like this, nigh upon a thousand feet in length, makes a wide sweep in turning, even with the helm hard over. At 21 knots the Titanic covered over a third of a mile in a minute's time. Even with her engines reversed she would have surged ahead for a half mile or so before coming to a stop. ”

“ The stokers rushed up from below and tried to beat a path through the steerage men and women and through the sailors and officers, to get into the boats. They had their iron bars and shovels, and they struck down all who stood in their way.
The first to come up from the depths of the ship was an engineer. From what he is reported to have said it is probable that the steam fittings were broken and many were scalded to death when the Titanic lifted. ”

“ The life-preservers helped to keep us warm, but the night was bitter cold, and it grew colder and colder, and just before dawn, the coldest, darkest hour of all, no help seemed possible. As we put off from the Titanic never was a sky more brilliant, never have I seen so many falling stars. All tended to make those distress rockets that were sent up from the sinking ship look so small, so dull and futile. The brilliancy of the sky only intensified the blackness of the water, our utter loneliness on the sea. ”

“ As an instance of the capriciousness of things maritime and the fallibility of human judgment, it is interesting to reflect that the Snark, a ten-ton yacht, the stanchness of which was greatly doubted, travelled her watery miles without mishap, and is still afloat, while the Titanic, the most wonderful craft that ever put out to sea, the last word in shipbuilding, declared unsinkable, bore over a thousand of her passengers to death, and lies to-day, a twisted mass of wreckage, irrecoverably lost in the depths of the Atlantic. ”

“ The inadequacy of the Titanic’s lifeboat appliances is not disputed. Steamship companies are already vying with one another to correct in this respect the admitted shortcomings of the past. The sole excuse offered is that collision bulkheads, watertight compartments and other like devices have been regarded until now as making the marvelous vessels of the present day “their own best lifeboats.” The Titanic and many of her sister ships of the ocean fleets have been called “unsinkable.” ”

“ Questions framed by Senator Smith several times have suggested that the use of a searchlight might have saved the Titanic. War ships of all nations make the searchlight a part of their regular equipment, as is well known. The Titanic’s surviving officers agreed that it has not been commonly used by vessels of the merchant marine. Some of them conceded that in the conditions surrounding the Titanic its use on a clear night might have revealed the iceberg in time to have saved the ship. Major Peuchen, of Toronto, said emphatically that it would have done so. ”

“ In this awful womb the Titanic took shape. For months and months in that monstrous iron enclosure there was nothing that had the faintest likeness to a ship; only something that might have been the iron scaffolding for the naves of half-a-dozen cathedrals laid end to end. Far away, furnaces were smelting thousands and thousands of tons of raw material that finally came to this place in the form of great girders and vast lumps of metal, huge framings, hundreds of miles of stays and rods and straps of steel, thousands of plates, not one of which twenty men could lift unaided ”

“ There is every reason to believe that the celebrated firm who built the ship, renowned the world over for the high character of their work; the powerful company whose flag she carried; aye, and even her talented designer, who was the first to pronounce the Titanic a doomed vessel and went down with the ship, were united in the belief that the size of the Titanic and her construction were such that she was unsinkable by any of the ordinary accidents to which the transatlantic liner is liable. ”

“ That confidence had been dreadfully overdone, so much so that the stewards had found the greatest difficulty in persuading the passengers to dress themselves and come up on deck, and some who had done so had returned to their state-rooms and locked themselves in. The last twenty minutes, however, must have shown everyone on deck that there was not a chance left. On a ship as vast and solid as the Titanic there is no sensation of actual sinking or settling. ”

“ Rostron, of the Carpathia. He says that after those who were saved got on board his ship he was told by some of them that when the boats first left the Titanic the people "really would not be put in the boats; they did not want to go in." There was a large body of evidence from the Titanic to the same effect, and I have no doubt that many people, particularly women, refused to leave the deck for the boats. At one time the master appears to have had the intention of putting the people into the boats from the gangway doors in the side of the ship. ”

“ The Titanic was in more senses than one a fool’s paradise. There is nothing that man can build that nature cannot destroy, and far as he may advance in might and knowledge and cunning, her blind strength will always be more than his match. But men easily forget this; they wish to forget it; and the beautiful and comfortable and agreeable equipment of this ship helped them to forget it. You may cover the walls of a ship with rare woods and upholster them with tapestries and brocades, but it is the bare steel walls behind them on which you depend to keep out the water ”

“ She collided with an iceberg on Sunday at 11.45 P.M. in Lat. 41° 46' N. and Long. 50° 14' W., and sank two hours and a half later; 815 of her passengers and 688 of her crew were drowned and 705 rescued by the Carpathia."
Such is the record of the Titanic, the largest ship the world had ever seen—she was three inches longer than the Olympic and one thousand tons more in gross tonnage—and her end was the greatest maritime disaster known. The whole civilized world was stirred to its depths when the full extent of loss of life was learned, and it has not yet recovered from the shock. ”

“ I cannot help feeling the deepest gratitude to the two sailors who stood at the ropes above and lowered us to the sea: I do not suppose they were saved.
Perhaps one explanation of our feeling little sense of the unusual in leaving the Titanic in this way was that it seemed the climax to a series of extraordinary occurrences: the magnitude of the whole thing dwarfed events that in the ordinary way would seem to be full of imminent peril. It is easy to imagine it,—a voyage of four days on a calm sea, without a single untoward incident ”

“ Other similar designs are known, by which the whole of the after deck can be pushed over from the stern by a ratchet arrangement, with air-tanks below to buoy it up: it seems to be a practical suggestion.
One point where the Titanic management failed lamentably was to provide a properly trained crew to each lifeboat. The rowing was in most cases execrable. There is no more reason why a steward should be able to row than a passenger—less so than some of the passengers who were lost ”

“ VII. In the building of merchant ships, unsinkable construction has been sacrificed to considerations of speed, convenience of operation, and the provision of luxurious accommodations for the travelling public. The inner skin, the longitudinal bulkhead, and the watertight deck have been abandoned. Although the transverse bulkhead has been retained, its efficiency has been greatly impaired; for, whereas these bulkheads in the Great Eastern extended thirty feet above the water-line; in the Titanic, they were carried only ten feet above the same point. ”

“ She is not, however, proof against disaster. The danger lies in her own power—in the tens of thousands of horse power with which she may be driven into another ship or into an iceberg standing cold and unyielding as a wall of granite. In view of this fact it is of the utmost importance that present-day vessels should be thoroughly provided with the most efficient life-saving devices. These would seem more important than fireplaces, squash-courts and many other luxuries with which the Titanic was provided. The comparatively few survivors of the ill-fated Titanic were saved by the life-boats. ”

“ Mr. Andrews, a partner in Harland and Wolff’s, and one of the Titanic’s designers, had gone quietly down by himself to investigate the damage, and, great as was his belief in the giant he had helped to create, it must have been shaken when he found the water pouring into her at the rate of hundreds of tons a minute. Even his confidence in those mighty steel walls that stretched one behind the other in succession along the [106] whole length of the ship could not have been proof against the knowledge that three or four of them had been pierced by the long rip of the ice-tooth. ”

“ The keel of the Titanic was laid on March 31, 1909, and she was launched on May 31, 1911; she passed her trials before the Board of Trade officials on March 31, 1912, at Belfast, arrived at Southampton on April 4, and sailed the following Wednesday, April 10, with 2208 passengers and crew, on her maiden voyage to New York. She called at Cherbourg the same day, Queenstown Thursday, and left for New York in the afternoon, expecting to arrive the following Wednesday morning. ”