The Loss of the S.S. Titanic by Lawrence Beesley (readnow .txt) 📖

CHAPTER VIII

THE LESSONS TAUGHT BY THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC

 

One of the most pitiful things in the relations of human beings to

each other—the action and reaction of events that is called

concretely “human life”—is that every now and then some of them

should be called upon to lay down their lives from no sense of

imperative, calculated duty such as inspires the soldier or the

sailor, but suddenly, without any previous knowledge or warning of

danger, without any opportunity of escape, and without any desire to

risk such conditions of danger of their own free will. It is a blot on

our civilization that these things are necessary from time to time, to

arouse those responsible for the safety of human life from the

lethargic selfishness which has governed them. The Titanic’s two

thousand odd passengers went aboard thinking they were

on an absolutely safe ship, and all the time there were many

people—designers, builders, experts, government officials—who knew

there were insufficient boats on board, that the Titanic had no right

to go fast in iceberg regions,—who knew these things and took no

steps and enacted no laws to prevent their happening. Not that they

omitted to do these things deliberately, but were lulled into a state

of selfish inaction from which it needed such a tragedy as this to

arouse them. It was a cruel necessity which demanded that a few should

die to arouse many millions to a sense of their own insecurity, to the

fact that for years the possibility of such a disaster has been

imminent. Passengers have known none of these things, and while no

good end would have been served by relating to them needless tales of

danger on the high seas, one thing is certain—that, had they known

them, many would not have travelled in such conditions and thereby

safeguards would soon have been forced on the builders, the companies,

and the Government. But there were people who knew and did not fail to

call attention to the dangers: in the House of Commons the matter has

been frequently brought up privately, and an American naval officer,

Captain E. K. Boden, in an article that has since been widely

reproduced, called attention to the defects of this very ship, the

Titanic—taking her as an example of all other liners—and pointed out

that she was not unsinkable and had not proper boat accommodation.

 

The question, then, of responsibility for the loss of the Titanic must

be considered: not from any idea that blame should be laid here or

there and a scapegoat provided—that is a waste of time. But if a

fixing of responsibility leads to quick and efficient remedy, then it

should be done relentlessly: our simple duty to those whom the Titanic

carried down with her demands no less. Dealing first with the

precautions for the safety of the ship as apart from safety

appliances, there can be no question, I suppose, that the direct

responsibility for the loss of the Titanic and so many lives must be

laid on her captain. He was responsible for setting the course, day by

day and hour by hour, for the speed she was travelling; and he alone

would have the power to decide whether or not speed must be slackened

with icebergs ahead. No officer would have any right to interfere in

the navigation, although they would no doubt be consulted. Nor would

any official connected with the management of the line—Mr. Ismay, for

example—be allowed to direct the captain in these matters, and there

is no evidence that he ever tried to do so. The very fact that the

captain of a ship has such absolute authority increases his

responsibility enormously. Even supposing the White Star Line and Mr.

Ismay had urged him before sailing to make a record,—again an

assumption,—they cannot be held directly responsible for the

collision: he was in charge of the lives of everyone on board and no

one but he was supposed to estimate the risk of travelling at the

speed he did, when ice was reported ahead of him. His action cannot be

justified on the ground of prudent seamanship.

 

But the question of indirect responsibility raises at once many issues

and, I think, removes from Captain Smith a good deal of personal

responsibility for the loss of his ship. Some of these issues it will

be well to consider.

 

In the first place, disabusing our minds again of the knowledge that

the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, let us estimate the

probabilities of such a thing happening. An iceberg is small and

occupies little room by comparison with the broad ocean on which it

floats; and the chances of another small object like a ship colliding

with it and being sunk are very small: the chances are, as a matter of

fact, one in a million. This is not a figure of speech: that is the

actual risk for total loss by collision with an iceberg as accepted by

insurance companies. The one-in-a-million accident was what sunk the

Titanic.

 

Even so, had Captain Smith been alone in taking that risk, he would

have had to bear all the blame for the resulting disaster. But it

seems he is not alone: the same risk has been taken over and over

again by fast mail-passenger liners, in fog and in iceberg regions.

Their captains have taken the long—very long—chance many times and

won every time; he took it as he had done many times before, and lost.

Of course, the chances that night of striking an iceberg were much

greater than one in a million: they had been enormously increased by

the extreme southerly position of icebergs and field ice and by the

unusual number of the former. Thinking over the scene that met our

eyes from the deck of the Carpathia after we boarded her,—the great

number of icebergs wherever the eye could reach,—the chances of

not hitting one in the darkness of the night seemed small.

Indeed, the more one thinks about the Carpathia coming at full speed

through all those icebergs in the darkness, the more inexplicable does

it seem. True, the captain had an extra lookout watch and every sense

of every man on the bridge alert to detect the least sign of danger,

and again he was not going so fast as the Titanic and would have his

ship under more control; but granted all that, he appears to have

taken a great risk as he dogged and twisted round the awful

two-hundred-foot monsters in the dark night. Does it mean that the

risk is not so great as we who have seen the abnormal and not the

normal side of taking risks with icebergs might suppose? He had his

own ship and passengers to consider, and he had no right to take too

great a risk.

 

But Captain Smith could not know icebergs were there in such numbers:

what warnings he had of them is not yet thoroughly established,—there

were probably three,—but it is in the highest degree unlikely that he

knew that any vessel had seen them in such quantities as we saw them

Monday morning; in fact, it is unthinkable. He thought, no doubt, he

was taking an ordinary risk, and it turned out to be an extraordinary

one. To read some criticisms it would seem as if he deliberately ran

his ship in defiance of all custom through a region infested with

icebergs, and did a thing which no one has ever done before; that he

outraged all precedent by not slowing down. But it is plain that he

did not. Every captain who has run full speed through fog and iceberg

regions is to blame for the disaster as much as he is: they got

through and he did not. Other liners can go faster than the Titanic

could possibly do; had they struck ice they would have been injured

even more deeply than she was, for it must not be forgotten that the

force of impact varies as the square of the velocity—i.e., it

is four times as much at sixteen knots as at eight knots, nine times

as much at twenty-four, and so on. And with not much margin of time

left for these fast boats, they must go full speed ahead nearly all

the time. Remember how they advertise to “Leave New York Wednesday,

dine in London the following Monday,”—and it is done regularly, much

as an express train is run to time. Their officers, too, would have

been less able to avoid a collision than Murdock of the Titanic was,

for at the greater speed, they would be on the iceberg in shorter

time. Many passengers can tell of crossing with fog a good deal of the

way, sometimes almost all the way, and they have been only a few hours

late at the end of the journey.

 

So that it is the custom that is at fault, not one particular captain.

Custom is established largely by demand, and supply too is the answer

to demand. What the public demanded the White Star Line supplied, and

so both the public and the Line are concerned with the question of

indirect responsibility.

 

The public has demanded, more and more every year, greater speed as

well as greater comfort, and by ceasing to patronize the low-speed

boats has gradually forced the pace to what it is at present. Not that

speed in itself is a dangerous thing,—it is sometimes much safer to

go quickly than slowly,—but that, given the facilities for speed and

the stimulus exerted by the constant public demand for it, occasions

arise when the judgment of those in command of a ship becomes

swayed—largely unconsciously, no doubt—in favour of taking risks

which the smaller liners would never take. The demand on the skipper

of a boat like the Californian, for example, which lay hove-to

nineteen miles away with her