The ship “Titanic”.
On the night of April 14-15, 1912, in the North Atlantic Ocean, more than 600 km southeast of the Canadian island of Newfoundland, the newest passenger liner Titanic, making its first transatlantic voyage, collided with an iceberg and sank.
Something that's hard to believe
At first, they simply refused to believe in the death of the most perfect ship at that time. The first media reports denied not only the massive loss of life, but also the fact that the ship could go to the bottom: “After the collision with the iceberg, all the people from the Titanic were rescued, the liner was towed to Halifax.”
The full horror of what had happened was realized only when on April 18 the ship “Karpatia” with the rescued reached New York. Of the more than 2,200 people on board the Titanic, just over 700 survived. 1,500 passengers and crew died in the icy waters of the Atlantic.
For some time, the area of the sinking of the “Titanic” received the name “floating cemetery” – because of the large number of dead bodies in life jackets. Several ships at once, up to June 1912, collected the remains of the dead, delivering them to the shore for burial. However, those who could not be identified were awaited by a funeral at sea.
Two investigations
When the first horror receded, both the survivors and the relatives of the victims wanted to get an answer to the question: why did the ship die, in the absolute reliability of which its creators were sure?
The investigation was conducted simultaneously in the United States and Great Britain. On April 19, hearings were opened by the US Senate Investigative Subcommittee, led by William Smith. Among those who answered questions from the Senate Commission were the Managing Director of the White Star Line Steamship Company, the surviving officers and sailors of the Titanic, passengers, as well as the captains of the ships near the crash site, the Carpathia and the Californian. “.
On board the Titanic was Thomas Andrews, Jr., a shipbuilding engineer and executive director of the Harland & Wolf shipbuilding company, who designed and built the giant ship.
Immediately after the collision with the iceberg, he studied the nature of the damage, the first to utter words about the inevitable death of the ship.
As a result of the collision with the ice giant “Titanic” at a level of about 7 m below the waterline (3 m above the keel) on the starboard side in the bow, it received several holes, stretching for a total of 91 m. As a result of the collision with the iceberg, 5 out of 16 were damaged waterproof compartments. The liner retained the ability to stay afloat if no more than four compartments were damaged.
Abnormal conditions
Andrews' conclusion was key to the investigation. The commission had to figure out the reasons why it happened.
Weather conditions were named as the main reason. First, in the spring of 1912, icebergs reached latitudes where they usually did not meet. In addition, the captain of the Titanic did not receive the latest radiograms about the change in the ice situation – the liner radio operators were busy transmitting messages from 1st class passengers.
On a moonless night, the iceberg was not lit, which is why the lookouts saw it rather late. It also affected the fact that the liner, crossing the Atlantic, went at high speed – this reduced the time that the crew had to make the right decision.
Surprisingly, many experts believed that for the Titanic in the current situation it would be better not to notice the iceberg at all. A frontal blow would have led to flooding and severe damage to the bow section, but the liner would have remained afloat. This would allow waiting for the arrival of help and most people would survive.
Who will be responsible for everything?
In December 2020, the British publication Daily Telegraph published an article in which, for the first time, fragments from the diary of Lord Mercy, judge of the High Court of London, who investigated the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, were presented to the general public.
His conclusions generally coincide with the results of the American investigation: before the crash, the Titanic went at high speed in a difficult ice situation and, despite warnings about icebergs in this part of the ocean, the ship did not conduct emergency exercises, and the number lifeboats did not provide the salvation of all those on board.
The question arose: who should be responsible for what happened? The ship's designer, Thomas Andrews, died along with the Titanic, moreover, the incident was not associated with any fatal design errors. The captain of the Titanic, Edward Smith, shared the fate of his ship, while his actions after the collision were considered competent and professional. As for the accident itself, at the time of the impact, Smith's assistants were on watch.
As a result, White Star Line's managing director Joseph Ismay and the captain of the steamship Californian Stanley Lord were the prime suspects.
Immoral boss
Ismay was accused of pressure on Captain Smith: it was argued that the head of the shipping company, demanding the establishment of a speed record for crossing the Atlantic, forced him to ignore all safety rules, which ultimately turned into a disaster. Also, witnesses claimed that Ismay climbed into the boat at the moment when women and children remained on board the Titanic.
However, it was not possible to prove the fact of pressure on the deceased captain, and the charges against Ismay were dropped. As for the second point, it was proved that the boss of the steamship company did not go headlong into the boat, did not push children and women away, so that his act was not considered a criminal offense. True, the moral condemnation turned out to be so strong that Ismay's career collapsed, and the last years of his life he lived as a recluse.
Captain Lord's delusion
Stanley Lord had nothing to do with the collision of the Titanic with the iceberg, but, nevertheless, there is reason to believe that the captain of the steamer Californian was indirectly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people.
By the time of the crash, the Californian was closest to the Titanic, 32 km away. For comparison, the “Carpathia”, which lifted most of the survivors on board, was 93 km from the collision site.
The survivors on the Titanic assured that they saw the lights of the ship, which, despite the signals for help, did not budge.
There was one radio operator on board the Californian, Cyril Evans. At 11:30 pm, having completed a 15-hour shift, he went to bed. The Titanic hit the iceberg ten minutes later. And half an hour later, the liner gave the first distress signal, which there was no one on the Californian to receive.
The Titanic officers, who saw the ship in the distance, fired several signal flares. The Californian noticed these signals, but could not correctly recognize them. Captain Lord himself suggested that we are talking about a ship stopped among the ice and simply indicating its location.
When the lights disappeared, the Californian assumed that the unknown ship had gone further, out of sight. It was only after the awakened radio operator returned to his seat that the ship learned about the sinking of the Titanic.
Conjuncture
As in the case of Ismay, a wave of public outrage hit the Lord. But there were no official accusations against him either in the USA or in the UK. The members of the two commissions of inquiry concluded that there is no reason to speak of deliberate inaction. They also did not consider it necessary to initiate an additional investigation into the Lord's case.
As a result, despite the anger of the survivors and loved ones of those who died in the waters of the Atlantic, not a single person was brought before the criminal court in the Titanic case as an accused. One of the worst shipwrecks of the 20th century was essentially blamed on an iceberg, a moonless night and a fateful coincidence.
