The Mockery of the Boats.
Meanwhile, with the ship sinking swiftly beneath them, there remained as a last hope for that hapless multitude the boats. The boats! Twenty in all, with a maximum accommodation of say 1,000 for 2,340 human beings!
A Blot on the British Board of Trade.
For years the British Board of Trade, renowned the world over for the jealous care with which it safeguards the life of the individual, has been guilty of the amazing anomaly of permitting the passenger ships of the vast British merchant marine to put to sea carrying boat accommodation for only one out of every three persons on board. The penalty for such unspeakable folly, we had almost said criminal and brutal negligence, may have been long delayed; but it was to come this night in a wholesale flinging away of human life, which has left a blot upon this institution which can never be effaced! Had the regulations called for the boat accommodation demanded by the German or our own government, every soul on board the "Titanic" could have been transferred and picked up by the rescuing ship.
Sun Parlors Versus Safety.
We can conceive of no other motive than that of commercial expediency, the desire to reserve valuable space for restaurants, sun parlors or other superfluous but attractive features of the advertising pamphlet and the placard, for this criminal reduction of the last recourse of the shipwrecked to so small a measure.
No practical steamship man can claim that the provision of boat accommodation for the full complement of a ship like the "Titanic" was impracticable. The removal of deckhouse structures from the boat deck of the ship, and the surrender of this deck to its proper uses, would give ample storage room for the sixty boats, more or less, which would be necessary.
Plans for a Full Complement of Boats.
We present on the front page a study of this problem, in which the number of boats on the "Titanic" has been raised from 20 to 56 and the accommodation from about 1,000 to about 3,100. The boats are carried continuously along the whole length of the boat-deck rails, and between each pair of smokestacks two lines of four boats each are stowed athwartship. The chocks in which these boats rest are provided with gunmetal wheels, which run in transverse gunmetal tracks, countersunk on the deck. As soon as the boat at the rail is loaded and lowered, the next boat inboard is wheeled to the davits and loaded, ready to he picked up and swung outboard as soon as the tackle has been cast loose from the boat that has been lowered. This method has the great advantage that if the ship has a heavy list, practically the whole of the boats can be transferred to the low side of the ship.
Is a Man Worth More Than a Sheep?
"But," says the shipping man, "all this means heavy top weights, the loss of valuable space, and heavy costs for installation and maintenance;" to which we reply, in the words of a certain venerable book, "By how much, then, is the life of a man worth more than that of a sheep!"
Light Out of Darkness.
Never, surely, in all the annals of human heroism, was there written a chapter at once so harrowing and inspiring as that which was gathered by the press from the pitiful remnant of that night of sacrificial horror. We turn from its heartrending story with a new sense of the God-like within us, and an exultant faith in the eternal uplift of the human race.
How the Great Ship Went Down.
Piecing together what the survivors witnessed from the boats, it is easy to understand the successive events of the ship’s final plunge. The filling of the forward compartments brought her down by the head, and, gradually, to an almost vertical position. Here she hung a while, stern high in air, like a huge, weighted spar buoy. As she swung to the perpendicular, her heavy engines and boilers, tearing loose from their foundations, crashed forward (downward); and, the water pressure increasing as the sank, burst in the so far intact after compartments. It was the muffled roar of this “death rattle” of the dying ship that caused some survivors to tell of bursting boilers and a hull broken apart. The shell of the ship, except for the injuries received in the collision, went to the bottom intact. When the after compartments finally gave way, the stricken vessel, weighted with the mass of engine and boiler-room wreckage at her forward end, sank, to bury herself, bows down, in the soft ooze of the Atlantic bottom, two miles below. There, for aught we know, she may at this moment be standing, with several hundred feet of her rising sheer above the ocean floor, a sublime memorial shaft to the sixteen hundred hapless souls who perished in this unspeakable tragedy!
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Add CommentInteresting how, in the last paragraph of the article, the author dismisses eyewitness accounts of the ship breaking apart and imagines the Titanic impaling the ocean floor and standing upright.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJ.P. Morgan's greed killed the Titanic, by building the world's three biggest ships simultaneously, despite a clear lack of skilled workers and steel. He wanted to get these death traps in the water and earning to pay off the massive loan, and beat Cunard Lines.
So he was allowed to use thin, brittle, sulfur-contaminated hull plate, smaller iron rivets instead of steel, and less than a third the needed number of lifeboats because his ad copy fooled maritime regulators. They really did believe she was unsinkable. Those unsightly boats just cluttered up decks passengers need for gamboling and shuffleboard! Begone!
Morgan's bean counters continually overruled the inexperienced engineer and puked out the Olympic, a ship so flimsy, the sides could be seen "panting" (flexing in and out by over three inches) at speed. The Olympic's frame began cracking on the first day of sea trials and workers slapped steel bandages all over it to make it seaworthy. Her sister ship, the Britannic, snapped in half and sank just four years later after hitting a mine in WWI. She sank in less than an hour. Her watertight doors and portholes had been left open.
Eyewitness testimony as to the flimsiness of these craft was suppressed, from the Titanic snapping in half, to White Star attempting to spirit several officers out of the country to prevent them from testifying at the inquiry. We will never know just how bad these ships were, because many of those who knew went to the bottom. But we DO know what J.P. Morgan did on that fateful night.
He inexplicably changed his plan to make the maiden voyage, and stayed home to deal with a change in art import laws as he raped Europe of priceless antiquities.
Most people didn't even know Morgan owned the Titanic, much less that he killed over a thousand people by trying to be the biggest and the cheapest. The press reprinted White Star Lines advertising copy verbatim, as the era's latest version of "too big to fail."
And it didn't fail, for Morgan. After the rigged inquiry blamed the idiot captain, E.J. Smith, for speeding into a known ice field at night without even bothering to provide his lookouts with binoculars, the insurer paid Morgan his money back. Smith may have been chosen for his recklessness, having caused three collisions with other ships by tearing around in port at full speed, and crushing the top of a tug with the Olympic's giant rudder. If anything went wrong, Morgan could blame the captain's inability to keep track of where other objects were in relation to the floating city.
The original report on the Titanic sinking is a model of good reporting: a credit to the Scientific American of old! The lack of lifeboats is a terrible comment on bad old British malpractice (I am a British citizen), in a world dominated by the bean-counters and people deluded enough to believe their own publicity. There never has been, and probably never will be, an unsinkable ship. The sinking of the Costa Concordia shows that there are no limits to human stupidity and arrogance.The ship sank probably because the captain was showing off to a pretty girl(see your other article about men being "cognitively impaired by attractive woman"). The passengers of this ultra-modern ship had not yet had their lifeboat drills, as the ship had only left port that morning. The Spirit of Free Enterprise (British Ferry) sank within minutes of leaving harbour a few years ago. So accidents can happen at any time, in the calmest weather.
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