Recalled To Life - Could More Have Survived The Titanic?

“Recalled To Life”, that’s the message that one Jarvis Lorry, an employee from Tellson’s Bank in London gives to a message he received in chapter 2 of Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale Of Two Cities. It is the message I give to those who read this in resurrecting my blog after many months of dormancy.

The original purpose of it was to document my struggle with atrial fibrillation. This is now changed to a general blog commenting on whatever strikes my fancy. Today I begin with the Titanic.

In a 2012 documentary on the ship producer James Cameron asked invited guests what they would do differently to save the life of everyone on board. The only qualification is that the Titanic still hits the iceberg.

Cameron’s premise is totally wrong. If you knew within the first five to ten minutes of the accident that the blow was fatal there are a number of things that could be immediately done, like uncover the boats and, especially, send out a distress call. As it turned out the first distress call wasn’t sent out until 35 minutes afterwards at about 12:15 AM Titanic time.

So let me reframe the premise that you could change anything except what they knew when. The critical question is approximately when did Thomas Andrews say the ship would sink? Walter Lord in A Night To Remember gives the approximate of 12:05 as to when the order was given to uncover the boats and muster the passengers and crew. At about the same time the boilers were begun to be drawn down. So around midnight is when Andrews said the ship would definitely sink. He also estimated it would take between an hour and an hour and a half or roughly sometime between 1 and 1:30. So this is the time frame we have to work with. Yes we know that the ship sank at 2:20, but they didn’t when Andrews estimated the time.

Getting back to the proposition of what would you do to save all of Titanic’s passengers and crew? The solutions suggested were: sailing to the ship they could see, sailing to the ice flow and sailing to the iceberg. Cameron suggested that if the ship was sailed backwards it would lessen the strain on the damage and slow the water coming in. That might be true, but there are several problems with this. With the ship heavily damaged it would slow the speed at which it could travel even going backwards. And with each passing minute more water is coming into the ship slowing it even further and quite possibly forcing it to stop well short of its destination.

Another issue is that while it was possible for people to climb onto an iceberg, as witnessed by a passing ship after the disaster, which noticed several men who had climbed onto one and died, it’s very doubtful that everyone on board could have gotten onto one. Also the Titanic gave the wrong position in its distress calls and so even had everyone on board managed to get onto an iceberg or the ice flow most if not everyone could very well have died.

Given this there were still several things the crew could have done that could have at the very least bought them far more time and saved more people. The most obvious one is not to send the boatswain and five other crewmen down below to open one of the lower gangways. For starters it added to the shortage of trained sailors for the boats, but more importantly it substantially increased the flow of water into the ship. It was like striking another iceberg. Instead crew could have been sent below to check for open portholes and close them. Open portholes also increased the flow of water into the ship. Doing either one of these could have delayed the sinking by at least another 20 minutes and both could have delayed the sinking by perhaps 40 minutes or more.

There is one thing that might have kept the ship afloat long enough for all to be rescued. Had all the watertight doors been raised once it was known that the ship was fatally damaged would have allowed the Titanic to sink on an even keel delaying the final plunge until perhaps well after dawn.

Like Cameron, I don’t damn the crew for the actions they took that time. Who knows what each of us would have done in that situation?

Look for my next post about the middle of April.