Loading at the Rail—Inadequate Life-saving Appliances—No Extra Lookout—Searchlights Blinding—Wireless Rivals Not All Aroused—Went to Death in Sleep—Scratch Seamen—Cries of Agony—A Pitiful Story—Senators Ascertain Pertinent Facts—Much Good Accomplished.
What has been accomplished by the Senatorial inquiry into the loss of the Titanic with sixteen hundred lives?
For more than a week of the two that have elapsed since the Titanic made a record on her maiden voyage—a record never paralleled in marine history for its horrors, its sacrifice of life and material property—an earnest body of United States Senators has been at work conscientiously striving to uncover the facts, not alone for the purpose of placing the responsibility for what has now become one of the most heart-rending chapters of all ocean history, but also in the hope of framing remedial legislation looking to the prevention of its recurrence.
To attempt to draw conclusions as to the value of the work of a committee which is yet upon the threshold of its task would be presumptuous, but it is not too soon to present and formulate some of the pertinent facts which its researches have established in the light of sworn evidence.
Any attempt at systematic analysis of the facts deduced from the many thousand of pages of testimony already taken naturally divided itself into two departments:
Were the Titanic’s equipment and her general state of preparedness such as to justify the broad claims made in her behalf before the crisis arose, that she represented the acme of human possibility not only in ocean going comfort and speed but also in safety at sea?
Were the personnel and discipline of her officers and crew of such a standard that, after the supreme crisis confronted them, they utilized to the best advantage such facilities for the safeguarding and preservation of life as remained at their disposal?
With ten thousand families on both sides of the Atlantic mourning the untimely death of relatives and friends who went down into the depths from the decks of a brand new ship, widely proclaimed the greatest and the safest that ever ploughed the sea, these are, after all, the most pertinent questions that may be asked by a sorrowing world as it looks to the future rather than the past.
LIFE-SAVING APPARATUS INADEQUATE.
It has been demonstrated—and frankly conceded by the company’s managers and officers in the light of after knowledge—that the Titanic’s life-saving appliances were woefully inadequate to the safeguarding of even one-half her complement of passengers and crew. On the day after the disaster was known to the world it was shown that the ship’s equipment of lifeboats complied with the requirements of the English Board of Trade, but that those requirements were so obsolete and antiquated that they dated back to 1898 and were drafted to provide for vessels of less than one-quarter the gross tonnage of the mammoth craft of 46,000 tons of displacement.