The Titanic carried on her boat deck—sometimes referred to as her sun deck—fourteen of the largest regulation size lifeboats, seven on her port side and seven on the starboard. Each of these had a carrying capacity, according to the Board of Trade’s established method of computation, of 65.5 persons. Their aggregate capacity when afloat, therefore, was 917. The ship carried, in addition, four of the so-called collapsible boats and two others known as emergency boats-comparatively small craft employed in occasional duty—as when a man falls overboard.
The combined capacity of these six when afloat was hardly more than sufficient to care for two hundred persons. At the most liberal estimate, therefore, the entire equipment of boats aboard the great White Star liner might have afforded refuge, in the most favorable conditions, to less than 1,200 persons, or not quite half the number actually aboard the ship, on her maiden voyage.
In stating the lifeboat capacity the term “when afloat” has been used advisedly. One of the points which each of the Titanic’s surviving officers has emphasized in evidence is the vast difference between loading with its human freight a boat that has been already placed in the water and loading one “at the rail,” from a deck seventy feet above the water, with the subsequent perils of lowering it by means of the tackles sustaining its weight from bow and stern. Several of the officers have said that, in lowering loaded boats from the rail of the Titanic’s boat deck, they would consider it unwise and even dangerous to fill the boats to more than one-half their rated capacity.
All the lifeboats that went away from the Titanic were loaded and lowered from the rail. Some of the smaller collapsible and emergency boats did not get away at all until the ship was so low in the water that they were simply pushed overboard, and one of them went over bottom up.
BOAT CARRIES 58 PERSONS.
Harold G. Lowe, the fifth officer, commanded a boat which carried fifty-eight persons aboard. This, so far as is known, is the largest number of passengers carried in any of the lifeboats. Mr. Lowe testified that as his craft was lowered away from the davits he feared momentarily that, as a result of the tremendous strain upon her structure, she would buckle amidships and break before she reached the sustaining surface of the water, dropping all into the sea. “Had one more person leaped aboard her amidships as she was going down past the other decks,” he said, “it might well have proved to be the last straw.”
Mr. Lowe feared this might happen, as he saw steerage passengers “glaring at the boat” as it was lowered past the decks whereon they stood. It was for that reason, he explained to the investigating committee, that he discharged his revolver three times into the air as he and his boatload were dropping past the three lower decks. His purpose, he said, was to show that he was armed and to prevent any effort to overload the craft beyond a point which he already considered perilous.
C. H. Lightoller, second officer and ranking surviving officer of the Titanic, expressed the opinion that, in filling lifeboats from the Titanic’s boat deck, “at the rail,” it was involving serious risk to load them to more than half their rated capacity for filling while afloat. H. G. Boxhall, fourth officer, expressed a like view, but added that in an extreme emergency one man might take more chances than another.
In view of these expert opinions, it will be seen that, when it came to loading the Titanic’s passengers into lifeboats “from the rail,” the actual life-saving capacity of her available equipment was far less than the one thousand or eleven hundred that might have been carefully packed away into boats already resting safely on the surface of a calm sea.