Sinking of the "Titanic"

by Jay Henry Mowbray

And this consideration naturally suggests the query, Why were the Titanic’s lifeboats all loaded “from the rail” of the topmost deck, at a point fully seventy feet above the sea? Why were they not lowered empty, or with only the necessary officers or crew aboard, and then filled with their quota of passengers, either from some lower deck, or else after they had reached the sustaining surface of the water?

It is evident that course was contemplated. Three of the surviving officers have testified that the available force of seamen was depleted after the ship struck, because a detail of men had been sent below to open up the gangway doors, for the purpose of embarking the passengers into the lifeboats from those outlets. There is nothing in evidence as yet to show that this purpose was ever accomplished, or to reveal the fate of the men sent to do the work.

Whether the men were unable or incompetent to force open the gangway doors, from which the lowered boats might easily have been filled, as the sea was as smooth as a mill pond; whether these outlets were jammed as a result of collision with the berg, or stuck because the ship’s mechanisms were new, has not been revealed and may never be known.

Certain it is that all the lifeboats were loaded “from the rail,” and their safe capacity was thereby reduced one-half in the judgment of the officers to whom their command was entrusted.

The inadequacy of the Titanic’s lifeboat appliances is not disputed. Steamship companies are already vying with one another to correct in this respect the admitted shortcomings of the past. The sole excuse offered is that collision bulkheads, watertight compartments and other like devices have been regarded until now as making the marvelous vessels of the present day “their own best lifeboats.” The Titanic and many of her sister ships of the ocean fleets have been called “unsinkable.” They were generally believed to be so, and it is only since this greatest of disasters has shattered many illusions that marine engineers have confessed ruefully that the unsinkable ship has never yet been launched.

PERILS MINIMIZED.

Since the day of the watertight compartment and of the wireless telegraph sea perils have been so minimized that in the most extreme of likely emergencies the function of the lifeboat had come to be regarded as that of an ocean ferry capable of transferring passengers safely and leisurely from an imperilled vessel to another standing by and co-operating in the task.

That was all the lifeboat had to do when the Republic sank. That was all they had to do years ago, when the Missouri, under Captain Hamilton Murrell’s expert management, took off a thousand persons from a foundering ship without the loss of a single life. So it had come to be believed that the lifeboats would never be called upon to do more than that, and least of all in the case of the Titanic, latest and most superb of all the vessels built by man since the world began.

So deep rooted was this conviction in the minds of seagoing men that when Senator Smith, of Michigan, chairman of the investigating committee, asked one of the surviving officers: “What was the purpose of the Titanic carrying her fourteen full-size lifeboats?” he naively replied; “To comply, I suppose, with the regulations of the London Board of Trade.”

There has been no evidence to indicate that the Titanic lacked the proper number of life jackets, or life belts—one for every person aboard the ship—and it has not been proven that these life belts were not new and of proper quality and strength. Major Peuchen, of Toronto, one of the surviving passengers, however, in the course of his testimony, made two significant comments. He said that when the Carpathia, on the morning after the disaster, steamed through a lot of the Titanic’s floating wreckage, he was surprised to note great quantities of broken bits of cork, such as are used in life preservers. He was astonished also that he did not see a larger number of floating bodies.