Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic

by Daniel Allen Butler

  Some people have suggested that the findings of the Senate investigation had some bearing on how Lord Mersey decided to conduct the Court of Inquiry, but that doesn’t seem likely. The court began hearing testimony two weeks before Senator Smith released his committee’s findings; furthermore, the emphasis of the two investigations were quite different, though complementary. The Senate subcommittee had emphasized asking how the disaster happened; the Mersey Commission asked why. Some twenty-one passengers were called to testify before the Senate investigation; Lord Mersey would call only three. The majority of witnesses appearing before the court would be officers and crewmen from the Titanic, Carpathia, and Californian; various experts in the field of ship construction; and representatives of Harland and Wolff and the White Star Line. In fact, of the three passengers who would testify, none of them would be as material witnesses.25

  The court sat for a total of thirty-six days over the next eight weeks, called ninety-six witnesses, and asked more than 25,600 questions, the longest and most detailed Court of Inquiry ever held in Great Britain. The transcript was more than a thousand pages, supplemented by exhibits and depositions, and the Report of the Commissioner added another forty-five pages. The entire cost of the inquiry came to nearly £20,000.26

  Undoubtedly one of the highlights of the inquiry was the intense interrogation on May 14 of Captain Lord and the officers of the Californian. The story that had broken in the American papers and been so doggedly pursued by Senator Smith had created an equally huge sensation in Great Britain. The attorney general, Sir Rufus Isaacs, was relentless in his questioning of Lord, pressing over and over again on points in his testimony that Isaacs found unsatisfactory. Lord tried to explain that he had only been told of a single rocket being fired, that he had not seen any of the rockets himself, that he was never informed by his officers that they thought the rocket—or rockets—might be a signal of a ship in distress, and that he had only the vaguest recollection of the night of April 14-15 as he had been asleep in the chartroom at the time. This satisfied neither Sir Rufus nor Lord Mersey, especially when Lord’s officers later contradicted him on nearly every important point in their testimony, most significantly about the number of times Lord had been told about the rockets and how many there were. Mersey drew attention to the same discrepancies in Captain Lord’s defense that Senator Smith had, notably the suspicious lack of any entries about rockets in the Californian’s log and the disappearance of the relevant pages of the scrap log.27

  An additional factor in the drama came out not in the courtroom but outside it, when the Californian’s officers, reproached by the wife of one of the Titanic’s officers, openly admitted that they had seen distress signals that night, but had not been able to rouse Captain Lord to take any action. More importantly, it became readily apparent that they tried none too hard, for fear of their captain’s temper. The truth finally came out: Captain Lord was a virtual tyrant, sharp-tongued and quick with disparaging remarks, and his officers were utterly cowed by him, to the point that they were bereft of any initiative, leaving all decisions to the captain. The image created in the mind of the public ever since has been of the Californian’s officers standing idly on the bridge, so thoroughly intimidated by their captain that they would rather watch another ship sink than run the risk of facing his wrath.28

  Another of the highlights of the inquiry, for the British public at least, came on May 20, when Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon were called to testify. Vicious rumors had started after the survivors had been rescued by the Carpathia that the £5 Sir Cosmo had promised the crewmen in Boat 1 to start a new kit for each of them had in fact been a bribe to keep them from rowing back to the wreck to pick up survivors. The situation was not helped by the ill-conceived idea to have the men from Boat 1 pose for a group picture, complete with lifebelts, for the Duff Gordons on the Boat Deck of the Carpathia. Lady Duff Gordon had only wanted the photograph as a memento, but to many of the survivors, still stunned and reeling from the disaster, it appeared as if the Duff Gordons were treating those crewmen like their personal rowing team.

  In hopes of quashing the rumors, Sir Cosmo and his wife petitioned Lord Mersey to be allowed to give evidence before the court. Lord Mersey agreed, and everyone who had been in Boat 1 appeared at the Inquiry, where Lord Mersey, Sir Rufus Isaacs, and Henry Duke, K.C., M.P., the Duff Gordons’ defense counsel, and other attorneys present subjected them to an intense cross-examination. When Lady Duff Gordon and Sir Cosmo were questioned first by Thomas Scanlan, who represented the National Sailors’ and Firemens’ Union, then by W D. Harbinson, who was representing the Third Class passengers, an overt sense of class antagonism crept into their questions. At one point Harbinson’s manner grew so antagonistic toward Sir Cosmo that Lord Mersey interrupted the questioning to remind him, “Your duty is to assist me to arrive at the truth, not to try and make out a case for this class against that class.”

  Harbinson relented, but the feeling was still there, and a short while later he asked Sir Cosmo, “Would I accurately state your position if I summed it up in this way, that you considered that when you were safe yourselves that all the others might perish?” It was an outrageous question under any circumstances, even actionable if it had been asked outside of a courtroom, and Mersey brought Harbinson up short again, asking “Do you think a question of that kind is fair to this witness? I do not! The witness’ position is bad enough!” Harbinson, cowed by Mersey’s outburst and sensing he was doing his clients no good by antagonizing the wreck commissioner, sat down, and Sir Cosmo was dismissed.29

  The findings of the wreck commission were delivered by Lord Mersey on June 30. He concluded that the loss of the Titanic was due solely to the damage caused by the collision with the iceberg and not to any inherent design flaw in the ship, and that collision was the direct result of the ship steaming into an area known to be hazardous with ice at an excessively high speed. There was an insufficient lookout kept, given the danger of the sea conditions, and that an overall sense of complacency among the ship’s officers had contributed to this oversight.

  The Titanic’s lifeboats, though fulfilling the Board of Trade requirements, were insufficient in number, and a change in the regulations was necessary. The boats themselves had been properly lowered but not properly filled, and had been insufficiently manned with trained seamen. As for the Duff Gordons, they were exonerated of any wrongdoing, although Lord Mersey made it clear that he believed that they could have acted more responsibly, or at least conducted themselves a little less tactlessly.

  On the subject of Captain Lord and the Californian, Lord Mersey was merciless. The evidence, he said, made it abundantly clear to him that the ship the Californian’s officers saw from their bridge, and watched as she fired rocket after rocket, was the Titanic. Captain Lord’s excuse that he was sound asleep in the chartroom and couldn’t recall having been told about the rockets didn’t wash with Lord Mersey, and he believed that Captain Lord had acted most improperly in failing to ascertain what was the matter with that ship and go to the stricken liner’s aid. The language of his conclusion was unequivocable:There are inconsistencies and contradictions in the story as told by different witnesses but the truth of the matter is plain.... When she first saw the rockets, the Californian could have pushed through the ice to the open water without any serious risk and so have come to the assistance of the Titanic. Had she done so she might have saved many if not all of the lives that were lost.30

  Mersey was not alone in his judgement of Captain Lord’s culpability: even among professional seamen there were serious questions raised about the master of the Californian. At one point, after the proceedings were closed but before Lord Mersey drew up his report, Capt. A. H. F. Young, the professional member of the marine department for the Board of Trade, went so far as to press Lord Mersey for a formal inquiry into Lord’s “competency to continue as Master of a British ship.” Apparently Mersey considered the request, but a legal technicality barred him from taking an
y action.31

  Finally, the Board of Trade received a fair amount criticism, despite earlier misgivings in some quarters. In addition to condemning the outdated lifeboat regulations, the court found the board’s required “boat drill” procedures laughable: usually one or two boats filled with picked crewmen who would go through the motions of rigging and lowering a lifeboat while the ship was in port. Despite his reputation as the “best cursed B.O.T. representative in Southern England,” Captain Clarke received some sharp words for permitting such a lax drill to suffice. Nothing had been done to acquaint the passengers with their boat assignments or any of the lifesaving equipment on board. That too would have to change.32

  There would be, over the years, observers and writers, mostly Americans, unfamiliar with the usage of British officialdom in the days before World War I, who would conclude that, because Lord Mersey did not explicitly condemn Captain Lord, the White Star Line, or the Board of Trade as resoundingly as Senator Smith did, the whitewash brush had been applied. To do so is to completely misunderstand the quiet, understated language with which Great Britain’s senior civil servants expressed themselves. Mersey’s report was every bit as damning as Senator Smith’s—it was simply less overt.

  When it was released, Lord Mersey’s report was considered to be far more erudite, comprehensive, and knowledgeable than that of Senator Smith’s inquiry. But with the passage of time, Senator Smith’s effort has fared far better in the hands of scholars and legal experts. Despite all the pomp and procedural trappings of the Mersey Inquiry, it was not as comprehensive as the American investigation, although in fairness, it has to be said that its warrant didn’t permit the scope of inquiry that Smith’s committee possessed. Ultimately, the American investigation, for all its seeming informality, or perhaps because of it, learned far more about what happened in those desperate hours than did the British inquiry. The Board of Trade’s inquest still has its notable defenders, such as Walter Lord, and on technical matters it far surpassed anything Senator Smith and his colleagues learned, but it was Senator Smith’s persistent and perceptive questioning that has left the world with the most vivid account of what really happened to the men and women aboard the Titanic.

  With Lord Mersey’s summation of the Court of Inquiry’s findings, the inquests were closed and the investigations completed. Civil suits against the White Star Line by survivors and victims’ families would drag on for years, but between the Senate investigation and the British Court of Inquiry, everything constructive that could be done had been done. Lessons were learned and conclusions drawn, and no amount of damages could bring back the dead. It could only be hoped that after the best efforts of legislators, regulating bodies, and the officers and crewmen of the North Atlantic liners were put forward, there would never be a repetition of that awful April night.

  CHAPTER 13

  Requiem

  The land shall mourn, each family by itself....

  —Zachariah 12:12

  ON GENTLY ROLLING HILLSIDESON THE OUTSKIRTS OF HALIFAX, NOVA Scotia, far enough from the center of the city that an entirely appropriate atmosphere of tranquility covers everything, sit row upon row of grey granite stones, all similarly carved and shaped. Some are more weatherworn than others, some bear names, others are nameless, but all have cut into their sloping upper faces a date: April 15, 1912. Below the date there is a number. The number is that given to the body that rests beneath the headstone, when it was plucked from the North Atlantic eighty-five years ago. They are all from the Titanic. 1

  Late in the evening of April 15, 1912, the Halifax agents of the White Star Line, A.G. Jones and Company, chartered the Commercial Cable Company’s cable ship Mackay-Bennett to recover as many of the victims of the Titanic as possible. Hurriedly placed orders for tones of ice, coffins—more than a hundred of them—as well as embalmers’ supplies were quickly filled, and by morning of April 17, Capt. F. H. Lardner had assembled an all-volunteer crew, while some forty members of the Funeral Directors Association of the Maritime Provinces had come aboard, and the Mackay-Bennett was ready to sail at noon. (In the days and months to come the White Star Line would be frequently, and sometimes justly, accused of callousness. In contrast, the voyage of the Mackay-Bennett was a genuinely compassionate act: the company was under no contract to recover any of the victims, especially at its own expense.2

  Already passenger ships were giving the area where the Titanic sank a wide berth. True, the shipping lane had been shifted some sixty miles farther south the day after the disaster, but even more compelling was the primal urge to shun the dead, and what captain would wish to present his passengers with the spectacle of a sea strewn with wreckage and floating bodies? One skipper, Captain Nelson of the Volturno—herself to be immolated in a horrendous fire with terrible loss of life only eighteen months later—with—held news of the sinking ship from his officers, crew, and passengers until the ship made port in New York.

  Nevertheless, some ships did pass near the spot where the Titanic went down, and the wireless messages guided the Mackay-Bennett to the spot. One ship, the Bremen, reported nearly a hundred bodies at 42.00’N, 49.20’ W When the Bremen docked at New York, several of her passengers were buttonholed by reporters, and among the most memorable of their accounts was that of Mrs. Johanna Stunke, who painted a heartbreaking vignette of unwitnessed tragedy:We saw the body of one woman dressed only in her night dress, clasping a baby to her breast. Close by was the body of another woman with her arms clasped tightly round a shaggy dog.... We saw the bodies of three men in a group, all clinging to a chair. Floating by just beyond them were the bodies of a dozen men, all wearing lifebelts and clinging desperately together as though in their last struggle for life.3

  The Mackay-Bennett arrived on the scene the evening of April 20, but night fell before the crew could begin work, so the next morning the laborious, back-breaking task of recovering the dead began. The seas were heavy and the wind bitingly chill as the boats were rowed back and forth and each body dragged aboard. All day long they worked, until by dusk the men of the Mackay-Bennett had recovered fifty-one bodies.

  As each body was brought aboard the Mackay-Bennett, a numbered square of canvas was attached to it. Any valuables or personal effects found were placed in a correspondingly numbered canvas bag. Since few of the dead carried any identification, a complete description of each victim was made—height, weight, age (estimated if not known), hair and eye color, any birthmarks, scars, or tattoos. All this information was meticulously recorded in the hope that it might provide the means to identify the dead. (When Edward A. Kent’s body was brought on board, he was still carrying the miniature of her mother that Mrs. Candee had given him for safekeeping. The miniature, which was eventually returned to Mrs. Candee, was one of the items used to confirm Kent’s identity.)

  The sea had not been kind to the bodies: exposure to the wind and water had seemingly aged many of them—Second Class passenger Reginald Butler, for example, was only twenty-five when he died, but the Halifax coroner would estimate his age at forty-two. Several of the bodies were so badly disfigured after a week’s immersion in the sea that the embalmer considered it pointless to carry them all the way back to Halifax. At 8:15 that evening, a burial service was held on the forecastle deck. Afterward, the Mackay-Bennett’s engineer Frederick Hamilton, described it in his diary that night: The tolling of the bell summoned all hands to the forecastle where thirty bodies are to be committed to the deep, each carefully sewed up in canvas. It is a weird scene, this gathering. The crescent moon is shedding a faint light on us, as the ship lays wallowing in the giant rollers. The funeral service is conducted by the Reverend Canon Hind; for nearly an hour the words “For as much as it hath pleased ... we commit this body to the deep” are repeated and at each interval there comes, splash! as the weighted body plunges into the sea, there to sink to a depth of about two miles. Splash, splash, splash.4

  Working from sunrise to sunset, by twilight on April 22, the crew of the Mackay-Benn
ett had recovered 187 of the Titanic’s dead. Captain Lardner informed White Star’s New York office that he would need help, but the Halifax agents had anticipated such an eventuality and had already chartered the Anglo-American Telegraph Company’s cable ship Minia on April 21. She sailed the next day and by April 26, the two ships were searching together. By noon that day 14 more bodies had been pulled from the sea, and the Mackay-Bennett had exhausted her stores. She put about for Halifax with 190 victims aboard, while the Minia would continue the search for more corpses until May 3. Between them the two ships recovered 323 bodies (5 more were later picked up by two other ships) and 119 of them were buried at sea.

  The Mackay-Bennett, her colors at half-mast, arrived at Halifax on April 30 and immediately slipped into Coaling Wharf Number 4 in His Majesty’s Naval Dockyard. There, shielded from morbid photographers by high concrete walls and protected by a joint police and naval guard, the bodies were unloaded. Even in death, the careful distinctions of class were observed: first came the crewmen, packed in ice but not embalmed nor sewn in canvas; followed by the bodies of the Second and Third Class passengers, which were sewn up in canvas; last off were the First Class passengers, all embalmed, all in coffins.

  The authorities in Halifax had thoroughly prepared for the Mackay-Bennett’s return. The Mayflower Curling Rink on Agricola Street, just a few blocks from the dockyard, was turned into a temporary morgue, where sixty-seven canvas-enclosed cubicles had been set up, each holding three bodies. Only people who could produce proof of identity or authorization from next of kin were allowed inside the morgue. The second floor of the rink was converted to a suite of offices for the coroner and his staff, who worked hard at producing the documentation necessary for issuing death certificates. In each case the cause of death was listed as “accidental drowning, S.S. Titanic, at sea.”