Captain Stanley Lord, Californian’s fourth skipper, had taken command of the ship just the previous year. Although a strict disciplinarian, like almost every other captain in the mercantile marine, Captain Lord was liked and respected by the seamen who sailed with him. As a navigator he was the equal of both Captain Rostron of the Carpathia and Joseph Groves Boxhall, who was serving as navigating officer on the Titanic. Captain Lord also had another claim to fame. A few years earlier the British Government had carried out tests with a number of different ships and masters to find out who was any good at loading and unloading horses and men without benefit of proper docking facilities. Captain Lord had shown then that he was the best skipper in the merchant fleet at quickly taking aboard large numbers of people from small boats while the ship was at sea. It was this skill that almost certainly got Lord involved in what was to happen, and which came close to ruining his career.
While the Californian had been lying idle, some general cargo had been taken aboard, but nothing of any consequence. Leyland Line vessels were usually loaded to full capacity, and sometimes beyond, before they sailed, so much so that there was a joke going around regarding log entries from ships belonging to other lines that read, ‘Passed two funnels going in opposite direction. Presumed Leyland vessel.’ Like so many regular practices aboard vessels involved with the Titanic disaster, Leyland’s habit of heavily loading its ships was suspended for Californian’s next voyage.
Orders suddenly arrived for Californian to load with coal and take on a small cargo of blankets and warm woollen clothing, bound for Boston on America’s west coast. Captain Lord was to take his ship to sea at the earliest possible moment and to make all possible speed on the journey. Under anything like normal circumstances Californian would not have received any sort of priority treatment when it came to acquiring coal for her voyage, but somehow the fuel was found in very short order. Such was Captain Lord’s hurry to leave London that a crew was rapidly signed on. He did not waste any time selling passenger tickets for the coming transatlantic crossing, even though there were hundreds of people waiting for just such a crossing. He despatched Harold Cottam, his wireless operator, to the Marconi office to pick up a wireless chart for the North Atlantic showing what ships would be where and when they would be within range of his own wireless equipment. Cottam, caught up by the sense of urgency in getting to sea, grabbed the first Atlantic chart he saw and hurried back to the ship with it. Unfortunately, when he got there he discovered that in his haste he had picked up the wrong chart. He had the one for the South Atlantic. He reported this to Captain Lord and requested permission to go ashore again and rectify the error. Captain Lord refused as there was no time before the Californian sailed. So it was that the Californian left London on 5 April 1912, heading for the North Atlantic, with no passengers aboard and with the wrong wireless chart, which meant that the operator would not know what ships he could contact at any point in the voyage.
What could possibly have been so urgent about a cargo of blankets and woollens that was so compelling that Captain Lord could not take the time to pick up the right wireless chart and take on a few eager fare-paying passengers? What could be so urgent that Californian should leave London and hurry out into the middle of the North Atlantic, burning coal that could much more profitably have been used transporting passengers, many of whom would have happily paid considerably more than the Leyland Line’s usual charge of £10 just to get a berth aboard any ship? What could possibly have been so urgent on 5 April but had ceased to be of any great import just ten days later when the ship, in a position just to the east of the Grand Banks, stopped her engines and drifted upon first getting a glimpse of field ice?
The ice should have come as no surprise to Captain Lord. Many ships completing an eastbound transatlantic crossing had reported seeing a vast field of ice studded with huge icebergs. A chart showing the position of this icefield and the speed at which it was drifting southwards had been prepared and circulated for the attention of masters planning to cross the Atlantic and who might encounter it. Captain Lord, on filing his intended route to America, would automatically have been told about the ice he was bound to run into at some point in his voyage. Why then did Captain Lord choose to endanger his ship and crew by selecting a course that would inevitably take him into ice when he had little or no experience of dealing with that particular hazard?
Chapter 11
All aboard
Easter Monday and the following Tuesday came and went, and still Titanic was a hive of industry as beds were made up, cabins tidied and cleaned, and fresh provisions brought aboard. Down in No 5 hold Mr Morgan’s people were carefully stowing and securing his crates. At the same time it seems probable that they were transferring the contents from Morgan’s crates to those belonging to the British Treasury, and vice versa. Only after ample time for that task to be completed did word reach the liner that J. P. Morgan would not be making the voyage after all. His excuse, and excuse it definitely was, was that he was feeling unwell and was not up to the rigours of a transatlantic passage aboard the world’s largest and most luxurious liner. Not only was Mr Morgan not sailing with the ship, but his cargo of valuable artefacts, without his presence to keep an eye on them, would not be going either. His crates were to be removed from the hold and put into secure storage until he was ready to accompany them to America. His instructions were carried out, but with one notable, and possibly intentional, oversight. One crate, containing a small ancient Egyptian statuette, was left on the quayside, unattended. It wasn’t there for long before a dock worker spirited it away in the hopes that it might prove to be of worth. At that time ancient Egyptian artefacts had not acquired the tremendous value that they have today, but they were still expensive items to acquire. As it was, the small statuette, having suffered somewhat over the millennia it had spent beneath the desert sands, was not of any great value. It certainly had nothing like the value of the contents of Morgan’s other crates. However, if it had been examined later it would have gone a long way towards establishing that Mr Morgan’s cargo was exactly what it was claimed to be, should any questions be asked. Unfortunately, the dock worker, whoever he might have been, did not advertise the fact that he had made off with part of Morgan’s shipment. To make matters worse, the liberator of the crate hadn’t got the faintest idea of how or where to sell the statuette, so he packed it away out of sight, and there it remained for some years. Eventually the artefact was anonymously donated to the Southampton Maritime Museum, where it still resides.
So, on the morning of Wednesday 12 April 1912, as far as most of the passengers were concerned, all was well although some of them might have smelled a rat, or perhaps the smoke that must have been issuing from the forward coal chute. Whatever the reason, there were more than 50 last-minute cancellations.
Most of the ordinary crew members must have heard the rumours, that the ship had been switched with her sister, but they had no inkling that there was anything particularly dangerous about the coming voyage. Anyway, all they had were suspicions. Thomas Rea’s employees might well have guessed that they had not put enough coal into the ship’s bunkers to take her all the way to New York, but they could not know for sure just what the liner’s requirements for the voyage actually were. Only Captain Smith and his senior watch officers, two or three of the highest officials of the White Star Line, Mr Morgan and a few trusted employees and associates, almost the entire workforce of Harland & Wolff, and the population of Belfast knew that there was anything seriously wrong! Nobody was about to listen to what anyone from Belfast had to say, not then or now. Stories about the Titanic and Olympic being switched still circulate in Belfast, as they have ever since 1912. Together with the rumours of the switch are the ones about the Titanic disaster being a massive insurance swindle. In fact, the insurance swindle is something rather more than a rumour inasmuch as it was still being taught as a part of the history of the event in schools in Southern Ireland as late as the 1960s, and may still be.
It was White Star Line practice to insure its vessels for only about two-thirds of their value. There were a couple of reasons for this seemingly cavalier attitude toward safeguarding the company’s investments. The first reason was the belief that its ships, being probably the best-constructed vessels in the world, were exceptionally safe, even though White Star had lost one or two over the years. The second, and more important, reason was that, given the line’s accident record, it had great difficulty in finding any insurers who were prepared to accept the risk. Nevertheless, with the ship we know as Titanic White Star persevered and managed to secure insurance cover to the tune of something like £4,000,000, almost three times what it had cost to build the ship (see Appendix 2 for details of the insurance). The major British underwriters were Commercial Union, which sold off the cover in small parcels to various other companies until they carried £1,000,000 worth. American insurance companies covered large sums. Even Lloyd’s of London, the world’s most famous maritime insurers, carried a large slice of Titanic’s cover, although they later denied doing so even though they had paid out almost before the ship had reached the bottom of the sea. White Star did not have it all its own way. At least one major insurer refused to cover any part of the risk on the Titanic. Sir Edward Mountain, the supremo of the Eagle Star Company, took one look at the ship and pronounced that in his opinion she was sitting much too low in the water.
Those within the White Star company responsible for arranging the insurance cover for the ship were so intent on obtaining cover for the vessel itself that they clean forgot to arrange the third party insurance for the crew, passengers and baggage. This oversight would result in yet another insurance fraud and cost many other shipping lines a considerable amount of money, but we will come to that later (see Appendix 2).
To return to events immediately prior to the Titanic setting out on her maiden voyage, most of the crew had been signed on four days earlier, on Saturday 6 April, in union halls and the White Star Line’s own signing office, so many of them had never set foot aboard the liner until that morning. Most of them lived in Southampton, but a few, driven by the necessity to obtain any sort of a berth because of the effect of the coal strike, made the trip from Liverpool, Belfast and London. On the Wednesday morning these men, totally unfamiliar with the ship they were about to take out onto the North Atlantic, began to make their way to the Titanic. Most of them had to be shown to their berths and to their places of employment. Their stay aboard the liner would turn out to be so short that they never would learn their way about the labyrinthine interior with any degree of certainty.
There was also considerable confusion among the officers, even though most of them had been with the ship ever since her trials more than a week before. At the last moment a new Chief Officer, Henry Tingle Wilde, was drafted aboard against his will. This meant that the existing Chief Officer, William McMaster Murdoch, would have to be demoted to First Officer. The existing First Officer, Charles Herbert Lightoller, would be demoted to Second, both with a commensurate decrease in pay. This would inevitably have caused a certain amount of bad feeling and also meant that the officers concerned would have no time to familiarise themselves with their new duties. Nor would they have time to become fully accustomed to their new cabins and surroundings. It is almost as if the White Star Line was intentionally trying to confuse the senior officers aboard the Titanic and make them less efficient than they might otherwise have been. Second Officer David ‘Davy’ Blair would have to leave the ship altogether, which from his viewpoint turned out to be no bad thing. However, Blair’s leaving was to cause an unfortunate sequence of events that might well have had a considerable bearing on what was to come. Before leaving the ship he locked his company-issue binoculars, stamped ‘Second Officer, Titanic’ in what had been his cabin. These were the binoculars that would normally have been made available to the ship’s lookout men stationed in the crow’s-nest; indeed, they had used them during the short voyage down from Belfast. The new Second Officer seems to have been unaware that it was a part of his job to ensure that the binoculars were available for the lookouts, should they require them, so the glasses remained locked away in the cabin.
Sunrise on sailing day was at 5.18am, and shortly after that the first crewmen began to arrive in ones and twos. They came into the dock through Gate 4 and made their way to the ship. Over the next hour or so more and more of them arrived until by some time before 7.00am most of the crew were aboard, more than 800 of them.
Captain Smith came aboard at about 7.30am and went straight to his cabin, where he was met by Chief Officer Wilde, whose duty it was to inform the captain of any problems. All of the ship’s officers with the exception of Captain Smith had spent the night on board. At about the same time that Smith had boarded the ship a Board of Trade immigration Officer, Captain Maurice Harvey Clarke, had also arrived. It was Clarke’s job to inspect the ship under the Merchant Shipping Act to make sure that she was up to the standards required by the BoT for an immigrant ship. He had already visited the vessel on a number of occasions during the short time she had been lying in Southampton Docks, but nevertheless he would appear to make a thorough job of inspecting Titanic that morning. Clarke was famous among the officers of the various immigrant ships that used the port as being a pain in the neck. He always did everything by the book and inspected every nook and cranny of whatever vessel he happened to be aboard, and Titanic was to be no exception - or so we have been led to believe.
True to form, Captain Clarke toured the ship, poking his nose in everywhere. He had a couple of lifeboats lowered just to check that the gear worked properly and that the crew knew how to use it. For that particular exercise, of course, crew members who did know how to operate the lifeboat falls had been specially selected for the test; as later events would show, the majority of the crew didn’t have a clue about how to lower the boats. Third-class accommodation was inspected, together with public rooms and life-saving equipment. Curiously, Captain Clarke, despite the nit-picking attention to detail for which he was so well known, failed to notice that the forward coal bunker was on fire. Heat and smoke must have been issuing from the bunker hatch and forward boiler room ventilators if there really was a fire. It is inconceivable the Clarke would have allowed the ship to put to sea with a coal bunker fire had he known about it. It is equally inconceivable that an inspector so well known for his thoroughness would have failed to notice such a fire. Nevertheless, the Board of Trade inspector did fail to report the fire and did issue the necessary paperwork allowing the Titanic to take on passengers and, when all was ready, to set sail. The last governmental safety check that might have averted the coming disaster had slipped away.
The crew were mustered by departments and inspected by a medical officer and Captain Clarke. Names were checked against those appearing on the sign-on list and the total number of crew aboard was ascertained. A master crew list was quickly put together and passed to Captain Clarke, a list we now know to have been horrifically inaccurate. Even if the list was somewhat less than authoritative it still showed that a number of crew members who had been signed on had failed to join the ship. There was nothing unusual in this and it was normal practice to sign up more men than were actually needed so that any shortfall could be corrected. However, the inspection by the medical officer and Captain Maurice Clarke should (and would) have shown up any crew member masquerading as another. Because of the inspections we can be fairly sure that all of those crewmen aboard were who they said they were, and more importantly who their documents showed them to be. Throughout much of his inspection the Board of Trade official was accompanied by White Star’s own Southampton maritime superintendent, Captain Benjamin Steele, who might just have guided the inspector to carefully selected parts of the ship.
Joseph Bruce Ismay came aboard the ship at about 9.30 that morning with his wife, Florence, and their three young children, Tom, George and Evelyn. As supremo of the White Star Line, Ismay had the run of the ship b
ut he only showed off the first class passenger areas of the vessel to his family, who would not be accompanying him on the voyage. Richard Fry, Ismay’s manservant, had boarded the ship earlier to see that his master’s suite, cabins B52, 54, 56 and the private promenade, were in order and to unpack his clothes. Fry had then retired to his own more spartan accommodation, cabin B102, across the hall from that of his master. Ismay’s secretary, W. H. Harrison, would be travelling with his employer, apparently so as to be on hand when they reached America. Little or nothing seems to be known about either of Mr Ismay’s two closest employees from that time onwards.
In the wireless cabin, just aft of the bridge on the starboard side, senior Marconi operator Jack Phillips and his mate, junior operator Harold Sidney Bride, were making sure that all was well with the ship’s wireless equipment. Officially only Phillips would be on duty from 10 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon, when he would be relieved by Bride. However, as this was sailing day and there would be a lot to do, both men worked whatever hours were required to maintain a continuous service. Perhaps it should be mentioned here that Phillips and Bride, although subject to the ship’s rules and discipline, were not employees of the White Star Line but worked for the Marconi company. They were not the only people aboard who appeared to be crew members but who in reality worked for another employer. All of the ship’s Italian catering staff were actually employed by Mr Gatti, owner of the famous London restaurant, who was himself making the voyage with his secretary, Paul Mauge. Like the wireless operators, the caterers were effectively sub-contractors and, although subject to the ship’s routine, do not appear to have reaped the benefits, such as they were, of being bona fide crew members, such as being allowed onto the boat deck in time to secure a place in a lifeboat should disaster strike.
The Great Titanic Conspiracy Page 13
