The United States Hydrographic Office calculated the amount of force required to have inflicted the damage to the ship as described at the time. To have opened a half-inch slit over a length of some 350 to 500 feet in the vessel’s side, about 1,173,200 foot tons of energy would have been required, enough to physically throw the whole ship 20 feet sideways. This amount of energy is comparable to the liner being struck by a full broadside from a contemporary battleship. Yet hardly anybody noticed!
Either the eye-witnesses were all mistaken, in which case we have to believe that nothing else they had to say was reliable, and that there is then no way to discover what really happened to the ship, or the collision with an iceberg that has long been the accepted version of events never really took place. It seems unlikely that hundreds of people who witnessed the same event and who told substantially the same story were all inaccurate, and as they continued to tell the same tale throughout their lives it is equally unlikely that they were all lying. Is it then possible that the lookout, Fred Fleet, was right when he thought that the ship had just missed the iceberg?
Quite clearly the ship struck something, but if not an iceberg what might it have been? A small piece of ice would have been pushed aside by the liner’s reinforced bow. A growler, an iceberg that has partially melted to the point where it begins to roll over, is without doubt a possibility. Growlers can be quite substantial and are as dangerous as the icebergs themselves, if not more so. A growler that has rolled relatively recently has mostly waterlogged ice showing above the surface of the sea, ice that does not reflect light and appears black at first glance. However, if the ship had struck a large growler the effect aboard, felt by the passengers and crew, would have been similar to her striking an iceberg. The same applies to the damage forward where the firemen’s passageway was opened to the sea. A large hole would have been torn in the ship’s side. As we know, there is no evidence of such a hole apparent on the wreck so the indications are still that the vessel struck something else.
There was very little in the way of an impact felt by those aboard Titanic, so whatever she struck was relatively small and easily pushed away or under the ship. It must have been pretty hard to have punched a hole though the liner’s hull to a depth of at least 15 feet to breach the firemen’s passageway without breaking off prematurely. The odds are stacked against it having been a finger of ice that had punctured the firemen’s passageway, for two reasons. The first reason is that a finger of ice would have been snapped off the main body of the iceberg before it ever penetrated as far as the passageway, or it would have been strong enough to have torn a huge hole in the liner’s hull as she slid past the iceberg at more than 25mph. There is no evidence to suggest that any such hole was ripped in the hull plating of the ship there, or anywhere else. Nor is there any evidence of ice within the hull of the vessel in the compartment at the forward end of the passageway, as there must have been if a finger of ice had punched its way into the ship and broken off. In fact, there is not a single piece of evidence from any survivor to suggest that there was any ice at all anywhere in the interior of the liner. As previously mentioned, had the vessel’s hull been seriously damaged below the waterline by ice, particles of that ice would inevitably have been carried into the ship by the incoming water. So where was this ice? Clearly, nobody saw any evidence of it whatsoever. The only evidence of ice aboard Titanic is that found on the forward well deck shortly after the engines had been suddenly put full astern from full ahead at the time of the accident. This ice, in all probability, came from the liner’s own rigging and wireless antennae, shaken free by the heavy vibration caused by the vessel’s engines going into reverse. After any examination of the evidence it should be apparent that the ship did not strike an iceberg at all, but something much smaller, lighter and harder. By far the most likely candidate must be another ship, perhaps even a submerged wreck.
As it turns out there is evidence to suggest that the Titanic struck another ship, although that evidence was not brought out in any detail at either the British or American Inquiries. Able Seaman Edward Buley, making his first voyage as a merchant seaman after serving for 13 years in the Royal Navy, said that he saw another ship close by at the time of the collision.
‘There was a ship of some description there when she struck [when the liner supposedly hit the iceberg] and she passed right by us... You could see she was a steamer. She had her steamer lights burning. She was off our port bow when we struck...’
Soon after the collision first class passenger Mrs Marion Thayer made her way up onto the boat deck. She described what she saw:
‘While still on the boat deck I saw what appeared to be the hull of a ship, heading in the opposite direction to our ship, and quite near us, from which rockets were being sent up. The vessel (about a mile off by this time) was half the size of the Cedric and higher out of the water at her bow than the Carpathia.’
Cedric was another White Star vessel of 21,000grt that had entered service nine years earlier. Carpathia was the 13,603grt vessel that picked up the vast majority of the survivors from the stricken liner the following morning. Mrs Thayer also said:
‘Upon looking over the side of the vessel [Titanic] I saw what looked like a number of long black ribs, apparently floating nearly level with the surface of the water. Parallel with each other but separated from each other by a few feet of water. These long black objects were parallel with the side of the ship.’
It was a moonless night, so whatever Mrs Thayer saw was very close alongside Titanic, within the area illuminated by the liner’s own lights. She had seen a ship with its bows high out of the water and therefore down by the stern, firing rockets. Edward Buley had seen a ship close by. Mrs Thayer had also seen what appears to have been wreckage floating alongside the liner, wreckage that according to all the available evidence did not come from the Titanic herself. The conclusion is inescapable. Titanic had struck another ship. Unfortunately we do not know just what other vessel was involved in the accident, but the area around the Newfoundland Grand Banks, where the incident occurred, was regularly frequented by ships illegally hunting for seals. These seal poachers did not advertise their presence for fear of encountering the British and American warships policing the area. If such a vessel had seen a ship approaching at high speed, as Titanic was doing, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that she would have put out all of her lights and attempted to hide behind a large iceberg. There would have been no way that Titanic’s lookouts, Fleet and Lee, could have seen such a ship in time to avoid a collision. It would have been doubtful that they would have seen such a vessel at all, even when the liner ran it down, if their attention had been distracted by a huge iceberg close alongside.
Is it possible that a relatively small hull breach reaching more than 15 feet into the interior of the liner could have been caused by her brushing alongside the rear end of another ship? The answer has to be yes. Titanic herself had more than 80 feet of propeller shaft, driving each of her two wing propellers, outside her main hull, so it must have been possible for even a much shorter exposed shaft on a smaller vessel to have been driven into the liner’s vitals, like a stiletto. Such a scenario has one massive advantage over the received version of the accident that sank the Titanic inasmuch as it is not utterly impossible. Neither does it contradict any survivor testimony or other evidence. Another ship scraping along the side of the Titanic would have had a very similar effect on the liner’s hull plating as an iceberg except that no ice would have been carried into the liner by the inrushing water. It is even possible that this other vessel survived the encounter, although somewhat battered. Curiously, the steamer Rappahannock did pass close to Titanic on the evening of 14 April, and did suffer from damage to her rear end, although her owners later denied having any vessels in the vicinity when the liner foundered. Not that Rappahannock was in any way involved in the sinking of the Titanic, but her presence in the immediate vicinity, and her owner’s denial, does illustrate the difficulties
encountered in trying to identify a mystery ship.
According to the received version of events aboard the stricken liner, Captain Smith ordered the fires in the forward boiler rooms to be extinguished within a very few minutes of the collision, which was a usual and sensible precaution. Cold water reaching hot boilers could easily cause a major explosion. Passengers on deck, however, recalled a tremendous roaring sound as the ship’s boilers vented steam through the funnels. This noise, which made conversation on deck difficult if not impossible, continued for some considerable time. The senior wireless operator, Jack Phillips, asked the captain if the noise of the venting steam could be reduced as he could not hear what was coming through his headphones because of it. As the Captain did not visit the wireless cabin until about 12.15am, we can be fairly sure that the steam was still being vented then, indicating that the fires were still alight and the boilers producing steam.
Captain Smith did not order his ship’s pumps to be started until about 12.25am, about 43 minutes after the damage to the ship had occurred and much too late for them to have any real expectation of prolonging the vessel’s life. By that time most of the forward pumps were completely submerged and unreachable, so that they could not be started in any case. This delay in starting the pumps begs the question, ‘Why?’ The pumps should obviously have been started the instant the Captain or his officers knew that water was entering the ship. About 3 minutes after the collision Captain Smith had sent for Mr Maxwell, the ship’s carpenter, and had ordered him to sound the ship (find out how much water had entered the vessel). It would not have taken the carpenter long to check the forward compartments; all he needed to do was take a quick look or speak to anyone who had been in them. Before long he was back on the bridge to report that No 6 stokehold was dry. If he meant the position usually occupied by the stokers feeding the furnaces at the aft end of No 4 boiler room, this information tells us nothing. If, however, he was referring to No 6 boiler room, which seems more likely, it tells us a great deal. If No 6 boiler room was still dry when the carpenter looked at it, we can safely assume that the damage to the skin of the ship did not extend that far back. In that case, why would the boiler room begin to fill with water shortly afterwards? There is a frighteningly simple possible explanation.
We already know that the junior engineers in at least one of the forward boiler rooms started the pumps there without waiting for orders from the bridge. If both boiler rooms Nos 5 and 6 were only slightly damaged, it would be reasonable to believe that the engineers in the very forward room were as efficient as those in the next compartment aft. In that case they too would have started the pumps very shortly after the collision. Under normal circumstances the engineers would have been doing the right thing by starting the pumps the instant they thought their ship’s hull had been breached, and their actions would have been commended. But what if these were not normal circumstances and the non-return valves in the pumps had been reversed so that instead of pumping water out of the ship the opposite occurred? Reversal of these non-return valves in the pumps would also provide an explanation for Captain Smith’s delay in ordering them to be brought into play. He knew exactly what to expect and would have been able to control the amount of time it took his vessel to sink by judicious use of those pumps had his vessel been undamaged. Unfortunately the ship was not undamaged and at least the forward two or three compartments were filling with water. In that case the Captain was doing the right thing, actually extending the life of the ship by not starting the pumps. By waiting for 45 minutes before ordering the pumps to be started, Smith would have believed that those in the forward boiler rooms were already under water and inoperable. But even 45 minutes after the supposed collision he was still unaware that his junior engineers had already done what they thought was the right thing, and had already started the pumps in those two forward boiler rooms. With the ship’s hull breached in the first three compartments and the pumps sucking water into the two forward boiler rooms, the ship, although relatively undamaged, was doomed.
Thomas Andrews, who had a hand in designing the ship and was aboard for the maiden voyage, could not have known that the forward pumps were filling the ship with water and would naturally assume that the damage to the hull extended as far back as No 5 boiler room, and said as much to Captain Smith. Even if he had known about the reversal of the valves in the pumps and guessed what had happened, there was little that could be done to rectify the situation. Even if the watertight doors were reopened to allow the incoming water to flow further into the ship and help prevent the bows from being dragged under, there was still no way of getting rid of it unless at least some of the pumps further aft had not been tampered with. It is a curious fact that when the ship’s lifeboats were lowered only one of them encountered a jet of water being pumped overboard from the liner. This jet of water was not coming from the ship’s pumps but from her condensers where exhaust steam from the engines was turned back into fresh water to be used again. There is nothing else at all in the eye-witness statements to suggest that water was actually being pumped out of the ship.
From the time water began to flow into the five forward compartments the situation was disastrous, but had Mr Murdoch not given the order to turn the ship towards the south immediately upon hearing of an iceberg right ahead, then all might not have been lost. Had he ordered hard a-port, the ship would have turned towards the north, toward where the SS Californian lay waiting. Instead, the turn towards the south opened the gap between the two ships until they were the better part of 20 miles apart, too far apart for distress signals fired from one to be visible from the other. By the time Titanic stopped she was on her own in an otherwise empty sea, with the exception of a great number of icebergs and possibly a couple of mystery ships, of course.
Preparations began to get as many people off the ship as was thought possible. The officers of the Titanic knew only too well that the ship’s lifeboats were only meant to accommodate about 1,200 people at best and that there was almost double that number aboard. They would have to be a little selective about who was allowed access to the boat deck. The steel mesh doors leading to the forward third-class accommodation were closed and locked, sealing in most of those berthed there with no chance of escape. Those doors are still locked. The all-Italian catering staff, who after all were not White Star employees at all but worked for Mr Luigi Gatti, owner of a famous London restaurant, were rounded up and locked in the second-class dining saloon. They were only Italians who would clog up the boat deck and prevent more deserving American and British passengers getting into the few available boats.
While these preparations were going on Captain Smith went along to the wireless cabin and instructed the operators to send out a distress call. Clearly the captain was losing his grip on reality even at this early stage in the proceedings, as he gave the Marconi men the wrong position to send. The first distress call sent out at 12.15am from Titanic gave her position as 41°46’N, 50°24’W, about 20 miles from where she actually was. This erroneous position was transmitted for about 10 minutes before it was corrected to 41°46’N, 50°14’W. The mistake was possibly nothing more than a simple error in writing down the position, but it immediately reduced any chance of a rescue.
Twenty miles away, to the north, the Leyland Line’s Californian lay with her engines stopped, drifting with the field ice. Her wireless operator had switched off his equipment at 11.30 that evening after contacting Titanic and being told off by Phillips or Bride for interfering with their commercial communications with the shore station at Cape Race.
Chapter 17
The view from the Californian
While the events described in the last chapter were going on aboard the Titanic a very different scenario was being played out aboard the Leyland Line’s Californian, about 20 miles away to the north. Although his wireless operator and about two-thirds of his crew had turned in for the night or were off duty, Captain Lord was neither of these things. In fact, Captain Lord would not go t
o bed at all that night.
The Californian was by no manner of means a small vessel herself. Launched at Dundee on 26 November 1901, she was 447ft 6in long and weighed in at 6,223grt. She was predominantly a cargo vessel but did have 19 staterooms that could comfortably accommodate up to 47 passengers. Captain Lord had taken over command of the ship in 1911. Born in Bolton on 13 September 1877, he had joined the West Indian & Pacific Steam Navigation Company in 1897 after first going to sea as a cadet in 1891. The WI&PSN Co was taken over by the Leyland Line in 1900, shortly before Leyland was itself taken over by J. P. Morgan’s IMM company. Lord obtained his Master’s Certificate in February 1902 and his Extra Master’s three months later, on 3 May. He served, mainly as Chief Officer, on the Antillian from August 1904 until 1906, when he took over as captain for a further five months. He then captained a series of Leyland vessels, including Louisiana and William Cliff before taking command of the Californian in March 1911. He was paid the princely sum of £240 a month as captain of the Californian, less than half the £500 per month paid to Captain E. J. Smith of the Titanic, even though, judging from the record, he was at least his equal as a seaman.
The Great Titanic Conspiracy Page 19
