The Great Titanic Conspiracy

by Robin Gardiner

  As we already know, Californian had left London on 5 April in so much of a hurry that her wireless operator, Cyril Furmston Evans, did not have the time to pick up the correct Marconi chart for the coming voyage. Without that chart Evans could not know what ships were within range of his wireless equipment until he either contacted them, or they him.

  It should be remembered that at the time a national coal strike was just coming to an end, a strike that had caused such a shortage of fuel that most ships, including first-class liners, had been unable to gather enough to put to sea. As described earlier, despite this fuel shortage enough coal had been found for Californian’s obviously urgent mission. A passenger ticket aboard

  Californian cost £10, one way. As there were so many transatlantic vessels confined to port because of the fuel shortage, there must have been thousands of people willing to pay that or more to gain passage. Despite having practically cornered the market in transatlantic voyaging, Californian sailed without a single passenger aboard.

  Californian made her best speed for the first nine days of her journey and had reached a position 42°5’N, 47°25’W. During the afternoon of 14 April she changed course so that longitude 51°W would be crossed at latitude 42°N. At about 6.30pm Californian passed three distinctive flat-topped icebergs, about 5 miles to the south of the ship. Lord had been previously warned of the presence of these icebergs and their position in a wireless message from the Parisien. Being in no doubt whatsoever as to whether or not his ship was in an area inhabited by large icebergs, Captain Lord ordered the lookouts to be doubled and had a man placed right in the bows of the Californian as an extra precaution. His attitude toward icebergs, it seems, was somewhat different from that of Titanic’s Captain Smith.

  Californian hurried onward until, at about 10.15pm, a strange brightness was spotted along the western horizon. Captain Lord guessed that the glow, known as ‘ice blink’, was caused by field ice. The vessel continued towards that ice for a further 5 or 6 minutes before Lord decided that discretion was the better part of valour and ordered the helm hard a-port and the engines full astern. Californian swung toward the east-north-east as she slowed to a stop. Captain Lord then ordered the engines stopped but steam to be kept up throughout the night in case the engines were required urgently. He never explained why he thought the engines might be urgently needed during that night. His ship, drifting slowly and safely in the same direction and at the same speed as the field ice and icebergs, could be in no conceivable danger from them. The captain was obviously aware that the ice presented no threat to his ship because he had the extra lookouts dismissed and sent below. After taking these simple precautions Captain Lord should have felt himself able to put his trust in his senior watch officers and look forward to a good night’s sleep, but sleep seems to have been the last thing on his mind.

  Once the Californian had stopped for the night Captain Lord calculated the ship’s position. To do this he used the vessel’s course, S89°W (true), the 120 miles she had travelled since the noon position had been established, and a stellar observation taken at 7.30pm. He and his officers had managed to get perfectly good sights all day. Californian’s position, worked out by Lord, was 42°5’N, 50°7’W, and his calculations would be reinforced by sightings taken the following day.

  Captain Lord was about to leave the bridge when he spotted the masthead light of another ship, to the east of Californian, on her starboard quarter. He pointed out the light to his Third Officer, Charles Victor Groves. Groves initially thought the light was nothing more than a star and said as much to Captain Lord but, as he later testified at the official inquiries into the sinking of the Titanic, he changed his opinion as the night wore on. Before another hour had passed, at about 11.25pm, Mr Groves was convinced that what he had first believed to be a star was in fact two masthead lights belonging to a passenger liner. (Titanic, although the largest vessel in existence at the time, only ever displayed one masthead light. Two lights were usually displayed by vessels with four or more masts, whereas Titanic had only two masts.) The Third Officer also believed that he saw the mystery vessel’s port-side red light. At no time did Mr Groves mention seeing any of the myriad lights coming from portholes, public rooms and promenade areas invariably shown by a passenger liner.

  Captain Lord, still convinced that the lights he had seen were coming from nothing more than a small cargo ship, left the bridge and made his way down to the saloon Deck. Once there he sent for his Chief Engineer, W. S. A. Mahan. When the Engineer arrived Captain Lord confirmed his instructions that steam should be kept up and the engines ready for instant use in an emergency throughout the night. He also pointed out to the engineer the lights of the mystery ship to which he had so recently drawn Mr Groves’s attention. It was a perfectly clear, flat calm night with no moon but with thousands of stars twinkling down. Under these conditions it was not at all easy to discern the horizon and Captain Lord had already been fooled into thinking that stars, low down on the horizon, had been the masthead lights of ships. He wanted the Engineer’s opinion as to whether the lights they could see were a ship or merely stars. Mahan’s opinion was the same as that of his captain, that the lights were those of a small cargo vessel. It was some time around 10.45pm when the Chief Engineer left to continue with his duties.

  A few minutes later Lord met his wireless operator, Cyril Evans, on deck. The captain asked Evans if he knew of any other ships in the immediate area. As far as Evans knew the only vessel equipped with wireless close by was Titanic. If only Evans had possessed the correct wireless chart for the North Atlantic he would not have had to guess what ships were close by from the strength of the signals he received from them. Pointing out the approaching steamer, Lord said, ‘That’s not the Titanic - she’s a vessel close to us in size. You’d better contact Titanic, however, and let her know we’re stopped in ice.’ Evans left immediately to carry out his instructions and began his transmission to the White Star liner at 10.55pm.

  Evans managed to get through the first part of his message to Titanic before he was interrupted by one of the liner’s operators. ‘We are stopped and surrounded by ice’ was as far as Evans got. ‘Keep out! Shut up! You’re jamming my signal. I’m working Cape Race.’ Evans gave up the attempt and merely listened to Titanic’s signals for a while. Even at that time the wireless operator aboard Titanic, whoever it was, should have recognised the message from Californian as an ice warning, or at least as an important navigational signal. He should have taken the message down and immediately conveyed it to the senior officer on the liner’s bridge, which is clearly what Captain Lord intended. The wording of the message would have been dictated by Captain Lord when he told Evans to contact Titanic and advise her of his situation. Why else then did Evans send a message saying that Californian was stopped and surrounded by ice when in fact she was on the edge of the ice field where there was only field ice and no icebergs in sight at all?

  Evans listened to Titanic’s wireless traffic up until about 11.30, then, as usual at that time of night, switched off his radio and began to prepare for bed. He had been on duty since 7 that morning and, having put in a 16½-hour day, he was feeling a little tired. It was quite normal for Marconi operators aboard ships that only carried one operator to work a ridiculously long week. For this they were paid the princely sum of £4 a month but, as Senator Smith at the American Inquiry was to sarcastically point out to Cyril Evans, ‘You have your board on the ship, and a room. Four pounds a month and all this for a 105-hour week!’

  At about the time Evans switched off his wireless the mystery ship, which was still approaching Californian from the southeast, had come close enough for Captain Lord to see not only her masthead lights but what appeared to be deck lights and her green starboard light as well. Lord estimated that the stranger was only about 5 miles away from him at this point. The captain ordered his Third Officer, Groves, to try and contact the mystery ship with the Morse lamp, but they could get no response. By 11.40pm Captain Lord mus
t have left the bridge again, for whatever reason, because it was then that Groves saw the stranger put her lights out and come to a stop. He did not tell Captain Lord what he had seen. (Titanic, as we know, did not come to a halt until well after 11.40pm when she supposedly struck something, and her lights did not go out until about 2.15 the following morning. It is therefore safe to assume that the ship visible from Californian was not the Titanic, despite continued attempts by some to make us believe that it was.)

  There is a very simple rule for working out the distance to the horizon from any vantage point at sea: V (distance in miles) = the square root of the height in feet of the observer’s eyes above the waterline, multiplied by 1.14. Using this simple formula we can work out that from Californian’s bridge, about 49 feet above the water, the visible horizon (had there been one that night) would have been about 8 miles away. From Titanic’s crow’s-nest the horizon would have been about 12 miles off. Had Titanic and Californian come within 5 miles of one another they would have been clearly visible to each other.

  Although it is painfully apparent that Titanic and Californian never came within sight of one another that night, one person’s incredible evidence was given entirely unwarranted credence by both the British and American Inquiries to the point where it has clouded the story of what happened that night for the better part of a century. According to his own account, at about 11.55pm (12.05am Titanic) Donkeyman Gill made his way up onto Californian’s deck to smoke a cigarette. There was no smoking allowed between decks because of the combustible nature of the urgent cargo of blankets and pullovers the vessel was carrying, according to Gill. Looking over the starboard rail Gill saw a ‘very large steamer about 10 miles away’. The donkeyman never explained quite how he managed to see a ship 3 or 4 miles beyond the horizon. Gill watched this steamer, he said, for a full minute. Going back below, he told a mate, William Thomas, who was in bed, that he had seen a steamer ‘going full steam’. Thomas later denied that Gill had mentioned a steamer or rockets, but said that they had only talked about the ice. Gill was very specific about the time, so the ship he saw was hardly likely to have been the Titanic, which had been in some sort of collision 20 minutes earlier. Unable to sleep, Gill was back on deck at 12.30am. He had been there for about 10 minutes when he noticed a white rocket ‘about 10 miles away on our starboard side. I thought it must be a shooting star.’ There had been a meteorite shower that night. ‘In 7 or 8 minutes I saw distinctly a second rocket in the same place.’ Gill clearly did not think that the rockets were of any great importance, and said as much: ‘I do not know if anyone did who saw them, but I did not. It was not my business to notify the bridge or the lookouts...’ Obviously seeing the rockets set Gill’s mind at rest because shortly after seeing the second he turned in for the remainder of the night.

  Gill’s statement has more holes in it than a colander and it seems more than likely that he made up his entire story simply to squeeze a few dollars out of American newspapers. At 12.05am (Titanic) the White Star liner was not ‘going full steam’, if she was moving at all. Third Officer Groves said that he saw the stranger’s lights go out at 11.40pm, yet Gill claims that the ship he saw was ablaze with lights. Gill saw only white rockets when we now know that Titanic fired a selection of red, white and blue ones. Whatever ship Mr Gill was watching, it certainly was not Titanic.

  The confusion over the mystery vessel seen from Californian was further compounded by a newspaper article, based on a statement from Californian’s Carpenter, McGregor, which appeared in the Clinton Daily Item:

  ‘...that the Californian was within 10 miles of the Titanic when she sank. At the time the Californian was sailing just ahead of the Titanic but had seen a big field of ice but in order to avoid it had turned south and went round the big mass. It was also said that the wireless operator on board the Californian notified the Titanic and all other vessels in the vicinity of the presence of the big ice field.

  It was shortly after the Californian had gone past the ice field that the watch saw the rockets that were sent up by the Titanic as signals of distress. The officer on watch, it is said, reported this to the boat (sic) [Captain] but he failed to pay any attention to the signals excepting to tell the watch to keep his eye on the boat. At this time the two boats were about 10 miles apart. It being in the night the wireless operator on board the Californian was asleep at the time.

  It is said that those on board the Californian could see the lights of the Titanic very plainly, and it is also reported that the Titanic saw the Californian. Finally the first mate on the Californian, who with several of the officers had been watching the Titanic, decided he would take a hand in the situation and so roused the wireless operator and an attempt was made to communicate with the Titanic. It was then too late, as the apparatus on the Titanic was out of commission. The operator did, however, catch the word ‘Titanic’, which was probably being sent from the Carpathia or some other boat, and this information was given to the Captain. He immediately ordered the boat to stop and was very much concerned as to the fate of the Titanic after that, but it was far too late. The Californian had during this time continued ahead under full steam and by the time the name of the boat was ascertained it is believed to have been about 20 miles away.

  The Californian turned back and started for the scene but it is a very slow boat as compared with the Carpathia and several others, and although the Carpathia was about 50 miles away when it first learned of the accident it was able to get there much sooner than the Californian. The next morning the Californian learned from the Carpathia that it had reached the scene and that the Titanic had gone down and that all the survivors had been picked up.

  According to McGregor, the Captain of the Californian had the appearance of being 20 years older after the news reached him. It is the belief of McGregor that the Captain will never be in command of the Californian again and he told Mr Frazer [his cousin] that he would positively refuse to sail under him again and that all of the officers had the same feeling. Mr Frazer says that according to the story as told him, that had the Captain of the Californian turned back when the rockets were first seen, hundreds of the Titanic’s passengers could have been taken off on that boat.’

  Like so many newspaper articles, television documentaries and books since, the article shows little regard for the facts of the matter and is completely misleading. It shows Captain Lord as derelict in his duty and unfit for command. As we already know, Californian was not ahead of Titanic by this time, she did not turn to the south to avoid the icefield, the Leyland Line vessel was not steaming at all but drifting with the field ice, Chief Officer Stewart did not send for Evans (the wireless operator) and order him to contact Titanic while the mystery ship was in view, and Californian did not turn back in order to go to the rescue.

  Far from showing Captain Lord as incompetent, the ascertainable facts of the incident point in the opposite direction. They argue that Captain Lord was aware that something was going to happen that night, possibly that the Titanic would be involved in some sort of accident. Could it be that he was torn between going to the rescue of what he believed to have been a small cargo ship or doing what he had been told to do and go to collect the thousands more people who would need rescuing from the liner? In that case Lord did the only thing he could do in deciding to sacrifice the few in order to save the many. So just what did Captain Lord do as that fateful night wore on?

  When Second Officer Herbert Stone came on duty at about midnight he found Captain Lord at the wheelhouse door. Lord pointed out to him the steamer, which was a little astern of the Californian’s beam by then. Lord also pointed out the field of dense ice to their south. Captain Lord then told Stone that he would not be going to bed that night but that he intended to rest, fully clothed, on the chartroom settee (where he would be easily available if needed). Lord was a little over 6 feet tall and the chartroom settee was only 5ft 6in long. Anyone who has spent a night on a bed that is too short to stretch out on will know that
Captain Lord was not anticipating a good night’s rest. The best he could hope for was a night’s fitful dozing in the steam-heated chartroom. Clearly Captain Lord, well aware that his own ship was in no conceivable danger, was expecting something to happen during the night. He left the bridge at 12.15am.

  All times from the bridge of the Californian are imprecise because there was no clock on the ship’s upper bridge, so times are taken from individual officers’ watches or is estimated.

  Second Officer Stone took over the watch from Third Officer Groves at about 12.10am. Groves had only very recently checked the ship’s heading against the compass and informed Stone that she was swinging around to starboard. He also drew Stone’s attention to the mystery ship and told him that they had already tried to contact her by Morse lamp, without any success. The Third Officer had already noted that the stranger was constantly changing her bearing from Californian and was moving away towards the west. (It will be recalled that by this time Titanic was either stopped or heading slowly away towards the south.)

  Stone studied the mystery vessel for a while and determined that she was only showing one masthead light and her red port-side light, so she was heading towards the east. There does seem to have been some confusion among Californian’s watch officers with regard to the stranger. Stone could also see some indistinct lights that he thought were just portholes, deck lights, or open doors. He did not see a brilliantly lit liner. The Second Officer thought the ship they had in view was nothing more than a small tramp steamer, about 5 miles away. Stone tried the Morse lamp for himself, but even though Californian’s light was visible at a range of about 10 miles, double the estimated distance to the mystery vessel, he too could get no response.