Titanic and the Mystery Ship

by Senan Molony

  There is always the possibility that ‘ten’ is a misprint. But Evans mentions Captain Lord talking to the ‘Chief Officer’ close to 11 p.m. that night. And Stewart is talking in the context of ‘not only’ taking dead reckoning to 10.20 p.m. to get his ship’s position. This time – 10.20 p.m. – helps to verify the phrase ‘half past ten,’ rather than a misheard ‘half past seven,’ which was the earlier time he had taken an observation of the Pole Star.

  The Californian position therefore can only be wrong if both Lord and Stewart, with the assent of Groves, and by extension the agreement of others, are lying. A mass lie, and one persisted in – perversely – by Groves, the man who had decided to help the British Inquiry. Yet there is independent support for the Californian’s claim to have been above latitude 42° N. The veracity of her account is strengthened by the fact that she reported by wireless to other ships the location of three large icebergs seen at 6.30 p.m. These icebergs were in a position entirely consistent with their having been seen a few hours earlier by the Parisian. That ship had reported what were likely the same three bergs in very much the same position in a prior wireless message. Be it understood – the Californian could not at that stage manufacture an alibi for her latitude in respect of an event – Titanic’s collision – that would not happen for several hours. Essentially, Californian says instead she stayed on that line above the 42nd parallel and stopped in 42° 05’ N also. That is twenty-two miles above the 41° 43’ latitude of the Titanic wreck site. To turn the Californian into a mystery ship, it would be necessary to show that she steamed south of her line for a very considerable period.

  So, did the Californian go south? The Californian was bound for Boston. Boston lies above the 42nd parallel. If Lord were to stay on 42 degrees N, West true, it would carry him all the way to the upper arm of Cape Cod. He has no reason in the world to go below the line of 42 degrees North. Meanwhile it should be remembered that Charles Victor Groves was the officer of the watch on duty prior to the Californian stopping. This means he had to control her course, and to maintain the heading of due west. If the ship had been on any other heading, surely Groves, the man who co-operated too much with the British Inquiry, would have told them of the secret plan to head south (towards Titanic)? But he did not do that, even though the inquiry regarded him as something of a ‘whistleblower’. While Groves does not specifically mention the course prior to stopping, he explicitly does not disagree with the captain’s stop position. In fact he declares (question 8425) that it was ‘bound to be accurate if the Captain put it in’. This is an answer which seems to imply an admiration of the captain’s skills in general.

  Meanwhile, if the Californian does go any way south, she has to correct by going north again at some stage in the voyage. Yet the fact is that Lord’s vessel was stopped for more than an hour before the Titanic hit her berg. The ice barrier to the west gives us a landmark of longitude. There is no benchmark equivalent for the Californian’s latitude – except for the minor point that Lord was correct that the ice extended that far north. The Mount Temple, stopped in the Titanic’s SOS position the next morning, saw Californian coming down towards her – from the north. We know Californian was to the north, but it is difficult to establish independently how far north.

  This will be done later in this book, when we will consider the Californian’s course more closely. And it will be shown that the latitude of Lord’s vessel is once again consistent with where he said he stopped. Meanwhile it can be suggested that longitude, plus course, plus speed, gives us an implied latitude. When these are weighed together, likely inferences can be drawn about Lord’s claimed stop position. We have seen longitude and course. What of speed?

  The difference in longitude between the Californian’s unimpeachable 6.30 p.m. position, 49° 09’ W (unimpeachable in the sense that it was given long before the Titanic struck the iceberg and there can be no possibility of fabrication. However the position was a dead reckoning from the ship’s noon position) and her 10.21 p.m. stop position (50° 07’ W) is fifty-eight minutes west.

  A stop position of 50° 07’ W, minus 49° 09’ W (earlier position) equals fifty-eight minutes, since there are sixty minutes in a degree. In this longitude there are 1,500 yards in one minute. We need to find the mileage travelled to the west in this period, and will first have to find the yardage travelled in total between 6.30 p.m. and 10.20 p.m. Fifty-eight minutes multiplied by 1,500 yards per minute gives 87,000 yards travelled. This distance, divided by the 2,026 yards in one nautical mile, comes to 43 nautical miles. The Californian travelled this distance between 6.30 p.m. and 10.21 p.m., when she stopped. It was roughly four hours of travel, which would give a speed of eleven knots (four multiplied by eleven is forty-four). In fact, to be precise, it is three hours and fifty minutes in time elapsed, so the speed was a little faster. To be absolutely exact, it is forty-three divided by 230 minutes of time, multiplied by sixty (minutes in an hour) to establish knots, or nautical miles per hour. So, forty-three divided by 230 gives 0.187. This figure multiplied by sixty gives 11.22 knots (the extra one-fifth of a knot is accounted for by Captain Lord’s belief that there was a westward component to the current). That was the Californian’s speed that evening – eleven and one-fifth knots. What did Captain Lord say about Californian’s speed?

  7115. At what speed were you going? — [Lord] 11 knots.

  And elsewhere:

  7137. I understand when you saw ice[bergs] first this evening it was before 6? — [Lord] It must have been about 5.

  7138. So that it was pretty clear daylight then? — It was perfectly clear, a beautiful day.

  7139. So that, it being clear at that time, you did not consider at that moment that it was necessary to slacken speed? — No.

  7140. But assuming that you had first heard of ice at 11.30 that night, wouldn’t you have considered it necessary? Did you, as a matter of fact, that night later on slacken speed? — Not until 20 minutes past 10.

  7141. You were only going 11 knots an hour? — That was my full speed.

  7142. Thirteen, I thought you said? — Driving on my consumption then, 11 knots.

  The Californian is going top speed to the west from her 6.30 position. Just as one would expect. She’s not dawdling, after the fact, hoping to be ‘overtaken’ by the SOS position. In other words, the Californian’s captain did not construct a stop position that would indicate a ‘slow’ Californian and that would allow her to see rockets in the ‘right’ place and show beyond doubt that it must indeed be some other vessel that Titanic is seeing to the north-west after she stops, ‘because we were too far behind her’. That is not an argument Lord relied on, even though he could have claimed to have been going slowly ‘on account of the ice’ seen from about 5 p.m. Instead he did what we expect, what every captain did – top speed – until it was suddenly prudent to stop completely. Despite the very fact that his full speed would inevitably put him ‘closer’ to the Titanic’s SOS position!

  Let us gather all this evidence together. Is Lord lying about his final stop position? If he is, his lie in 1912 placed him in incredible danger of what eventually happened – his being saddled with the blame for 1,500 deaths. His claimed speed did him no favours, and nor did his longitude, which rather stupidly showed that his crew were seeing rockets in a place where the Titanic was not firing them… at least by the 1912 consensus that the Titanic was where she said she was. These would be two clumsy mistakes for a man supposedly lying to extricate himself from a problem. But instead he hangs himself twice. And then, spectacularly, a third time, when he argued that the Titanic position must be wrong. Yet why should he cast doubt on the Titanic’s SOS position by suggesting the sinking is further east, when this is closer to his own claimed position? What sort of suicidal ‘defendant’ would do such a thing? Only one who is in fact honest. And one who trusts rather touchingly in judicial fairness.

  Why should a captain, after all, be such an enemy to himself when some of his own crew are hanging him t
oo? Third Officer Groves did a lot of damage to Captain Lord. He was the man who believed he had seen a ‘passenger steamer’ and who, despite not seeing any rockets at all himself, agreed when asked by counsel that he believed now, after the sinking, that this vessel he saw was ‘most assuredly’ the Titanic. Yet we remember what the same Groves said about his captain’s stop position and its credibility:

  8425. In the log book it is stated that when you stopped your ship in the ice, the position of the ship was 42° 5’ N and longitude 50° 7’ W. Is that accurate?

  Groves: Well, it is bound to be accurate if the Captain put it in.

  Remarkable confidence. But an indication of official unhappiness with this opinion, and the Court’s innate suspicion, is indicated by an immediate sour objection by the Solicitor General: ‘This witness wouldn’t know, would he?’

  There is another consideration to the notion that Lord was lying. At 11 p.m. on April 14, having stopped, he told Californian wireless operator Cyril Evans to send out a transmission that the Californian was stopped and surrounded by ice.

  It is likely Evans had the Californian’s exact position at that time – which was a substantial time before Titanic hit the berg. Whether Evans would have gone on to offer it is an open question, since he was cut short by the luxury maiden voyager with the rebuff: ‘Keep out! I am working Cape Race’:

  9123. When you gave the final message to the Titanic did you commence that message by giving your address, so to speak – your position then? — [Evans] No.

  But Evans never testified about what stop position it was that he might have possessed. If he, an independent Marconi employee, was ‘got at’ by Lord and told to stitch a fraudulent position into the record, one would expect him to do that. But he did not mention at all in evidence any ship’s position he might have been given at that time. And he was only asked about it fleetingly (US Inquiry, p.740):

  Evans: I called him [Titanic] up first. I said MGY three times, and gave him my own call signal once, which is MWL. I said: ‘Say, Old Man, we are surrounded by ice, and stopped’.

  Senator Bourne: You gave your location, did you not?

  Evans: No, sir; I was just giving that as a matter of courtesy, because the Captain requested me to.

  Sen. Bourne: You expected a reply from him, or an inquiry as to what your location was, where the ice was, did you not?

  Evans: No, sir. I thought he was very much south of me, because we were bound for Boston, and we were north of the track. We were following the track of the Parisian.

  It may be that Evans actually had his vessel’s stop position – where ice was – for transmission if it was wanted. Otherwise the communication is meaningless. For Captain Lord it would be akin to sending someone to the shops to make purchases without any money. The report and the position go together. Evans may not have expected the Titanic to want the location of the ice, because he thought that vessel was too far away for it to be relevant to her, but it is hardly for him to judge. Evans said in his British evidence (question 9193): ‘The Captain told me to expect the Titanic to be away to the southward of us’. But in a continuation of his US evidence, cited above, Evans suggests that he indeed had his own ship’s position, at least at the time when he was finally finding out about the sinking and the Titanic’s SOS position (US Inquiry, p.740):

  Evans: I can only work on that we were about 20 miles away.

  Senator Fletcher: From what?

  Evans: From the Titanic, and therefore he would be 20 miles away from us.

  It is now time for common sense to tell us some reasonable conclusions.

  Firstly, Lord is not going to stop until he meets the ice. Secondly, he has no motive for going south at all. Groves would anyway have told if that happened. Thirdly, his stop position to the west reflects Californian’s top speed since the 6.30 p.m. sighting. Fourthly, top speed is what all captains did, but in Lord’s case it doesn’t aid him in avoiding Titanic but arguably puts him closer to that ship as the Titanic eats up the gap. In addition, Evans, Groves and others support Lord’s time for stoppage and make no suggestion of altered speed or course. And Lord’s claimed stop position does him no advantage and actually hurts his case in 1912. His suggestion that Titanic’s position was wrong – and he was correct, we know today – made him appear deceitful. But he knew it was wrong in part because he was certain of his own position. In other words, he ironically could have appeared to be a liar because of his innocent devotion to honesty! This leads ultimately to the probability that Californian’s stop position is true.

  Taking this finding, we still must find out the exact distance between the Californian and the sinking Titanic. By Lord’s account, the Californian at 10.21 p.m. was stopped only 8¼ miles west of the known Titanic wreck, but crucially 22 miles to the north. That’s the ‘L’. The diagonal line completing the triangle gives the exact distance. A child can do it with a ruler. Draw out 22mm of vertical separation on a sheet of paper with 8.25mm along the east–west meridian. Now join the two points to close the right-angle triangle and measure that line. It should come to 23.5mm. That would be a general indicator of mileage. Plotted on computer by the Irish Marine Emergency Service, the exact distance between the Californian (reported stop position) and the Titanic wreck site (centre of the boilers in the debris field) is 23½ nautical miles. It seems probable therefore that the Californian’s position in 1912 when she stopped was 23½ nautical miles from the Titanic’s sinking position. Of course there was some slippage because the Californian was drifting slightly south for somewhere around an hour and twenty minutes before Titanic stopped abruptly, having hit the berg. The Californian was stopped, and drifting, much earlier.

  After the Titanic came to rest, both ships thereafter drifted at the same rate until the Titanic sank, there being no difference in their respective positions when both were stopped. After the Titanic sank, Californian drifted further still. The 1992 reappraisal of the evidence conducted by the British Government’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch rates the southward drift between the times of Californian-stop (10.21p.m., her time) and Titanic-stop (11.40 p.m., Titanic time) to have been ‘some two miles’ (p.11). This seems to be excessive. It would imply an estimated rate of current at between 1.33 and 1.74 knots, depending on how Californian and Titanic times related to each other.

  If the times aboard the two ships are taken as the same, (so that 11.40 p.m. Titanic time was also 11.40p.m. Californian time, for the sake of argument) this British Government calculation produces 1.33 knots of drift per hour. It is almost certainly an excessive estimation, judging from all the evidence of drift available to the 1912 inquiries. Captain Moore of the Mount Temple claims: ‘From the time I got there, from about 12.30 – the time I received the call – until half past 4, there would be a drift there of perhaps, say, half a knot an hour’ (US Inquiry, p.780). Sir Robert Finlay suggests: ‘As regards the Caronia’s ice, even allowing for a drift of only half a knot, that ice must have got to the Southward of the track which the vessel was pursuing’ (British, p.769). US hydrographer John Knapp: ‘The Labrador Current, which brings both berg and field ice down past Newfoundland, sweeps across the banks in a generally south to southwest direction…with a set [direction of drift] of about 12 miles a day’ (US Inquiry, p.1121). That’s another estimate of half a knot per hour.

  These are the only testified rates of drift at both the US Senatorial and British Inquiries. Half a knot drift by the Californian while she alone was stopped would put her at just under 23 miles from the Titanic when the latter struck, at least as an interim step. The British reappraisal in 1992 also noted (p.11): ‘Between the collision and sinking, both ships will in all probability have drifted similarly so that their position relative to each other would not appreciably change’. But we must also factor in the southerly drift in the Titanic’s position between her striking the berg and sinking. The wreck site is not the Titanic’s collision point – and two hours and forty minutes (between collision and sinking) of
southward drift must be corrected to place the Titanic back at the collision point at 11.40 p.m. her time. When this is done, Titanic is back on her exact track to New York. The Californian position, drifting until the same time (Titanic time 11.40 p.m.), is now at a separation of 21½ nautical miles from that vessel. This calculation employs the testified standard drift of half a knot for both ships. Thereafter the two stopped vessels effectively remained at this distance without varying (since both are drifting similarly) until 2.20 a.m., when the White Star Liner left the surface of the ocean. So – 21½ miles. Not the mystery ship’s 5 miles from Titanic.

  Evans, the Californian’s wireless operator, a man employed by the Marconi Co. and on only his third trip on that vessel, mentions a distance of some 20 miles when he began trying to find out what had happened the next morning. As the most independent man aboard the Leyland liner, he has no reason to lie, but of course had no real idea of the Titanic’s position, except that she was probably on her official track to southward, which he knew to be substantially south of the Californian’s more northern Boston track (US Inquiry, p.740): ‘I can only work on that we were about 20 miles away… from the Titanic…’ And the Titanic wreck today lies to the south of her track, there since her slow drift while sinking. A total of 21½ miles is rather a considerable distance for Californian to be the mystery ship. Especially a mystery ship generally estimated by Titanic observers to be at a distance of only 5 miles. And it is an entirely impossible distance for any vessel that was showing its red light, or any visible side light.