by Senan Molony
This positive action was more than sufficient to nullify any previous concern which might have been created by her apparently making use of confusing rocket signals of low power reaching only to mast height, and lacking any explosive content or detonation such as was customarily associated with a distress rocket and which should have been perfectly audible in the calm conditions then obtaining.
I was also in Court on May 15th. I clearly recall that when Lord Mersey, the President, pressed Mr Groves, the Third Officer, to express his opinion that the ship seen from the Californian was the Titanic, Lord Mersey commented that this was also his opinion – a comment which does not appear in the official record of proceedings.
Detail hereafter referring to his suspension at Liverpool, resignation, and subsequent career has been included previously. Lord ends the account with:
…I am making this sworn statement as a final truthful and authoritative record of what occurred when I was in command of the Californian on the night of April 14th, 1912.
[Signed] Stanley Lord
Sworn by the above-named deponent Stanley Lord at 13 Kirkway, Wallasey, in the County of Chester, on this twenty-fifth day of June, 1959, before me, Herbert M. Allen, Notary Public.
25
THE 1992 REAPPRAISAL
Despite the matter being taken up by the Mercantile Marine Service Association, Lord was to have no rehabilitation by the time of his death in 1962, half a century after the disaster.
The matter was only reopened after ‘new evidence’ emerged with the discovery of the wreck site in 1985. Maddeningly, in an attempt to keep the location secret, explorer Robert Ballard stated publicly soon after his success that the position of the wreck indicated that the Californian was much closer to the Titanic than she had claimed in 1912 – but this was a wilfully deceptive statement; Ballard later admitted that he had simply invented this claim to throw wreck-site pursuers off the scent. Once again it seemed that Captain Lord was fair game. The real position of the wreck immensely strengthens, if not utterly verifies, all of the Californian contentions.
The Titanic’s exact co-ordinates, despite Ballard’s best efforts, emerged within two years. As a result of their widespread circulation, the British Government in 1992 acceded to requests to re-examine the ‘Californian Incident’ in light of the now-established scientific fact that the Titanic was 13 nautical miles (mostly to the east but also a little further south) of where she thought she was. This was also why the wreck had eluded discovery for so long.
Captain Lord meanwhile was thirty years dead and beyond redemption.
The case was referred to the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) of the British Department of Transport. But because it was ‘outside the ordinary run of MAIB investigations’, an outside inspector – retired nautical surveyor Thomas Barnett – was appointed to the reappraisal. When his report was returned, it did not satisfy the Chief Inspector of Marine Accidents, Captain Peter Marriott, who did not agree with the findings. He considered further examination was required, and appointed his most senior colleague, Captain James De Coverly, the Deputy Chief Inspector, to undertake the task once more. That task was to find answers to four key criteria: the positions of the Titanic and Californian, and the distance between them from collision to sinking; to consider whether the Titanic was seen by the Californian during that period; whether distress signals from the Titanic were seen by the Californian, and if so, whether proper action was taken; and to assess the action taken by Captain Stanley Lord during that night and next morning.
The final answers amounted to the first official vindication of Captain Lord since 1912. They were:
a) The Californian was between 17 and 20 miles from the Titanic, most likely 18 miles.
b) It is more likely the Titanic was not seen by the Californian.
c) The Titanic’s distress signals were seen, yet proper action was not taken.
d) The message from Gibson ‘did not get through’ to Captain Lord. Instead, Second Officer Stone was ‘seriously at fault’.
The original, outside inspector – whose findings had been rejected by MAIB – felt that the Titanic and Californian were between 5 and 10 miles apart whilst they lay stopped, and probably nearer 5 miles. The Deputy Chief Inspector however instead found that the separation was ‘substantially greater, probably about 18 miles’. The two inspectors disagreed substantially on the effect of drift. The first, retired surveyor Barnett, considered that a current (contrary to that setting west-north-west, identified by Captain Lord) had been affecting the Californian since noon on 14 April, so that she was considerably further south than she believed. Since the Titanic and Californian ‘would not see each other even on a very clear night at a distance greater than 8 to 10 miles’ (p.9), this original assessor considered that the Californian was indeed the Titanic’s mystery ship.
This conclusion overlooks some rather obvious facts – such as the repeated celestial observations taken by the Californian to establish her position that evening, her positions transmitted in wireless messages, the captain’s own reckoning of the stop position, and its verification by Chief Officer Stewart. All would require serial mistakes if the first inspector were to be correct. Also the visual identification of the Titanic at 5 miles by Lord, Stone and Gibson as being simply a modest tramp steamer goes unexplained.
Meanwhile the Deputy Chief Inspector listed his own several reasons why it was a ‘most unlikely’ theory that a pronounced southerly drift would go unnoticed by the Californian for almost ten and a half hours before she stopped, as the original inspector’s findings would suggest. They can be briefly summarised as follows:
1) A southerly current in the region of the accident was unusual. It would have been progressively more unusual – and more noticeable – the further east one places it, such as to the Californian’s eastern noon position.
2) The pole star sight taken by Stewart at 7.30 p.m., having been steaming due west, agreed in latitude with the noon observation of the same day. ‘It follows that the net effect [of current] was nil’, at least until 7.30, the Deputy Chief Inspector declares, unless the observations were in error or false evidence was given.
3) The positional evidence given before the accident occurred, in a wireless message to the Antillian about icebergs. The Californian cannot deliberately give ‘false’ evidence as to early drift long before any disaster has begun. The Californian can only be correct or in error. The Deputy Chief Inspector concluded that the latitude given to the Antillian ‘adds weight… to the evidence against a southerly set’ of drift earlier in the day and evening.
4) The icefield lay in a roughly north/south direction close to the 50th meridian. It seems clearly reasonable to associate this field with a southerly current; but if such a current was to be found much further east, why was no ice there?
Thus the Deputy Chief Inspector dismisses the odd reasoning of the outside consultant. It appears, however, that the DCI was unaware of other evidence that the current before the Californian stopped was setting not to the south, as the outside assessor imagines, but to the north. In the first place, there is the fact that Lord was steering slightly south of due west and relying upon the prevailing current to bring him back up to due west so that his latitude remained the same throughout. The Californian had also that evening transmitted this message to the Antillian, overheard by the Titanic: ‘6.30 p.m. apparent ship’s time, latitude 42° 03’ N, longitude 49° 09’ W, three bergs five miles southwards of us, regards, Lord’ (03’ N is an error – the actual observed latitude of 42° 05’ N was entered in the Californian’s log).
In his 1959 affidavit, Lord said of these bergs that they ‘would appear to have been the same icebergs sighted and reported by wireless during the day by the Parisian in position 41° 55’ N, 49° 14’ W’. In other words the bergs had drifted north from 41° 55’ to 42° – and not to south – if Lord’s impression is correct that these were the same three bergs. They had also drifted east, as all the ice wa
s doing. North and east is a Gulf Stream effect.
Titanic Fourth Officer Boxhall exactly explained the point (US Inquiry, p.917):
Senator Newlands: How about the ice in the locality in which you placed it on the chart? Was it likely to drift; and if so, in what particular direction?
Boxhall: Yes; we should expect it to drift to the northward and to the eastward.
Sen. Newlands: And not toward the south?
Boxhall: Not to the southward, as a rule; not in the Gulf Stream.
Sen. Newlands: So that, as you proceeded along the track after you had charted this ice, your assumption would be that the ice would drift farther away from your track rather than drift toward it?
Boxhall: More to the northward and eastward; yes, sir.
Lord meanwhile stated in the same affidavit that a Pole Star observation at 7.30 p.m., together with a previous observation for longitude ‘gave me proof that the current was setting to WNW at about 1 knot’. Again we have a northern flavour to the current before Californian stopped, and not a southern one. The current may then be showing the influence of meeting the Labrador current. Even without this additional material, the DCI cannot agree with the outside assessor that the Californian and the Titanic were close enough to see each other, as a pronounced and long-term (yet somehow unnoticed) southerly drift since noon would have it. The DCI says:
In my opinion, Titanic was not seen by Californian, nor vice versa, except possibly at a range much greater than the ordinarily visible horizon (8–10 miles) owing to abnormal refraction.
Even if this were so, the DCI stated that he had ‘no need nor cause to discount Californian’s evidence’ as to her stopping place. The only adjustment required after Californian came to rest, he wrote, was for the then drift of current – i.e. after 10.21 p.m. He then went on to deduce what he thought to be the likely drift obtaining. The DCI calculated the current by using the distance between the site of the Titanic wreck on the sea bed and the position where Captain Lord said he ‘left the wreckage’ at 11.20 a.m. The problem here is that Lord appeared to mean ‘broke off the search’ at that point, and clarifies in his last testament that the location refers to where he left the area, having earlier seen wreckage in the vicinity of the Carpathia.
Thus misled, the DCI then divided this distance by the number of hours – nine – that had elapsed since the sinking time (2.20 a.m.). From Titanic wreck (41° 43’ N, 49° 56’ W) to Lord’s point of departure from the wreckage search (41° 33’ N, 50° 01’ W) is 10.7 nautical miles. This distance, 10.7 miles, divided by nine hours, gives a drift of 1.19 knots, but the DCI erred in rounding-up when he referred to a drift of ‘about 1.3 knots’ (p.9), instead of 1.2 as indicated by his own calculations. Then, on the same page, he again changes his mind with a reference to ‘a current setting about south by west at something like 1.25 knots’. But this rate of drift is massively at variance with estimations given by witnesses to the 1912 Inquiries. These are the only estimations of drift from the American and British Inquiries and they all suggest the same rate of half a knot per hour. Captain Moore states: ‘From about 12.30… 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 says: ‘allowing for a drift of only half a knot that ice must have got to the southward of the track’ (British Inquiry, p.769). Knapp states: ‘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 of about 12 miles a day [½mph]’ (US Inquiry, p.1121).
Then there is the Californian evidence about drift which is non-specific as to speed, but which hardly suggests drift of as much as 1 knot per hour – Gibson with his gradually changing bearings of the other steamer, Stone with his twice-declared observation (7969 and 8058) ‘we were slowly swinging’, and Groves, who emphasised: ‘We were swinging, but very, very slowly’ (8150).
Meanwhile we have seen that Captain Lord’s wreckage position was not taken where he found anything necessarily, but was a retrospective estimate of the point where he resumed his course to the west, based on a noon observation taken by his officers forty minutes later. Such a misunderstanding over wreckage would then completely invalidate the DCI’s calculations as to morning drift (meanwhile, the Titanic’s wreck site is, significantly, 3 nautical miles below track, which would also appear to suggest a rate of drift slightly too rapid… One could could speculate about her going to the south and west after her attempt to avoid the iceberg, but idle speculation has cursed this story).
Look again at Lord’s guessed place for the wreck site and its actual location… the wreckage from the actual site could in all likelihood not have drifted so far down as to find itself in his search circle. That distance is 10.7 miles – virtually an hour’s steaming at all-out full working speed for the Californian.
The explanation may lie in the possibility that Lord was actually searching in a position too far south and west of the actual sinking site to see any waterlogged bodies, of which there were many hundreds for days afterwards, as seen by passing liners (Northern Whig, 2 May 1912, p.7):
BODIES AND WRECKAGE SIGHTED. Boston, Wednesday – The Captain of the steamer Sagamore reports having sighted two bodies and a considerable quantity of wreckage about five miles north of the spot where the Carpathia rescued the Titanic’s survivors. – Reuter.
Lord naturally thought he was searching in the immediate area of the wreck and would later locate his guessed location of the foundering within short miles of where he had encountered the Carpathia.
Essentially the suggestion is that Lord’s reference to ‘the position where I left the wreckage’ is a loose one, and that there may not have been actual main wreckage in the position where he turned back. Thus the actual drift would not be what the British Government’s Deputy Chief Inspector of Marine Accidents calculated (on the basis of Lord’s wreckage-leaving remark). Putting this location aside would substantially slow the rate of drift, in keeping with ALL the evidence to the British and US Inquiries, which instead uniformly agreed a drift of half a knot.
Let us accept however, for the sake of argument, the DCI’s estimation of 1.3 knots. He uses this to calculate drift of the Californian between her own stop and Titanic stop. This would be over the hour and twenty minutes between 10.21–11.40 p.m., the Deputy Chief Inspector assuming for convenience that both times are contemporaneous. So, 1.3 miles for the hour, plus one-third of 1.3 (0.433) for the twenty minutes, is 1.73 miles. But the DCI again rounds up the 1¾ mile southward drift of the Californian, assuming the current is stronger again at up to 2 miles in that time: ‘While stopped, she [Californian] would have drifted further, for some 2 miles up to the time Titanic hit the berg’, the DCI writes. He admits that this is maximum drift, and indeed we have seen that he has increased what already seems to have been a very much excessive drift calculation. We know that the Californian stop position is 23½ miles from the wreck site. Taking away the 2 mile drift reduces the separation to 21½ miles.
But the Titanic drifted also during her two hours and forty minutes of sinking (from 11.40 p.m. to 2.20 a.m.). Such drift too must be taken out of the 21½ mile separation. This period is twice the one hour twenty minutes between Californian stop (10.20 p.m.) and Titanic stop (11.40 p.m.). Doubling the 2 mile drift found in the latter case means the 21½ miles are reduced to a 17½ mile separation during the sinking.
This is the absolute minimum distance between them, allowing for maximum drift, according to the DCI’s calculations. And the Deputy Chief Inspector says as much: ‘I therefore consider that the Californian was between 17 and 20 miles from Titanic at the time of collision, bearing about north-west by north from her… Between the collision and the sinking, both ships will in all probability have drifted similarly so that their position relative to each other would not appreciably change’ (p.11).
Meanwhile, if the DCI had instead trusted to the ½ knot rate cited by those who gave drift evidence i
n 1912, the gap between the Californian’s stop position and the wreck site decreases from 23½ miles to 22.83 miles in respect of the time when the Californian was drifting alone (½ knot multiplied by 1.33 hours equals 0.67 miles).
The separation then falls further, from 22.83 to 21½ miles, as a result of the Titanic’s drift (½ knot multiplied by 2.66 hours equals 1.33 miles). In other words, 21½ miles is the putative maximum distance between the Californian and the Titanic at the time of impact, according to testimony the DCI has overlooked.
WAS THE RMS TITANIC SEEN BY CALIFORNIAN?
The DCI writes:
To my mind, the question posed is answered conclusively by evidence of what was seen – and by what was not seen – from the Titanic… Titanic’s speed, maintained until collision at 11.40 p.m., suggests that if at that time she was five miles from the Californian, then at 11 p.m. she will have been nearly 20 miles away, which is a very long way off for her to be seen [the Californian’s stranger was seen as a light by Lord at 10.30 p.m., and noticed by Groves at 11.10 p.m.]… What is significant, however, is that no ship was seen by Titanic until well after the collision… watch was maintained with officers on the bridge and seamen in the crow’s nest, and with their ship in grave danger the lookout for another vessel which could come to their help must have been most anxious and keen… It is in my view inconceivable that Californian or any other ship was within the visible horizon of Titanic during that period; it equally follows that Titanic cannot have been within Californian’s horizon.
He continues:
