You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [48]
Captain Smith himself was among those who believed the ship’s publicity. The society captain freely expressed his confidence in the Titanic and her sister ship, the Olympic. He told friends, “Either of these vessels could be cut in halves and each half would remain afloat almost indefinitely. The non-sinkable vessel has been reached in these two wonderful craft.”
On the surface, it seemed as though Captain Smith had ample reason to be sanguine. Born on January 27, 1850, in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent of Staffordshire, he was married and had one child, and a career with White Star that began in 1880 as the fourth officer on the Celtic. He later commanded the Majestic, the Adriatic, Celtic, Coptic, Germanic, Olympic, and several others. His reputation continued to grow. “When anyone asks me how I can best describe my forty years at sea,” Captain Smith was widely reported as saying, “I merely say ‘uneventful.’ I have never been in an accident of any sort worth speaking about. I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern ship building has gone beyond that.”
Modern shipbuilding had reached its pinnacle with the Titanic. She was 882.5 feet long (compare that to a modern aircraft carrier at approximately 900 feet in length), 92.5 feet wide at the beam, and weighed in at 46,328 tons. The Titanic carried twenty-nine 100-ton boilers, which produced 55,000 horsepower to drive her two sets of four-cylinder reciprocating engines at speeds up to twenty-five knots.
She was the first ship to have a swimming pool. Her accommodations included First Class Staterooms available in any one of seven architectural styles, two first-class stairways (including a Grand Staircase of polished oak, decorated with a bronze cherub, a clock, and gold-plated light fixtures as well as natural light from a domed overhead skylight), a luxuriously wood-paneled and decorated First Class Lounge, a Smoking Room fitted with stained-glass windows, a hundred-foot-long Dining Salon, the Verandah Café, a Turkish bath, a squash court, a gymnasium, and four electric elevators. The Titanic was designed to carry as many as 2,599 passengers and 903 officers and crew.
The ship had been outfitted with sixteen sets of double-action boat davits, enough to hold forty-eight lifeboats, but she carried only fourteen regular lifeboats (seating 65 people each), two emergency sea boats (seating 35 each), as well as four smaller collapsible boats (seating 49 each). Filled to capacity, these boats could have carried 1,176 people to safety. There were life belts available for all, but they were of little help in surviving the freezing waters of the North Atlantic.
When the Titanic struck an iceberg some four hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland on April 14, 1912, at 11:40 P.M., she was sailing with 2,223 passengers and crew. Of that number only 706 made it into lifeboats, many of which were lowered from the doomed liner with fewer than a third of their seats filled. The rest, 1,517 men, women, and children, went down with the great ship when it finally sank beneath calm waters at about 2:20 A.M. A more careful loading of the available boats could have saved over three hundred more people.
But no matter the number of seats filled, the Titanic and a majority of those she carried were doomed, because a seat on a lifeboat for every person on board was not required! Not by the British Board of Trade, which had authority over British shipping, nor by U.S. authorities with jurisdiction over