You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [49]
Captain Smith had admitted, while commanding the Olympic, that additional safety equipment was needed, but that White Star did not provide it, “not due to a desire…to save money, but rather because they believed their ships to be safe. Lifeboats were thought to be required…only in cases in which passengers were to be landed.”
In spite of his stated concern, the captain was amazingly lax in matters of safety. The closest thing to a lifeboat drill held on the ship had been the brief lowering of two boats into the water on the starboard side while still docked at Southampton. A list of lifeboat stations for crew members wasn’t posted until several days into the voyage, nor were passengers ever drilled in emergency procedures.
For all Smith’s faith in his floating charge, the question arises of just how much faith should have been placed in the Millionaire’s Captain by his employers. Despite his assertion of an “uneventful” life at sea, Smith’s record was hardly spotless. While it’s true he had been involved in only relatively minor accidents, they all seemed to point to the fact that the modern superliners had grown too large for Smith’s knowledge and experience as a seaman.
In 1911, Captain Smith was given command of the Olympic, until Titanic’s commissioning the largest ship afloat. She was almost twice as big as any ship he had ever handled, and his inexperience showed through on the ship’s maiden voyage on June 21, 1911. As the giant liner was being moved into her slip, the tug the O. L. Hallenbeck was sucked against the Olympic, cutting off the smaller ship’s stern frame, rudder, and wheel shaft after a sudden reverse burst of the giant ship’s starboard rudder.
Several months later, on September 20, 1911, the Olympic collided with the Royal Navy cruiser Hawke in a narrow channel off the Isle of Wight.
Yet in spite of these incidents and in spite of this apparent proof that he was unaware of the displacement effects of a ship the size of the Olympic, he was allowed to continue commanding superliners, perhaps on the assumption that any captain could navigate any ship, regardless of her size.
It was such a miscalculation that caused the Titanic’s famous encounter with an iceberg. In fact, even as the Titanic left her berth at Southampton on Wednesday, April 10, at 12:15 P.M., Captain Smith’s awkwardness with this behemoth of a ship caused yet another, albeit minor, incident. The backwash from the Titanic’s starboard propeller carried away the moorings of another liner, the New York. The Titanic’s maiden voyage had to be delayed by half an hour until the smaller ship could be secured.
The rest of the voyage went off without a hitch. Though cold — the water temperature in the North Atlantic hovered around the freezing mark — the weather was uniformly clear, the sea calm. The Titanic’s radio operator began receiving wireless warnings of ice in the area from nearby ships on Sunday, April 14. At least seven separate warnings were logged and reported to Captain Smith or his senior crew throughout the day, some of ice as near as five miles from the Titanic’s position. But neither Smith nor his officers seemed overly concerned. Even in the face of the warnings, the captain ordered the ship to maintain her cruising speed of twenty-one knots. There are some who believe the captain was under pressure by J. Bruce Ismay, managing director of the White Star Line and a passenger on this voyage, to push the Titanic in order to beat the Olympic’s old speed record for the Atlantic crossing. Not only was the Titanic the largest ship afloat, she was going to be the fastest as well.
Only about an hour before encountering the iceberg, the Titanic had received a wireless message from the steamship Amerika: “We are stopped and surrounded by ice.” The radio operator of the Titanic couldn’t be bothered, replying, “Shut up. I am busy. I am working [i.e., sending passenger messages to] Cape Race [Newfoundland].”
In spite of these warnings, Captain Smith did almost nothing. He took no precautions other than to