The Night Lives On Read online

  Nobody thought about that just now. Pride was everything. “A Masterpiece of Irish Brains and Industry,” proclaimed the Irish News and Belfast Morning News the following day. At the moment all eyes were turned on Slip No. 3, where the Titanic stood poised, her hull glistening under a fresh coat of black paint. Above the huge gantry encasing the vessel flew the British Red Ensign, the American Stars and Stripes, and a set of signal flags spelling out “Good Luck.”

  Just before noon Lord Pirrie, the elderly Chairman of Harland & Wolff, began receiving his Distinguished Guests at the shipyard’s main offices on Queen’s Road. The owners’ party was led, of course, by Joseph Bruce Ismay, Chairman and Managing Director of the White Star Line. His father, Thomas Ismay, had been a towering figure—the man who built White Star from scratch—which might help explain why the son struck some people as autocratic and overly assertive.

  Numerically, the Ismay family dominated the owner’s party, but only numerically. The truly dominating figure in the group was the great American financier J. Pierpont Morgan, whose fierce, piercing glance could wither any target. In 1902 Morgan had formed the International Mercantile Marine, a huge shipping trust which now controlled the White Star Line. The Titanic flew the British flag, but her ownership was about as British as U.S. Steel, another Morgan trust.

  Promptly at noon Lord Pirrie led his guests from the offices to the observation stands a few yards away. These had been hastily hammered together and draped with bunting for the occasion. The owner’s party filed into a small stand alongside the Titanic’s port bow. Other guests joined the press, now 90 strong, in the main stand directly in front of the liner’s bow.

  His guests seated, Pirrie headed off for a final inspection of the launching gear. He sported a jaunty yachting cap, a fittingly festive touch for the occasion. Today marked not only the launching of the largest ship in the world; it was also his and Lady Pirrie’s birthday.

  At 12:05 P.M. a red signal flag was hoisted on the Titanic’s sternpost, warning the tugs and spectator fleet to stand clear. At 12:10 a rocket was fired, announcing five minutes to go. The pounding of hammers on a dozen last-minute chores ceased. The buzz of conversation in the stands tapered off. The great crowds in the Albert Quay enclosure, at Spencer Basin, in the harbor craft, and on the wharfs and quays all fell silent, as the final minutes ticked away.

  At 12:14 another rocket was fired, but for long seconds the Titanic still seemed to stand motionless on the stocks. The workers on deck were the first to sense a trace of movement, and they began to cheer. Those on shore took it up, as they too could now see the ship coming to life. A bedlam of whistles added to the din, along with the crack of bracing timbers and the jangle of anchor chains, meant to slow the vessel down once she was afloat. Slowly gathering momentum, she glided smoothly down the ways, lubricated with 3 tons of soft soap, 15 tons of tallow, and 5 tons of tallow mixed with train oil. At 12:15:02—just 62 seconds after she began to move—the Titanic was proudly afloat.

  While a fleet of tugs nudged her toward the fittingout berth, Lord Pirrie hosted an intimate luncheon at the shipyard for the Ismay party and Mr. Morgan. Their day was capped by a special treat: at 2:30 they were whisked to the Titanic’s sister ship Olympic, which had just completed her trials and was lying in Belfast Lough. She would take the Distinguished Guests back to England, giving them a preview of life on the great new vessel they had just seen launched—except that the Titanic would be even more magnificent.

  Meanwhile most of the dignitaries present at the launching enjoyed a gala luncheon at Belfast’s Grand Central Hotel. Besides port officials and visiting firemen, this group included the engineers, naval architects, and technical experts whose expertise enabled the great Edwardian Captains of Industry to put together their grand schemes and designs. These technicians were both underpaid and overworked, and it was a positive bargain if Harland & Wolff could keep them happy with an occasional luncheon of filet de boeuf washed down with Chateâu Larose 1888, as was the case today.

  Finally, there was the press. They, too, were given a special luncheon at the Grand Central Hotel, this one hosted by the White Star Line. Speaking for the line, Mr. J. Shelley thanked the journalists for their support, and pointed out that shipbuilding was doing more good for the Anglo-Saxon race than all the chancelleries of Europe combined.

  “Hear! Hear!” cried the newsmen, and in a flowery response, the well-known maritime writer Frank T. Bullen praised the modesty of Harland & Wolff in eschewing ceremonial frills like bands and flag-waving. That was “the British way,” he noted approvingly.

  The proceedings concluded with the entire press corps sending a telegram to Lord Pirrie on the Olympic, wishing him and Lady Pirrie a happy birthday, and congratulating them both on the successful trials of the Olympic and launch of the Titanic.

  There was only one sour note. The editor of the Irish News and Belfast Morning News—evidently a mythologist—couldn’t understand why the ship was named Titanic. The Titans, he pointed out in an editorial the following morning, were a mythological race who waged war against Zeus himself to their ultimate ruin. “He smote the strong and daring Titans with thunderbolts; and their final abiding place was in some limbo beneath the lowest depths of the Tartarus.” It seemed strange to name this great new ship after a race that “symbolized the vain efforts of mere strength to resist the ordinances of the more ‘civilized’ order established by Zeus, their triumphant enemy.”

  The paper finally decided, a little lamely, that the Titanic had been apparently named in the spirit of contradiction, that she represented the ultimate triumph of order and modern civilization, and that her builders and owners really stood for a later race of mythological giants who were wiser than their Titanic fathers. In other words, the builders and owners knew best, and they must have had some good reason for this seemingly inappropriate name.

  CHAPTER III

  Legendary from the Start

  THE BUILDING OF THE Titanic has created almost as many legends as her sinking. Not long after A Night to Remember was published, several letters arrived from Ireland explaining the “real” reason why the ship sank. The trouble could be traced, these letters said, to the official number—3909 04—given the Titanic by those Ulstermen who built her. Held up to a mirror, these figures spell NO POPE. True enough, provided one fudges the “4” a little.

  But a quick check of the records destroys the theory. The yard number assigned to the Titanic by Harland &Wolff was “401,” and her Board of Trade official number was “131,428.” Viewed in a mirror, neither of these numbers says anything at all.

  Then there is the legend that the Titanic was advertised as “unsinkable.” The press, captivated by the ironical implications, has faithfully repeated the story through the years. Actually, the White Star ads never made such a claim about either the Titanic or her sister ship Olympic. All promotion almost invariably used the simple slogan “Largest and finest steamers in the world.”

  This bit of debunking has now led the inevitable band of Titanic revisionists to go much further. “I can find no contemporary evidence that the Titanic was regarded as virtually unsinkable until after she had sunk,” wrote journalist Philip Howard in the London Times in 1981. “With hindsight we have created the myth because it makes a more dramatic metaphor.”

  He should have looked a little harder. On June 1, 1911, along with its account of the Titanic’s launch, the Irish News and Belfast Morning News ran a follow-up story headlined TITANIC DESCRIBED. This included a detailed account of the ship’s 16 watertight compartments and the electrically controlled doors that connected them. “In the event of an accident, or at any time when it may be considered advisable, the captain can, by simply moving an electric switch, instantly close the doors throughout, practically making the vessel unsinkable.”

  Later that June the prestigious magazine Shipbuilder also described these miracle doors, explaining how they could be closed by merely flicking a switch on the bridge, making the s
hip “practically unsinkable.”

  Captain Smith himself believed it. As he explained when he brought over the much smaller Adriatic in 1906:

  I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.

  So the “unsinkability” of the Titanic was not the product of some slick advertising copywriter, nor was it a myth later invented to improve the story. It was the considered opinion of the experts at the time, and it worked its greatest mischief neither before nor after the event, but during the hours of agonizing uncertainty while the tragedy was still unfolding.

  “We place absolute confidence in the Titanic. We believe that the boat is unsinkable,” declared Philip A. S. Franklin, Vice-President of the White Star Line in New York, as the first alarming reports began to drift in around 8 A.M. on April 15.

  The Titanic could certainly float two or three days, he elaborated around noon. Other experts seemed to agree. Captain Johnson of the American Liner St. Paul declared that it was practically impossible for the Titanic to sink, because her 15 bulkheads would keep her afloat indefinitely. Actually, the Titanic had by now been at the bottom of the sea a good 12 hours.

  “I want to say this,” Franklin later testified at the U.S. Senate investigation. “During the entire day we considered the ship unsinkable, and it never entered our minds that there had been anything like a serious loss of life.”

  How close to “unsinkable” really was the Titanic? Did she embody the latest engineering techniques? Was she as staunch as man could make her? Did she at least represent what we have now come to call “the state of the art”?

  The answer is “No.” Far from being a triumph of safe construction, or the best that could be done with the technology available, the Titanic was the product of a trend the other way, a trend that for 50 years had seen one safety feature after another sacrificed for competitive reasons.

  In 1858 a ship had been built that really did come close to being unsinkable. This was the Great Eastern, a mammoth liner of 19,000 tons and nearly 700 feet in length. She proved a commercial disaster—unwieldy, under-powered, uneconomical, and unlucky—but in one respect she was superb. She brilliantly incorporated every safety feature that could be devised.

  The Great Eastern was really two ships in one. Two feet, 10 inches, inside her outer hull was a wholly separate inner hull, the two joined together by a network of braces. Like the Titanic, she was divided into 16 watertight compartments by 15 transverse bulkheads, but on the Great Eastern, the bulkheads ran higher and had no doors. To get from one compartment to another, it was necessary to climb to the bulkhead deck, cross over, and go down the other side. The bulkhead deck was also watertight, with a minimum of hatches and companion-ways. Finally, the Great Eastern had two longitudinal bulkheads extending the whole length of her boiler and engine rooms. This honeycomb of walls and decks gave her a total of some 40-50 separate watertight compartments.

  The acid test came on the night of August 27, 1862, two years after she began her trans-Atlantic service. Steaming for New York with 820 passengers, the Great Eastern was off Montauk Point, Long Island, when she scraped an uncharted rock, ripped a gash in her outer skin 83 feet long and 9 feet wide. Considering her size, the hole was comparable to the damage that sank the Titanic.

  But the Great Eastern did not go down. She sagged to starboard, but the inner skin held and the engine rooms remained dry. Next morning she limped into New York Harbor under her own steam.

  Her survival was a tribute to the engineering genius of her builder, Isambard Kingdom Brunel—and to the mood of the times. The mechanical engineer was the western world’s new hero—and no wonder. Twenty years before the building of the Great Eastern, the only way to cross the Atlantic was by sailing packet. Slow, cramped, and unpredictable, the trip could take a month. Then, almost overnight it seemed, came these absurd-looking floating “teakettles.” Their pistons hissing and clanking, their tall chimneys belching smoke and sparks, their paddle wheels thrashing the waves, they quickly cut the trip to less than ten days. The men who wrought this miracle—the engineers who made steam do their bidding—were deferred to on every question involving the design and construction of these new contraptions. If Brunel wanted his “leviathan” to be the best in every way—size, speed, strength, and safety—that was the way it would be, regardless of cost.

  But the engineers did not have the last word for very long. The speed and reliability of the new steamships meant a great surge in trans-Atlantic travel, with profits further fattened by the growing emigrant trade and generous mail contracts. The stakes were high, and by 1873 eleven major lines were fighting for their share. Entrepreneurs and promoters moved in, and the perfect ship was no longer the vessel that best expressed the art of the shipbuilder. It was the ship that made the most money.

  Passengers demanded attention; stewards could serve them more easily if doors were cut in the watertight bulkheads. A grand staircase required a spacious opening at every level, making a watertight deck impossible. The sweep of a magnificent dining saloon left no room for bulkheads that might spoil the effect. Stokers could work more efficiently if longitudinal bulkheads were omitted and the bunkers carried clear across the ship. A double hull ate up valuable passenger and cargo space; a double bottom would be enough.

  One by one the safety precautions that marked the Great Eastern were chipped away in the interests of a more competitive ship. There were exceptions of course—the Mauretania and Lusitania had to meet Admiralty specifications—but the Olympic and Titanic were more typical. When the “unsinkable” Titanic was completed in 1912, she matched the Great Eastern in only one respect: she, too, had 15 transverse watertight bulkheads.

  But even this was misleading. The Great Eastern’s bulkheads were carried 30 feet above the waterline; the Titanic’s bulkheads, only 10 feet. Even her vaunted system of watertight doors that could be closed from the bridge “by simply moving a switch” fell short of its promise. Only 12 doors at the very bottom of the ship could be closed this way. The rest (some 20 or 30) had to be closed by hand. On the night of the collision some were; some weren’t. Some were even closed, then opened again to make it easier to rig the pumps.

  Why, then, was such a vulnerable ship considered by the owners themselves to be virtually unsinkable? Partly, it was because the Titanic would indeed float with any two compartments flooded, and the White Star Line couldn’t imagine anything worse than a collision at the juncture of two compartments. But there was another reason, too, why the owners were lulled into complacency. This was because the ship looked so safe. Her huge bulk, her tiers of decks rising one atop the other, her 29 boilers, her luxurious fittings—all seemed to spell “permanence.” The appearance of safety was mistaken for safety itself.

  The Titanic was indeed a magnificent sight as she left Belfast on April 2, 1912, and headed for Southampton, where she would begin her service on the North Atlantic run. At 46,328 tons, she was the largest ship in the world—only a trifle bigger than her sister ship Olympic, but 50% larger than any other liner afloat. With ships increasing in size so dramatically, her vast bulk inevitably led to still more legends: that she had a golf course…that she carried a small herd of dairy cows to supply fresh milk…that she was a half-mile long. The Titanic boasted none of these features; in fact, she was quite similar to the Olympic, which had already been in service for a year. White Star’s problem was how to give the new ship a little extra glamour when both vessels had basically the same structure.

  The company solved this problem brilliantly with two new amenities that required a minimum of structural change. First, a set of 28 splendid staterooms were installed on B Deck, more lavish than any on the Olympic and complete with large windows (not portholes) that looked out directly on the sea. Most of these rooms were interconnecting and could be turned into suites of any size. Each was painstakingly decorated in a different period style—L
ouis XVI, Early Dutch, Regency, and so on. Two suites even had private promenade decks done in half-timbered Tudor.

  The second innovation was even more arresting. A section of the Second Class Promenade Deck was appropriated for a dazzling new First Class attraction: a genuine French “sidewalk” café, complete with genuine French waiters. By now the veteran Atlantic traveler was bored by mere paneled magnificence—one more ornate lounge would have made no impression—but the addition of this bright, airy café with its Continental chic (especially on a staid British ship) was sensational.

  As a final touch, the forward half of the Promenade Deck was glassed in, giving the First Class passengers extra shelter in bad weather and, incidentally, marking the Titanic as a step ahead of her sister ship Olympic.

  Both the Café Parisien and the new “special staterooms” stirred great attention as the Titanic prepared to sail on her maiden voyage, April 10. They stamped her as the most luxurious ship on the Atlantic—at least until next year, when an immense new German liner, already taking shape at Hamburg, would enter the unending struggle for maritime supremacy.

  CHAPTER IV

  Had Ships Gotten Too Big for Captain Smith?

  AS I RECALL, ON the day it sailed, all England was merry in the celebration of a holiday for the occasion. Flags flying in the breeze in every city and hamlet. There was the inevitable speech-making. That gloriously martial air, “Britannia Rules the Waves,” was the mighty theme-song of the day….

  So the Reverend Wilfred G. Hurley described the Titanic’s maiden sailing, April 10, 1912, in a little pamphlet published 37 years later by the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle. It is a familiar picture, handed down by countless writers through the years.