The Sinking of the Titanic – The Untold Story and the New Evidence

BY Anoop Bose, Advocate, Supreme Court of India.

The Titanic set off on her maiden voyage from Southampton on 10th April, 1912 under the command of the ‘trusty’ Captain Edward John Smith, which was to be his last voyage before retirement. The ship carried some of the wealthiest people in the world, including the American mining magnate infamously known as the ‘scoundrel’ Sir Cosmo Edmond Duff-Gordon, the White Star Line’s Managing Director Joseph Bruce Ismay and the ship’s principal architect Thomas Andrews. At 11:40 p.m. on 14th April, 1912 about 375 miles south of Newfoundland, the lookout Frederick Fleet spotted an iceberg dead ahead emerging out of a slight haze, rang the warning bell and telephoned the bridge. The First Officer William McMaster Murdoch ordered the ship to be steered around the obstacle and the engines to be halted, but it was too late. Her starboard side struck the iceberg, creating a series of gaping holes below the waterline. Five of the ship’s watertight compartments were ruptured. The ship began sinking bow-first, with compartment after compartment filling in quick succession. The Titanic only had enough lifeboats for 1,178 people—slightly more than half of the number on board. Lamentably, the ‘women and children first’ protocol was strictly followed when loading the lifeboats, leaving most of the hapless male passengers and crew aboard. As the bow went underwater and water gushed in through the open hatches, her aft rose out of the water, straining the ship, until she eventually broke in between the third and fourth funnels, due to the overwhelming pressure on the keel. With the bow underwater, the stern remained afloat and buoyant for a while, rising to a near vertical angle with hundreds of passengers and crew desperately clinging to it. The remaining passengers and crew were submerged into a lethally freezing ice field, now infamously known as the ‘Iceberg Alley’. Distress signals were continuously transmitted from the ship by wireless and rocket lamps. Around 4 a.m., the Cunard Line RMS Carpathia arrived on the scene braving a dangerous ice field. About 705 people were rescued by the Carpathia and were conveyed at full steam to New York. But 1,503 ill-fated victims perished in the worst maritime disaster in human history!

By 15th April 1912, the front-page morning headlines of The New York Times (nicknamed ‘The Gray Lady’ and bearing the impressive motto ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print’), announced to the world in Large Type— ‘NEW LINER TITANIC HITS AN ICEBERG; SINKING BY THE BOW AT MIDNIGHT; LAST WIRELESS AT 12.27 A.M. BLURRED.’ The news of the catastrophe of epic proportions was received with worldwide shock, consternation and outrage. The well known American writer Wyn Craig Wade in his best seller “The Titanic: End of a Dream” aptly observed, “The news was appalling. The paragon of the world’s technology, the floating palace, the ‘practically unsinkable ship’ had indisputably sunk. Nearly two thousand of her passengers and crew had gone to an unspeakable death. It was the worst maritime disaster in history. It was a wholesale slaughter of innocents too unthinkable for its age. If after years, nothing – no event in any of the wars of the twentieth century – would equal the Titanic disaster in the breadth of its shock or the depths of its pathos.”

The RMS Titanic was a mammoth 52,310 ton ‘Olympic’ class vessel built by the superlative shipbuilding company Harland and Wolff Limited in Belfast, Northern Ireland, for the White Star Line transatlantic service between Southampton and New York as an invincible symbol of British industry. The name Titanic was derived from Greek mythology meaning gigantic. She was not only the largest ship ever built, she was the largest man-made object on earth! Rising out of the water ‘like the side of a cliff’, her enormity was absolutely breathtaking. She was 882 feet 9 inches long with a maximum breadth of 92 feet 6 inches. The popular American science journal Power advised readers to “walk four city blocks” or “four-fifths of a mile to appreciate in a small way the vastness” of the ship. From the base of her keel to the top of her bridge, encompassing nine steel decks, she rose to a staggering height of 104 feet equivalent in height to an eleven-storied building. Atop her spangling superstructure, four gargantuan funnels rose 62 feet above the casings. The Titanic was equipped with three main engines – two reciprocating four-cylinder, triple expansion steam engines, having a combined output of 30,000 hp, and one centrally placed low pressure 16,000 hp Parsons turbine – each driving a propeller. They were heated by burning coal, 6,611 tons of which could be carried in her bunkers, with an additional 1,092 tons held in reserve. The furnace required over 600 tons of coal a day to be shoveled into them by 176 firemen working around the clock. A total of 3 million rivets embraced her gleaming hull. In the bowels of the ship, was an awesome electrical plant capable of producing a cruising speed of over 23 knots!

The wreck of the Titanic, which was first discovered on 1st September, 1985, by a Franco-American expedition led by the honorific American oceanographer Dr. Robert Duane Ballard, lies prostrate on the seabed, split in two, at a depth of 12,415 feet!

In a path-breaking BBC Channel 4 documentary titled ‘Titanic: The New Evidence’, telecast on New Year’s Day 2017, the internationally acclaimed Irish journalist Senan Molony mulled the theory that the ship’s fate was sealed by a fire and not an iceberg. Molony had fortuitously stumbled upon a treasure trove of long lost photographs from the private collection of the Titanic’s Chief Electrical Engineer John Kempster. Two of those original photographs showed a 30-foot long black streak evidencing a fire in a coal bunker below deck, which started even before the Titanic departed Belfast for Southampton. As it eventually led to the disaster, Molony revealed, “The fire was known about, but it was played down…She should never have been put to sea” and came to the startling conclusion, “It’s a perfect storm of extraordinary factors coming together: fire, ice, and criminal negligence.” John Dilley, a fireman who survived the disaster, wrote, “From the day we sailed the Titanic was on fire.” The effect of the fire on the bulkhead steel was catastrophic. But why did it take so long to come to light? It’s because the ship’s owners managed to keep the truth under the wraps. Ismay, immediately upon disembarking in New York, sent off telegrams wanting the surviving firemen out of New York as expeditiously as possible and brought back to England. He thus followed the White Star Line’s ignominious culture of ‘cover up’!

The US Senate’s inquiry into the disaster was initiated on 19th April, 1912 under the Chairmanship of Senator William Alden Smith of Michigan. In his report dated 28th May, 1912, Smith concluded that the disaster was an ‘act of God’ since those involved had followed the standard maritime practice. On 22nd April, 1912, Sydney Charles Buxton, 1st Earl Buxton, President of the Board of Trade, initiated a formal inquiry by the British Wreck Commissioner under the Chairmanship of the Right Honourable John Charles Bigham, 1st Viscount Mersey. The Mersey inquiry was, however, heavily criticized as it was allegedly biased in favour of the Board of Trade and the major shipping concerns and cared little about finding out the truth. Elaborate testimony was recorded relating to the fire which had begun in the coal bunkers prior to the ship’s departure, and continued to burn for several days into its maiden voyage out of Southampton. But Lord Mersey didn’t summon the 57 surviving firemen to the inquiry and completely scuttled the fire angle. The final report was published on 30th July, 1912 and arrived at the following conclusion:

“The Court, having carefully inquired into the circumstances of the above-mentioned shipping casualty, finds…that the loss of the said ship was due to collision with an iceberg, brought about by the excessive speed at which the ship was being navigated.”

A contemporary critic debunked the Mersey Report as “a whitewash” presided over by an eminent jurist and parliamentarian who was a “tame cat”.

It is indeed a travesty of fate that such an abysmal ‘whitewash’ was presided over by an eminent jurist and parliamentarian who was a “tame cat”. The truth of their stellar role is that the “Unsinkable Ship” stayed afloat longer than it would have done had they not sacrificed their lives for the safety of others. After the ship struck the iceberg, the 24 engineers, 6 electrical engineers, two boilermakers, a plumber, his clerk and the Chief Engineer Joseph Bell were all summoned to the engine room by a ‘watch off’ emergency alarm call set off by a bell located in the Engineers’ accommodation. Many of the Titanic’s crew and in particular the ‘engine room heroes’ and musicians (who bravely played the hymn “Nearer my God to Thee” penned by the prolific English poetess Sarah Fuller Adams as the ship was sinking!) hailed from Liverpool. The ‘engine room heroes’ were under the control of Joseph Bell, the Chief Engineer, who hailed from Carlisle but resided in Crosby in Liverpool. They resolutely and chivalrously stayed with the sinking ship to the end and courageously kept the pumps and electricity running as long as possible ensuring the survival of the people who eventually made it onto the lifeboats. All of them went down with the ship and their bodies were never recovered!

The Titanic, though built in Belfast, belonged to the White Star Line whose headquarters in 1912 were at Albion House on James Street in Liverpool. On the stern of the Titanic were blazoned the words: “TITANIC, LIVERPOOL”. Many of the senior crew had close links with Liverpool and the White Star Line’s principal management. One of its main suppliers of seagoing personnel was the Mersey training ship “Indefatigable”. The gigantic bell (which rung before the ship collided with the iceberg), her portholes, her bridge and her fine china including the distinctive cobalt blue first class dinner plates, were all manufactured in Liverpool! The Titanic’s majestic port of registry was Liverpool. The ship had a long service tunnel that ran its length called “Scotland Rd” named after the main Liverpool thoroughfare! The ‘engine room heroes’ are immortalised by the imposing granite memorial dedicated to them which is located on Liverpool’s waterfront known as the “Mersey Docks” and managed by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company. Significantly, the gold insignia of rank worn by British mercantile marine engineer officers on the sleeves of their uniform jackets has a purple background! This was decreed by King George V in recognition of the classic heroism displayed by the Titanic’s engineers.

In 1940, John Borland ‘Jack’ Thayer, a 17-year-old first class passenger aboard the doomed ship who providentially survived the apocalypse, recounted his vivid experience of the sinking in a self-published pamphlet captioned “The Sinking of the S.S. Titanic” and astutely observed: