There's a reason so many died in the Titanic

[Neapolitan Ice Cream]

In 1912, one man was blamed for all the deaths on the Titanic. This man was not the Titanic’s captain, but Captain Stanley Lord of the steamship Californian.
This medium sized, nondescript tramp steamer had been close enough to see the distress rockets fired by the Titanic, but had not gone to the rescue. This aspect of the Titanic disaster is known as the Californian incident.

What happened? The Californian incident is controversial, but we know this: Late in the evening of 14 April 1912, in mid-Atlantic, the Californian had run into a low, slushy icefield. Captain Lord decided to stop for the night, and retired to rest in his chart room. An unknown ship then approached from the southeast and, at 11.40pm or thereabouts, stopped. Then, from about 12.45am onwards, the ship fired eight white rockets. These rockets were seen by the Californian’s second officer Herbert Stone, who was standing the midnight watch on the bridge. He reported the rockets to his captain, but Lord did not leave the chart room. No one woke the wireless operator. At 2.20am the ship disappeared.

On the same evening, in the same general area of the ocean but somewhere to the south, the Titanic hit her iceberg at about 11.40pm, fired eight white rockets to attract the attention of a ship she could see to her north, and sank at about 2.20am.

To the American and British inquiries this concordance of times and events was conclusive: they found that the Californian saw the Titanic’s distress rockets and condemned Captain Lord for not responding to them. If he had gone to the rockets, they said, he could have ‘saved many if not all of the lives that were lost’.
“Had he been vigilant…there is a very strong probability that every human life that was sacrificed through this disaster could have been saved” — Senator William Alden Smith, US Senate.

“When she first saw the rockets the Californian could have pushed through the ice to the open water without any serious risk and so have come to the assistance of the Titanic. Had she done so she might have saved many if not all of the lives that were lost.” — Lord Mersey, UK Wreck Commissioner.

daviddyer.com.au/the-californian-incident

 

[CAPSLOCK]

That's very sad, and extremely negligent on their part. Why would they think a ship was firing flares, if not to ask for help?

 

[fla4fun]

In 1912, one man was blamed for all the deaths on the Titanic. This man was not the Titanic’s captain, but Captain Stanley Lord of the steamship Californian.
This medium sized, nondescript tramp steamer had been close enough to see the distress rockets fired by the Titanic, but had not gone to the rescue. This aspect of the Titanic disaster is known as the Californian incident.

What happened? The Californian incident is controversial, but we know this: Late in the evening of 14 April 1912, in mid-Atlantic, the Californian had run into a low, slushy icefield. Captain Lord decided to stop for the night, and retired to rest in his chart room. An unknown ship then approached from the southeast and, at 11.40pm or thereabouts, stopped. Then, from about 12.45am onwards, the ship fired eight white rockets. These rockets were seen by the Californian’s second officer Herbert Stone, who was standing the midnight watch on the bridge. He reported the rockets to his captain, but Lord did not leave the chart room. No one woke the wireless operator. At 2.20am the ship disappeared.

On the same evening, in the same general area of the ocean but somewhere to the south, the Titanic hit her iceberg at about 11.40pm, fired eight white rockets to attract the attention of a ship she could see to her north, and sank at about 2.20am.

To the American and British inquiries this concordance of times and events was conclusive: they found that the Californian saw the Titanic’s distress rockets and condemned Captain Lord for not responding to them. If he had gone to the rockets, they said, he could have ‘saved many if not all of the lives that were lost’.
“Had he been vigilant…there is a very strong probability that every human life that was sacrificed through this disaster could have been saved” — Senator William Alden Smith, US Senate.

“When she first saw the rockets the Californian could have pushed through the ice to the open water without any serious risk and so have come to the assistance of the Titanic. Had she done so she might have saved many if not all of the lives that were lost.” — Lord Mersey, UK Wreck Commissioner.

daviddyer.com.au/the-californian-incident

The saddest part of the Californian story to me is that initially the wireless operator was at his station. He tried to send a message to a ship that was visible (believed by most to be the Titanic) about being stopped by the ice field. But Phillips, an employee of the Marconi Company (not White Star, who owned Titanic) was busy sending paid passenger messages to the Cape Race station on land and brushed him off. Since the Californian did not maintain 24 hour radio operations, the operator shut down and went to bed not long before the collision occurred. Why no one got him up later is the biggest mystery. I would have thought it would be easier to contact the ship by radio than trying to use Morse Lamps, which was unsuccessful. If the Californian had a 24 hour radio room, they would have known what was happening. As it was, they didn’t find out what happened until their radio operator came on shift the next morning, after the Carpathia had arrived. Even if the captain didn’t specifically say to wake up the radio operator, shouldn’t the person in command during the night have had the authority to do that on his own? I suppose if all radio operators at the time were employees of the radio company and not the shipping company there could have been contracts that restricted overtime or something along those lines but I have to believe there were exceptions during distress calls.

Another puzzling thing is that the Carpathia did not see the Californian, but saw other ships in the vicinity while picking up survivors, as many as four according to some reports. This does lend some credence to the Californian insisting that the ship they saw sailed away, and the fact that they said the rockets were even with the mast, not flying up much higher as the rockets on Titanic did (meaning that the Titanic’s rockets were appearing above another ship). It may have also contributed to the Morse Lamps not working as intended. There are still many debates about how close the Californian and the Titanic were and whether they were visible to each other. There have also been discussions regarding how long it would have taken for the Californian to restart her engines from a full stop and then maneuver safely around the ice to the ship. Some argue the Carpathia would have still been there first and that hypothermia would have still claimed the passengers in the water. This does not absolve the Californian of the responsibility to do everything they could to make sure another ship was not in distress, especially in regards to the radio operator, but it does give an indication that there was a lot going on that hasn’t been thoroughly researched and explained. At a bare minimum they could have continued sending distress calls for Titanic when she was no longer able to (although debatable, with a less powerful radio, that it would have helped). So many little things went wrong that night that it’s easy to wonder if just one had gone differently would those passengers have survived. It would have been interesting to get the testimony of some of the other ships in the area to find out what they knew, when they knew it, and why didn’t they assist Carpathia with survivors.

The Californian and Captain Lord certainly played a significant part in the Titanic disaster, but I don’t think it’s fair to pin the loss of life squarely on his shoulders. He was just one more contributing factor. There were too many other people, from Captain Smith and Bruce Ismay all the way back to Harland and Wolff’s designs, who contributed just as much to the final outcome. What if the ice warnings had all been delivered to the bridge in a timely manner, and the officers on the bridge had taken them seriously and altered their course farther south as a result? Captain Smith himself said about the Olympic that he couldn’t conceive of a ship foundering because ship building had gone beyond that. Did that make him complacent? What if Harland and Wolff had designed the watertight compartments with the ability to seal them completely instead of leaving them wide open at the top? She was already designed to float with her first four compartments breached so if they could have contained the water from compartment five, would she have remained afloat? Everyone could have done a better job in my opinion, even down to the passengers who didn’t take the evacuation seriously which contributed to life boats being launched partially empty because they couldn’t wait any longer. Every empty lifeboat seat was a life lost unnecessarily.

This is why the Titanic fascinates us over 100 years later. There are still questions that haven’t been satisfactorily answered and people won’t give up until they are.