How to Survive the Titanic

‘It was in the night time,’ Rostron politely replied. ‘Although I was running a risk with my own ship and my own passengers, I also had to consider what I was going for.’

‘To save the lives of others?’

‘Yes,’ Rostron nodded. ‘I had to consider the lives of others.’

‘You were prompted,’ said Smith, ‘by your interest in humanity. And you took the chance.’

‘It was hardly a chance,’ said Rostron. ‘Of course it was a chance, but at the same time I knew quite what I was doing.’

‘I think I might say, for my associates,’ Smith looked around him, ‘that your conduct deserves the highest praise.’

It had been ‘absolutely providential’, said Rostron, that the modest Carpathia picked up the mighty Titanic’s CQD (the maritime distress call). Senator Smith agreed that it had indeed been ‘a very remarkable coincidence’, ‘so providential as to excite wonder’. Had the message come five minutes later, ‘the ill-paid operator’ who ‘snatched this secret from the air, would have forgotten his perplexities in slumber’.

Ismay listened as Rostron (mistakenly) explained that a boat the size of Collapsible C could contain up to seventy-five people — considerably more than the forty-five he had stated earlier — and confirmed that ‘if the Titanic had hit the iceberg bow-on — she should have been in the New York harbour instead of at the bottom of the sea’.

Smith then fired his killer question: ‘Who is the master of a ship at sea?’

‘By law,’ replied Rostron, ‘the Captain of the vessel has absolute control, but suppose we get orders from the owners of the vessel to do a certain thing and we do not carry it out: the only thing then is that we are liable to dismissal.’ Smith took it in: to the crew, the Captain was next to God, to the owner, the Captain was an employee.

Rostron was released, and he returned to begin again his ship’s delayed Mediterranean cruise. He was later given honorary American status when he became the first Englishman to have a plaque of his head placed in New York’s Hall of Fame.

Before the morning session ended, Congressman J. A. Hughes of West Virginia made an intervention. Hughes, whose newly married daughter, Mrs Lucian P. Smith, had been on the Titanic and lost her husband, was a recipient of the mysterious Marconigram from the ‘White Star Line’ stating that the steamer was being towed to Halifax with all her passengers on board. It was Mrs Lucian P. Smith who then told the press, in a story which had spread across America, that on being picked up by the Carpathia, Ismay had insisted he be given a good meal and private quarters. The Congressman now read aloud a message he had received from a certain newspaper: ‘You are quoted in press reports declaring, following Mrs Smith’s story, that Ismay should be lynched. Please wire us, day press rate collect, 500 words, your view of Titanic disaster.’

Hughes wished it known that he denied using that exact wording, and had turned down the suggestion that he provide the paper with any further views. ‘Lynched’ was a loaded term. White supremacists were busy lynching African Americans at this time, and the most recent public lynching had taken place on the night the Titanic sank. It was a term which expressed visceral hatred, and which comprised the wish to see a slow execution before a bloodthirsty mob of spectators. Senator Smith thanked Congressman Hughes, and Ismay left for lunch.

The Titanic is, amongst other things, a story of doubles and so it is appropriate that the Captain of the ship should have the same name as the man who then steered the American inquiry, and that what began as a contrast between two men — the first a villain, the second a hero — should continue as a clash between two cultures, one seen as arrogant and backward-looking, the other as naive and progressive. Ismay, who in England was not considered well bred, symbolised for Americans the moral corruption of the Old World. Senator William Alden Smith, who was regarded in America as an altruist and a seeker after truth, represented to the English the crude self-interest of the New World.

Smith’s background made him the epitome of self-reliance. When he was twelve, his family, who were poor and devout, moved from the sleepy backwater of Dowagiac, Michigan, to the industrial city of Grand Rapids. Soon afterwards his father died of lung disease and William Alden dropped out of school to sell newspapers, deliver telegrams, and run a successful popcorn stall in order to support his mother and siblings. At twenty-one he started studying law (paying his way by cleaning the offices) and at twenty-four he set up his own law firm where he gained a reputation for winning his cases ‘by wearing his adversaries out’. He became a Congressman and then, aged forty-seven, a maverick member of the Senate. A Republican supporter of small businesses and a champion of ‘the little man’, Smith fought against the likes of J. Pierpont Morgan. Nothing would give him greater satisfaction than to watch the House of Morgan sink: if the inquiry were able to prove that Ismay was negligent, or had been cognisant of negligence, on board the Titanic then the IMM could be sued. As a reporter for the Grand Rapids Evening Press explained: ‘The Senator’s viewpoint is that… the question is not one of responsibility merely, but of liability for damages in civil suits. Should it be developed that reasonable diligence was not exercised in sailing the Titanic, the families of survivors have a good chance to collect the damages.’ Smith believed that Ismay was hiding something, and his object was to keep him in the United States until the inquiry was over, even if he was no longer required as a witness. Once Ismay returned to England he would be out of the reach of US law. As long as he remained in Washington, Smith could crack him like an egg.

The English press saw Smith as no more than a snapping terrier whose self-importance and evident ignorance could be mercilessly lampooned. ‘The Michigan senator’, wrote the London Standard, ‘is less qualified as an investigator than the average individual to be picked up in the average American streetcar.’ Smith was sent up as a figure in music-hall burlesque; for Joseph Conrad, who wrote about the wreck for an English literary journal, he was Mr Bumble, the cocked-hatted power-hungry beadle in Oliver Twist, and Conrad referred to the inquiry as ‘Bumble-like proceedings’. Smith’s only British defendant was Alfred Stead, whose father, the journalist W. T. Stead, had gone down with the ship. ‘The newspapers,’ Alfred Stead wrote, ‘tell us that Senator Smith… is a “backwoodsman”, ignorant of all nautical affairs. I do not care if he is a Red Indian. His ignorance, if it exists, is excusable ignorance, whereas the ignorance of officers and seamen in their duties is criminal negligence.’

^{A cartoon of Senator Smith, published in the Graphic, 1912}

But it was not the difference between Ismay and Smith, Ismay and Rostron, or England and America which lent the inquiry its peculiar quality; it was the sameness of Ismay and Second Officer Lightoller. Generally regarded as one of the heroes of the night, Lightoller had loaded the lifeboats on the port side and then, as the ship was descending, had taken ‘a dive’ and found himself drawn, by a sudden rush of water, to the wire mesh of a giant air shaft on which he became glued by the pressure of the sea. Unable to detach himself, Lightoller assumed that this is how he would die when a blast of hot air came up the shaft and blew him back to the surface of the water. He was then pulled under again, and just as he was ‘rather losing interest in things’, as he later put it, he eventually surfaced by the side of an overturned collapsible boat. Holding onto a piece of rope, he floated alongside it until one of the ship’s giant funnels fell, missing him by inches and causing the raft, and Lightoller, to be flung fifty yards clear of the sinking Titanic. Men were now starting to scramble onto the lifeboat and Lightoller joined them, eventually taking control. ‘If ever human endurance was taxed to the limit,’ he said in his memoirs, ‘surely it was during those long hours of exposure in a temperature below freezing, standing motionless in our wet clothes.’ He ordered every man on the upturned boat to face the same way and to ‘lean to the left or stand upright or lean to the right, as the case might be. In this way we managed to maintain our foothold on the slippery planks by now well under water.’ Here the party remained for several hours until they were taken on board two of the half-empty lifeboats.

Senator Smith was unmoved by accounts of Lightoller’s survival; as far as he was concerned Rostron was the saint of the story and Lightoller simply a stooge of Ismay, more concerned with keeping his job with the White Star Line than preventing future tragedies at sea. Had they not been whispering together in the cabin of the Carpathia, cooking up their plot to abscond on the next available White Star liner without