The Titanic Secret (42 page)

Maria stepped across to where Tremayne was standing and wrapped her arms around him. Tremayne grunted in pain and she immediately relaxed her grip.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I forgot to mention I’ve got a couple of cracked ribs as well. What did you tell Mansfield in there?’

‘I told him to get lost,’ she said defiantly. ‘I don’t care what he reports back to my boss in the States. I cannot and will not work for somebody who shows such callous disregard for human life. Have you seen him?’

Tremayne nodded.

‘And?’

‘Oddly enough, I told him pretty much the same thing, but in more robust language. As of now, I’m no longer a member of the Secret Service Bureau, and I don’t think I’m going to lose much sleep over it.’

Maria looked at him. ‘So you’re out of a job, then? What will you do?’

‘Nothing for a while, unless I can find a decent opening for a battered cripple, but I’m sure something will turn up eventually. What about you?’

‘Well, I’ve burned my bridges here, that’s for sure, so I was going to head back to New York. But I’m not in any hurry to leave.’

Tremayne nodded. ‘Fancy a short holiday somewhere?’ he asked.

‘Good idea. One condition, though. Wherever you have planned, it’d better be a hell of a long way from the sea.’

Alex Tremayne smiled. ‘You can count on it,’ he said.

This is of course a work of fiction, and the events I’ve described as taking place on the ship and in Berlin and elsewhere never actually happened. The
Titanic
really did hit an iceberg, literally a glancing blow, but that was enough to send the world’s biggest ship to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

The facts of the sinking are beyond dispute, the timeline well established, but still there are numerous unanswered questions. It is still not clear why the captain of the
Titanic
saw fit to ignore the numerous ice warning messages – at least seven – which had been passed to the ship during her last day on the surface. With hindsight, it could be argued that to proceed at full speed through waters known to be scattered with icebergs, with only two men aloft in the crow’s nest – men who had no binoculars, and who were simply relying on their eyesight – to provide warning of any obstruction ahead, was an act of madness or, at best, criminal negligence. Exactly why Captain Smith chose this course of action is still a matter of conjecture.

It was popularly believed at the time that the
Titanic
was unsinkable, but this was not a claim that was ever made by either the company which built the ship, Harland and Wolff of Belfast, or the White Star Line: ‘virtually unsinkable’ was as far as they were prepared to go. In fact, the ship was designed to remain afloat with up to four compartments flooded. Unfortunately, because the ship turned away from the iceberg when it was sighted, a projecting part of the floating mass of ice scraped down the side of the vessel, doing remarkably little damage to the hull, but opening up a narrow gash which exposed six compartments to the Atlantic Ocean. That was enough to doom the ship.

In point of fact, if the lookouts had
not
sighted the iceberg, or the officer of the watch on the bridge had not turned the ship away, it’s at least possible that the
Titanic
might not have sunk. If the ship had hit the iceberg square on, with her bow, obviously substantial damage would have been caused to the vessel but, crucially, only to the bow. This might have caused severe flooding in the forward compartments, but the closing of the watertight doors in this area – which was controlled from the bridge and was actuated before the impact – might have saved the vessel. But we will never know for sure.

Once the ship came to a halt, and the damage had been assessed, there were delays in orders being issued which are extremely difficult to understand. Within minutes of the impact at 2340 on 12 April 1912, it must have been absolutely clear to everyone on the bridge that the ship was going to sink, but it still took twenty-five minutes before the captain ordered the lifeboats to be uncovered, and it was an hour and five minutes before the first boat was finally launched. The radio operators were only instructed to send the first distress message thirty-five minutes after the impact with the iceberg, and it was one hour and ten minutes before the first distress rocket was fired.

No doubt there was considerable confusion on board at this time, but these delays in ordering measures to be taken, measures which clearly would not have helped save the ship, but which might have reduced the catastrophic death toll, is simply incomprehensible. In any sinking, time is of the essence. If the first distress message had been sent immediately after the collision, it is at least possible that more ships would have heard it and been able to render assistance. As it was, the first ship to arrive at the scene, the RMS
Carpathia
, didn’t arrive until 0410 on 13 April, almost two hours after the
Titanic
broke her back and sank in two sections, and by that time every passenger and crew member who was not in a lifeboat was dead.

Many who jumped from the sinking ship died the moment they hit the water, their necks broken, ironically, by the life jackets they wearing. The buoyancy inside these flotation devices snapped their heads backwards, frequently with fatal results. Others drowned, obviously, but the vast majority simply died of cold, of hypothermia, in the freezing waters of the Atlantic.

Much has been made of the wholly inadequate number of lifeboats on board the ship, and many people seem to believe that if the
Titanic
had carried more boats, most if not all of the passengers and crew could have been saved. But it’s worth pointing out that at the time, the number of lifeboats was – bizarrely – governed by the vessel’s tonnage, not by the number of people carried on board, and the
Titanic
was in compliance with the prevailing legislation.

One fact that is not generally known is that when the ship arrived at Southampton, several of the lifeboats were removed before the transatlantic voyage, apparently to increase the amount of space available for promenading on the upper decks, and these boats remained behind at the port after the ship sailed. When news of the tragedy broke, the White Star Line ordered that the name ‘Titanic’ be painted out on each boat, to disguise their origin. And I know that for a fact because I was acquainted with a person, now sadly deceased, who was a descendant of one of the men employed to do this.

The reality of the situation, though, is that launching the lifeboats took so long that even if there had been a further fifteen or twenty boats on board, almost certainly the ship would have sunk before these extra lifeboats could have been launched, and probably the loss of life would have been about the same. The only possible advantage that extra lifeboats might have conveyed would have been to provide additional boats that people struggling in the water could have climbed into, assuming that the boats would have floated free of the ship as it sank. But even this is somewhat doubtful. Many of the people who were known to have been picked up from the sea and placed in lifeboats still died of hypothermia because of their sodden clothing.

Finally, there are the conspiracy theories, the most popular of which suggests that it wasn’t the
Titanic
which sank at all, but her sister ship, the
Olympic
. Whether there’s any truth in this suggestion is open for debate, but there are a few facts which are suggestive.

The two ships were for some time being worked on side-by-side at the Belfast dockyard of Harland and Wolff, the
Titanic
because it was still being built, and the
Olympic
because it was being repaired following a serious collision with the Royal Navy cruiser HMS
Hawke
in the Solent in November 1911. This collision had possibly snapped the keel of the
Olympic
, and also knocked one or more of the main propeller shaft bearings out of alignment. Damage of this sort would be frighteningly expensive to repair, and it’s been suggested that the White Star Line did not carry sufficient insurance to cover the costs.

The theory goes on to suggest that the identities of the two vessels were swapped at Belfast, the idea being that the badly damaged ‘new’ ship would be deliberately sunk on her maiden voyage to allow the company to collect the insurance money, while the ‘repaired’
Olympic,
actually the brand-new
Titanic,
would continue to operate as the company’s flagship.

This may sound far-fetched, but some information has been produced by the conspiracy theorists which suggest that, at the very least, not all was well with the
Titanic:

So is there any truth in the conspiracy theory? The bottom line is that nobody really knows. In those days, few parts of a ship were stamped with identifying names or numbers, so it is certainly possible – at least in theory – that the identities of the two vessels could have been changed. Certainly some parts of the
Titanic
ended up on the
Olympic
because the ship being built was cannibalized to get the repairs to the
Olympic
done as quickly as possible. There are also some anomalies relating to the internal design of the ship which now lies on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. And in some ways it could be argued that it’s surprising the
Olympic
had such a long and generally trouble-free life on the oceans of the world in view of the severe damage which she certainly suffered in that collision.

So I suppose you could say that it’s case not proven, and much of the evidence for the theory is circumstantial at best.

But,
Olympic
or
Titanic
, there’s no mistaking the incredible hold that this, one of the greatest and most publicized maritime disasters of all time, continues to exert on us all.

My thanks to Luigi Bonomi, my friend and agent, who had the idea and cracked the whip, imaginatively aided and abetted by Thomas Stofer. And to my delightful editors at Simon & Schuster – Maxine Hitchcock and Emma Lowth – who saw the potential and took a gamble. My grateful thanks to you all.