Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (51 page)

Though all of the principals involved in the controversy over the apparent willful inactivity of the Californian and her captain the night the Titanic sank are long dead, the debate continues with an intensity that shows little sign of subsiding with the passing years. In the United Kingdom, where the issue is most hotly contested still, the entire incident has become a political football, with all of the attendant distortions, half-truths, and outright deceptions that characterize any dispute where lawyers and politicians displace the original aggrieved parties. Powerful trade unions, which have defended Captain Lord for over three quarters of a century and so stand to lose a great deal of face should Lord be unambiguously found negligent, have intervened and interfered in an official government inquiry and caused the investigators’ final report to be materially altered before being released to the public; writers partial to Lord’s protests of innocence have been retained to produce books and articles that attempt to “prove” that it was patently impossible for the officers on board the Californian the night of April 14-15, 1912, to have seen the
Titanic’s
distress rockets or watch the sinking liner disappear, let alone come to her aid; and other writers who believe the opposite to be true have been warned of potential professional ruin if they press their views too vigorously.

Both sides trot out impressive arrays of experts, armed with reams of various forms, charts, tables, and other paraphernalia. Each camp, those who believe in Captain Lord’s innocence and those who maintain his guilt, present their arguments with remarkable lucidity and convincing earnestness. Ultimately, however, the debate over whether Captain Lord failed to come to the aid of the sinking Titanic or simply and rightfully ignored a small tramp steamer or fishing vessel nearby comes down to two points: the rockets that were seen from the Californian, and the positions of the two vessels.

The issue of the rockets is a major stumbling block for the defense of Captain Lord. The number of rockets fired by the Titanic and the number seen by the officers on the Californian were identical (eight); the rockets fired by the doomed liner were all white, and the rockets described to Captain Lord three separate times were all white; the times during which Quartermaster Rowe was firing his eight rockets from the
Titanic’s
bridge and Officers Stone, Groves, and Gibson stood on the
Californian’s
bridge and watched eight rockets burst high over the unknown ship to the south were approximately the same. (The word “approximately” is used because there was a twelve-minute difference between the bridge clocks of the two ships, and the times when certain events took place on board the Titanic that night are understandably uncertain. Quartermaster Rowe believed he fired his first rocket at about 12:45 A.M. and his last at about 1:30 A.M., but an error of five to ten minutes either way in his estimate of those times would be quite possible and quite forgivable.) Since no one on board the Titanic saw any other ship in the vicinity firing rockets or flares of any kind, although they were desperately looking for some indication from any ships that might be nearby, Captain Lord’s oft-repeated defense that there was an unknown vessel (or vessels) between the Californian and the Titanic firing flares of some sort lacks credibility.

Despite the phenomenal exertions of Captain Lord’s supporters over the years, no vessel has ever been found that can reasonably be placed anywhere near both the Titanic and the
Californian
in a position where she could be seen from both ships at the same time. The most energetically endorsed candidate for this mystery ship is the little Icelandic fishing smack Samson, which had been illegally taking seals in the Grand Banks early in April 1912. A typewritten manuscript, which first appeared in the 1930s and was allegedly based on a handwritten journal kept by one of her crew, asserts that the
Samson
was indeed the vessel seen by both the Titanic and the
Californian,
and that the “rockets” observed by the
Californian’s
officers were in fact “signal flares” used to communicate with other fishing vessels in the area. No explanation is offered as to why these “flares” were never observed from the Titanic, though. In the end, the case the document puts forward for the
Samson
being the mystery ship collapses completely, as dates, times, speeds, and locations fail to correlate properly or are contradicted by official records. The greatest damage done to the case for the
Samson
is in the log of the customs collector of the port of Reykjavik, Iceland: harbor fees paid by the
Samson
on April 12 and 20 make it devastatingly clear that the little six-knot fishing boat would never have been able to leave Iceland to reach a point anywhere near the Titanic and return again in that span of time.

This “second ship” hypothesis of Lord’s and his supporters’ rests heavily on the second point in the debate over the Titanic and the Californian, namely the positions of the two ships. Captain Lord’s defense has been built over the years around the idea that the Californian was too far to the north of the
Titanic’s
position to allow her officers to be able to actually see the stricken liner. Lord maintained that his ship was between nineteen and twenty-one miles away, which would have put the Titanic well over the horizon and even made sighting her distress rockets difficult. It was this intervening distance that allowed the “mystery ship” to steam between the Titanic and the Californian, stop at the same time the Titanic struck the iceberg, remain stationary for more than two and a half hours, fire eight white rockets for some obscure purpose, then steam away at the same time the Titanic sank. All that was necessary to establish the distance was to compare the
Californian’s
position as recorded in her log with the position the Titanic gave when sending her distress signals by wireless.

Even allowing for the remarkable number of coincidences such a chain of events would require, and any good historian will vouchsafe to being no stranger to coincidence in history, there are serious flaws in this argument. It was firmly established in 1981 by a research team sponsored by Jack Grimm, a Texas oilman who had hoped, vainly, to be the man who would find the wreck of the Titanic, that the bridge clock which Fourth Officer Boxhall was using in calculating the
Titanic’s
position had not been reset at the beginning of the last watch, and so was running twenty minutes fast. Using this incorrect time, he estimated that the Titanic had traveled fourteen miles farther west than she actually had. This meant that instead of her position being 41 °46’ N., 50° 14’ W., she was actually at 41 43’ N., 49° 56’ W ; that is, somewhat to the south and east of where Boxhall’s figures had placed her.

In the Californian’s log, her stated position when she stopped for the night at 10:20 P.M., April 14, 1912, was 42°5’ N, 50°7’ W This would have put her nineteen miles to the northeast of the position Boxhall had worked out for the Titanic, conveniently distant enough to support Lord’s contention that the Titanic was not visible from his ship. Even when the
Titanic’s
correct position is taken into consideration, the Californian would still have been nearly twenty miles away. But the Californian’s logged position was calculated by dead reckoning based on a sun-sighting taken some four hours earlier. What it does not take into account is the 1½ knot current from the north-northwest that caused the ship to drift to the south-southeast as she was steaming, a drift that continued after she stopped at the edge of the icefield, pushing her nearly nine miles away from her estimated position. Factoring that drift into the Californian’s position leaves her less than eleven miles from the Titanic, a position where the sinking White Star liner would have been clearly visible.

There is also a nagging doubt—and a very strong one—about the truth of the entries in the
Californian’s
log. A ship’s master is ultimately responsible for the contents of his vessel’s log, and nothing is entered in it without his approval and permission. For this reason and to avoid errors in log entries, ships keep what is called a “scrap log.” This is a record kept during a watch of everything that occurs on board relating to the handling of the ship, including helm and engine orders, signal and navigational information, and status of the crew and stores. It also includes any sightings of other vessels. It is a captain’s responsibility to review the contents of the scrap log daily and approve, amend, or correct the entries, after which they are entered into the ship’s formal log. The scrap log is kept as a back-up, though, and rarely disposed of. It was noted at the time of both the U.S. Senate inquiry and the Board of Trade investigation that the
Californian’s
scrap log for the night of April 14-15, 1912, had vanished, and that the formal log contained no references whatsoever to the ship seen by three of Lord’s officers, the rockets that ship fired, or Lord’s order to attempt to contact the ship by Morse lamp. The missing sections of the scrap log and the absence of any entries for the night in question were never adequately explained by Captain Lord at either inquest.

It was at these inquests as well that serious discrepancies between the testimony of Captain Lord and his officers appeared, differences so great that at times it gave the impression that these men weren’t even on the same ship at the same time. When the true picture finally emerged, it became clear that Lord was a latter-day Captain Bligh, an inflexible tyrant with a powerful temper, given to sarcasm and derisive comments that embarrassed and humiliated his officers, who in turn would go to any length to avoid coming into conflict with their captain. It takes little imagination to envision Captain Lord dictating the exact contents of the log entries for the night of April 14-15, so that they would say precisely what he wished them to say and nothing else.

Nor is it difficult to conceive of Captain Lord falsifying his ship’s position in order to more easily exonerate himself. There is some circumstantial evidence that he did so, beyond that of the missing scrap log and the sterile entries in the formal log, evidence that has never been refuted. When Cyril Evans relayed an ice warning to the Titanic at 7:30 P.M., he gave her position as 42°3’ N., 49°9’ W At this time the Californian was on a west-southwest course (S 89° W true), yet when the Californian stopped three hours later, the position recorded in the log put her well to the north of where that course would have taken her had she maintained it, and there is no indication that Captain Lord ever ordered a course change: even had he done so, it would have been to the south—changing course to the north would only have carried the Californian into even heavier ice than she had been compelled to stop by.

Admittedly, these items are certainly not damning evidence, but they are sufficient to raise enduring questions about Captain Lord and his veracity. What is evident is that Captain Lord was determined not be publicly blamed and stigmatized for failing to come to the aid of the Titanic. This is understandable, even forgivable. What is unforgivable is that, even if it was not the Titanic seen from the Californian’s bridge that night, someone was in trouble, and Stanley Lord was clearly unwilling to go to anyone’s aid. He would go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that he would not be held responsible for his inaction and that there would be insufficient evidence to suggest that he was.

Try as his family might to rehabilitate his character, and strive as the various special interests may that have made Captain Stanley Lord’s case their own, the verdicts of the two inquiries, which echoed each other with devastating precision, have withstood all the legal maneuvering, political posturing, and forensic legerdemain that have attempted to refute them, and so Lord continues to stand condemned. It may be true, as has often been maintained, that Stanley Lord in person was charming, warm, kindhearted, and a devoted family man, but his demeanor as the master of a merchant ship was forbidding and autocratic to such a degree that his officers and crew were terrified lest they might displease him. Sadder still is the thought that he was a man who refused to undertake the slightest risk to go to the aid of those in peril. Few pronouncements have ever been more damning than the conclusion concerning Captain Lord reached by Sir Rufus Isaacs, the attorney general at the Board of Trade inquiry, when he spoke of Captain Lord: