The Night Lives On (18 page)

In both his interview with the Clinton
Daily Item
and his letter to London, Carpenter McGregor declared that Stewart was so exasperated at the
Californian’s
inaction that he finally woke up Evans on his own, apparently
without any clearance from the Captain. This seems going too far; Captain Lord must have given at least tacit approval.

What changed his mind? My hunch is that it was not Stewart’s logic or eloquence, but a complete change of circumstances. An entirely new and reassuring element had entered the picture: daylight.

By 5:20 the night was rapidly fading, and the coral tint of dawn was spreading over the sea, showing the great ice field in all its detail—the bergs, the growlers, the loose, flat cakes of the floe. It was now possible to see the channels that wound through the ice…and the densely packed areas where it was too thick to go. It was at last safe for a prudent man to act.

It did not have to be that way. Captain Rostron, “The Electric Spark,” proved that. But the
Californian
was different—a plodding cargo liner presided over by a cautious captain and an uninspired watch. Six months later, before attitudes had hopelessly hardened, Captain Lord wrote a letter to his “M.P.” In it he admitted there was “a certain amount of ‘slackness’ aboard the
Californian
the night in question.” He was probably thinking of Stone, but it’s a word that could well serve as an epitaph for the performance of the whole ship that night—including her captain.

T
HE BRONZED MEN OF
the sea were soon gone from the stage, their place taken by a pallid cast of lawyers, bureaucrats, technical experts, and (eventually) historians. Even before the
Carpathia
reached New York, voices were rising in Washington, demanding to know how such a catastrophe could happen.

The chorus was led by Senator William Alden Smith, a man whose constituency had nothing to do with the sea; he was from Grand Rapids, Michigan, 720 miles from the Atlantic Coast. Nor was he an expert on nautical matters; he was a railroad lawyer. But Senator Smith knew a hot political issue when he saw one, and here was an event that couldn’t help but give him instant national exposure.

Nominally a Republican, Smith was at heart a maverick, fitting into neither the stand-pat nor progressive wings of the party. He did have populist leanings—liked to battle the trusts—and this penchant may have influenced him now. After all, the White Star Line was an integral part of Pierpont Morgan’s shipping combine.
Smith also liked playing the role of a rough, unpolished country boy taking on the city slickers, and White Star’s combination of British merchants and Wall Street financiers may have been too good a target to resist.

First step was to check the White House and the congressional leadership, but they had no plans of their own. Satisfied, Smith now rammed through the Senate a resolution directing the Committee on Commerce to name a subcommittee to investigate the disaster. Then a quick meeting with Senator Knute Nelson, chairman of the Commerce Committee, and by noon on April 17th the subcommittee was in existence. To no one’s surprise, Smith headed it up.

Characteristically, he saw to it that the six other members of the subcommittee were chosen without regard to any nautical knowledge. All he wanted was political balance. Hence there were three Republicans and three Democrats, with each party supplying a conservative, a liberal, and a moderate.

The most daring feature was the subpoena powers granted the subcommittee. After all, many of the key witnesses would be British. No one was sure whether the subcommittee’s subpoena powers extended to foreigners or not, and assuming they did, no one knew how the proud, sensitive British seafaring men would respond.

Smith took his chances, for there was no time to lose. The
Carpathia
might not answer President Taft’s queries, but there was evidence that her wireless room was doing more than the forlorn business of tapping out the list of survivors. On April 17 the U.S. cruiser
Chester
intercepted an interesting message from the little Cunarder to the White Star offices in New York:

Most desirable
Titanic
crew should be returned home earliest moment possible. Suggest you hold
Cedric,
sailing her daylight Friday….Propose returning in her myself, (signed) YAMSI

It did not take a team of crack cryptanalysts to figure out that “YAMSI” was Ismay spelled backward. Apparently the White Star chairman was planning to get himself and the lost liner’s crew out of U.S. jurisdiction before any investigation could be started.

Smith and the subcommittee members immediately headed for New York with a small army of marshals. They arrived on the evening of April 18—just as the
Carpathia
reached Quarantine. They hurried by taxi to the Cunard pier, arriving as the rescue ship crept in amid the blaze of photo-flash explosions. As the gangplank fell in place—before even the first survivors could step ashore—the Senator and his marshals rushed aboard.

They found Ismay in the Chief Surgeon’s cabin, where he had been secluded ever since his rescue Monday morning. The ship’s rumor factory had him out of his mind with grief and shock, but the figure that awaited them was thoroughly composed.

No, said “YAMSI,” he wouldn’t dream of skipping any American inquiry. He wanted to cooperate in every way. He would certainly appear at 10
A.M.
tomorrow in the Waldorf-Astoria’s East Room, which had been converted into a hearing room for the subcommittee in New York.

True to his word, Ismay was already seated at the conference table when Senator Smith and his party entered the East Room the following morning. At 10:30
Smith opened the proceedings, calling on Ismay as the first witness. Would he kindly give the Committee any information he thought might be helpful, telling the story “as succinctly as possible.”

Ismay quickly showed how succinct he could be. After giving the
Titanic’s
engine revolutions for each day of the voyage—and the day’s run that resulted—he came to Sunday night. “I was in bed myself, asleep, when the accident happened,” he explained. “The ship sank, I am told, at two-twenty. That, sir, I think is all I can tell you.”

Unfazed, Smith asked what Ismay did after the impact, and perhaps for the first time the White Star Chairman realized that he was in for a grilling that would eventually add up to 58 pages of testimony.

Across the Atlantic, the British viewed the Senate investigation first with disbelief, and then with dismay. What were those cheeky Americans doing investigating a British family matter anyhow? As Joseph Conrad put it in the May 1912 issue of the
English Review
:

…
Why an officer of the British merchant service should answer the questions of any king, emperor, autocrat, or senator of any foreign power (as to an event in which a British ship alone was concerned, and which did not even take place in the territorial waters of that power) passes my understanding.

The fact that the
Titanic
was, after all, serving American ports and soliciting American passengers seemed to make little difference and the fact that, after piercing the corporate veil, the White Star Line was basically an
American-owned company was never even mentioned. All in all, Conrad sniffed, the Senate’s intrusion was a “very provincial display of authority.”

Nor did Senator Smith help his cause as the investigation unfolded. He showed almost total ignorance of ships and the sea, once asking a witness, “Did the
Titanic
go down by the head or the bow?”

His most famous gaffe occurred when he asked Fifth Officer Lowe, “Do you know what an iceberg is composed of?”

“Ice, I suppose, sir,” replied Lowe, going in for the kill.

Yet Smith’s question was not all that bad, considering the general lack of knowledge on both sides of the Atlantic about icebergs and what they could do. It was hard to believe that a mere piece of ice, however big, could rip apart a steel hull. Smith was wondering whether icebergs might also contain more familiar lethal material like rocks and stones. Earlier he had put the same question to Fourth Officer Boxhall, and got a straight answer: “Some people tell me that they have seen sand and gravel and rocks and things of that kind in them.” That time nobody laughed. It took Lowe to see the opening and drive home the thrust.

“A born fool,” concluded the London press, and contempt was added to chauvinism in the continued attack on the Senate’s investigation. There was a general feeling that things would be different when the British launched their own inquiry into the tragedy. As the
Daily Telegraph
politely explained:

The inquiry which has been in progress in America has effectively illustrated the inability of the
lay mind to grasp the problem of marine navigation. It is a matter of congratulation that British custom provides a more satisfactory method of investigating the circumstances attending a wreck.

The “more satisfactory method” was a special court, convened by the Board of Trade, headed by Lord Mersey, a prominent jurist appointed by the Lord Chancellor at the Board of Trade’s request. Assisting him were five “assessors,” but they were in no sense associate judges; they were strictly technical experts, there to help Lord Mersey, if and when called upon. As Commissioner of Wrecks, he had the final say on everything—the matters to be investigated, the witnesses to be called, the interests that would be represented, and ultimately the findings of the Court itself.

The
Daily Telegraph
called Lord Mersey “one of the country’s leading authorities on nautical affairs,” but actually he was far from that. Although an experienced judge, his field was commercial law, and he had served as president of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court for only a year. Yet he was shrewd, witty, and possessed the kind of legal mind that could readily assimilate the facts of a complicated case.

The Inquiry opened May 2 at the London Scottish Drill Hall, a great barn of a building with dreadful acoustics, but the only available place big enough to hold all who had reason to come. For 36 days the story of the
Titanic
unfolded once again, as a steady parade of witnesses were examined by counsel representing such varied interests as the White Star Line, the National Sailors and Firemen’s Union, the Third Class passengers, the owners and officers of the
Californian,
and the
Board of Trade itself. Over 50 lawyers were present altogether, constantly jockeying to protect or promote their clients’ interests.

Through it all, Lord Mersey remained in firm command. Usually he was content to let the testimony unfold, but if he thought that it was getting nowhere, he would break in with an irritated, “This is not helping me at all.” Evasive witnesses especially annoyed him. At one point in the questioning of the unfortunate Herbert Stone, Second Officer of the
Californian
, Mersey suddenly declared, “You know, you do not make a good impression upon me at present.”

Above all, he did not tolerate fools gladly. During the testimony of Alexander Carlisle, designer of the
Titanic
, Carlisle described a meeting at which he and Harold Sanderson of the White Star Line were present but did not say anything. “Mr. Sanderson and I were more or less dummies,” Carlisle explained.

“That has a certain verisimilitude,” Lord Mersey observed.

Apart from the Commissioner’s urbanity—along with an unruffled atmosphere where opposing counsel politely called one another “my good friend”—the British Inquiry differed in a less noticeable but more important way from the rough-and-tumble of the Senate’s investigation. It put much more emphasis on the technical side of the disaster: the faulty design of the
Titanic
; the Board of Trade’s outdated lifeboat regulations; the Board’s casual acceptance of inadequate boat drill; the reckless navigation practiced by shipmasters in the competitive struggle on the North Atlantic run.

Unconsciously, through the testimony of witnesses, the Inquiry also brought out the laxity of the Board of
Trade in administering its own regulations. Captain Maurice Henry Clarke, the inspector who cleared the
Titanic
for sailing, approved a “boat drill” that consisted of lowering only two lifeboats, manned by a handpicked crew, while the ship was tied up at dock. While he conceded that he had tightened his requirements since the disaster, Lord Mersey broke in:

“Then you do not think your system before the
Titanic
disaster was very satisfactory?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you think it satisfactory before the
Titanic
disaster?”

“No, sir.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Because it was the custom.”

“Do you follow a custom because it is bad?”

“Well, I am a civil servant, sir, and custom guides us a good bit.”

Even more depressing was the testimony of Sir Alfred Chalmers, who had been Nautical Advisor to the Marine Department of the Board of Trade, 1896-1911. It was felt that he would know better than anybody else why the Board’s lifeboat regulations had not been updated to reflect the enormous increase in the size of vessels since 1896. Sir Alfred, it turned out, had no interest in updating regulations; he thought there were too many already. He preferred, as far as possible, to do away with all regulations, leaving such matters as lifeboats to the “voluntary action of shipowners.” He was, in short, an owner’s dream: a regulator who didn’t believe in regulations.

As for the
Titanic
, Chalmers declared, no lives were lost because the required number of boats had not been increased since 1896. Her problem was not too few, but too many boats. He pointed out that many of the boats had left half-filled. This was often due to complacency. If there had been fewer boats, the passengers would have been less complacent. The boats would then have left with more people in them, and ultimately more would have been saved.