Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (3 page)

In the meantime, Thomas Ismay had decided that it was becoming too expensive to continue to pursue both unrivaled speed and unparalleled luxury in White Star ships. Instead, since luxury had made White Star’s reputation, luxury would continue to be White Star’s hallmark. The Line’s ships would continue to be nearly as fast as its competitors’, but the out-and-out race for the Blue Ribband would be run without the White Star Line.

The quest for the Blue Ribband, the mythical prize that went to the liner making the fastest Atlantic crossing, east- or west-bound, was by the end of the nineteenth century a competition filled with jingoistic overtones, becoming far more than a simple commercial rivalry between shipping firms. When the Cunard Line’s
Campania
captured the Blue Ribband with an average speed of nearly 21 knots in 1896, the title had been in British hands for nearly two decades, usually being handed off between White Star and Cunard ships. Despite a slow start, however, two German shipping firms, Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutscher-Lloyd, began gathering momentum and prospering from the burgeoning immigrant trade, and soon German ships began to establish a style all their own on the North Atlantic. Before long the directors of Norddeutscher-Lloyd decided that their ships should also set the pace. Approaching the Vulkan shipyard of Stettin, East Prussia, they had a simple proposal: “Build us the fastest ship in the world and we’ll buy it; anything less and you can keep it.”

The result was the mean-looking, imposing Kaiser Wilhelm
der Grosse.
She was the first in a series of German steamships notable not only for interiors where, as John Malcolm Brinnin put it, “the landscapes of Valhalla enscrolled on the walls and ceilings of grand saloons would all but collapse under their own weight,” but also for a succession of increasingly more powerful engines that drove them at ever faster speeds across the Atlantic. Almost inevitably the pretensions of the ships’ interior appointments were a reflection of the bombast and pomposity of Wilhelmine Germany, and they quickly became easy targets for the wits of the day, who referred to the decors as “hideously” or “divinely” “North German Lloyd,” meaning, as one American contemporary put it, “two of everything but the kitchen range, then gilded.”
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Her ostentation slowed her not a whit, for the Kaiser Wilhelm
der Grosse
romped across the North Atlantic on her maiden voyage in early 1897 at nearly 22 knots. Great Britain was aghast. “In that jubilee year [Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee], England was not feeling modest,” wrote Humphrey Jordan.

Not content in merely besting the British, the Germans embarrassed them next by introducing the
Deutschland,
which belonged to the Hamburg-Amerika Line, and crossing the “Big Pond” at a speed of nearly 23 knots. Long, low, with a sleek four-funneled superstructure, the Deutschland looked the very part of the Atlantic greyhound. Yet her preeminence was to last less than a year when the new
Kronprinz
Wilhelm set a new record at 23 ½ knots; the year after that the Kaiser Wilhelm
II
proved a shade faster still. This Teutonic monopoly on the Blue Ribband was more than Great Britain could stand: a head-to-head showdown was approaching between these upstart Germans and the established maritime power of the British. France and the United States, once serious contenders, were soon left in the wakes of these two great rivals.

A key to German success was that the German shipping lines were being heavily subsidized by their government, a course of action the British government was loathe to follow. Conversely, if the British hoped to overtake their German rivals, it would have to be done with government funding and naval design expertise. It was a race that Thomas Ismay had anticipated and refused to be drawn into.

What Ismay hadn’t counted on, though, was the Americans, specifically one Junius Pierpont Morgan, who had the green gleam of money in his eye. Morgan, the greatest of a generation of trust builders, had conceived of a vast freighting monopoly that would control the shipping rates of goods and the fares of passengers being transported from Europe, from the moment they left the Old World until they arrived at their destination in the New. Since the American rail barons, and especially Morgan, had already monopolized U.S. railroads, all that remained for Morgan’s dream to become reality was to gain control of the North Atlantic shipping lines.

Morgan’s first move in that direction came in 1898, when he acquired the financially troubled Inman Line. The elder Ismay had attempted to form a consortium of British shipowners that would keep Inman out of Morgan’s hands, but the attempt fell apart because too few of Ismay’s colleagues believed Morgan was serious. It was one of the few failures in Ismay’s career, and foreseeing a fierce rate war on the North Atlantic, he rued it until his death in 1899.

He was right. The same year Thomas Ismay died, Morgan purchased a controlling interest in both Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutscher-Lloyd. A year later he gained either ownership or control of the .Leyland Line, the Dominion Line, and the Red Star Line. Setting his sights on both White Star and Cunard, Morgan began cutting fares until his lines were offering a Third Class passage to America for as little as £2.
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J. Bruce Ismay, who succeeded to the directorship of the White Star Line after his father’s death, was every bit as determined as his father to resist Morgan. Morgan, however, received help from an unexpected ally: Lord Pirrie. Realizing that a rate war would leave White Star with little capital for new ships, and having made Harland and Wolff dependent on White Star almost exclusively for new shipbuilding orders, Pirrie began to pressure the younger Ismay to accept Morgan’s offer to buy the line. Thomas Ismay would have told Lord Pirrie to be damned and fought the “Yankee pirate” tooth and nail, but though Bruce Ismay was his father’s son in many ways, he didn’t possess the innate ruthlessness his father had. Rather than stand up to Pirrie, the younger Ismay eventually caved in, and in 1902 Morgan’s shipping combine, now known as International Mercantile Marine (IMM), acquired control of the White Star Line.
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Cunard, meanwhile, had skillfully exploited Morgan’s attempt to purchase White Star, and was ultimately able to wring considerable concessions from the British government to allow the company to remain in British hands. These included sizable annual operating subsidies, low-interest loans, and Admiralty assistance in designing two new superliners. Undoubtedly, had Ismay held out long enough, he would have gotten similar concessions from the government, but in a contest of wills with Lord Pirrie he was no match for the older man, and so Morgan gained the White Star Line.

The two new liners that Cunard was to build using Admiralty assistance were intended to outstrip any other vessel on the North Atlantic in sheer speed and outdo White Star’s best in pure luxury. Launched in 1906, they were the
Lusitania
and the
Mauretania.
Immediately they presented a challenge to the White Star Line that could not go unanswered. Fast, luxurious, and imposing (it would be stretching the truth to call them beautiful), they became the most celebrated ships on the North Atlantic passage—and no one else had anything that even remotely compared to them.
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It was this stark reality that Ismay and Lord Pirrie confronted over cigars and brandy in the summer of 1907. Producing a sketch pad, Pirrie began outlining the dimensions and proportions of the ships that would become White Star’s response to the
Lusitania
and
Mauretania.
The only concession that White Star would make, both men agreed, was in speed: the big Cunard ships had been designed using Admiralty expertise in the latest high-pressure turbine propulsion systems, an area where Harland and Wolff’s experience was limited. As a result, the ships Lord Pirrie’s yard would build would be a knot or two slower than Cunard’s two speedsters. Beyond that, the
Lusitania
and Mauretania would have to be beaten at their own game. If Cunard wanted to build big, White Star would build bigger; if Cunard wanted to offer luxury, then White Star would offer luxury on a scale never before seen on the North Atlantic, nor, as circumstances would have it, would ever be seen again.

It was necessary, Ismay decided, to have three ships, all built to the same design, so that the White Star Line could offer weekly sailing east- and west-bound and maintain a cargo and passenger capacity that would nearly double that of the two Cunard ships. As the two men continued to talk, the doodles and sketches became more defined, and by the end of the evening Pirrie and Ismay had outlined the trio of ships that were to become the Olympic, Titanic, and
Gigantic.
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In the remarkably short time of six months, ideas from that night became reality, and in December 1907 the keel of the Olympic was laid in the newly designated Slip No. 2 at Harland and Wolff. The new liners were so huge that the space previously used to build three hulls was devoted to two of the new giants. The construction of the trio was to be staggered: the Olympic being laid down first, followed a few months later by the Titanic. Once the Olympic was launched the
Gigantic’s
keel would be laid in her old slip. The new liners were projected to be ready to go into service in the spring of 1911, 1912, and 1913 respectively.

Simultaneously with the laying of the
Olympic’s
keel, construction began on an enormous gantry that would surround Slips No. 2 and 3. This huge latticework of timber and steel was to be the largest such gantry ever constructed, standing until 1973, when it was demolished for scrap. The gantry served as a cradle of sorts, allowing workmen access to all parts of the ships as they were being built.
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The size of the new ships was astonishing. Built in an age that was impressed by size, the shipping world recited their dimensions from memory: 882½ feet in length, with a beam (width) of 98 feet, the ships stood 175 feet from the keel to the top of their four tall funnels. With a displacement of 45,000 tons, the three new sisters would be in every way the largest ships in the world, over 120 feet longer than the
Lusitania
and
Mauretania,
and more than 12,000 tons heavier. Within their hulls would be nine decks, accommodating 3,300 passengers and crew.

Despite their immense size, the ships were strikingly beautiful. The
Olympic-class
ships were the final expression of the traditional yacht-inspired shapes that had been the hallmark of Harland and Wolff ships for forty years. Elegant, unbroken lines flowed from a gently angled stem to a dignified counter stern, with a carefully proportioned superstructure topped by four gracefully raked, equally spaced funnels imparting a sense. of power and balance to the appearance of the ships. Years later retired Harland and Wolff executives would regard the Olympic and the Titanic—especially the
Titanic
—as the yard’s finèst shipbuilding achievements.

The liners’ aesthetic perfection—slim grace rather than mere ponderous bulk—was evenly matched by their technical sophistication, and the most remarkable and highly touted feature of their design was their watertight construction. Above the keel lay a double bottom, seven feet deep, which ended at the turn of the bilge, but the hull itself was designed to incorporate a carefully thought-out arrangement of watertight partitions. Rather than being built with the usual one or two “collision bulkheads” in the bow, the hull was divided into sixteen watertight compartments of roughly equal length, formed by fifteen watertight bulkheads built laterally across the ship. The arrangement of these bulkheads was far from arbitrary: several ships had been lost in the past half century to collisions with other vessels, most recently the White Star Line’s own Republic in 1906, and the trio of new liners were designed to avoid a similar fate. These new ships were capable of floating with any two of their sixteen watertight compartments flooded, since a collision with another ship couldn’t do worse than open up more than two adjacent compartments. In fact, they could float with any three compartments flooded, and under certain circumstances even float with four compartments open to the sea.

Oddly though, these bulkheads didn’t carry up very high into the hull: after calculating how having two adjacent compartments flooded would affect the ships’ trim, the designers determined that the first two and last five bulkheads need only go as high as D Deck, while the middle eight carried up only to E Deck, which at midships was barely fifteen feet above the waterline. The designers’ research showed that even if one of the vessels were struck amidships and two compartments flooded, the weight of the seawater in the open compartments would be insufficient to pull the ship deep enough that the water would begin to overflow the top of the bulkheads into adjacent compartments.

Connecting these sixteen compartments were a series of immense watertight doors. Normally left open during the ship’s operations, they could be rapidly closed by any of three different methods. There was a master switch on the bridge that closed most of the doors automatically, including all the doors on the bottom deck; or there were switches in each compartment so they could be closed individually by tripping a manual switch; and there was a float-triggered mechanism that automatically closed a door if there was six inches or more of water on the deck of the compartment. So comprehensive were these watertight arrangements that in a commemorative issue of the prestigious British journal
Shipbuilder,
published on the occasion of the Olympic’s launch, the authors of the piece labeled the ships “practically unsinkable.” Before long, and perhaps inevitably, the qualifying adjective was forgotten by the general public.
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