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- [00:01]
Advertiser
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- [00:28]
Narrator
There it's 12:37am on April 15, 1912. The small Cunard liner Carpathia is en route from New York to Gibraltar. In the wireless room, 21 year old Marconi operator Harold Cottam is exhausted. He's been on duty since 7 o'clock in the morning. Cottam has just returned from the bridge where he gave his final report of the day to the ship's officers. Now he's slipping off his work jacket and unlacing his boots, preparing for bed. But he keeps his headphones on just in case. Like most liners at the time, Carpathia has only one operator. The ship's wireless communication is not an around the clock service. So when Cottam is off duty or out of the room, any incoming messages go unheeded, including this evening, the distress calls broadcast by Titanic, both the old signal CQD and the brand new sos. Before he turns in, the young man decides to do one last good deed for the day. He's overheard the shore station at Cape Cod struggling to get private messages through to Titanic. Knowing that Carpathia is much closer to the White Star vessel, he decides to lend a hand. But when Cotton makes contact with Titanic to let them know they have messages waiting, he gets a lot more than he bargained for. Come at once, sends Titanic's senior operator Jack Phillips. We've struck a berg. In case Cottam should doubt the severity of the situation, Phillips adds, it's a CQD old man, before giving Titanic's last known coordinates. Cottam is stunned. Shall I report this to the captain? He sends back feebly. The answer comes back right away. Yes. Come quick. Cottam races to the bridge where he finds first Officer Horace Dean on watch. Together, the two men go to wake Captain Arthur Rostron. What the hell? Exclaims Rostron, demanding to know why Cottam and Dean have barged into his cabin. The young Marconi operator describes the message he just received from Titanic. You're absolutely sure? Rostron asks. Any trace of irritation gone. Now certain Replies Cottam. Captain Rostron leaps out of bed and throws on a dressing gown. The three men make for the bridge. Within moments, the captain is issuing orders. Call all hands on deck, he commands. Get ready to swing out the boats. Rostron sets a course for Titanic's position, full speed ahead. He tells Cottam to let Phillips know help is coming. But the distance between the two ships is more than 50 miles. For a steamer like Carpathia, with a top speed of only 14 knots, that's about four hours sailing time. The question is, will Titanic still be afloat when they reach? From the Noiser podcast network, this is Titanic, Ship of Dreams Part 6. An hour after hitting the iceberg, Titanic has come to a dead stop. The sea all around is as calm as the mill pond, the stars so bright that you can read your watch by them. Passengers have begun to come up on deck in their life jackets. But although the ship has already developed a slight list, very few people on board know that she's sinking, let alone that her designer, Thomas Andrews has predicted she'll go down within a couple of hours. In the wireless room on the boat deck, Marconi operators Jack Phillips and Harold Bright are hard at work. They're still trying to reach other potential rescue ships and they're not having much luck. Tim Moulton One of the things that.
- [05:23]
Historian
Came out of the Titanic disaster inquiry was that there should be 24 hour radio watch. In reality, what that meant was that there should be two radio operators on all ships. Now Titanic was a vast ship and she did have two radio operators in Phillips and Bride, but all the other ships in the area that were smaller that were responding to these distress signals, they only had one operator, so I think it was hit and miss at that time of night. Had the collision occurred in the daytime, everyone would have been awake and it would have been no problem. In fact, the first distress signal was not sent out until after midnight. That was when ships without dual radio operators had no one on radio watch that night.
- [06:05]
Narrator
In fact, Titanic's wireless men have just made contact with another liner, the Frankfurt. Unfortunately, she's even further away than the Carpathia.
- [06:15]
Historian
Phillips and Bride are tapping away for about an hour and a half after the collision, trying desperately to hope that someone else is going to wake up who's nearer to them and get the message. Unfortunately, most of the replies that are coming in are coming in from ships that they know don't have the speed to arrive in time.
- [06:36]
Narrator
Professor Jerome Chertkoff There was no ship.
- [06:40]
Expert
That could come and help them in Time. If another ship had been within hailing distance, that would have saved a lot of lives.
- [06:51]
Historian
They get a heartbreaking reply from the Olympic that says, okay, I've got it. I'm 400 miles away. Are you steering to meet us?
- [07:00]
Narrator
Titanic's sister ship, Olympic is captained by White Star veteran Herbert Haddock, the man who put Titanic through her sea trials in Belfast Loch just two weeks earlier. @ first, it's hard for Haddock to grasp just how serious the damage from the iceberg really is. After all, these are the ships that everyone said were unsinkable.
- [07:22]
Historian
They just can't believe this. No one can really comprehend that the great Titanic really is sinking. And those that can are too far away to be able to help.
- [07:36]
Narrator
There is a ship much closer to Titanic's position, a cargo liner called the SS Californian. She is less than 20 miles away, stopped dead for the night on the edge of an ice field. The Californians wireless operator Cyril Evans was in communication with Phillips and Bride before he knocked off for the night at 11.30pm, just nine minutes before Titanic hit the iceberg. Now, though Evans is sound asleep in his bunk, he won't be woken until after dawn. Californian's Captain Stanley Lord knows there's another ship nearby, but he has no idea it's Titanic. The unusual atmospheric conditions that previously camouflaged the iceberg are now scrambling Titanic's identity as well.
- [08:31]
Historian
Because the horizon was slightly raised behind Titanic, she appeared to be within the horizon. And that meant to sailors that she looked as though she was five miles away, because the horizon's about 10 miles away. So if a ship's hull down over the horizon, it's 10 or 12 miles away. If a ship is hull up within the horizon and looking about halfway between you and the horizon, it's about five miles away. And the problem is that because Titanic looked five miles away, they judged that she was 400ft long and about the same sizes as California. In fact, she was the biggest ship in the world, twice as far away.
- [09:09]
Narrator
It's an understandable misjudgment, but in situations like these, an honest mistake can prove deadly.
- [09:19]
Historian
The crucial thing there was they knew from their charts at the North Atlantic that the only ship near them with radio was the Titanic. And so the radio horizon concluded them to be certain that the ship they were looking at was not the Titanic, and therefore they did not wake up their radio operator. And that's what caused the tragedy. Otherwise everyone would have been saved. So the atmospheric conditions caused the accident and they, they turned that into a catastrophe.
- [09:49]
Narrator
In the inquiries that follow the sinking, witnesses from both vessels will testify to seeing an unknown ship about five miles away. In other words, midway between their respective positions.
- [10:03]
Historian
And of course, the inquiry actually tried to trace this ship and they wondered, was it the Samson? Was it this? Was it that they all tried to think of? What is a ship that is five miles between these two vessels?
- [10:15]
Narrator
It's not until more than a century after Titanic sank that the discovery of the cold water mirage offers a possible solution.
- [10:24]
Historian
And of course, what the mirage discovery made me realize is that the mystery ship was a mirage. If you like, it was the Californian appearing nearer to Titanic than she was. And it was Titanic appearing nearer to Californian than she was. So there was in fact, no mystery ships.
- [10:42]
Survivor Eva Hart
Survivor Eva Hart I saw that ship terribly close.
- [10:47]
Historian
I saw it.
- [10:48]
Survivor Eva Hart
You know, it wasn't just lights on the horizon. You could see it was a ship.
- [10:52]
Historian
A lot of the reason for not having much panic on Titanic was they could see the Californian and they did believe California was coming to her.
- [11:07]
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- [11:46]
Narrator
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- [12:04]
Medical Professional
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- [12:36]
Narrator
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- [12:44]
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- [13:12]
Narrator
Conditions apply for Titanic's crew, identifying the ship they can see to the north of them is less important than getting its attention. Since their wireless distress call has gone unanswered, other means of communication must be attempted. But these too fall foul of the freak weather conditions that night.
- [13:34]
Historian
Partly in desperation, they started more slam signaling to this nearby vessel, which we now know was the Californian. But unfortunately, the messages didn't reach the ships because the ships were in fact further away than each ship thought they were from each other. And then, out of even more desperation, they started firing rockets into the air as distress rockets. Unfortunately, because the ships were actually so far away, the rockets were exploding in the normally refracting air at about 600ft up. And of course, at that distance, they were tiny because Titanic was actually about 12 miles away. And so that's why they either thought the rockets were coming from a ship further away, which in some senses is true, if that makes sense. But they also may have thought they were some sort of company signals. Unfortunately, it gave Captain Lord the excuse to wait until daylight to go and investigate what was really going on.
- [14:32]
Narrator
At a quarter past one, Captain Lord is woken by his second officer, Herbert Stone, and informed that rockets have been sighted. Are they company signals? The captain asks. Stone replies that he can't be sure. Well, go on, Morsing, captain Lord tells him before drifting back to sleep. It's a violation of the strict regulations regarding rockets spotted at sea according to the Board of Trade rulebook. If there's any doubt about their intended meaning, then they must be assumed to be distress signals. In the inquiries to come, the Californian's captain will be heavily criticized for his inaction. With the benefit of hindsight, it's hard not to see Lourd as grossly negligent, certainly compared to the heroic Captain Rostron of the Carpathia, Julian Fellowes.
- [15:33]
Expert
The Carpathia had an efficient, disciplined captain with a proper sense of values. And his only limitation was simply the distance he was away. He got there as quickly as he could, but it was too late. The Californian is the example of how not to run a ship. And actually, ironically, it was the Californian that gave rise to. To the greatest change in shipping rules and laws. I mean, the fact that after this accident, you could never turn off a ship's radio again because the California just turned off their radio when everyone wanted to go to bed. I mean, it sounds incredible to us, but that is exactly what happened. And they didn't even turn it on when they woke the captain up to tell him the rockets were still going off, the alarm rockets were still being sent up.
- [16:27]
Historian
We have the benefit of hindsight, and he did not. And we have to remember that the reason that captains are captains is because all of their experience is brought to bear, and they look at things and they trust their judgment sometimes more than the judgment of their junior officers, because they've got more experience. And just as Captain Smith's experience was working against him, so Captain Lord's experience was working against him.
- [16:50]
Expert
Captain Lord has had his defenders over the years, but I think they're on a poor wicket, to be honest. I think his behavior is disgraceful and inexplicable. All he had to do was very slowly and carefully travel the five miles that separated him from the Titanic to find out what was going on. And if nothing had been going on, then he could have stopped there and gone back to Beth, but he chose not to do it. He was a shameful figure for the rest of his life. And without sounding too hard, I think he deserved to be. He condemned many men and women and children to their deaths when he could have saved them all. And it really is as simple as that.
- [17:46]
Historian
What I actually think happened was I think Captain Lord was well aware of what was going on. Now, don't get me wrong, he had no idea it was the title Titanic and that thousands of lives were at stake. But what he probably did believe is that a nearby vessel, probably a fishing vessel, was in some sort of difficulty, not sufficient difficulty to actually do more slam signals to him. And what he thought was he was looking after the 50 people on his ship. So what he decided was he would investigate the shenanigans and goings on that he could tell from some rockets going off and things like that on this nearby ship that wasn't signaling to him. He decided that he would investigate that in daylight when it was safe to do so. Now, the tragedy for him is that having made that quite rational decision, he then found out at daylight, at dawn, that the biggest ship in the world had sunk with the loss of thousands of lives. And his hair literally went white overnight. And I think in a way, he never really, deep down forgave himself for that. But we have to look at him as a puny human, like all of us puny humans. And I think he was just making decisions based on the data that was coming in. Unfortunately, that data was extremely unusual and very hard to interpret because of the weather conditions that night.
- [19:06]
Narrator
Captain Lord isn't the only one who fails to grasp Titanic's dire predicament. More than an hour after the collision with the iceberg, many of the ship's own passengers are still oblivious to the danger they're in. Like the proverbial frog slowly boiled alive, they won't understand what's happening until it's too late to do anything about it.
- [19:30]
Expert
Well, we all know how when a fire alarm goes off in your office, you don't pay it any attention at all. You just carry on with your telephone call on the assumption that someone will deal with it or it's a test or whatever. And when someone actually comes along and says, listen, guys, I'm afraid that's a real fire alarm, it's absolutely astounding. You know, you don't pay any attention. And at the beginning of the alarm on the Titanic, I'm sure there were plenty of people who said, oh, I don't want to wake the children and I don't want to get up and it's so cold.
- [20:04]
Narrator
Professor Stephanie Barchewski.
- [20:06]
Survivor Eva Hart
There's a crew member who's sleeping and some of his buddies come in and tell him, hey, you know, we've hit an iceberg. There's ice all over the decks. And he just says, yeah, well, that won't do any harm. And, you know, rolls back over and goes to sleep.
- [20:22]
Narrator
Only 12 hours earlier, White Star chairman Bruce Ismay was cheerfully boasting to first class passengers, we are in amongst the icebergs. Even now. After the collision, hitting a berg is seen as a novelty. Fletcher Williams is in his first class cabin on seadeck, sipping on a whiskey cocktail, when his business partner, Elmer Taylor, knocks on the door. We've struck an iceberg. Taylor declares gleefully. I brought you a piece of it for your highball Ever since Captain Smith gave the order to start loading the lifeboats, Titanic's stewards have been knocking on doors, doing their best to persuade the sleeping inhabitants to come up on deck with limited success.
- [21:20]
Historian
Titanic had no, if you like, tannoy system. She had no sort of global system where the bridge could make a message. So, in fact, you know, stewards would have been told to get people up, but they didn't want to create a panic. So I think they'd have given the impression that it's a precaution. You know, we've had some serious damage. As a precaution, people should get in the lifeboats. They had to walk that tightrope between creating a panic on a ship where there were not enough lifeboats for everyone versus actually getting an orderly evacuation and saving as many people as possible.
- [21:54]
Narrator
Not everyone is in the mood to cooperate.
- [21:57]
Survivor Eva Hart
It is very late at night. Many people would have eaten a heavy meal, probably drunk a fair bit. I mean, I think some people are just going to be in such disbelief, they're going to say, ugh, you know, and the fact that you're in bed and you're warm and you're cozy and you don't want to get up if nothing else is going to delay you reacting to it, right? Because you're probably going to think, oh, five more minutes and then I'll get up. This can't really be that sort of urgent.
- [22:18]
Narrator
Susie Miller.
- [22:20]
Passenger
They'd been sold a ticket on an unsinkable ship and here they were being told it's sinking.
- [22:26]
Expert
It's not just that you were woken from sleep, it's that, you know, if I'm sitting in my cabin awake and somebody comes and tells me we've hit an iceberg, you need to get your life belt on and get up to the boat deck. And the bump seems really minor. Is this guy right or not? I think if you have a public address system with the captain telling you, but here's a steward who comes to your door, knocks on your door and says, get out. Get your life belt on and get to the boat there.
- [22:59]
Passenger
This can't possibly be happening. You know, we're not going to sink. This is the Titanic. It's the biggest shipment in the world. There's no way it's going to sink. So, yeah, you can understand why it took some time for passengers to realize the gravity of the situation and realize, yeah, we actually do need to get off onto a lifeboat underway.
- [23:21]
Narrator
To begin with. Even senior crew members assume that launching Titanic's lifeboats is more A case of following procedure than responding to any real threat. When Second Officer Lightoller suggests getting the women and children aboard the boats, he is far from certain that Titanic will sink. When passengers come up and ask him if he thinks the situation is serious, Lightoller can honestly answer no. As he puts it, getting the boats in the water is just a precaution. Lightoller points out the lights of the Californian, which are easily visible from the boat deck. Whatever happens to Titanic, surely everyone on board will be fine. Like many of the passengers, Lightoller was in bed when the iceberg first scraped along the side of the ship from his cabin on the port side of the boat deck. The damage didn't feel that severe.
- [24:23]
Expert
Light Tolar said he felt a slight bump and heard a grinding sound. That was it. And he didn't think it was a big deal, and other people didn't think it was a big deal. Some ice had fallen on the deck where passengers went sometimes on promenades and they were playing with the ice. You know, getting the lifeboats out and down was just kind of show and tell, just pro forma. It wasn't really needed, but we probably ought to do it just because that's sort of what you're supposed to do when something happens to the ship.
- [25:03]
Narrator
That morning, Titanic's crew were supposed to have taken part in their first lifeboat trail at sea, but that was cancelled by Captain Smith in favor of an extended church service. Now, a little over 12 hours later, they find themselves lowering the boats for real.
- [25:23]
Passenger
They were cradled in what are called davits, so a cradling and lowering mechanism. It was basically chain based, so you lowered them down using a chain system.
- [25:35]
Survivor Eva Hart
So there's the crewmen on each side holding the rope right through a pulley. And then there's. The rope is attached to the bow of the lifeboat and the stern of the lifeboat, and the crewmen have to work together to lower it. And that's very hard to do. And again, remember, they hadn't had much practice, right? So what would often happen is one crewman would lower too fast and so suddenly the bow of the ship is dangling down and everybody's about to fall out of the lifeboat. And then the same thing would happen with the stern. So it's a very, very scary, perky, jerky process. Early on, they can't really convince people to get into the lifeboats. People are like, why would I want to get off this nice warm ship and go out there in the freezing cold ocean? The ship seems a lot safer, but Part of it also is because the lifeboats are not being loaded in a very kind of orderly fashion.
- [26:12]
Expert
There was no emergency planning and training. There was no practice or training on the ship of passengers going to the lifeboats. Passengers were not assigned to specific lifeboats, so there was pretty much chaos.
- [26:39]
Narrator
The lack of rehearsal leads to some significant differences of opinion. Not only is there no direct line of communication between Captain Smith and his passengers, his orders aren't even clearly understood by his own crew. Titanic's engines are still venting exhaust and the deafening rush of air means it's hard for anyone to hear each other on the boat deck. Smith has assigned his two most senior subordinates to supervise the lowering of the lifeboats. First Officer Murdoch is responsible for the odd numbered boats on the starboard side, Lightoller for the even numbered boats on the port side. And the two men have very different ideas about the task at hand.
- [27:27]
Survivor Eva Hart
The orders are very confused, right? I mean, the most famous order, you know, that the captain gives is women and children first. Well, what does that mean? You know, it's not entirely clear. So Lightoller, who's loading passengers on one side of the ship, interprets that as women and children only. So he will not allow any men on the lifeboats.
- [27:48]
Historian
On the starboard side of Titanic, Murdoch allowed men to go in with women and children in order to encourage the boats to be lowered more quickly. Lightoller really took the order as women and children only rather than women and children first. And so he didn't allow, for example, 14, 15, 16 year old boys to travel with their mothers.
- [28:12]
Passenger
Was it women and children first or women and children only on those lifeboats? And the unfortunate thing is that the instructions were so unclear and you know, the captain was being so. He was just, he just didn't take control of the situation. The captain did not step in and say, okay, here's what we need to do. He left it to his senior officers to get on with loading those lifeboats. So very unclear about how these lifeboats should have been loaded. And just such bad leadership by Captain Smith.
- [28:50]
Narrator
Captain Smith's conduct in the two and a half hours Titanic takes to sink will be debated for more than a century. Is he a negligent commander who fails to save as many lives as possible or an experienced officer simply following the protocols he's been given?
- [29:12]
Survivor Eva Hart
You know, Captain Smith knows there's not enough seats for everybody on the lifeboats. He knows that every seat on those lifeboats is precious. They can't afford to launch them half full, right? He knows that that's literally going to lead to people dying. And I think for me, the mystery of Captain Smith is why he's not there sort of behaving more, you know, in a kind of leadership and more forceful capacity. Nobody really sees him like after the collision. And I don't want to cast aspersions because I don't know what he's doing. We don't know what he's doing. He might have been doing something helpful that we, we just aren't aware of. And, you know, in addition to that, you know, all of us, none of us know how we would behave right, in that particular circumstance. And he must have been dealing with an enormous weight of, you know, just that he was in charge of the ship and what had happened. But, you know, the whole story does cry out for somebody, right, to have taken a sort of leadership role. And several hundred people, potentially more, could have survived if those lifeboats had actually been loaded properly.
- [30:03]
Expert
The leaders did a bad job preparing the passengers once they hit the iceberg. It's estimated that it took 25 minutes before Smith decided the ship should be abandoned. So they wasted 25 minutes they could have used to get passengers up and ready to go into the light boats or even lower some. He's delegating authority to people who are responsible. I assume that was a normal course of things. I think you can exaggerate Smith's failing. It seems to me that the nitty gritty of doing things is left up to the subordinates.
- [30:46]
Historian
The important thing to remember about Titanic's crew, and particularly her captain, Captain Smith, is that they were Royal Naval Reserves. So Smith was a high ranking captain within the Royal Navy when he was called up. So he would train with the Navy and he was used to that kind of order and that kind of drill.
- [31:09]
Expert
It's easy to talk about what they did wrong at the time, Chanet. There's a lot they did right.
- [31:16]
Historian
When the chips are really down and things are really serious, you behave extremely properly and you just want to do things as safely and efficiently as you possibly can. And I think that's what was going through the minds of the officers and senior personnel on Titanic throughout the tragedy.
- [31:35]
Narrator
One man who is doing little to help alleviate the chaos despite his best efforts is White Star Chairman Bruce Ismay. He is certainly no naval officer. Throughout Titanic's voyage, Ismay has occupied an ambiguous position on board, somewhere between an ordinary passenger and a member of Captain Smith's command crew. Now still dressed in his pyjamas and slippers with a suit and coat hastily thrown over the top, Ismay attempts to get involved with lowering the lifeboats. Lower away. He shouts at Fifth Officer Harold Lowe, who's working the crank mechanism for lifeboat number five. But Lowe doesn't welcome Ismay's input, and in the dark, he doesn't even recognize his boss. As far as he's concerned, Ismay is just an interfering passenger, one who needs to get back in his box. If you get the hell out of my way, I'll be able to do something, lowe snaps back angrily. He then calls Ismay a word so rude that no account of the disaster dares to reproduce it. Ismay skulks away, suitably chastened. He tries to help with lifeboat number three instead. Eventually, number five is lowered with just over half the seats taken.
- [32:59]
Survivor Eva Hart
If the lifeboats had been loaded more efficiently, hundreds more people could have been saved, right? Those lifeboats go off. Some of them go off. Less than a third full.
- [33:14]
Narrator
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- [33:29]
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- [33:52]
Survivor Eva Hart
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- [34:02]
Narrator
Did you know that the team behind Ship of Dreams makes other podcasts too? Discover them all@noiser.com, the home of the Noiser podcast network, Real Dictators, also hosted by me. Paul McGann returns on April 30th with the story of Fidel Castro. Head to noiser.com to find out more. A little before 1am Quartermaster George Rowe is at his post on Titanic's after bridge, right at the stern of the ship, 200 meters from the command center. The first he knows of the evacuation is when he spots a small white object in the water. Confused, Roe telephones the bridge. Do you know that a lifeboat has been lowered? He asks fourth Officer Boxor.
- [34:59]
Survivor Eva Hart
Literally. Some of the officers are off in various parts of the ship, and they start to see lifeboats floating around in the water. One of them calls and says, hey, you know, are you. There's a boat, you know, with some people on it, floating around in the water. He doesn't even know that the ship is sinking, and they've sort of forgotten about him wherever he was stationed. And they're like, oh, you know, you need to get in here and, you know, grab some distress rockets and come and help us. Another member of the crew kind of looks out and sees one of the lifeboats in the water, and he says, you know, if they're going to launch the boats, why don't they actually put some people in them?
- [35:32]
Narrator
In the next episode, the chaos continues as more lifeboats leave Titanic half empty, fights break out on deck over the rapidly dwindling number of spaces, and a senior officer pulls a gun on a teenage passenger. That's next time. You can listen to the next two episodes of Titanic Ship of Dreams right now without waiting by subscribing to Noiser Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description to find out more.