Titanic Belfast Quotes

Up in the crow’s nest on the foremast, lookouts Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee could see the lights of the French coast in the distance and the mast lights of other ships. For a closer look, binoculars would have helped, but the pair they had used in the crow’s nest on the trip from Belfast to Southampton had gone missing. This had been reported to Second Officer Charles Lightoller, but he had said there wasn’t a replacement set available. No one seemed bothered about it, so the lookouts weren’t worried either. Binoculars were not standard equipment in the crow’s nest on many ships. And these things just seemed to happen on a maiden voyage.

Among Morgan’s many “loads” at the time was a scheme to create a huge international shipping syndicate that could stabilize trade and yield huge returns from the lucrative transatlantic routes. By June of 1902 he had purchased Britain’s prestigious White Star Line for $32 million and combined it with other shipping acquisitions to form a trust called the International Mercantile Marine. In 1904 Morgan installed White Star Line’s largest shareholder, forty-one-year-old J. Bruce Ismay, son of the line’s late founder, as president of the IMM. The second-largest shareholder was Lord William J. Pirrie, the chairman of Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipbuilders responsible for the construction of White Star’s ships. Pirrie had been the chief negotiator with Morgan’s men and was placed on the board of the new trust. The British government had acceded to Morgan’s flexing of American financial muscle in the acquisition of White Star but had also provided loans and subsidies to the rival Cunard Line for the building of the world’s largest, fastest liners, Lusitania and Mauretania—with the proviso that they be available for wartime service. By the summer of 1907, the Lusitania had made its record-breaking maiden voyage, and Pirrie and Ismay soon hatched White Star’s response. They would use Morgan’s money to build three of the world’s biggest and most luxurious liners. Within a year Harland and Wolff had drawn up plans for two giant ships, and by mid-December the keel plate for the first liner, the Olympic, had been laid. On March 31, 1909, the same was done for a sister ship, to be called Titanic. A third, named Britannic, was to be built later.

One consequence of this change was the missing binoculars for the lookouts. On the trip to Southampton from Belfast, the lookouts had used the now-departed second officer’s binoculars, which he had locked in a drawer in his cabin before he left the ship. When Lightoller inquired about binoculars for the lookouts, he was told that none were available for them.

The Titanic Historical Society and the International Titanic Society are two of the resources available to the reader to learn about the many inaccuracies of the stories about the RMS Titanic sinking. Libraries in Washington, New York, Belfast, Richmond, Halifax, and London are just a few with extensive Titanic collections of news coverage of the event.

more appealing because their grandeur would outmatch all the competition. The Titanic was one of three ships built under this plan: the Olympic was the first, Titanic was the second, and Britannic was the third. Britannic also met an untimely end: it hit a mine and sank in 1916 during World War I, while the Olympic remained in service until 1935. The White Star Line operated the ships, but they did not build them: all three ships were built in Belfast, Ireland by the firm Harland and Wolff. This company dispatched its most prominent employees for the construction of the grand ships, especially the Titanic, including their chairman Lord William James Pirrie (largely responsible for decisions regarding the number of lifeboats), his brother-in-law and designer Right Honorable Alexander Carlisle (who would leave the company over a dispute with Pirrie about the number of lifeboats), and Thomas Andrews, a shipbuilder and architect (who was on board for the maiden