Titanic Captain Quotes

One must never prioritize their own gain over humanities survival.

With its untold depths, couldn't the sea keep alive such huge specimens of life from another age, this sea that never changes while the land masses undergo almost continuous alteration? Couldn't the heart of the ocean hide the last–remaining varieties of these titanic species, for whom years are centuries and centuries millennia?

If it’s only a kiss you want, I can kiss you with my clothes on.” —Katie O'Reilly to Captain Lord Blackthorn

Skip your fancy talk, Captain Lord Blackthorn. If I do your bidding, and I’m still discussing that with the Almighty, it will only be to save my arse.” Katie O'Reilly to Captain Lord Jack Blackthorn in "Titanic Rhapsody

Those who believe in the unconditional benefits of past experience should consider this pearl of wisdom allegedly voiced by a famous ship’s captain: But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident… of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort. E. J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS Titanic Captain Smith’s ship sank in 1912 in what became the most talked-about shipwreck in history.*

If there was one thing that made Captain Lord Jack Blackthorn smile more than holding a pretty woman in his arms, it was a winning hand at cards. To his dismay at the moment he had neither.

It would appear to a quoting dilettante—i.e., one of those writers and scholars who fill up their texts with phrases from some dead authority—that, as phrased by Hobbes, “from like antecedents flow like consequents.” Those who believe in the unconditional benefits of past experience should consider this pearl of wisdom allegedly voiced by a famous ship’s captain: "But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident… of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort." E. J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS Titanic Captain Smith’s ship sank in 1912 in what became the most talked-about shipwreck in history.

The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as 'Fat Man and Little Boy.') And a river runs through it. And on this river, the Taedong River, is moored the only American naval vessel in captivity. It was in January 1968 that the U.S.S. Pueblo strayed into North Korean waters, and was boarded and captured. One sailor was killed; the rest were held for nearly a year before being released. I looked over the spy ship, its radio antennae and surveillance equipment still intact, and found photographs of the captain and crew with their hands on their heads in gestures of abject surrender. Copies of their groveling 'confessions,' written in tremulous script, were also on show. So was a humiliating document from the United States government, admitting wrongdoing in the penetration of North Korean waters and petitioning the 'D.P.R.K.' (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) for 'lenience.' Kim Il Sung ('Fat Man') was eventually lenient about the men, but not about the ship. Madeleine Albright didn't ask to see the vessel on her visit last October, during which she described the gruesome, depopulated vistas of Pyongyang as 'beautiful.' As I got back onto the wharf, I noticed a refreshment cart, staffed by two women under a frayed umbrella. It didn't look like much—one of its three wheels was missing and a piece of brick was propping it up—but it was the only such cart I'd see. What toothsome local snacks might the ladies be offering? The choices turned out to be slices of dry bread and cups of warm water. Nor did Madeleine Albright visit the absurdly misnamed 'Demilitarized Zone,' one of the most heavily militarized strips of land on earth. Across the waist of the Korean peninsula lies a wasteland, roughly following the 38th parallel, and packed with a titanic concentration of potential violence. It is four kilometers wide (I have now looked apprehensively at it from both sides) and very near to the capital cities of both North and South. On the day I spent on the northern side, I met a group of aging Chinese veterans, all from Szechuan, touring the old battlefields and reliving a war they helped North Korea nearly win (China sacrificed perhaps a million soldiers in that campaign, including Mao Anying, son of Mao himself). Across the frontier are 37,000 United States soldiers. Their arsenal, which has included undeclared nuclear weapons, is the reason given by Washington for its refusal to sign the land-mines treaty. In August 1976, U.S. officers entered the neutral zone to trim a tree that was obscuring the view of an observation post. A posse of North Koreans came after them, and one, seizing the ax with which the trimming was to be done, hacked two U.S. servicemen to death with it. I visited the ax also; it's proudly displayed in a glass case on the North Korean side.

Let me assure you, the struggle is real. I clicked my tongue, ready to fire back a snarky comment about Captain Obvious, but the titanic clash of emotions in those emerald eyes rendered me speechless. Guarded yet exposed. Challenging yet submissive. Unwilling to bend yet impossibly vulnerable. “You’re allowed to stare,” his jaw twitched, “so long as you promise to break the golden rule.” “What golden rule?” “Look but don’t touch.

A CANINE EULOGY TO THE TITANIC: The ship’s log says that twelve dogs boarded The Titanic Airedales a King Charles Spaniel Fox Terrier Chow Chow a Poodle French Bulldog Great Dane a Newfoundland. Two Pomeranians and a Pekingese were smuggled off in lifeboats concealed in blankets a Scottish Deerhound de-boarded moments before leaving port the captain returning the dog to his young daughter. One woman lived the rest of her life haunted by the memory of her Poodle clinging to her pajamas as she left her cabin. The rip of fabric. The panicked cry. The scritch of nails on the wood of the cabin door. Another left a lifeboat after being told her Great Dane was too large to be permitted to join her. Their bodies were found, days later. The woman frozen, still clutching her dog. Who made the right choice?

WOMEN AND CHILDREN.” STILL? You’re on the Titanic II. It has just hit an iceberg and is sinking. And, as last time, there are not enough lifeboats. The captain shouts, “Women and children first!” But this time, another voice is heard: “Why women?” Why, indeed? Part of the charm of the cosmically successful movie Titanic is the period costume, period extravagance, period class prejudice. An audience can enjoy these at a distance. Oddly, however, of all the period mores in the film, the old maritime tradition of “women and children first” enjoys total acceptance by modern audiences. Listen to the booing and hissing at the on-screen heavies who try to sneak on with—or ahead of—the ladies. But is not grouping women with children a raging anachronism? Should not any self-respecting modern person, let alone feminist, object to it as patronizing and demeaning to women? Yet its usage is as common today as it was in 1912. Consider these examples taken almost at random from recent newspapers: Dateline Mexico:

am not able to blame Captain Smith. He had not the experience which his own misfortune has afforded to those whom he has left behind, and he was doing only that which other skilled men would have done in the same position. It

The evidence shows that he was not trying to make any record passage or indeed any exceptionally quick passage. He was not trying to please anybody, but was exercising his own discretion in the way he thought best. He made a mistake, a very grievous mistake, but one in which, in face of the practice and of past experience, negligence cannot he said to have had any part; and in the absence of negligence it is, in my opinion, impossible to fix Captain Smith with blame. It

It is in human nature to look for blame when such tragedies as the sinking of the Titanic occur, but the fact of the matter remains that the collision with the iceberg was likely not the fault of high speed, the captain not being on deck, ignoring warnings about ice, or the lookouts not having the equipment they needed or not paying attention. More than anything, it was probably due to profoundly bad luck.

he renowned America painter Francis Davis Millet sent a letter from the Titanic’s last stop before attempting to cross the cold Atlantic Ocean. In it he wrote, “Looking over the passenger list I only find 3 or 4 people I know but there are a number of obnoxious, ostentatious American women, the scourge of any place they infest, and worse on shipboard than anywhere. Many of them carry tiny dogs, and lead husbands around like pet lambs.” It seemed that Francis didn’t think much of the women and their dogs that were of the snobbish set; however, it is safe to assume that there may have been at least a dozen dogs most of who were boarded in special kennels and others that shared the staterooms with their owners. Of these only 3 made it into the lifeboats with their owners and survived. We also know that there were chickens on the ship since later there was a claim made totaling $207.87 for lost chickens by a passenger named White. Other claims were made for lost dogs including a Chow-Chow dog that was valued by Harry Anderson for $50 and a claim of $750 by a passenger Daniel for the loss of his pedigree bulldog. Passenger Carter claimed $300 for the loss of his two dogs. There were a few pet birds on the ship and yes, the ship also had a cat named Jenny who was kept aboard as a working mascot. Jenny’s job was to keep down the ship’s population of rats and mice under control. However, it can be safely assumed that all of the rodents perished although one was seen running across the Third Class Dining Room just prior to the sinking.

But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident… of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort. E. J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS Titanic

Thus, Rockefeller and other industrial captains conspired to kill competitive capitalism in favor of a new monopoly capitalism.

It is in human nature to look for blame when such tragedies as the sinking of the Titanic occur, but the fact of the matter remains that the collision with the iceberg was likely not the fault of high speed, the captain not being on deck, ignoring warnings about ice, or the lookouts not having the equipment they needed or not paying attention. More than anything, it was probably due to profoundly bad luck. Regardless,

The fact that the Titanic slowly resumed her course after hitting the iceberg is not included in many accounts of the disaster but it was noted by several others on board besides Lawrence Beesley. Quartermaster Alfred Olliver later testified that Captain Smith gave the “Half Speed Ahead” order for the engines not long after the collision. The captain had by then sent Fourth Officer Boxhall below on a tour of inspection, so it seems likely that he thought the ship would have to limp in to New York or Halifax under its own steam and that they could proceed slowly in the meantime. By best estimates, the ship moved forward for about ten minutes and may have stopped when Chief Officer Wilde reported to Smith that the forepeak tank, a water ballast tank deep in the forward bow, was taking in seawater.

When the fourth officer entered the post office on G deck, the mail clerks were hastily pulling armfuls of envelopes out of the sorting racks. On looking down into the lower storage room, he saw mailbags floating in water. When Boxhall reported this to the bridge, the captain gave the order for the lifeboats to be uncovered and went below to see the damage for himself. The ship’s designer, Thomas Andrews, was already making his own inspection tour of the lower decks. He went into the post office and soon dispatched a mail clerk to find the captain. The clerk hurried along the corridor and returned with Captain Smith and Purser McElroy. After they had viewed the damage, Andrews was overheard saying to Smith, “Well, three have gone already, Captain.” Andrews was undoubtedly referring to three of the ship’s bulkheads that divided the ship into the watertight compartments that gave the Titanic its reputation for unsinkability. With only three compartments flooded, however, there was a chance that the pumps could stay ahead of it. The captain then returned to the bridge and gave the order for women and children to go up on deck with lifebelts. Thomas Andrews, meanwhile, continued his inspection. At around twelve-twenty-five William Sloper saw Andrews racing up the staircase with a deeply worried look on his face. As the ship’s designer passed by Dorothy Gibson, she put her hand on his arm and asked him what had happened. Andrews simply brushed past the prettiest girl and continued upward three stairs at a time. He had just discovered that two more watertight compartments had been breached. Andrews knew how serious this was. The bulkhead between the fifth and sixth compartments extended only as high as E deck. As the ship was pulled down at the bow, the water would spill over it into the next compartment, and then the next, until the ship inevitably sank. In all his planning at Harland and Wolff, he had never imagined a scenario such as this. Andrews informed the captain that the ship had only an hour left to live—an hour and a half at best. Smith immediately told Fourth Officer Boxhall to calculate the liner’s position and take it to the Marconi Room so the call for assistance could be sent out. He also gave orders to muster the passengers and crew.

The lights of the Californian did indeed seem tantalizingly close. But the steamer was not responding to the Titanic’s CQD calls because its Marconi operator had turned off his equipment and gone to bed over an hour before, after being told to “Shut up” by Jack Phillips. Fourth Officer Boxhall had tried signaling the ship with a Morse lamp but had received no response. He was relieved when Quartermaster Rowe arrived carrying more distress rockets. Surely the ship would see these and come over. “Fire one, and then fire one every five or six minutes,” Captain Smith ordered. Boxhall continued flashing with his lamp between rocket bursts.

On the steamer Californian, which is estimated to have been anywhere from eleven to twenty miles away, eight rockets were sighted but none were heard. A recent study has revealed that the unusually flat sea that night would have acted like a mirror that reflected and thus deadened the sound, making it inaudible beyond five to six nautical miles. Yet the rockets were definitely seen if not heard by the Californian, and the fact that its captain, Stanley Lord, did not wake the ship’s wireless operator to find out why a ship was firing rockets in the middle of the night remains one of the most haunting “if only’s” of the Titanic story.

As 1:00 a.m. approached, Second Officer Lightoller was feeling frustrated. None of the lifeboats on the port side had yet been launched, despite his best efforts. He had managed to get Lifeboat 4 swung out and lowered half an hour ago, even though Chief Officer Wilde had twice told him to wait. Both times Lightoller had jumped rank and gone directly to Captain Smith to get the go-ahead to proceed. The captain had also suggested that Lifeboat 4 be lowered to A deck since he thought it would be easier for the passengers to board from there. But a crewman had just shouted up that the A-deck windows were locked. (Smith may have forgotten that, unlike the Olympic, the Titanic had a glassed-in forward promenade.) Lightoller sent someone to unlock the windows and to recall the passengers who had been sent down there. Meanwhile, he moved aft to prepare Lifeboats 6 and 8, ordering that the masts and sails be lifted out of them. Just then the roaring steam was silenced and Lightoller was slightly startled by the sound of his own voice. Arthur Peuchen overheard the order and, ever handy around boats, jumped in to help cut the lashings and lift the masts out onto the deck. After that the call went out for women and children to come forward. The “women and children only” order would be more strictly enforced here than on the starboard side where men were being allowed into boats. When a crowd of grimy stokers and firemen suddenly appeared carrying their dunnage bags, Chief Officer Wilde was spurred into action. “Down below, you men! Every one of you, down below!” he bellowed in a stern, Liverpool-accented voice. Major Peuchen was very impressed with Wilde’s commanding manner as he drove the men right off the deck, and thought it “a splendid act.” Helen Candee, however, felt sympathy for the stokers whom she later described as a band of unknown heroes who had accepted their fate without protest. She was waiting by Lifeboat 6 with Hugh Woolner, who had been by her side ever since he had gone down to her cabin from the smoking room after the collision. “The Two” had then walked together on the boat deck, amid the roar of venting steam, and had noticed that the ship was listing to starboard. They went into the lounge to escape the cold and the noise, and there a young man came over to them with something in his hand. “Have some iceberg!” he said with a smile as he dropped a piece of ice into Helen’s palm. The ice soon chilled Helen’s fingers, so Woolner dashed it from her and rubbed her hand and then kept it clasped in his.

When the sun came up fully, the ice field began to glow in mauves and corals, a breathtaking sight. There was one iceberg with a double peak about two hundred feet high. To Lucy Duff Gordon the illuminated bergs looked like giant opals, and May Futrelle noted how they glistened like rock quartz, though one of them, she thought, was doubtless the murderer. The scene reminded Hugh Woolner of photographs of an Antarctic expedition. Seven-year-old Douglas Spedden raised a few smiles in Boat 3 by exclaiming to his nurse, “Oh Muddie, look at the beautiful North Pole with no Santa Claus on it!” Daisy Spedden recorded in her diary that as their boat was rowed toward rescue, “the tragedy of the situation sank deep into our hearts as we saw the Carpathia standing amidst the few bits of wreckage with the pitifully small number of lifeboats coming up to her from different directions.” After racing through the night to the Titanic’s distress position, the Carpathia had spotted Fourth Officer Boxhall’s green flares and had headed for them. “Shut down your engines and take us aboard,” Boxhall shouted up as the Carpathia drew alongside Boat 2 at 4:10 a.m. “I have only one sailor,” he added, as the boat tossed on the choppy swells. “All right,” came back the voice of the Carpathia’s captain, Arthur Rostron.

That morning Captain Rostron had considered several places he might land his more than seven hundred unexpected passengers. He’d first considered the Azores so that he could continue to the Mediterranean as scheduled; then Halifax, which was the nearest port. But on seeing the survivors come aboard, many of them in a distressed state and some in need of medical attention, it soon became clear that he should take them directly to New York. Rostron decided to visit Bruce Ismay to discuss the decision with him but the shattered White Star chairman quickly gave his agreement to whatever the captain thought was best. It was Rostron who had earlier prompted a dazed Ismay to send a wireless message notifying the White Star Line’s New York office about the accident. To Philip Franklin, the U.S. vice president of White Star’s parent company, the International Mercantile Marine, Ismay had written: Deeply regret advise you Titanic sank this morning after collision iceberg, resulting serious loss life. Full particulars later. Bruce Ismay.

Captain Rostron paid another visit to Ismay’s room that morning. He had received a wireless message from the Olympic proposing that the Titanic’s passengers be transferred to her. Rostron thought that putting the survivors into boats for a second sea transfer was a very bad idea. Even the sight of a ship that so closely resembled the Titanic might stir up panic among the survivors. Ismay agreed emphatically—the Olympic should stay out of sight. On board the sister liner, however, Frank Millet’s friend Daniel Burnham had been told that they were steaming to the rescue of the Titanic’s passengers, and he was preparing to give up his suite to Frank and Archie Butt. He could use the time on board with Frank to prepare him for the next meeting of the Lincoln Memorial Commission. In a letter waiting for Frank in New York, Burnham had written, “The rats swim back and begin to gnaw at the same old spot the moment the dog’s back is turned,” the “rats” being several congressmen who were still pushing for John Russell Pope’s design over that of Henry Bacon. The letter had concluded, “I leave the thing confidently in your hand.” When a list of the Titanic’s survivors was posted on the Olympic’s notice board the next morning, however, Burnham saw that Millet’s name was not on it. In his diary entry for April 16, the ailing architect recorded the news of the Titanic’s loss and noted that “Frank D. Millet, whom I loved, was aboard of her … and probably [has] gone down.” Burnham himself would die two weeks later, but the classical white temple he had championed for the Lincoln Memorial would prevail—a tribute to the architect’s persistence and that of the friend he loved.

The Olympic’s Marconi operators were relaying all the messages from the Carpathia to stations onshore, due to the Cunard liner’s limited wireless range. Marconi forms had been distributed to the survivors that morning but many of their messages would not be sent for another day or two—if at all. Captain Rostron had instructed that the first priority was to transmit a list of the survivors. The Carpathia’s chief purser and his assistant were busy compiling the names of passengers while Lightoller worked on the list of the surviving crew and engine room staff and a senior steward gathered the names of the cooks and stewards. The grim tally would come to 712 people rescued from a ship that had held 2,209. Over two-thirds of those on board the Titanic had perished.

In the afternoon, it was Second Officer Lightoller’s turn to answer questions, the first of nearly two thousand he would be asked by this committee and the British inquiry that followed. Throughout his testimony, Lightoller acquitted himself well and skillfully steered criticism away from Captain Smith and the White Star Line even while he considered the American inquiry to be “nothing but a complete farce.” The second officer came to have particular contempt for Senator Smith, whose ignorance of nautical matters led to him being ridiculed by the English press as “Watertight Smith” for asking whether the watertight compartments were meant to shelter passengers. The London Globe called Smith “a gentleman from the wilds of Michigan” who felt it necessary “to be as insolent as possible to Englishmen.” British resentment toward America’s waxing power was captured by the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who wrote in his diary that if anyone had to drown it was best that it be American millionaires. To the English elites, the U.S. inquiry seemed to be yet another example of American muscle flexing. But a Labor parliamentarian, George Barnes, noted more dispassionately that “it may be humiliating to some to have an [American] inquiry into the loss of a British ship but … the average person realizes that Americans get to work very quickly, and the average person, I think, is rather glad it is so.

In fact, the “women and children first” protocol for abandoning ship was not a particularly ancient one. It began with the HMS Birkenhead, a British troopship that was wrecked off Cape Town, South Africa, on February 26, 1852. The soldiers famously stood in formation on deck while the women and children boarded the boats, and only 193 of the 643 people on board survived. Hymned as the “Birkenhead drill” in a poem by Rudyard Kipling, it became a familiar touchstone of Britain’s imperial greatness and AS BRAVE AS THE BIRKENHEAD was a much-used heading in UK Titanic press coverage. A story that Captain Smith had exhorted his men to “Be British!” further burnished the oft-cited claim that Anglo-Saxon men had not forgotten how to die.

Chivalrous or not, there was no denying that of the 1,667 men on board, only 338, or 20.27 percent, had survived as compared with a 74.35 percent survival rate for the 425 women. On April 21 the bodies of the Titanic’s victims began to be pulled out of the north Atlantic by the Mackay-Bennett, a cable ship that had been sent out from Halifax with a hundred tons of ice and 125 coffins on board. The Mackay-Bennett’s captain described the scene as resembling “a flock of sea gulls resting on the water.… All we could see at first would be the top of the life preservers. They were all floating face upwards, apparently standing in the water.” John Jacob Astor’s body was found floating with arms outstretched, his gold pocket watch dangling from its platinum chain. To the ship’s undertaker it looked as if Astor had just glanced at his watch before he took the plunge. It is often written that Astor’s body was found mangled and soot-covered and that he must therefore have been crushed when the forward funnel came down. Yet according to three eyewitnesses, Astor’s body was in good condition and soot-free, and like most of the other floating victims, he appeared to have died of hypothermia. On April 25 the body of the Buffalo architect Edward Kent was recovered. In the pocket of his gray overcoat was the silver flask and ivory miniature given to him by Helen Candee on the grand staircase, and these were later returned to her by Kent’s sister. Frank Millet’s body was found on the same day and identified by the initials F. D. M. on his gold watch. The next evening the Mackay-Bennett left for Halifax with 190 bodies on board, another 116 having been buried at sea. A second ship, the Minia, had arrived on the scene, but after a week’s search it retrieved only seventeen bodies, and two other ships would find only an additional five. The Mackay-Bennett landed in Halifax on April 30 to the tolling of church bells and flags flying at half-staff. Horse-drawn hearses took the bodies from the dock to a temporary morgue set up in a curling rink.

45 P.M. on that Friday evening a wireless message was received from the captain of the French liner La Touraine saying that they had “crossed [a] thick ice-field” and had then seen “another ice-field and two icebergs” and giving the positions of the ice and that of a derelict ship they had spotted. Captain Smith sent his thanks and compliments back and commented on the fine weather. While adding this information to the map in the chart room, Fourth Officer Boxhall remarked to the captain that La Touraine’s positions were of no use to them since French ships always took a more northerly course.

Contrary to popular belief, there was no “captain’s table” where E. J. Smith would entertain a favored selection of passengers each night. Smith normally took his meals at a table for six in the dining saloon or in his cabin, served by his valet or “tiger” as the captain’s attendant was known.

fact of the matter remains that the collision with the iceberg was likely not the fault of high speed, the captain not being on deck, ignoring warnings about ice, or the lookouts not having the equipment they needed or not paying attention. More than

Give up on your dream and die!

Meticulous in such maneuvers, Rockefeller made sure to leave no fingerprints and told Captain Vandergrift that it was “of utmost importance that nobody knows of [Standard Oil’s] thought of doing something about [the suit] outside the [Clarion] County.

the captain ordered the hatches over the steerage fastened down.

Among the leading intellectual proponents of Roosevelt’s form of liberalism were the three brilliant young founders of The New Republic, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl—all slightly older friends of Adolf Berle’s. In 1909 Croly published a Progressive Era manifesto called The Promise of American Life. “The net result of the industrial expansion of the United States since the Civil War,” Croly wrote, “has been the establishment in the heart of the American economic and social system of certain glaring inequalities of condition and power … The rich men and big corporations have become too wealthy and powerful for their official standing in American life.” He asserted that the way to solve the problem was to reorient the country from the tradition of Thomas Jefferson (rural, decentralized) to the tradition of Alexander Hamilton (urban, financially adept). Weyl, in The New Democracy (1913), wrote that the country had been taken over by a “plutocracy” that had rendered the traditional forms of American democracy impotent; government had to restore the balance and “enormously increase the extent of regulation.” To liberals of this kind, these were problems of nation-threatening severity, requiring radical modernization that would eliminate the trace elements of rural nineteenth-century America. Lippmann, in Drift and Mastery (1914), argued that William Jennings Bryan (“the true Don Quixote of our politics”) and his followers were fruitlessly at war with “the economic conditions which had upset the old life of the prairies, made new demands on democracy, introduced specialization and science, had destroyed village loyalties, frustrated private ambitions, and created the impersonal relationships of the modern world.” A larger, more powerful, more technical central government, staffed by a new class of trained experts, was the only plausible way to fight the dominance of big business. The leading Clash of the Titans liberals were from New York City, but even William Allen White, the celebrated (in part for being anti-Bryan) small-town Kansas editor who was a leading Progressive and one of their allies, wrote, in 1909, that “the day of the rule of the captain of industry is rapidly passing in America.” Now the country needed “captains of two opposing groups—capitalism and democracy” to reset the

About ten miles away Third Officer Charles Victor Groves stood on the bridge of the Leyland Liner Californian bound from London to Boston. A plodding 6,000-tonner, she had room for 47 passengers, but none were being carried just now. On this Sunday night she had been stopped since 10:30 P.M., completely blocked by drifting ice. At about 11:10 Groves noticed the lights of another ship, racing up from the east on the starboard side. As the newcomer rapidly overhauled the motionless Californian, a blaze of deck lights showed she was a large passenger liner. Around 11:30 he knocked on the Venetian door of the chart room and told Captain Stanley Lord about it. Lord suggested contacting the new arrival by Morse lamp, and Groves prepared to do this. Then, at about 11:40, he saw the big ship suddenly stop and put out most of her lights. This didn’t surprise Groves very much. He had spent some time in the Far East trade, where they usually put deck lights out at midnight to encourage the passengers to turn in. It never occurred to him that perhaps the lights were still on … that they only seemed to go out because she was no longer broadside but had veered sharply to port.

Ten miles away on the Californian, Second Officer Stone and Apprentice Gibson watched the strange ship slowly disappear. She had fascinated them almost the whole watch—the way she kept firing rockets, the odd way she floated in the water. Gibson remarked that he certainly didn’t think the rockets were being sent up for fun. Stone agreed: “A ship is not going to fire rockets at sea for nothing.” By two o’clock the stranger’s lights seemed very low on the horizon, and the two men felt she must be steaming away. “Call the Captain,” Stone ordered, “and tell him that the ship is disappearing in the southwest and that she has fired altogether eight rockets.” Gibson marched into the chart room and gave the message. Captain Lord looked up sleepily from his couch: “Were they all white rockets?” Gibson said yes, and Lord asked the time. Gibson replied it was 2:05 by the wheelhouse clock. Lord rolled over, and Gibson went back to the bridge. At 2:20 Stone decided that the other ship was definitely gone, and at 2:40 he felt he ought to tell the Captain himself. He called the news down the speaking tube and resumed studying the empty night.

Yet there was still ample opportunity to avoid disaster. Every officer on the bridge, from Captain Smith to the very junior Moody, knew that sometime before midnight the Titanic might encounter ice. It was with this thought in mind that the Captain left the Wideners’ party shortly before 9:00 and joined Lightoller on the bridge.

Why couldn’t Captain Smith and his officers see the difference? Certainly they knew the importance of wireless in an emergency. The help summoned by the sinking liner Republic in 1909 proved that. But no one on the Titanic’s bridge seemed to appreciate the value of wireless as a constant, continuous navigational aid. Basically, they still thought of it as a novelty—something that lay outside the normal running of the ship. It was a mindset tellingly illustrated by the way the wireless operators were carried on the roster of the crew. Phillips and Bride were not listed with the Deck Department; they came under the Victualling Department—like stewards and pastry chefs.

At 12:05 A.M.—25 minutes after that bumping, grinding jar—Captain Smith ordered Chief Officer Wilde to uncover the boats … First Officer Murdoch to muster the passengers … Sixth Officer Moody to get out the list of boat assignments … Fourth Officer Boxhall to wake up Second Officer Lightoller and Third Officer Pitman. The Captain himself then walked about 20 yards down the port side of the Boat Deck to the wireless shack.

But the messages were not “put together.” If the recollections of the four surviving officers are any guide, most of the warnings went unnoticed on the bridge. Fourth Officer Boxhall, who was always Captain Smith’s choice for marking the ship’s chart, could only remember pricking off the La Touraine’s sighting on April 12. Of the six ice messages received on the 14th, the day of the collision, there is firm information about only the first two. The Caronia’s sighting, received at 9 A.M., appears to have been noted by Boxhall. Third Officer Pitman distinctly remembered seeing him jot the single word “ice” on a slip of paper, with the Caronia’s sighting underneath, and then tuck the slip into a frame above the chart room table. Other officers recalled seeing the same sighting pricked off on the chart—also Boxhall’s work. And around 12:45 Captain Smith showed the complete Caronia message to Second Officer Lightoller, senior officer on the bridge at the time.

About an hour later Captain Smith had the Baltic’s warning, too, but there’s no evidence that he showed it to anybody on the bridge. Instead, he took it with him as he started down for lunch about 1:30. On the Promenade Deck he ran into Bruce Ismay, who was taking a pre-lunch constitutional. They exchanged greetings, and the Captain handed the Managing Director the Baltic’s message as a matter of interest. Ismay glanced at it, stuffed it in his pocket, and went on down to lunch. He still had it late in the afternoon when he ran into Mrs. Thayer and Mrs. Ryerson, two of the most socially prominent ladies aboard. Ismay, who liked to remind people who he was, lost no time producing the Baltic message and reading them the titillating news about icebergs ahead.

Coming out of the smoking room that evening just before dinner, he again met Captain Smith. The Captain asked if Ismay still had the message, explaining that he wanted to post it for his officers to read. Ismay fished it out of his pocket and returned it without any further conversation. Then the two men continued down to the Á la Carte Restaurant—Ismay to dine alone with the ship’s surgeon, old Dr. O’Laughlin; Smith to join the small party the Wideners were giving in his honor. There’s no evidence that the Baltic’s information was ever noted on the bridge before the whole affair became academic. As for the four other ice messages received on the 14th—those from the Noordam, Amerika, Californian, and Mesaba—none of them were remembered by any of the surviving officers. The Noordam’s warning was acknowledged by Captain Smith, but what he did with it nobody knows. The Californian’s message was received by Second Wireless Operator Harold Bride, who testified that he took it to the bridge but didn’t know whom he gave it to. The Amerika and Mesaba warnings were received by First Wireless Operator John Phillips, but what happened to them remains a mystery.

There is only one account of the musicians making their way to their position. It comes from stewardess Violet Jessop, who knew Woodward and Hume from their time on the Olympic. She was in her bunk on either E or F Deck and heard a “low, rending, crunching, ripping sound” on impact but didn’t leave her cabin until the call to lifeboats came. On the way up the stairs she passed Captain Smith, J. Bruce Ismay, Chief Purser Herbert McElroy, and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. O’Laughlin, none of whom seemed overly concerned. She wrote that as she turned at the top of the staircase, “I ran into Jock, the bandleader and his crowd with their instruments. ‘Funny, they must be going to play,’ thought I, and at this late hour! Jock smiled in passing, looking rather pale for him, remarking, ‘Just going to give them a tune to cheer things up a bit,’ and passed on.

By now there was no lack of people willing to leave the Titanic, but a new problem arose. The officers in charge of launching the boats were afraid to put too many passengers in them for fear they might buckle and pitch everyone into the sea. Actually, there was no danger of this. Harland & Wolff had designed all the boats on the Olympic and Titanic to be lowered with their full complement of people. In a test on May 9, 1911, the shipyard even loaded one of the Olympic’s boats with weights corresponding to 65 persons, then raised and lowered it six times without any sign of strain. Neither Captain Smith nor his officers seem to have been aware of the test. Harland & Wolff never told them that the boats could be lowered fully loaded; the builders simply assumed they knew this as “a matter of general knowledge.” If they ever knew, nobody remembered it that night. Boat 6 rowed off with a maximum of 28 people; Boat 8 with 39; Boat 2 with 26. Acting on his own, Lightoller decided he might get more people into the boats by utilizing the portside lower deck gangway. He sent six seamen down to open the doors, and ordered the boats, once afloat, to row down to the opening and receive additional passengers. It didn’t work. The doors were never opened; the men sent down were never seen again. They were probably trapped by some sudden inflow of water before they could get the job done.

It would take far longer than ten minutes—and more than a gratuitous slap at Captain Smith—to get the Californian off the hook. On the afternoon of April 26, the Senate Committee heard in turn Gill, Lord, and Evans…and ultimately rejected the Captain’s version of events. Putting all the evidence together, the Committee found that the Californian was less than 19 miles away, saw the Titanic’s rockets, and “failed to respond to them in accordance with the dictates of humanity, international usage, and the requirements of law.

Why the band came to be playing in these circumstances is a question that will never be satisfactorily answered. Pierre Maréchal, the French aviator, informed the chairman of the Amalgamated Musicians’ Union that they’d been told to do it. He was sure that instructions had come down from Captain Smith, possibly via Purser McElroy, saying that they should play in order to prevent panic. The sound of bright music would have suggested that even if all was not well, at least all was under control. He reasoned that in the captain’s mind, the eventual deaths of eight men were a reasonable sacrifice for the saving of hundreds of passengers.

If the message was addressed to Captain Smith, one of the operators would take it directly to the Captain and hand it to him personally. If addressed simply to the ship, it might be delivered by a messenger, and to anyone on duty on the bridge. If sent just to be relayed on, like the Amerika’s alert to the Hydrographic Office in Washington, there seems to have been no standard practice at all.

Nor does there seem to have been any clear-cut procedure for handling the messages once they reached the bridge. According to Third Officer Pitman, every captain had his own system, but it’s hard to explain the system on the Titanic. Of the three messages addressed to Captain Smith personally, the Caronia’s was posted, the Noordam’s can’t be traced, and the Baltic’s spent the day in Bruce Ismay’s pocket. Of the rest, there’s no record that they were ever seen by any officer on the bridge.

Until 1912 the various steamship lines dealt directly with their musicians, signing them up as members of the crew like stewards, firemen, and ordinary seamen. The pay was union scale, which worked out at £6 10s. a month, plus a monthly uniform allowance of 10s. Then the Blacks entered the picture. An enterprising talent agency based in Liverpool, they promised the steamship companies a simpler and cheaper way to good music. One after another the companies signed contracts, giving the Blacks the exclusive right to supply bands to their vessels. The musicians still signed the ship’s articles for a token shilling a month (putting them clearly under the captain’s authority), but they were now really working for the Blacks, and could get no jobs except through the Blacks. Since the musicians worked for the Blacks or not at all, they had to take what the Blacks were willing to pay them—which turned out to be a sharp cut in salary. Instead of a basic pay of £6 10s., they now got only £4. Instead of a uniform allowance of 10s. a month, they now got nothing at all. The terms of employment were also hard: if the steamship company objected to any musician, the Blacks had the right to remove the man without any investigation or explanation.

Both American and British law had long given special protection to shipowners whose vessels, through negligent handling, caused damage to others. The risks of sending ships to sea were so great that some special incentive was needed, if maritime nations were to grow and prosper. Moreover, on land the factory owner could at least theoretically oversee the acts of his employees, but the shipowner had no such control over his captain and crew. By the very nature of the business he was usually out of touch, and it seemed unfair to hold him to the same degree of responsibility when something went wrong. Therefore, as long as he did not have “privity or knowledge” of the negligence, his liability would be limited.

This group knew the crew almost as well as each other. It was the custom to cross with certain captains rather than on particular ships, and Captain Smith had a personal following which made him invaluable to the White Star Line. The Captain repaid the patronage with little favors and privileges which kept them coming. On the last night John Jacob Astor got the bad news direct from Captain Smith before the general alarm, and others learned too.

Captain Jones, I submit to you that you were never really cut out to be Captain. Oh, you’re done it well, just like you do a good job of most things you tackle. But you’re not a Captain. You don’t enjoy ordering other people around. You like your independence, you like to go to strange places and do exciting things. In an earlier age you would have been an adventurer, a soldier of fortune.

Let's imagine... if you glimpsed the future, you were frightened by what you saw, what would you do with that information? You would go to... the politicians, captains of industry? And how would you convince them? Data? Facts? Good luck! The only facts they won't challenge are the ones that keep the wheels greased and the dollars rolling in. But what if... what if there was a way of skipping the middle man and putting the critical news directly into everyone's head? The probability of wide-spread annihilation kept going up. The only way to stop it was to show it. To scare people straight. Because, what reasonable human being wouldn't be galvanized by the potential destruction of everything they've ever known or loved? To save civilization, I would show its collapse. But, how do you think this vision was received? How do you think people responded to the prospect of imminent doom? They gobbled it up like a chocolate eclair! They didn't fear their demise, they re-packaged it. It could be enjoyed as video-games, as TV shows, books, movies, the entire world wholeheartedly embraced the apocalypse and sprinted towards it with gleeful abandon. Meanwhile, your Earth was crumbling all around you. You've got simultaneous epidemics of obesity and starvation. Explain that one! Bees and butterflies start to disappear, the glaciers melt, algae blooms. All around you the coal mine canaries are dropping dead and you won't take the hint! In every moment there's the possibility of a better future, but you people won't believe it. And because you won't believe it you won't do what is necessary to make it a reality. So, you dwell on this terrible future. You resign yourselves to it for one reason, because *that* future does not ask anything of you today. So yes, we saw the iceberg and warned the Titanic. But you all just steered for it anyway, full steam ahead. Why? Because you want to sink! You gave up!

Before Rowland could reply a shout from the crow’s-nest split the air. “Ice,” yelled the lookout; “ice ahead. Iceberg. Right under the bows.” The first officer ran amidships, and the captain, who had remained there, sprang to the engine-room telegraph, and this time the lever was turned. But in five seconds the bow of the Titan began to lift, and ahead, and on either hand, could be seen, through the fog, a field ofice, which arose in an incline to a hundred feet high in her track. The music in the theater ceased, and among the babel of shouts and cries, and the deafening noise of steel, scraping and crashing over ice, Rowland heard the agonized voice of a woman crying from the bridge steps: “Myra—Myra, where are you? Come back.

Margaret Brown used the notoriety she got from her involvement in the event to bring attention to her numerous causes. Two of those causes became the reform of sea-going to make it safer and honoring the valiant of the Titanic disaster. She would be the one to personally hand Captain Rostron of the Carpathia the Congressional Gold Medal for his role in the rescue.

after the Committee had scuttled former Chief Counsel Dick Sprague, that he’d be crazy to take the job. “I told him,” said Wolf, “that it was like the owners of the Titanic giving a guy a call and saying, ‘Hey, our ship is sinking, we need a new captain.

With his head brimming with these and many other instigating readings—Virgil and Milton; Goethe’s musings on the “Titanic, gigantic, heaven-storming” Prometheus; William Beckford’s Arabian romance, Vathek; Carlyle’s portrait of Cromwell in Heroes and Hero-Worship; Shelley’s mad scientist; a slew of whaling books—the idea of Captain Ahab began to take form.

Titanic received several ice warnings from ships steaming ahead of her during the voyage. In fact, seven separate warnings were received on April 14. The warnings about the dangerous ice reached the captain and other ranking officers from the Marconi telegraph operators on board. While it is easy to assume that folly or pride led these warnings to be ignored, that is probably not the case. As was stated previously, it was standard practice for the ship to continue on at fast speed even through ice-infested waters. Collisions of large ships with icebergs over the preceding decades had not resulted in disaster, and most ships depended on their reliable lookouts in the crow’s nest to warn them about ice in their path. The lookouts on the night of April 14 were Frederick Fleet and Reginald Robinson Lee, and they, along with the other lookouts on board, had all been

informed about the danger of ice on the journey. Fleet and Lee were nearing the end of their two-hour shift at around 11:40 pm when Fleet spotted the iceberg that would fell the mighty ship. He followed protocol, immediately issuing a warning and phoning the bridge, where he warned First Officer Murdoch, as the captain had gone to bed for the night. Murdoch ordered the engines reversed and the ship to turn, hoping to avoid the berg completely. But his decision proved fatal, and the starboard (right) side of the ship scraped alongside the jagged ice underneath the water, ripping holes in five of the watertight compartments toward the bow of the ship.