The Death Ship

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Titanic's Lifeboats

One of the biggest issues people have with Titanic is its lifeboats: were there enough? If not, why? If they had been filled to capacity, how many people would have been saved? Were the crew adequately trained to evacuate the ship? Did the crew dispatch them quickly enough? It is often the first issue people turn to when discussing the sheer number of fatalities during the sinking.

Many of the questions surrounding the lifeboats come from the idea that the ship was unsinkable. A publicity brochure from White Star Line in 1910 for Titanic and Olympic stated that they were designed to be practically unsinkable, though White Star Line stuck to its assertion that the ship had been designed to be unsinkable, not that it was actually unsinkable. There isn't much of a difference between those two, if you ask me, but White Star Line was always quick to cover its own back. Other publications supported this notion of the ship being unsinkable: the Irish News and Belfast Morning News reported in June 1911 that the hull's watertight compartments and tried-and-tested watertight doors - which would fall by gravity via hydraulic cataracts when the electric magnet that held them open was deactivated on the bridge - meant that the ship was practically incapable of sinking. The Shipbuilder magazine's article on Titanic and Olympic agreed.1

Supposedly, a deckhand stated that 'God himself could not sink this ship' when asked about it,2 inspiring the famous line in the 1997 film. This notion of the ship's unsinkability also reached the ears of passengers: Thomson Beattie wrote in a letter to his mother in Fergus, Ontario, that he was 'coming home in a new, unsinkable boat';3 and Margaret Devaney said that she boarded the Titanic because she 'thought it would be a safe steamship' and 'had heard it could not sink'.4 It was not that passengers had an almost religious belief that the ship was unsinkable, but that they believed it had been built so well that it could only sink in the most unlikely, nigh-on impossible, of circumstances.

In 1912, the Board of Trade was trying to make ships watertight and become lifeboats in themselves. The Board of Trade rewarded shipbuilders with having to carry fewer lifeboats if their ship was properly sub-divided, which the Titanic was. The ship's eventual lifeboats numbered twenty - fourteen traditional, two emergency and four collapsible - but the boats could not accommodate everyone; in fact, they could only fit 1,178 of the 2,208 passengers and crew on board. But the ship was unsinkable, a lifeboat in itself, so surely it did not need to fit all those people? This view was supported by Archibald Campbell Holms, a shipbuilding expert (and spiritualist) from Scotland whose 1904 work Practical Shipbuilding: A Treatise on the Structural Design and Building of Modern Steel Vessels became a go-to for industry professionals. In a second edition of the book published in 1918, Holms stated:

The fact that Titanic carried boats for little more than half the people on board was not a deliberate oversight, but was in accordance with a deliberate policy that, when the subdivision of a vessel into watertight compartments exceeds what is considered necessary to ensure that she shall remain afloat after the worst conceivable accident, the need for lifeboats practically ceased to exist, and consequently a large number may be dispensed with.5

This was not an unfair assessment to make and was, in fact, backed up by evidence. In 1909, White Star Line's ship RMS Republic was sailing from New York to the Mediterranean when it encountered dense fog off the coast of Massachusetts. Despite precautions, it collided with SS Florida of the Lloyd Italiano Line. SS Florida's bow was crushed, killing three crewmen, while RMS Republic was sliced open on its portside. Two passengers who were asleep in their cabins - William J. Mooney and Mary Lynch - were killed instantly, while a third, Mary's husband Eugene, would later succumb to his injuries at Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. The ship began to list as its boiler and engine rooms flooded with water, thanks to a rip in its side not dissimilar to the damage Titanic later fell victim to. Like Titanic, it did not have enough lifeboats to accommodate all its passengers, but it stayed afloat long enough to transfer everyone via the lifeboats it did have to SS Florida and the Greshem, a cruising cutter and auxiliary gunboat that answered RMS Republic's distress call. RMS Republic did sink, despite efforts to tow it to New York for repairs as SS Florida was, but the evidence, in White Star Line's eyes, was clear: in the event of a major accident and / or disaster, its ships could stay afloat long enough to avoid loss of life, and it provided the number of lifeboats accordingly.

It is worth noting, however, that it took almost half a day for RMS Republic's passengers to be transferred to a rescue ship, and the ship sank at a much slower rate than the Titanic. White Star Line could not accurately predict how fast or slow Titanic would sink (two hours, forty minutes in the end) in the event of a collision, be it an iceberg, rocks or another ship. Even if Titanic had had additional lifeboats, it's unlikely that they would have saved more lives, unless Titanic had stayed afloat longer, allowing Carpathia to reach more survivors. This was addressed in a speech by Lord Charles Beresford, Chief of the British Channel Fleet, a few weeks after the disaster, in which he lamented that 'it might be fairly supposed that had the Titanic floated for twelve hours, all might have been saved'.6

The Titanic carried the number of lifeboats - twenty - it was legally required to. At the time of its launch, Titanic was subject to the requirements of section 427 of the Merchant Shipping Act 1894 and the Merchant Shipping Act 1906. These outlined the rules and regulations ships were required to follow to keep their passengers safe. At the time, the number of lifeboats required was based on the tonnage of a ship, not on the number of passengers and crew it could carry. The highest requirement, applied to ships over 10,000 tonnes - Titanic was 46,328 - was to have at least sixteen lifeboats able to accommodate a total of 990 people. The ship's design would have enabled it to carry over sixty lifeboats, but as these weren't required within the current regulations, they weren't incorporated into its construction.

These regulations were wildly outdated. When the regulations were outlined in the 1880s, the largest liners at the time - Etruria and Umbira, sister ships of the Cunard Line, one of White Star Line and Harland & Wolff 's biggest competitors - had a tonnage of 8,000grt (gross registered tonnes). By the time the legislation came into effect, White Star Line's own Oceanic surpassed the 10,000-tonnage mark at 17,272 gross tonnes, so the legislation was practically outdated as soon as it was passed. Shipbuilding had advanced unexpectedly quickly in less than twenty years and ships had become much larger than anyone could have predicted. RMS Carmania, another Cunard Line ship, had berths for 2,650 passengers but only enough lifeboats for 29 per cent. In fact, only six of the thirty-nine British liners at the time had enough lifeboats to accommodate all their passengers, and these were the ones that were registered as over 10,000 tonnes.

Ships from companies across the water did not fare much better. SS Amerika (recommissioned USS America during the First World War), launched in 1905 by Harland & Wolff for the Hamburg America Line of Germany, for example, was a 22,225-tonne passenger liner with only enough lifeboats for about 55 per cent of its crew. (Interestingly, SS Amerika also reported icebergs on 14 April 1912, not far from where Titanic struck hers). The legislation had not been updated to reflect any of this, so while White Star Line's decision not to include more lifeboats did result in a loss of life that could have been avoided, it was covered legally. When asked during the British inquiry why the regulations had not been updated since they had been drawn up, Sir Alfred Chalmers of the Board of Trade stated:

Due to advancements that had been made in shipbuilding it was not necessary for boats to carry more lifeboats. The latest boats were stronger than ever and had watertight compartments making them unlikely to require lifeboats at all. Sea routes used were well-travelled meaning that the likelihood of a collision was minimal. The latest boats were fitted with wireless technology.7

The ship's lifeboats had the capacity for 1,178 people - far more than what was required in line with the Table and Rules within the Merchant Shipping Acts of 1894 and 1906. So White Star Line, technically, acted within the requirements of the legislation placed upon it and actually provided more lifeboats than legally required. It was only in hindsight, following investigations and inquiries into the sinking, that the British Commissioner recommended that the appropriate number of lifeboats and rafts on board ships such as Titanic...