As can be seen in Chapter 10 of this book, early information about the wreckage was misleading. When it came to rest, Titanic did not retain two funnels, nor was its stern totally in pieces. These errors might be put down to the difficulty of observing the wreck using the limited lighting available to Ballard. His refusal to release the exact position of the wreck was deliberate. Ballard at first said only that the wreck lay about ten miles to the east of the distress position. Secrecy could not last, as too many were aware of the real position, and soon the exact coordinates were revealed.
We now know that the wreck is in two major pieces in the midst of a large debris field. Satellite navigation gives the position of the bow as 41°43’57″N, 49°56’49″W. The stern lies in 41°43’35″N, 49°56’54″W. The position of the stern is considered to mark the place at which Titanic sank, as its lack of hydrodynamic form caused it to sink practically vertically. The bow was relatively intact and traveled some distance forward during its sinking. At least 60 feet of the hull between the two sections was totally destroyed. The wreck lies about 13 nautical miles from the distress position.
Facts since discovered from the wreck cast new light on two main topics, namely, the navigation of Titanic and nearby ships as well as the process of the ship’s sinking.
Titanic’s distress signals gave her position after striking the iceberg as 41°46’N, 50°14’W. For many years this was generally accepted as correct, partly because of its endorsement by Captain Rostron of Carpathia, which had steamed to the wreck scene with apparently unerring accuracy. Evidence for its inaccuracy came from Captain James Moore of Mount Temple and Captain Stanley Lord of Californian, but both were overlooked in the general adulation of Captain Rostron. Captain Moore had reached the vicinity of the distress position on the morning of April 15, 1912, and found nothing. To his eastward lay a field of ice, beyond which Carpathia could be seen picking up Titanic’s lifeboats. A longitude observation showed Mount Temple lay in about 50°10’W, somewhat east of the longitude of the distress position. Carpathia was even farther east and the distress position was obviously wrong. Captain Lord reached the wreck site on the morning of the sinking and later placed the floating wreckage in 50°1’W.
Writers dismissed these anomalies, with the creditable exception of Peter Padfield, in The Titanic and the Californian of 1965. However, Padfield lacked the key needed to fully solve the puzzle. This we now have.
An obvious implication of the wreck position is that Titanic’s accident occurred only a few miles south of the normal track for New York. Allowing for some southerly drift on the Labrador Current during the sinking, an inquiry conducted by Britain’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch in 1992 determined that Titanic stopped in about 41°47’N, 49°55’W. Given the small inaccuracies inherent in the navigation of 1912, this position may be accepted as satisfactory for all practical purposes. It is certainly sufficient to show Captain Smith made no particular effort to avoid the known ice region. Contrary to some accounts, he had followed the usual track within the limits of practical navigation. This was realized by Lord Mersey and his assessors in 1912. In his report, Mersey wrote, “The alteration of the course at 5:50 p.m. was so insignificant that it cannot be attributed to any intention to avoid ice.”
The often repeated claim that Titanic was steaming ten miles south of the usual track stems from unreliable testimony from Third Officer Herbert Pitman and Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall. It was seized on by both plaintiffs and defendant in the British civil claims court. The plaintiffs said it proved Captain Smith was aware of ice. The defense said it proved he did something about it.
With the inaccuracy of Titanic’s distress position known, the question of how it was arrived at can be considered. Several possible explanations, none of them authoritative, have been proposed.
The position was determined by Joseph Boxhall, acting alone. He allowed a speed of 22 knots “over the ground,” which was in line with Titanic’s known speed during the previous day. He took as his starting point a position obtained by multiple star sights at 7:30 p.m. and calculated the distance run since the sights.
His next task was to convert the distance run to degrees and minutes of longitude and determine the new longitude. The present author has proposed three ways in which he may have gone astray. Using a marine table known as a Traverse Table, he may have taken out figures for a latitude of 48° instead of for 42°, which appears on the same page. He may have made the calculation using spherical trigonometry and logarithms, as taught for the Board of Trade examinations. In this case, using the logarithm of a sine instead of the logarithm of a cosine would produce a similar error. Thirdly, he may have taken as his starting point the customary dead reckoning position made for 8:00 p.m., instead of the more accurate 7:30 p.m. position.
An American researcher, Sam Halpern, has proposed a novel theory. He suggests the 7:30 p.m. position was itself incorrect because an error of one minute was made in the timing of all the evening longitude sights. The present author has checked this idea with a modern master mariner and he agreed it was possible, though officers were aware such an error could be made.
All these possible mistakes would produce an error approximating to the distance proven by the wreck position. However, the truth will never be known. Boxhall may have merely written down an incorrect figure at some point.
With the wreck position known, Carpathia’s rescue mission can be reassessed. The present author was probably the first to do this, publishing his findings online in 1998.*
From Captain Rostron’s evidence, it can be calculated that he believed he started from 41°10’N, 49°12’W, a point 58 miles from the distress position, and steamed to it on a course of 308° True. This course misses the wreck site by about seven miles, passing well southwest of it.
The answer to this anomaly lies in evidence from Captain Rostron and others. After Titanic sank, Joseph Boxhall, in emergency boat 2, periodically fired green hand flares, with the intention of keeping the lifeboats together and attracting a rescuer. Toward the end of his passage, Rostron sighted one of these flares a little off Carpathia’s port bow. Had he been on the course he thought he was steering, the flare would have been sighted off his starboard bow, if at all. Furthermore, the flare must have been no more than ten miles away, as can be shown from nautical tables. Rostron thought he was much farther away, as by his reckoning he had only been steaming toward the wreck for slightly more than two hours. It has been shown that he was mistaken in his timing and the sighting was made after about two and a half hours.* Carpathia covered about 38–40 miles in that time at a realistic speed of 15 knots. She covered the last ten miles in about forty-five minutes, occasionally slowing and changing course to avoid icebergs. Carpathia had started from a point farther east than Rostron calculated and no more than 50 miles from Titanic.
No Titanic topic raises more controversy, hot tempers, and outright rudeness than the question of what the captain and crew of the Leyland Line’s freighter Californian did or did not do during the night of April 14, 1912.†
When Titanic’s wreck was discovered, some hailed it as a vindication of Captain Stanley Lord. It was about 22 miles from his claimed overnight position. He had claimed the distance was about 19 miles. Therefore the ship seen from Californian could not have been Titanic. There is another side to the argument and it is not helpful to Captain Lord and his apologists.
In a statement written on board Californian at Captain Lord’s request, his second officer, Herbert Stone, said he had observed a stationary ship bearing SSE from the stationary Californian. If Californian was anywhere near the place claimed by Captain Lord, this is the bearing of Titanic’s wreck. Moreover, it was on the same side of the ice field that halted Californian. The distress position was to the SSW of Californian and it was in this direction that Lord steamed on the morning of April 15.
The wreck position does not improve our knowledge of the distance between Californian and Titanic. It does greatly increase the likelihood that the ship seen from Californian was Titanic.
The American and British inquiries agreed Titanic sank intact. This was in spite of rather contradictory reports of the hull breaking in the last stages of the process. There may have been an element of class distinction in this decision. The evidence of officers Charles Lightoller and Herbert Pitman was preferred to that of seamen and passengers. In Britain one of Titanic’s designers, Edward Wilding, testified that the hull was strong enough to have withstood the stresses of sinking.
The discovery of the wreck has settled the argument over the breakup, but a good deal of controversy remains, with a few crank theories to boot. There is now broad agreement on a few matters.
At the point when the hull failed, Titanic was on the verge of sinking, purely through the weight of water in her forward compartments. This was determined by naval architects C. Hackett and J. G. Bedford and published in the journal of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects in 1996. The fracture of the hull did little to accelerate the sinking.
The hull probably first began to fail at the double bottom, this being in compression. This occurred when the hull was inclined at ten to fifteen degrees, with the propellers clear of the sea. Failure of the sides and upper decks quickly followed and the section immediately forward of the reciprocating engines disintegrated. Five small boilers fell from this area but the twenty-four remaining boilers stayed in place, contrary to the accounts of 1912 and later books. The extreme violence of the event is demonstrated by the separation of the two foremost cylinders from the engines.
The two main parts of the hull fell to the seafloor at a considerable speed. The bow was driven some fifty feet into the mud, decelerating at a rate that left many interior items in place. The stern also dug deep, bending the propeller shafts to the level of G deck, though the rudder remained intact. Much of the stern section was reduced to a tangle of steel plate, probably because compartments imploded under pressure during the descent.
Since 1985 the wreck has been extensively examined. Details are beyond the scope of this book, but a few points are worth mentioning, in view of the amount of misinformation floating about.
In 1996, Paul Mathias of Polaris Imaging used ground-penetrating sonar to obtain images of the damage to the starboard side of Titanic’s hull. The results show intermittent narrow gaps in the plating, rather than the legendary three-hundred-foot gash. The images obtained agree fairly well with eyewitness testimony, especially the long gap extending along most of boiler room 6 and into boiler room 5. The total area of the gaps agrees well with calculations made by Harland and Wolff’s Edward Wilding in 1912.
Parts of the hull have been recovered, enabling the steel plating to be tested. Much was made of test results published in 1992 which showed that when cooled to around the freezing point the steel was readily fractured by a sharp blow, in what is termed a Charpy V-notch test. “Brittle steel” was for a time a popular hobbyhorse. Less publicity was given to tests performed in 1999 that showed that when bent at a moderate rate the cold steel simply bent, as can be seen on the wreck.
Attention turned to the rivets recovered from the wreck site. Some of these failed because their points failed. (The ends hammered or pressed down by the builders are called points.) Metallurgists discovered that the proportion of slag in the wrought iron rivets, hammered in manually, was higher than would have been ideal. This may have contributed to the iceberg damage, but it should be noted that steel rivets pressed hydraulically also failed.
Argument over details seems likely to continue forever, but the essentials of the sinking appear settled. A hull built to withstand the normal rigors of the North Atlantic failed when confronted by the abnormal.
*For more detail, see http://www.titanicebook.com/carpathia.html.
*See evidence from Carpathia passenger Howard Chapin, radio records, and Titanic survivor, Mahala Douglas.
†See Chapter 5.