Five: To the Lifeboats!, History Smashers: The Titanic

One of the myths surrounding the story of the Titanic disaster has to do with the lifeboats. You’ve probably heard stories about how the luxury ship cut corners, how there weren’t the required number of lifeboats on board, and that’s why so many people died. But that’s not entirely true.

It is true that the Titanic only had enough lifeboats for about half of the passengers on board. But even though there weren’t enough boats for everyone, the White Star Line actually included more lifeboats than the law required. Back then, the number of lifeboats required on a ship was based on the weight of the ship. It had nothing to do with the number of passengers on board who might need to be rescued. At the time, that law said that any ship weighing at least ten thousand tons had to have sixteen lifeboats. The Titanic weighed way more than that. It came in at forty-six thousand tons, but there was no difference in how many lifeboats were required, because the law hadn’t caught up to the shipbuilding industry, which was now making bigger and bigger ships. So even though it was enormous, the Titanic would have been perfectly legal with just sixteen lifeboats on board. But the ship actually had twenty.

THE TITANIC’S LIFEBOATS

14 regular wooden lifeboats (65 passengers each)

4 collapsible boats (47 passengers each): These had bottoms made of wood and cork, with canvas sides that could be lifted before launch or even in the water. They could be stacked on deck, so they took up less space than regular wooden lifeboats.

Originally, the plan was for the Titanic to have more than twice as many lifeboats. Early plans called for forty-eight boats, but the shipbuilders decided that would clutter up the decks and leave passengers less room for walking in the ocean air. Historians also wonder if the White Star Line was worried that more boats could actually make passengers feel less safe. After all, if the ship was so modern and safe, why would it need all those lifeboats? So the decision was made to keep just twenty lifeboats—enough to fit less than a third of the ship’s maximum capacity. Historians wonder if more lifeboats would have made a big difference. Some argue it wouldn’t have, because there simply wouldn’t have been time to launch them all. Even with twenty lifeboats, the crew ran out of time to load passengers before the ship went down.

Part of the problem was that people didn’t want to get into the lifeboats. Half an hour after the Titanic hit the iceberg, the first lifeboats were ready for passengers. But there were few passengers to be found. Many were still sleeping. Others knew the ship had hit an iceberg but thought everything was fine. Even after they realized that the crew was loading lifeboats, many weren’t interested. It was cold out, and staying on the big ship felt safer than being lowered down in that little lifeboat. Even if the Titanic was sinking, another ship was coming to rescue them, right? Why not wait where it was more comfortable?

At about 12:30 a.m., the Titanic’s crew was ordered to load the women and children into lifeboats. Crew members walked from cabin to cabin, waking people up. Around ten minutes later, the first boat was lowered.

Now all twenty lifeboats were gone. If they’d been launched at capacity, they could have saved more than 1,100 people. But most of the boats weren’t even close to full. One had left with only a dozen people on board. In the end, only 698 people made it into the lifeboats. The rest of the passengers and crew were trapped on a sinking ship.

Who made it into the lifeboats? More women than men. Because of the “women and children first” policy, three-quarters of the Titanic’s female passengers would be rescued, while just one in five men survived. And first-class passengers were more likely to survive than those from lower classes.

One of the myths surrounding the Titanic disaster has to do with these statistics. There were rumors that third-class passengers were deliberately kept from the lifeboats by locked gates and bullying crew members. But there’s no real evidence that ever happened. There were gates because immigration laws at that time required third-class passengers to be kept separate from the rest of the ship to prevent the spread of disease. That didn’t really make much sense, since wealthy people get sick, too, but it was the policy back then.

But historians don’t believe most of those gates were locked. More likely, other factors kept many third-class passengers from getting into the boats. The third-class cabins were farther from the boat decks. The ship was enormous, with hard-to-navigate hallways, stairs, and passages, so it couldn’t have been easy to find their way. Some didn’t want to leave behind their possessions; they were traveling with everything they owned. And many of the third-class passengers were immigrants who didn’t speak English, the language in which the crew members were giving orders and warnings. It’s likely that many simply didn’t know what was happening or understand what they were supposed to do until it was too late.

You might think that with so much loss of human life, the dogs on board the ship would be doomed. But three of them were rescued, too—little lapdogs whose owners quietly brought them into the lifeboats.

There were also rumors of a pig in one of the lifeboats. Those were true…sort of.

THE GOOD-LUCK PIG

One of Titanic’s survivors, Edith Rosenbaum, refused to get into the lifeboat without her good-luck pig. It was a little toy music box that her mother gave her for good luck after she’d survived a car crash that killed her fiancé. Rosenbaum had felt like she needed luck on the trip. She’d written a letter from Queenstown, telling her secretary back home that she liked the ship but “I cannot get over my feeling of depression and premonition of trouble.”

When the iceberg hit, Rosenbaum didn’t want to get into a lifeboat. But one of the sailors grabbed her musical pig and tossed it into the lifeboat, so she decided to go in after it. It was her lucky pig, after all. That night, she comforted the children in the lifeboat by making it play its tune.

The pig was rescued along with its owner. Later on, experts at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, fixed the toy and figured out how it worked. (You could wind the music box by turning its curly tail.) They made a recording of the song and posted it online so the public could help identify the tune. It turned out to be a song called “La Sorella,” composed by Charles Borel-Clerc.