CHAPTER 10 Two More Boilers
Do not suppose that every man understands the sea.
Pirî Reis, Kitab-ı bahriye (1521)
BY SUNDAY AFTERNOON, TOMMY ANDREWS was fairly certain that the next day would see the Titanic’s full running speed tested for the first time.1 All twenty-four of her principal boilers were to be operational that evening, with the five auxiliary boilers due to be fired up the next day or, failing that, on Tuesday.2 Around lunchtime on the previous day, Andrews had received news that the fire burning too intensely in one of the coal bunkers in Boiler Room 5 since the sea trials in Belfast had been extinguished. To enable a damage inspection by the ship’s leading firemen, the Boiler Room had been emptied of coal, which produced a list to port so slight that the only passenger who seems to have noticed it was a Cambridge-educated science teacher taking lunch in the second-class Dining Saloon.3 One of the inspectors, Fred Barrett, reported that in several spots the “bottom of the watertight compartment was dinged.” His colleague Charles Hendrickson agreed and added that “all the paint and everything was off.”4 Decades later, this mild mutilation has been blamed, at least in part, for the loss of the Titanic, with proponents believing that the fire had weakened the bulkhead between Boiler Rooms 5 and 6, thus speeding or, in some schools of thought, securing the sinking after the collision with the iceberg had created “a perfect storm of extraordinary factors coming together.”5 In 2017, this theory was the focus of renewed speculation when it was somewhat misleadingly presented as a new discovery. In fact, it had previously been articulated at length in a television documentary first broadcast twenty years earlier, then re-examined in a 2004 report by the Geological Society of America in partnership with Ohio State University and scrutinized again in 2008 in a series of articles in the Independent.6 During the 2017 revival of the bunker fire theory, footage of the wreck was marshaled to show where the Titanic’s hull had fatally exploded outwards upon collision, thereby opening Boiler Room 5 to the sea. The underwater footage in question showed the exterior of the Titanic’s Mail Room on G-Deck, not one of its boiler rooms, and it had almost certainly buckled out due to the impact generated when the Titanic plowed into the seafloor after she sank, not when she hit the iceberg. Contemporary newsreels of the Titanic preparing to leave Belfast also allegedly show a discoloration of the hull, cited as evidence of how dangerous the bunker fire had been. The discoloration is more probably a consequence of deterioration in the century-old film, and the highlighted area again corresponds with the Mail Room, not the boilers. Unless the mail clerks had taken to torching every letter on the Titanic and holding their epistolary inferno up against the hull for ten days, it is hard to see how any of the film footage corroborates the suggestion that the fire, which was without doubt a nuisance, played a role in the eventual tragedy.
The coal fire in Boiler Room 5 is a constituent part in a series of arguments that attribute the loss of the Titanic to a mistake in design or construction. Variations include the quality of the steel or rivets used during construction by Harland and Wolff, the failure to extend the watertight compartments higher than E-Deck, and the provision of too small a rudder. It is true that, as with many things used in the industries of 1912, the steel hammered together to create the Titanic might not pass inspection today, but it has survived at the bottom of the inhospitable Atlantic for over a century and at no point did any contemporaries, many of whom were desperate to shift the blame from the Titanic’s operators, suggest that the fault lay with her builders. Tests carried out on small pieces of the Titanic’s hull that have been raised to the surface since her discovery in 1985 have all shown strength, rather than weakness, to the extent that a report commissioned by the US National Institute of Statistics and Technology in 1997 concluded that “no apparent metallurgical mistakes were made in the construction of the RMS Titanic.”7 As for the rudder, it was only fractionally smaller than a modern ship’s would need to be to obtain certification to commence trading.8
At the time of her launch, the Shipbuilder magazine had described the Titanic and her sisters as “practically unsinkable.” After the disaster, popular culture seized on the adjective, while defenders of the ship and her owners pointed to the qualifying adverb. The White Star Line never advertised the Titanic as an unsinkable ship, which is not to say that she was never described as such by those who might reasonably have been expected to show more restraint. During post-dinner drinks in the Reception Room on Saturday evening, a passenger was close enough to hear “Captain Smith tell his party that the ship could be cut crosswise in three places and each piece would float.”I9 Interestingly, this was, almost verbatim, a quote remembered independently by another passenger, who heard it from Thomas Andrews when he allegedly told her “that the Titanic was absolutely unsinkable. He said that she could break in three separate and distinct parts and that each part would stay afloat indefinitely.”10 It is hard to credit that a captain and a naval architect sincerely believed that a trifurcated ship could remain afloat, yet as reassuring hyperbole the “cut in three” imagery seems to have become something of a stock phrase during the voyage. The two passengers who heard it from Smith and Andrews did so independently of one another, on different days of the voyage, and they published their accounts without any perceptible opportunity to be influenced by each other’s testimony. The unsinkable claim related to the watertight compartments being impacted by a force capable of piercing the Titanic beneath the waterline. A fire or a devastating freak weather occurrence was still understood as having the power to destroy anything on the sea, whereas collisions were increasingly regarded as inconveniences. Three years before, the public’s confidence in modern ships had been strengthened by the sinking of the White Star’s Republic when, on a voyage from New York to Gibraltar, she had been hit in heavy fog by an Italian immigrant ship, the Florida. By the time the Republic foundered nine hours later, all passengers and crew, barring six unfortunates who had been asleep in their cabins at the point where the Florida struck, had been transferred to rescue ships which had been summoned by her wireless transmissions. The sinking seemed to prove that, even in the worst possible scenario, liners could remain afloat for long enough to allow help to arrive in time for a full evacuation.11
As historical ironies go, few are more temptingly didactic than a serious flaw in a ship labeled “unsinkable.” Yet there is scant evidence to suggest that there was any significant dereliction in the Titanic’s design or construction which contributed to her demise. Considering the extent of the damage inflicted by the iceberg, the most remarkable feature of the Titanic’s final hours is that she stayed afloat for as long as she did. The various attempts to explain the sinking as the result of human error, either by Harland and Wolff or by the White Star Line, ring in some way like a distorted continuation of the contemporary mind-set that trusted in the Titanic as “practically unsinkable.” If the Titanic had been of “the highest skill and perfection in marine construction,” a product of the greatest level of craftsmanship and expertise available between 1909 and 1912, then the disaster that overtook her would not have happened.12 If her rivets had been of better quality. If her steel had been stronger. If the boiler-room bunker fire had been extinguished in Belfast rather than halfway across the Atlantic. If her rudder had been larger. If she had been worthy of the confidence placed in her, human endeavor might still have triumphed over Nature. On closer examination, however, there was only one truly egregious error in how the Titanic was handled and that was with her speed.
Proof of the ship’s incrementally increasing speed had been displayed for passengers in daily postings at noon showing the distance covered in the previous twenty-four hours. A sweepstake was typically organized on transatlantic crossings to guess the next day’s run, with passengers good-naturedly trying to tease out hints from officers and stewards.13 Those who had bet on a superior performance from Saturday to Sunday were rewarded when 546 miles was announced, an increase of twenty-seven compared to the previous day.14 After Sunday lunch, John and Jack Thayer ran into Bruce Ismay, who showed them a telegraphed ice warning from a nearby White Star liner, the Baltic, and told them that in preparation for a full-speed run, weather permitting, the next day, “Two more boilers were opened up today.”II15 Ismay also remarked that he did not think the Titanic would reach ice until about nine o’clock that evening. When father and son took a walk on deck, the conversation with Ismay made sense to Jack, who had thought before breakfast that they were “in for another very pleasant day,” but now realized that it was “noticeably colder.”16 It was not the first time the two men had spoken to Ismay or to Thomas Andrews, whom they also bumped into that afternoon during their stroll.17 Andrews, Ismay, and the ship’s chief engineer, Archibald Frost, had had several “short chats… all observing the performance of the ship” with the Thayers earlier in the voyage.18
In contrast to his son, John Thayer was more interested in the ship’s performance than in the weather. He was a sincere believer in progress’s symbiotic relationship with capitalism, as he had shown in his career at the Pennsylvania Railroad, where he campaigned to limit government involvement in industry, testifying before the Pennsylvania Senate Railroad Committee in February 1907 that any attempt by the state legislature to impose a cap on the price of a train ticket would result in increases for commuting fares, the curtailment of services, or the use of freight revenues to cross-subsidize passenger traffic, thereby ending “the tremendous volume of business thrown upon us by the increased prosperity” of the previous decade.19 There had been a crisis of faith for Thayer in 1910 when, immediately before the financial crisis of that year, he had assured the railroad’s investors that “the outlook is splendid for a continuation of these [favorable] conditions.”20 How much his work aggravated the depression with which Thayer struggled all his adult life is unclear, although in the aftermath of the 1910 upset he had visited “nerve doctors” in Switzerland. Marian accompanied him and she may have been the first to suggest the retreats to help her husband. They had spent time in Switzerland in the winter of 1911–12, before their visit to Berlin and then their voyage on the Titanic, and it is probable though unprovable that a sojourn in a clinic was the reason behind the Swiss leg of their trip.
Despite the economic setbacks and the bouts of mental anguish, Thayer remained hopeful about the future and advances in transportation. It was a worldview that kept Thayer in step with Ismay and other plutocrats on board, including Colonel Astor and, to a lesser extent, Isidor Straus. It was not a universally shared optimism. Ida Straus had attributed the unpleasantness with the New York to the dangers inherent in ships the size of the Titanic, and during an evening conversation with John Thayer in the Smoking Room the Canadian railway tycoon Charles Hays gloomily warned that “the White Star, the Cunard and the Hamburg-American lines are now devoting their attention to a struggle for supremacy in obtaining the most luxurious appointments for their ships, but the time will soon come when the greatest and most appalling of all disasters at sea will be the result.”21 To some, the pursuit of greater man-made glory smacked of the Tower of Babel, producing a superstitious foreboding that cautionary vengeance would be inflicted to temper such arrogance.22 For those with more terrestrial neuroses, it seemed lunatic for companies to be led primarily by the pursuit of breaking a record.
Fourteen years before the Titanic’s maiden voyage, an American novelist, Morgan Robertson, published a novella, Futility, which described the maiden voyage of a British luxury liner called the Titan:
She was the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men. In her construction and maintenance were involved every science, profession, and trade known to civilization. On her bridge were officers, who, besides being the pick of the Royal Navy, had passed rigid examinations in all studies that pertained to the winds, tides, currents, and geography of the sea; they were not only seamen, but scientists. The same professional standard applied to the personnel of the engine-room, and the stewards’ department was equal to that of a first-class hotel.
From her lofty bridge ran hidden telegraph lines to the bow, stern engine-room, crow’s nest on the foremast, and to all parts of the ship where work was done.… From the bridge, engine-room, and a dozen places on her deck the ninety-two doors of nineteen water-tight compartments could be closed in half a minute by turning a lever. These doors would also close automatically in the presence of water. With nine compartments flooded the ship would still float, and as no known accident of the sea could possibly fill this many, the steamship Titan was considered practically unsinkable.
… In short, she was a floating city—containing within her steel walls all that tends to minimalize the dangers and discomforts of the Atlantic voyage—all that makes life enjoyable.23
On the fourth night of the fictional trip, the Titan is running at too high a speed through a dense fog, causing her to hit an iceberg and sink with the loss of thousands of lives due to insufficient provision of lifeboats. Futility was not a particularly successful novella at the time of first publication in 1898, which explains why the White Star Line was unaware in 1911 that they had christened their flagship with a name unsettlingly similar to a fictional leviathan that had capsized in the North Atlantic. Futility had articulated fears of the moment—at the time of writing, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Große had just taken the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic, the first of her larger running mates had been commissioned from a shipyard in Germany, and White Star were celebrating the launch of the Oceanic. Boundless confidence in the future of societies often jostles alongside fear at the impact of irrevocable change, and the evolution of the ocean liners between 1898 and 1912 had intensified both sets of feelings. The near doubling in size between the Kaiser class and the Cunard sisters and then the riposte from the Olympic class struck some observers as hubristic mania.
Contrary to the oft-repeated assertion that the Titanic was intent on snatching the Blue Riband from the Mauretania, she was not attempting to break the record for the fastest crossing to New York. Her creators and her owners knew that her engines were incapable of matching the speeds reached by the Mauretania or the Lusitania. They had designed her that way. The White Star Line had ostentatiously dropped out of the Blue Riband frenzy thirteen years earlier, when they announced their intention to focus on comfort, size, and safety in lieu of speed, and their tactic had paid dividends with increased passenger revenue and an enviable reputation with all three classes of travel.24 Even the way in which the losses of their Republic and Suevic had been handled had augmented White Star’s prestige.25 Holding the speed record was not even necessarily advantageous, beyond the first flurry of favorable publicity. It had ruined the career of the Deutschland, the winner in 1900 subsequently notorious for the discomfort she created with vibrations when she ran at full speed; she suffered a steep decrease in reservations to the point that she was retired, renamed, fitted with new engines, and deployed as a cruise ship.26 Furthermore, although shorter voyages meant reduced catering and accommodation costs for the ship’s operators, those savings were often erased by the cost of the extra fuel consumption needed to maintain the liner’s record.27
In contrast, the Olympic was widely praised for her displays of “excellent, though not excessive, speed and of great comfort”; some second-class passengers who had previously sailed on the Lusitania remarked over Sunday lunch on the Titanic that this crossing was more comfortable because the latter was a smoother ship; and, as with every White Star commander at the start of a voyage, when he boarded the Titanic at Southampton Captain Smith had received a letter from his employers reiterating, “You are to dismiss all idea of competitive passages with other vessels, and to concentrate your attention upon a cautious, prudent and ever watchful system of navigation which will lose time or suffer any other temporary inconvenience rather than incur the slightest risk which can be avoided.”28
That the Titanic lacked both the intention and the capability of taking the Riband from the Mauretania did not, however, mean that she proceeded at a leisurely pace. In the testing of her engines, her speed had been increased progressively since leaving Queenstown. Even after warnings of ice ahead had been received from other ships, seven of which arrived on Sunday the 14th, Captain Smith’s approach was still in keeping with received professional wisdom at the time which held that thanks to the advances in technology “speed makes for safety under practically all conditions except that of fog.”29 If ice was ahead, the easiest course of action for a ship as large and as safe as the Titanic was to get through it quickly, a view Captain Smith had expressed earlier in his career when, discussing ice with a colleague, he remarked, “I go as fast as I can for by so doing I shorten the time of danger.”30
The temperature had dropped further by the time John Thayer took his next walk on deck at about five o’clock with his bereaved friend, Arthur Ryerson, a lawyer by profession, with family money from a Chicago-based steel distributor, who had spent most of the voyage sequestered in his suite with his wife and children, mourning his eldest son’s death in a car crash. The funeral was planned for Friday afternoon at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, two days after the Titanic was due to reach New York.31 John and Marian had called on the Ryersons and persuaded them to take advantage of decks rendered quiet as most other passengers trooped indoors “restlessly searching for a warm place.”32 The wind had picked up, whipping around the decks and canceling in the name of safety any vague plans to conduct a lifeboat drill that afternoon.33 Two days earlier, the Yale Daily News had printed a resolution that would be forwarded to the Ryersons when they reached America: “Whereas Almighty God in His incomprehensible wisdom has taken from among us our beloved classmate and friend Arthur Larned Ryerson, who died bravely far from the comforting presence of those nearest and dearest to him, be it Resolved, That we, the Class of 1914, express to his family our most sincere sympathy for their terrible loss, and be it further Resolved, That these resolutions be printed in the News and that a copy be sent to his family.”34
“I absolutely hate myself”: J. Bruce Ismay, managing director of the White Star Line.
The Titanic was sailing westward, with the sun setting ahead of her in the course of Thayer and Ryerson’s hour-long promenade, and the sky was “quite pink” when they saw Bruce Ismay, in a blue lounge suit, talking to their wives. As the men approached, Ismay got up from his deck chair, bid all four a good afternoon, and beetled through the nearby entrance leading to the aft Grand Staircase. Ismay’s own marriage had long ago atrophied as his wife struggled to find happiness with an impatient perfectionist and, after Florence Ismay passed through menopause, sexual relations between the couple had ceased.35 She had done her duty as first lady of the line by joining Ismay for the maiden voyage of the Olympic and she saw no reason to burden herself with a repeat appearance for the Titanic’s. Her husband had, in the days since meeting them at Cherbourg, developed an infatuation with Marian Thayer, which Marian herself was either blithely unaware of or tactfully oblivious to. The two women told their husbands that, on what Emily Ryerson called a “very cold but perfectly beautiful” afternoon, Ismay had joined them to check if the extra staff and rooms he had arranged for the Ryerson party had made them more comfortable. Whatever his good intentions, no one could ever accuse Bruce Ismay of getting ahead on charm. Failing to recognize that Mrs. Ryerson was still too fragile to conduct willingly a conversation about anything other than the depth of her own grief, and perhaps not even that, Ismay had launched into a spiel about the ship’s speed and the ice warnings he had been shown by Captain Smith. There was a German tanker nearby “wanting a tow,” which Ismay reasonably felt was not the responsibility of a passenger carrier of the Titanic’s size. Regarding the ice, Emily Ryerson had apparently asked, “Of course you are going to slow down?” To which Ismay, parroting the line taken by Smith and most other captains he had known, answered, “Certainly not, we are going to put on more steam and run away from them.” He also predicted that if the Titanic performed as well as was expected during the full-speed test the next day, they might reach Manhattan late on Tuesday evening, rather than at sunrise on Wednesday, as scheduled. As they descended to their respective cabins and the bugle sounded in advance of dinner, the two couples wondered what they would do if they reached New York early. The Thayers had access to a private railway car, for which they might need to send a telegram, to have it dispatched to wait for them on Tuesday evening. In his rambling, awkwardness-addled braggadocio, Ismay had forgotten to mention that if a White Star vessel arrived at its pier after 8:00 p.m. it was company policy to permit passengers to stay on board and disembark after breakfast.36
I. Smith did not hold much interest in the possibilities of a shipwreck, having told a journalist three years earlier that “modern shipbuilding has gone beyond all that.”
II. This telegram had been passed on to Ismay by Captain Smith, to whom it was returned that evening for posting in the Officers’ Mess. It was the only ice warning to the Titanic that was shown to Ismay and it may have been given to him as a courtesy because it came from another White Star ship.