New book about the Titanic
There's a new book out about the Titanic, called The Other Side of the Night, and while you'd think that every minute of the ship's voyage had been covered in great detail already, this one does, at least, attempt to focus on something a bit different, namely the other two ships that were intimately involved in the disaster. Those would be the Cunarder Carpathia, which steamed at a top speed no one ever thought her capable of to attempt a rescue, and the Leyland liner Californian, which was stopped up against an ice floe no more than 10 or so miles north of the sinking ship, but never moved despite the officers' witnessing signal rockets fired by the Titanic after she struck the iceberg. Most people familiar with the details of the disaster will already know the stories of these two ships as well, and the book doesn't really tread much new ground. (Although I don't remember ever knowing before that Second Officer Lightoller's feisty Australian wife Sylvia chewed out the Californian's junior officers during a break in the Board of Trade hearings about the disaster.)
There has long been a bit of a cottage industry of defenders of Californian's captain Stanley Lord, who claim that the ship was much farther away than 10 miles and that the rockets sighted were not those fired by Titanic. The book's author does an excellent job of both showing that this argument doesn't hold much water (so to speak) and pointing out that, even if the rockets seen by the Californian weren't those of Titanic, they were clearly distress signals as specified by the regulations of the British Board of Trade, and therefore the Californian's captain was negligent for failing to do anything. But equally significantly, he points out the falsity of the notion that if the Californian had just come to the rescue, everyone from Titanic would have been saved. While it's true that the loss of life would likely have been smaller, the reality is that by the time Californian actually got to the Titanic, even from only 10 miles or so away, there would not have been enough time to conduct a rescue of the sort performed, say, by the Ile de France at the wreck of the Andrea Doria four decades later. Titanic sank far too quickly for that. Still, there's no question that they would have been able to rescue victims from the water, and it's conceivable that the numbers of dead and rescued would have been reversed if the Californian had acted rather than not.
Good book, if a bit redundant.
There has long been a bit of a cottage industry of defenders of Californian's captain Stanley Lord, who claim that the ship was much farther away than 10 miles and that the rockets sighted were not those fired by Titanic. The book's author does an excellent job of both showing that this argument doesn't hold much water (so to speak) and pointing out that, even if the rockets seen by the Californian weren't those of Titanic, they were clearly distress signals as specified by the regulations of the British Board of Trade, and therefore the Californian's captain was negligent for failing to do anything. But equally significantly, he points out the falsity of the notion that if the Californian had just come to the rescue, everyone from Titanic would have been saved. While it's true that the loss of life would likely have been smaller, the reality is that by the time Californian actually got to the Titanic, even from only 10 miles or so away, there would not have been enough time to conduct a rescue of the sort performed, say, by the Ile de France at the wreck of the Andrea Doria four decades later. Titanic sank far too quickly for that. Still, there's no question that they would have been able to rescue victims from the water, and it's conceivable that the numbers of dead and rescued would have been reversed if the Californian had acted rather than not.
Good book, if a bit redundant.