IELTS JOURNAL 148 D In the ten hours prior to the Titanic’s fatal collision with an iceberg at 11.40pm,
six warnings of icebergs in her path were received by the Titanic’s wireless
operators. Only one of these messages was formally posted on the bridge; the
others were in various locations across the ship. If the combined information in
these messages of iceberg positions had been plotted, the ice field which lay
across the Titanic’s path would have been apparent. Instead, the lack of formal
procedures for dealing with information from a relatively new piece of
technology, the wireless, meant that the danger was not known until too late.
This was not the fault of the Titanic crew. Procedures for dealing with warnings
received through the wireless had not been formalized across the shipping
industry at the time. The fact that the wireless operators were not even Titanic
crew, but rather contracted workers from a wireless company, made their role
in the ship’s operation quite unclear.
E Captain Smith’s seemingly casual attitude in increasing the speed on this day to
a dangerous 22 knots or 41 kilometers per hour, can then be partly explained by
his ignorance of what lay ahead. But this only partly accounts for his actions,
since the spring weather in Greenland was known to cause huge chunks of ice to
break off from the glaciers. Captain Smith knew that these icebergs would float
southward and had already acknowledged this danger by taking a more
southerly route than at other times of the year. So why was the Titanic travelling
at high speed when he knew, if not of the specific risk, at least of the general risk
of icebergs in her path? As with the lack of coordination of the wireless
messages, it was simply standard operating procedure at the time. Captain
Smith was following the practices accepted on the North Atlantic, practices
which had coincided with forty years of safe travel. He believed, wrongly as we
now know, that the ship could turn or stop in time if an iceberg was sighted by
the lookouts.
F There were around two and a half hours between the time the Titanic rammed
into the iceberg and its final submersion. In this time 705 people were loaded
into the twenty lifeboats. There were 473 empty seats available on lifeboats
while over 1,500 people drowned. These figures raise two important issues.
Firstly, why there were not enough lifeboats to seat every passenger and crew
member on board. And secondly, why the lifeboats were not full.
G The Titanic had sixteen lifeboats and four collapsible boats which could carry just
over half the number of people on board her maiden voyage and only a third of
the Titanic’s total capacity. Regulations for the number of lifeboats required
were based on outdated British Board of Trade regulations written in 1894 for
ships a quarter of the Titanic’s size, and had never been revised. Under these
requirements, the Titanic was only obliged to carry enough lifeboats to seat 962