RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean during the early morning hours of 15 April 1912. The cause: uncontrollable flooding after colliding with an iceberg. More than 1,500 persons perished in that disaster. The cause: an insufficient number of lifeboat seats for all passengers and crew. The U.S. Senate and British Board of Trade conducted inquiries in 1912 and mistakenly concluded that Captain Stanley Lord, master of the SS Californian, was within visible range of the Titanic as she sank and failed to render aid. The cause: aggressive investigations more keenly focused on the convenience of a conclusion rather than the labor of elucidating the truth.
The popular version of the Titanic story advanced by the 1912 investigations is that the sinking vessel sighted the lights of a mysterious vessel within five miles. Her officers launched distress rockets more than 300 feet into the air and signaled by Morse code with powerful lamps in an attempt to communicate her distress to the nearby ship. The Titanic observed no response from that vessel.
The Californian likewise sighted flares from a mysterious vessel that steamed up within a range of five miles and failed to answer her signal lamp as she lay stopped at the east edge of a huge north-south ice barrier. Captain Lord maintained that he was well to the north— 19 miles away from the distress position given by the Titanic—whereas the 1912 hearings concluded that the cargo vessel had to be farther south than Lord reported: namely, still along the eastern edge of the ice floe, five to eight miles from the passenger liner.
Ernest Gill, donkey boilerman on board the Californian, made a statement incriminating Captain Lord, telling shipmates that he saw flares from a passenger steamer and that the captain did not respond to them. Gill apparently sold his story to a newspaper for a sum equal to his annual salary and immediately departed the ship, never to be heard of again. His account brought the matter to the attention of the Senate investigation and led to the conclusion that the Californian saw the Titanic and did nothing about it.
The evidence for and against Captain Lord is lengthy and often flawed. A misplaced reliance on the reported time of events between ships in the area is a frequently repeated error in the reconstruction of the evidence. In 1912, ship’s time was established throughout most of the Atlantic by observing local apparent noon and setting the clock to 1200. Without knowing and reconciling the longitudinal difference of each vessel at noon the previous day, all time and event comparisons are unreliable. Further, most witnesses offered estimated times without direct access to a timepiece during their observation. Time is not the only repeated error. The supposition that the Californian sighted the flares of a vessel other than the Titanic has been suggested, though this solution is unsupported by evidence. Atlantic Ocean currents and the drift of the sinking liner have been estimated repeatedly and factored into numerous assumptions. Lacking specific evidence and directly reliable measurements of this very dynamic body of water, it is unreliable to assume any specific drift; it is more accurate to enlarge the most probable area of position of the ocean liner, making measurements approximate to within a mile.
Our report summarizes an unbiased review of thousands of pages of testimony, both British and U.S., and a thorough investigation spanning 13 years and several continents. It leads to a different conclusion than was reached in 1912 so far as Captain Lord’s position and proximity to the Titanic. Furthermore, it reveals how unsubstantiated and convenient are the conclusions of Lord’s accusers.
The engine room laborer Gill was Captain Lord’s major accuser. He is discredited in fact and motivation by A. M. Foweraker in an article that appeared in The Nautical Magazine (1913) and Eugene Seder in the spring 1985 edition of The Titanic Commentator. Gill said he saw the Titanic moving at full speed, whereas the liner was actually stopped, taking water, and down by the head. He also reported seeing—from north of the Titanic—a port sidelight. The Titanic, sailing west, did not reveal a port sidelight to the north, even after striking the iceberg and backing down.
Those who condemn Captain Lord rely heavily upon the testimony of the Californian’s third officer, Charles Groves. He asserted that the ship he sighted to the south was a “passenger steamer,” not a medium- or small-size tramp steamer as her other officers described. The 1912 investigators entirely missed the point that the vessel he described could not have been the Titanic. Like Gill, Groves said he saw a port side light; he never saw a green one. Groves described the numerous deck lights of the vessel he saw having been turned off before midnight, as was customary for the sleeping comfort of passengers in transatlantic trade. But all of the Titanic’s survivors attest to the continuous burning of exterior lights until the ship’s final plunge two hours later.
The Californian’s second officer, Herbert Stone, has been frequently cited for having suggested that the ship he was observing to the south looked “queer” and might have had a list, but he addressed this in his testimony. He said the lights simply looked different than before, and that he clearly did not think that the ship was in distress. He also was the man who observed the ship sail away to the southwest in a gradual manner, as her stem light disappeared over the horizon. When asked if the ship’s stem light had disappeared as would a light on a ship that suddenly foundered, he answered the British Commissioner plainly, “not by any means,” that the ship had “a gradual disappearing of all her lights, which would be perfectly natural with a ship steaming away from us.”
Stone’s testimony ultimately reveals the neglected facts about the distress rockets. As the officer on board Californian who saw nearly all of the rockets in the sky, he described them as follows: “I have remarked at different times that these rockets did not appear to go very high; they were very low lying; they were only about half the height of the steamer’s masthead light and I thought rockets would go higher than that.” His statement also offers that the rockets may have come “from a greater distance past the ship.”
With the most credible witness suggesting that the rockets observed from the Californian were not very high on the profile of the “smallish steamer” lying to his south, and that it appeared that the origin of the rockets might lie behind this steamer, it seems remarkable and inexcusable that investigators of the 1912 hearings did not pursue this issue further.
Four deck officers observed the unknown ship to the south of the Californian. Three saw her to be a medium or small steamer, and one saw her to be a passenger vessel. In 1912, only 12 ships in transatlantic trade exceeded 20,000 tons. The vast majority of ships were within the range of 5,000 to 7,000 tons, including the Californian (at 447 feet). Captain Lord described the ship he spotted as a “medium sized steamer . . . something like ourselves.” (Statistically, most ships engaged in North Atlantic trade at the time were of similar tonnage.) Even to Groves, the amazing loom of the Titanic (46,328 tons, 882 feet) would have looked like a city ablaze, not merely a “passenger steamer.” She was the largest man-made object afloat, clearly beyond a casual description. It would be like comparing the lights of a small Mediterranean cruise ship to those of the Queen Elizabeth 2.
Captain Lord was the only man on board the Californian who had seen the Titanic’s virtually identical sister ship, the Olympic, and at a range of five miles. When he saw the unknown steamer approaching his vessel, he clearly recognized that she could in no way be the Titanic. He was the only one afloat qualified by experience to have offered this opinion.
Because they were viewed as low lying against the silhouette of the nearby steamer, these rockets were not interpreted as distress signals. They were not high enough, and the ship did not appear to be in distress. In 1912 rockets were fired for many reasons: signals between ships of the same shipping line, courtesy signals, recall signals for dories fishing around ice floes, and other nonemergencies. Only after the Titanic’s sinking did the conservative use of pyrotechnics become well defined.
A contrast of the flare elevations observed by Stone against the distance at which a flare would have to have been fired in order to appear “about half the height of the steamer’s masthead light” is presented in Figure 1. The ship silhouette is the reference at a range of five miles from the observer, just as the Californian was believed to have been. Flares are fired at distances between 5 and 22 miles from the observer. The five-mile flares, or those fired from the ship directly, would appear more than nine times higher in angular measurement than was described by the witness. As the witness suggested, had the flares been fired from some location behind the nearby steamer, the range from the observer to the flare source would be in agreement with the position in which Captain Lord always maintained he was in.
Knowing exactly where the Titanic sank by the location of her straight sinking boilers, and using this position as an assumed origin of the flares, one can determine the position of the Californian as observer. It clearly disproves the possibility that she was within five to ten miles of the damaged liner, presents evidence that one other vessel was between the Titanic and the Californian, and supports the statements of Captain Lord and his officers that their position—19 miles from the Titanic’s distress position and more than 22 miles from the known location of her sinking—was correct.
During his testimony, Captain Lord cited the applicable deviation and variation pertaining to his magnetic compass error the night the Titanic sank. Applying this information to the bearings of the nearby steamer as sighted by the Californian witnesses, it is impossible for the vessel to have been the Titanic for two reasons.
First, the true bearing of the vessel was changing away from the Californian from 181° T to 203° T. From the actual position of the Titanic’s sinking along the reciprocal of this bearing, there was nothing but ocean; she sighted no ships in this direction. This bearing would have found the cargo ship in a position of nearly nine miles to the east of the ice floe against which she stopped. Nine miles before the ice floe, the Californian could not have even seen the ice and would have had no reason to stop there.
Second, the observations of the survivors who testified at the British hearing consistently identify the bearing of the vessel they observed at a range of five miles. Fourteen witnesses—most of whom were experienced mariners—stated that the lights were sighted between broad on the port bow and fine on the bow. Only one witness said that the ship was on the starboard beam. Three survivors unanimously agreed that the bow of the Titanic was pointing northwesterly as she was sinking, meaning that the port bow target would have been westerly and north of the liner, where the Californian clearly was not. This information is even more convincing today, knowing the final position of the Titanic’s wreckage.
Perhaps the most persistent and unanswerable piece of evidence in Captain Lord’s favor is the matter of the signal lamps. Both vessels carried these 360° lights that were energized by a key switch and visible for up to 16 miles. Both vessels were using their lamps to signal the nearby vessel: first, at a range much less than the luminous range of their lamps; and second, on a night of record clarity. Both the Californian and the Titanic reported no response from the other vessel. Had these two actually seen each other, neither could have missed the other’s signal. These two ships were each looking at another vessel, not each other.
The British Board of Trade investigation summary states the following conclusion:
“The ‘Titanic’ collided with the berg at 11:40. The vessel seen by the ‘Californian’ stopped at this time. The rockets sent up from the ‘Titanic’ were distress signals. The ‘Californian’ saw distress signals. The number sent up by the ‘Titanic’ was eight. The ‘Californian’ saw eight. The time over which the rockets from the ‘Titanic’ were sent up was from about 12:45 to 1:45 o’clock. It was about this time that the ‘Californian’ saw the rockets. At 2:40 Mr. Stone called to the Master that the ship from which he had seen the rockets had disappeared. At 2:20 a.m. the ‘Titanic’ had foundered. It was suggested that the rockets seen by the ‘Californian’ were from some other ship, not the ‘Titanic.’ But no other ship to fit this theory has ever been heard of.”
Nearly every sentence of this statement is incorrect. The vessel observed by the Californian showed sidelights that could have been displayed only by a vessel traveling in an opposite direction: eastbound instead of west. The Californian’s witnesses did not see “distress signals”; they saw rockets, too low on the horizon to be recognized as distress signals from the nearby ship. The vessel seen nearest the Californian did not “disappear” at the time the Titanic foundered, but merely sailed away slowly, over the horizon to the southwest, in the opposite direction from where the liner is known to have sunk. Further, that vessel had been observed to have secured her deck lights completely, two hours before the Titanic foundered. All survivor accounts assert that she maintained her deck lights until the final moments, offering further evidence that the ship sighted was not the Titanic. Finally, the board’s finding that “no other ship to fit this theory has ever been heard of’ is not true. More correctly stated, the investigators ceased looking for any vessel to fit the mystery- ship theory once the Californian was named.
A lone voice has repeatedly addressed this issue in the form of a confession, which has been challenged by history buffs studying the Titanic. In 1912, the Norwegian sealing vessel Samson was working the ice floe that claimed the passenger liner, and was within ten miles of her distress position. The first officer, Henrik Naess, sighted flares and a well-illuminated vessel, but turned his vessel through the ice floe and retreated, fearing a Revenue Cutter’s boarding and the revelation of poached sealskins. Naess did not realize that the vessel he saw approaching was the sinking Titanic until reaching the port of Isafjordhur, Iceland, and comparing her SOS position with his deck log. Only then did he realize his proximity to a great maritime disaster, and personal sorrow for not having properly identified the situation or having been provided with a wireless.
Coauthor David Eno conducted a thorough investigation of Naess, interviewing family and friends of the deceased man throughout Norway and tracing his steps in Iceland. Naess was awarded gold and silver mariner’s medals from several nations, and his skill as an ice pilot was unchallenged. His life full of maritime contributions and accomplishments, he certainly had no reason to contrive the circumstances of his statement.
Misconceptions and misinformation about the Samson are more abundant than actual information. Naess referred to having been off “Cape Hatteras” rather than Cape Race in two of his four statements regarding the Titanic. It’s possible that the elder mariner confused these similarsounding names. Also, the catch records from the sealing ship show a good trip for 1912, which would not be possible had the vessel actually been off Hatteras, where no arctic seals have ever been found.
Amateur historians have attempted to discredit the Naess statements about the Samson by suggesting port visits to Isafjordhur on 6 and 20 April according to a recovered Icelandic document. These dates would not allow a transit from port to the area where the Titanic sank and back. Additional port records recovered in Iceland verify that the Samson did arrive when Naess said she did, and Lloyd’s List does likewise.
Perhaps even more convincing is the testimony of witnesses who remember the Samson’s visit to the Icelandic port and further corroborate the claims of Naess. The position and movements of Naess’s ship introduce evidence of a second ship lying between the Titanic and the Californian. The Samson was closest to the ocean liner and was observed by her survivors to sail away as Naess described. The unknown steamer, against whose silhouette the Titanic’s flares were observed, was closest to the Californian. We haven’t conclusively identified that ship, but we’re continuing to collect and evaluate information about it.
Consistently, the investigators of 1912 chose an expedient solution rather than analysis of the testimony. In their wake, the Titanic wrecked one more life, that of Captain Stanley Lord. But the existing evidence, the position of the ocean liner’s wreckage, the testimony in the 1912 hearing transcripts, and the elaborated evidence of this investigation all prove that the Californian did not watch the Titanic sink. Captain Lord is innocent.