Col. Archibald Gracie

Colonel Archibald Gracie IV was born January 17, 1859. He achieved fame as one of the first survivors to write about the sinking of RMS Titanic nearly 100 years ago in April of 1912. Historian Walter Lord used Gracie’s book, The Truth About The Titanic, to sort out the order of events of “the night to remember” for his own classic telling of Titanic’s story.

Gracie’s adventures began modestly enough that night when he notice a slight hesitation in the forward thrust of the world’s largest liner. Then his friend Clinch Smith appeared with a lump of ice indicating that the Titanic had grazed an iceberg. The colonel did not need a life at sea to tell him something shocking had happened.

Soon, Gracie found himself busily putting “unattached women” into lifeboats, acting as a sort of guardian to women in first class who were traveling alone. This went on until the Titanic was so low in the water that senior surviving officer C. H. Lightoller borrowed Gracie’s penknife to cut away Collapsible B lifeboat and get it into the water, the last boat to leave the ship.

However, Gracie’s travails were only about to begin. In a dockside interview he said:

“After sinking with the ship, it appeared to me as if I was propelled by some great force through the water. This might have been occasioned by explosions under the water, and I remembered fearful stories of people being boiled to death. . . .

“Again and again I prayed for deliverance, although I felt sure that the end had come. I had the greatest difficulty in holding my breath until I came to the surface. I knew that once I inhaled the water would suffocate me.

“When I got under water I struck out with all my strength for the surface. I got to the air again after a time which seemed to me to be unending. There was nothing in sight save the ocean, dotted with ice.”

Gracie survived the sinking by clambering aboard Collapsible B with Officer Lightoller. They and others stood on the bottom of the overturned boat and balanced it until they could be taken into a safer vessel.

Eventually Gracie succumbed to the accumulated affects of the cold of that night on the open sea, but not before he had completed work on his now classic first-hand account of the disaster.

Gracie lies buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Gracie Mansion, the mayor of New York’s residence, is named after an ancestor of Colonel Gracie who founded the family fortune.

Stephen Hines is the author of Titanic: One Newspaper, Seven Days, and the Truth That Shocked the World, which covers the sinking of RMS Titanic from the pages of the world’s largest newspaper of the time, The Daily Telegraph of London.

Literary Prospecting As It Relates to Titanic Book

It is one thing to do a book. It is quite another to let your prospective reader know that you have produced what he wants to read.

All the literary prospecting in the world won’t make up for the still unanswered connudrum of how do I let the public know about this product I know they’ll want to read if they can only find out about it.

Celebrities get their forum, whether they have anything to say or not, simply by being either famous, or talented, or simply rich and worth attention because we value people for the money they have, no matter how they got it. It is enough for most media to pay attention to the rich even if they have only inherited it.

In fact you can make a case that a prospector ought to do his or her prospecting for someone else. The only problem is that the famous really don’t even need a product to sell, since their fame is already their commodity. Just Take up the Huffington Post sometime. Why are these particular people in this particular online magazine–because they themselves and their soap opera lives are the stuff of magazine copy. Gossip is all some people know of news.

Here is a challenge, then, for the literary prospector who feels that his work stands or dies based on merit: his book is the story he wishes to promote; it is of the Titanic itself that he sings. And he is sounding a sour note.

Many times his tune falls on deaf ears because he is fascinated by Titanic statistics. There are a million (?) of them. How many people were on board? How many were saved? How many lifeboats were there? How many went away only half full? What  was the length of the Titanic? How do you make that figure impressive today when there are so many bigger structures around? Does anyone really even care about all the numbers connected with RMS Titanic?

Well, my experience so far suggests that the same thing that drives the Huffington Post’s readers drives those who would wish to read about the Titanic.

It is the people stories that make for the most fascinating reading. It turns out that people don’t so much want to know that the boat deck was seventy feet above the icy water as they want to know that Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus died together in each other’s arms. They want to know that J. J. Astor placed his pregnant wife into a boat, and then stood back to await his doom. (In short, they want to know what happened to those fictional characters Rose and Jack who are now referred to in Titanic Museums across the country almost as though they were real.)

Fortunately, Titanic: One Newspaper, Seven Days, and the Truth That Shocked the World is all about human drama: the drama of those reading unbelievable things in the newspaper, the drama of those awaiting word on loved ones, the drama of Southampton awaiting worl on the loss of nearly 500 hundred of its citizens, and the drama of New York awaiting reports on the loss of some of its most notable figures.

The whole challenge of publicity, then, is in making others care for the these stories as much as you do. You have had the process of discovering the living truth of a great drama, and now you must inspire others to feel about these people in the same way you do.

The past isn’t past after all; its drama still lives in the hearts of caring people. The only question is, how to make a distracted media–politics, Iran, economic crises–understand this.

The personal story still counts most of all.

The Titanic: How Do You Know What You Know About It?

I am not sure there is a single statistic about RMS Titanic, which went down on the night of April 14/15 of 1912, that is not subject to revision upon further reflection or information. And the information just never stops coming.

Take, for example, the number of people saved from the deathly waters of the Atlantic. Was it 705 rescued, as Captain Rostron of the Carpathia maintained, or was it 713 as his own purser claimed to have counted. There are those who accept the number 712 because they think the purser himself double-counted the misspelled name of one person. Others stoutly maintain that 711 is the right number. I would like to study the topic further, but there are too many other interesting questions to answer. (I’m also waiting for someone else to stick his neck out.)

I can tell you that the Titanic was either traveling 20 mph, 21 mph, 22 mph, 23 mph, 24 mph, or 25 mph. What I can’t tell you is which number has the highest degree of probability. Guesstimates are bases on the number of revolutions per minute the propellers were making, and testimony as to that number conflicts. In any case, you don’t want to hit an iceberg at any one of those speeds.

As to how high the boat deck was, where the passengers were loaded onto lifeboats, opinions vary there too. A recent trip to the Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge brought forth the information from a film shown there that the boat deck was 80 feet above the ocean. But I’ve read or heard of other numbers such as 60 feet, 65 feet, 70 feet, and 75 feet. Come to think of it, as the ship went down, the last boats away must have been much closer to the water than that! In fact, at least one collapsible was launch at zero feet above the water!

Because original sources themselves–the newspapers–were not always accurate, we can only go back to the diagrams and documents of the builders Harland and Wolff to find real facts on the exact design and structure of the “world’s largest” ship. There are Titanic aficionados who are interested in such things, and books are out there on the building of this wonderful ship that would have been one of the wonders of her age if only she hadn’t sunk on her maiden voyage. Titanic museums and websites would be the best place to look for such books.

And, of course, my book, too, can be found at Amazon.Com. I just can’t vouch for all the numbers.

Titanic: One Newspaper, Seven Days, and the Truth That Shocked the World Biography of Stephen W. Hines

In the last twenty-four years, Stephen Hines has published eighteen books with over 600,000 copies in print. Using his skills as a literary prospector, Hines has researched and developed four bestsellers: Little House in the Ozarks, (1991; 206,131 printed) “I Remember Laura”, (1994; 106,928 printed), The Quiet Little Woman (1999; 215,000 printed), and Laura Ingalls Wilder: Farm Journalist (2007; 2,500 books sold).

Little House in the Ozarks was a Publishers Weekly bestseller, and The Quiet Little Woman landed on the USA Today gift book list. (The University of Missouri considers Farm Journalist to be a bestseller from the standpoint of its being an academic book.)

Hines spends his time in magazine and reference archives, on the Internet, and in university libraries to make his discoveries. His Ozarks book republished over 140 forgotten columns of the famous children’s author Laura Ingalls Wilder. It was the first time these columns had been published in book form. It was also a major Christian Booksellers Association title, though most of the sales were in regular trade stores.

The Quiet Little Woman was a significant success for Honor Books. These Christmas stories by Louisa May Alcott reintroduced the nineteenth century’s most popular writer for children to a whole new generation of readers and led to the publication of two more books: Kate’s Choice (2001) and Louisa May Alcott’s Christmas Treasury (2002). Christmas Treasury is still available from the author.

A release for 2006, Writings to Young Women From Laura Ingalls Wilder helped to revive interest in Mrs. Wilder’s biography from those years that followed her childhood as she continued to pioneer on the Ozark hill farm she shared with husband Almanzo and daughter Rose. This three book series honored Mrs. Wilder’s birth 140 years ago in Pepin, Wisconsin, early in the year 1867.

The University of Missouri release in 2007 collected all of Mrs. Wilder’s writings from the old Missouri Ruralist farm paper and published them just as they originally appeared between the years 1911 and 1925.

Hines’s eighteenth book is new and is Titanic: One Newspaper, Seven Days, and the Truth That Shocked the World. The work memorializes the 100^th anniversary of the sinking of RMS Titanic on the night of April 14/15 of 1912.

As a graduate student at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, Hines started his career by editing and writing for the Indiana Oral History Newsletter. After graduation, Hines moved to Asheville, North Carolina, to work as a copy editor for The Presbyterian Journal, now called World magazine.

From Asheville, Hines and his family moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to work for Thomas Nelson Publishers where he eventually became managing editor. After several years at Thomas Nelson, he went to work as editor for Wolgemuth & Hyatt, Publishers, and then went to M. Lee Smith Publishers. Now he writes and edits from his home.

Over the years, Hines has also published:

• James: A Faith That Works by David C. Cook, 1987
• Words From a Fearless Heart by Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1995
• Saving Graces: The Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Broadman & Holman, 1997
• Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Fairy Poems by Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1998 (30,000 copies in print)
• The Quiet Little Woman (for young readers) by Honor Books, 2000
• The True Crime Files of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Berkley Books, 2001
• The Christmas Treasury of Louisa May Alcott by RiverOak Publishing, 2002
• The Abbot’s Ghost and The Baron’s Gloves are his newest Louisa May Alcott discoveries and were published by Thomas Nelson in October, 2005.
• Ben Hur by Lew Wallace abridges this beloved masterpiece to update it for the modern reader. Thomas Nelson was the publisher in 2005.

Hines and his family live near Nashville. His hobbies include compulsive reading, competitive running, and songwriting. From 2001 to 2003 he was founding Director of Communications for the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services. Currently, he is working on two books: Velvet the Dog and Wyatt Earp Was My Uncle.

A website, LiteraryProspector.Com, gives would-be writers advice and ideas on how to get started in publishing and relates the latest information on his Titanic book. His poetry has appeared in The Tennessean, The Nashville Scene, InReview, and Hills & Hamlets. He currently writes a column for The Nolensville Dispatch, and has written for the Nashville Striders’ Funrunner magazine.

Update on the Book

Marketing your new book is the seemingly never-ending job of sending out exciting information about something you’ve written about again, and again, and again. Frankly, the part I like best about the whole experience of book marketing, especially Titanic: One Newspaper, Seven Days, and the Truth That Shocked the World, is talking to groups.

Now that I have a power-point presentation, I want to present the message of the book, with slight variations to fit the audience, all the time. One of my best experiences was just recent and at the Brentwood Library. It would be a World Series night, of course. But the only seven people there asked about thirty minutes worth of questions.

Just before my Brentwood experience I had had the opportunity of talking with daughters Laura and Amy’s school classes. The kids were really primed, but as a 62-year-old I had to be ready and tell them, no, I wasn’t on the Titanic when it went down.

When you get to a certain age, school kids just can’t help but ask that question. (One of my slides does have a picture of Millvina Dean, the last survivor, who died in 2009. What an amazing life she lived.)

I do lack a really good picture of Margaret Tobin Brown, and she is an essential person to mention, because she is the only one to become a celebrity from the “night to forget,” as Mrs. Henry B. Harris said. (Mrs. Harris is the one who claimed a million dollars on the life of her husband. She had to settle for $50,000.)

As usual, Gwen gave great support, and I look forward to speaking far and wide about the book.

Titanic Tidbits: The “Unsinkable” Molly Brown

Titanic Tidbits: The “Unsinkable” Molly Brown

Celebrity comes to people in many ways: some make themselves a spectacle; others follow the path to fame through the route of achievement; and others simply have fame thrust upon them through a variety of circumstances. There is one other thing about celebrity: sometimes you become celebrated simply because you have survived a catastrophe such as what happened on September 11, 2001.

I like to think of Molly Tobin Brown as being an example of the person who became famous for a variety of reasons, and I believe that New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was already a celebrity, became even more famous as a result of surviving the events of 9/11 with dignity, a dignity that even revived his career.

In the case of the now famous Molly Brown, she wasn’t even supposed to be on board the largest passenger liner in the world. She had been enjoying a European and Mediterranean tour with her daughter when she got the call that her first grandchild was ill. Thus, she came to be on the Titanic rushing back to America.

And she was about to have fame thrust upon her.

How the Titanic came to hit the iceberg is relatively well known. Relying on lookouts to give fair warning the massive ship was going at about 24 mph when it had to execute a turning maneuver in 37 seconds to avoid being “holed.” She didn’t make it past the berg, which had lain low in the water and blended with its background. (Those were the excuses anyway.)

For Mayor Giuliani, his situation wasn’t dissimilar to Molly Brown’s. He had nothing to do with the planning and execution of the World Trade Center as a building. Economic forces in New York had brought about the erection of the two tallest buildings in the world on Manhattan Island. Yet they stuck above the New York skyline like a sore thumb. They had been bombed once by Al-Qaeda, but no one could or did guess the buildings would be targets again. So, without warning it was suddenly left up to New York’s then embattled Mayor to set aside his own marital and political problems and get on with the duty of presenting the courageous face of New York and its people to the eyes of the world.

Frankly, Molly Brown had had no intention of becoming a symbol of indomitability and courage of Titanic survivors either, because she hadn’t originally intend to be one.

Since the Titanic was not supposed to sink, in fact, was “unsinkable,” she busied herself with helping other women into the boats and resisted efforts to place her in one. For one thing, at first, she thought the Titanic wouldn’t sink; and for another, she wasn’t so weak as to need to be urged into one of the lifeboats.

Finally, one of the crewmen, who knew that women and children were to go in the boats first, became exasperated and simply picked her up and threw her into Lifeboat No. 6. As it turned out, this bold act was to reveal that Mrs. Brown could hold her own in a desperate situation and lead both men and women to safety.

No. 6 Lifeboat had no more hit the water than Robert Hitchens, at the tiller, and Major Peuchen and Frederick Fleet at the oars fell to fighting over who was in charge of the vessel.

Hitchens said he was because he had the tiller, but he had already disobeyed a direct order from Captain Smith to stand by and pick up more passengers. Major Peuchen felt his advice couldn’t be ignored because of his rank as a military man, and Frederick Fleet tried to arbitrate between the two.

It was also a bit frightening that Hitchens kept threatening to throw people off the boat if they kept arguing with him.

Molly Brown couldn’t stand it. After trying to intervene on behalf of Major Peuchen and being cursed by Hitchens, she came after the Titanic’s helmsman and chased him off the tiller and took charge herself.

While Hitchens cringed to the side, with a sail wrapped around him, and complained that they were all certain to die, Molly soon had most of the women rowing along with the men and spirits rose as they greeted the rescue ship Carpathia at dawn. (Disclaimer: All of the foregoing refers to Molly Brown’s behavior as reported by the author Gene Fowler in his book Timberline and by others who may have embellished her story. If there was embellishment, trying to set the record straight has been Kristen Iversen, whose book, Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, presents a much less extravagant picture of Molly.)

Even on board the Carpathia she was indefatigable. She helped create a survivors committee, used her skills in language to act as a translator, and saw to the needs of other survivors. In New York she was instrumental in seeing that medals were struck for the captain and each member of the crew.

She established her claim to popular immortality by famously stepping onto the pier in New York harbor and declaring to reporters that she had survived because she was “unsinkable.”

Molly Brown went on to help erect a memorial in Washington, D.C., place wreaths on the tombs of victims buried in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and write articles about the sinking.

During World War I, she worked for French relief organizations and was awarded the Legion of Honor.

As for Rudy Giuliani, he went on to found Giuliani Partners and advise other major cities of the world on how to deal with terrorism. His public grief and outrage after the 9/11 attack expressed the grief and anger of a great city and elevated him in the eyes of the nation. In 2002, he was knighted by the Queen of England for his services during that critical time.

Titanic Tidbits: The Coal Fire

According to conflicting testimony, at U.S. and British hearings on the loss of the Titanic, it was either common or uncommon to have coal fires in the bunkers of coal-powered ships. I think both men giving testimony on the matter were only reflecting on their own experiences.

Fireman Frederick Barrett did not find a coal fire unusual, but another fireman giving testimony (Charles Hendrickson) had been at sea for five years without having noticed such a phenomenon.

So, what’s to be made of the coal fire on the Titanic and whether it was a serious matter or not?

First, I’ll assert that it was a serious matter because crew chiefs for the men who were putting out the fire told those they supervised to keep this information from the passengers. One can interpret this as a pretty serious hush-up or only regard it as what you expect to be told on the world’s most luxurious ship on her maiden voyage. Let me call it a serious hush-up, but only so that the passengers may go on their blissful way—until something really bad happens like an iceberg.

Second, the coal fire came up relatively early in the investigation and was handled by investigating authorities as something to be handled without hysteria. From a publicity standpoint a coal fire sure looks bad, but after all it’s the iceberg’s being in the way that makes the Titanic famous.

All testimony agrees that the coal bunker the fire was in was empty by Saturday and had left a dent or ding in the bulkhead between Boiler Rooms 6 and 5—in that order from front to back of the ship. The great flood of water that came into Room 6 came clearly from the outside, the starboard side of the ship. That room was evacuated immediately; and at this point, it was clear to the surviving firemen that the ship was in serious trouble because it had been punctured, not because it had a warp in a bulkhead cause by a fire.

Some have suggested that the Titanic might have stayed afloat a few more minutes if this particular bulkhead had not been weaken by flame; but the truth is, boats were still being sent off under capacity, and it is doubtful there would have been any difference in lives saved if the ship had stayed afloat longer. Toward the end, there simply weren’t any more boats to be had.

Death delayed could hardly have been of much comfort.

Titanic: The Ships That Never Were

Everyone from Captain E. J. Smith to his senior officers to passengers saw the light of another ship on the night the Titanic went down. Indeed, the captain himself, a veteran of some forty years at sea, felt the ship was so close it could be reached by lifeboat.

Yet no ship came to Titanic’s aid, though rockets were being fired. The Californian, the only ship known to be in the area, is thought to have been some twenty miles away of the sinking vessel, not five or six miles away. What, then, can be made of the numerous reports of the sighting of the lights of a vessel at only five or six miles distant from the stricken Titanic?

Truthfully, I don’t think we will ever have a convincing answer.

There are only three ships now known that could have possibly been this mystery ship, and probability still sides with the now duly notorious Californian as being the ship that did not come to the Titanic. (Out of the suspected ships that may have been on the scene, only the Californian was located in the right general direction in which all survivors were looking when they saw the mysterious light or lights that gave them so much initial hope.)

True; a crewman of the Norwegian ship Samson came forward fifty years after the fact to state that he saw the lights of the Titanic, but that his ship was fishing illegally and so concluded that a Canadian Coast Guard ship was firing rockets to warn off poachers. Lest they be impounded, so his story goes, the Samson fled.

The problem with Hendrik Naess’s testimony is that no one else came forward to support his tale. Furthermore, shipping records in Iceland show that the Samson was safely in port there on the night the Titanic went down. To me, the Icelandic shipping documents trump Naess’s memory.

The Mount Temple has also been accused of being close to the Titanic but of not coming to her aid. Here, there may be some truth, because by the captain’s own testimony, he was only about fifty miles away when he heard the Titanic was going down. He reports in a New York Times article from that era that he stopped in his rush to the Titanic because he feared for the safety of his ship. The ice danger was too great.

The rescuing ship Carpathia, also having to dodge ice, didn’t stop but came on to the scene from the south and picked up all the survivors. (Perhaps it was easier coming from the south.) Since Mount Temple lay directly east of the Titanic, no matter how close it got before stopping till morning, it couldn’t have represented the light to the north spotted by Titanic survivors in lifeboats.

Mount Temple’s captain can be accused of a failure of nerve, but not of having been callously close to the Titanic and then sailing away.

So the mystery ship remains a mystery. The only glimmer of light I can see myself lies with a report made by the British Marine Accident Investigation Branch in 1992. One of the report’s authors suggests that unusual atmospheric conditions existing on that night of April 14, 1912, made the Californian visible to the Titanic over the horizon, and thus Titanic thought it was about to be rescued by a ship that was actually twenty miles away and stopped in pack ice herself, as, indeed, the Californian was.

This is the only solution that makes sense to me, farfetched though it is.

Titanic Tidbits: Second Officer C. H. Lightoller

After the list of famous passengers that went down with the Titanic, one of the most well-remembered of the survivors is the ship’s second officer, Charles Herbert Lightoller, informally called “Lights.”

Lightoller was the senior surviving officer from the Titanic and the man in charge of loading portside lifeboats. He strictly enforced the “women and children first” rule of the waves whereas Officer Murdoch, on the starboard side, followed the rule of women and children first and then, if there was any room, men could enter the boats. Hence, quite a few men were saved from the Titanic although it had first been thought that mostly women and children had been saved. (Of the survivors, 52% were women and children and 48% were men.)

Lightoller was so concerned with the possible appearance of having survived in place of a woman that in his U. S. Senate testimony he declares he did not leave the ship, but stayed with her to the very end. The Titanic left him is the way he put it, and, indeed, he nearly drowned in the sinking. Then the forward funnel fell within a few feet of him, nearly crushing him before he could get to an overturned lifeboat.

But Lightoller was born to survive.

The Titanic’s second officer went to sea at the age of 13 on full-rigged sailing ships, scrambling among the sails some 200 feet above the ships’ decks in wind, rain, ice and snow.

He was shipwrecked early in his career and spent several precarious days on St. Paul’s island in the Indian Ocean. The crew nearly starved before being rescued.

While an officer on Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic, he was nearly done it when a nine-foot pole crashed beside him.

After the sinking of the Titanic, he gave nothing short of brilliant testimony under tough questioning from Senator William Alden Smith, and then warded off even tougher inquiry from the British Wreck Commission chaired by the misnamed Lord Mersey. The British investigation can be read in its entirety by googling “British Wreck Commission Titanic.”

Lightoller quite probably saved the White Star Line millions in damages by convincing the commission that the Titanic was only following the custom of the sea when it ran into an iceberg at some 24 miles an hour on a moonless night.

Yet, he was never to command a White Star ship.

Instead, he advance his career in the Royal Navy during World War I. While in charge of a torpedo boat, he won the Distinguished Service Cross for attacking a German Zeppelin, and then, as captain of the destroyer Garry, he rammed and sank U-boat 110 and was made Lt. Commander.

When Lightoller became convinced that he would never command for the White Star Line, he retired in the 1930s and invested in real estate. He eventually bought his own small boat called the Sundowner and used it for pleasure until the British navy asked him and his wife to cruise up and down the German coast spying on German military activity.

Later, he participated in the rescue of troops at Dunkirk in 1940 where he used the Sundowner to bring back 130 soldiers from the coast of France.

Lightoller died in 1952 at age 78. Obituaries naturally dwelt on his heroism during the sinking of the Titanic—but in doing so they gave a fascinating life short shrift. His autobiography, Titanic and Other Ships, can be read online at Gutenberg.com.

Titanic Tidbits: Safety of the Lifeboats

Titanic Tidbits: Safety of the Lifeboats

When the Royal Mail Ship Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, almost all safety precautions had been directed toward preventing the ship from going down because of a side collision with another liner. Icebergs hadn’t really been taken into account.

In the case of another ship running into the Titanic broadside, the royal mail ship was probably good to remain afloat for a day or so under the worst sort of collision conditions. There would have been time for rescue ships to arrive, being called by telegraph, and lifeboats would have ferried passengers from the Titanic to rescuing ships. Except for those perhaps killed in the initial collision, everyone on board could have been saved, and probably would have been saved.

The actual wreck with the iceberg presented almost completely unforeseen problems. Speed of action was essential, and yet the ship’s crew had not trained to unload passengers onto lifeboats with speed. In fact, they hadn’t been trained to load passengers onto the rescue boats at all.

Much has been made of the fact that no lifeboat drill was ever held on the Titanic, though one had been scheduled for the very day of the disaster; but such a drill would not have matter, for whatever the drill was, it would have involved few passengers and would not have revealed to the over 2,000 people on board that there were not enough lifeboats for them all.

Thus, any drill held would have been more for show than for anything else.

Keep in mind that it is an established fact that the senior officers on the Titanic did not know that the lifeboats were designed and had been tested to hold a full complement of passengers while the boats swung from the davits at the boat deck level of the ship.

Senior surviving officer Herbert Lightoller let the first boats he supervised go away half empty because he was afraid that a full boat might collapse in the air and send all the occupants to their deaths. Only when the situation became increasingly desperate did he allow boats to go from the boat deck down to the water completely full.

Behold! The lifeboats held together. They were sturdy after all!

Hence, one must conclude that British shipping officials and those in charge of seeing that proper safety information was passed on the crew utterly failed in their duties. Perhaps as many as 400 more people could have been saved if only the crew had known the strength of their own lifeboats.