Submitted by ChadExtra t3_10iuu73 in todayilearned
A completely rational and understandable fear. I hate the crewman felt like it was his fault, but they were all victims of circumstance. It was going to end badly no matter and smart thing to do was to not risk compromising the lifeboat’s safety.
It was the fault of the idiot that designed the ship.
How? Titanic was carrying more lifeboats than required and got tremendously unlucky with how it hit the ice berg. No ship at that time would have survived it, the fact that it took more than two hours to sink AND did so remarkably evenly until the end is pretty wild.
This is factually incorrect. The Titanic was carrying very few lifeboats because of the designers hubris that she was a ship that could never sink
>This is factually incorrect
You wanna back that up with a quote? Because afaik it's the truth:
>At the time, the Board of Trade's regulations stated that British vessels over 10,000 tons (Titanic was just over 46,000) must carry 16 lifeboats with a capacity of 5,500 cubic feet (160 m3), plus enough capacity in rafts and floats for 75% (or 50% in case of a vessel with watertight bulkheads) of that in the lifeboats. Therefore, the White Star Line actually provided more lifeboat accommodation than was legally required.
>
>The regulations made no extra provision for larger ships because they had not been changed since 1894, when the largest passenger ship under consideration was only 13,000 tons, and because of the expected difficulty in getting away more than 16 boats in any emergency.
You can look up those regulations here. Now, those regulations were heavily outdated due to the massive increase in size and capacity that had happened in the ocean liner industry, but that only became apparant after Titanic sank (Titanic's safety requirements were written at a time where the biggest ship in the world was about a third of her size). Look up the 1914 Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, they changed a bunch of stuff (24 hour radio, lifeboats, ice patrol) in response to the sinking.
The usual idea was that the lifeboats would be let down, the passangers ferried to a nearby ship (as the transatlantic shipping lanes were very busy there should always be one nearby, especially because sinkings were expected to happen closer to port due to collisions or groundings), rinse and repeat. That worked some of the time, but a lot of the times the ships sank way too quickly too launch their lifeboats or conditions were so bad that the lifeboats sank themselves. So lifeboats weren't seen as the massive safety feature they are today. A lot of the time people figured they were safer on board the bigger ship instead of being capsized, dragged into the propellors or left to deal with heavy seas in a small, wooden lifeboat. Especially on a sinking like Titanics which was remarkably calm and steady up until maybe 20 minutes before it went down.
So even if Titanic had more lifeboats? It probably wouldn't have done a lot. She sank slowly (look up Ocean Liner sinkings around that era, a LOT of them go down in 5-20 minutes), but even then they didn't manage to launch all of her boats (that they weren't fully filled isn't the issue, the plan was to fill them consecutively from the lower doors to ensure a safer launch, but that didn't happen for a variety of reasons).
Look at the RMS Empress of Ireland: similar in size to the Titanic, got requipped with more lifeboats following Titanic, sank two years later within 14 minutes, with a list so heavy that they couldn't launch the port lifeboats at all (passangers tried, but they slammed into the side of the ship and got thrown into the water).
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