The Loss of the S. S. Titanic: Its Story and Its LessonsBeesley, Lawrence
History
The Loss of the S. S. Titanic: Its Story and Its Lessons
Beesley, Lawrence
Shipwrecks -- North Atlantic Ocean; Titanic (Steamship)
One point where the Titanic management failed lamentably was to
provide a properly trained crew to each lifeboat. The rowing was in
most cases execrable. There is no more reason why a steward should be
able to row than a passenger--less so than some of the passengers who
were lost; men of leisure accustomed to all kinds of sport (including
rowing), and in addition probably more fit physically than a steward
to row for hours on the open sea. And if a steward cannot row, he has
no right to be at an oar; so that, under the unwritten rule that
passengers take precedence of the crew when there is not sufficient
accommodation for all (a situation that should never be allowed to
arise again, for a member of the crew should have an equal opportunity
with a passenger to save his life), the majority of stewards and cooks
should have stayed behind and passengers have come instead: they could
not have been of less use, and they might have been of more. It will
be remembered that the proportion of crew saved to passengers was 210
to 495, a high proportion.
Another point arises out of these figures--deduct 21 members of the
crew who were stewardesses, and 189 men of the crew are left as
against the 495 passengers. Of these some got on the overturned
collapsible boat after the Titanic sank, and a few were picked up by
the lifeboats, but these were not many in all. Now with the 17 boats
brought to the Carpathia and an average of six of the crew to man each
boat,--probably a higher average than was realized,--we get a total of
102 who should have been saved as against 189 who actually were. There
were, as is known, stokers and stewards in the boats who were not
members of the lifeboats' crews. It may seem heartless to analyze
figures in this way, and suggest that some of the crew who got to the
Carpathia never should have done so; but, after all, passengers took
their passage under certain rules,--written and unwritten,--and one is
that in times of danger the servants of the company in whose boats
they sail shall first of all see to the safety of the passengers
before thinking of their own. There were only 126 men passengers saved
as against 189 of the crew, and 661 men lost as against 686 of the
crew, so that actually the crew had a greater percentage saved than
the men passengers--22 per cent against 16.
But steamship companies are faced with real difficulties in this
matter. The crews are never the same for two voyages together: they
sign on for the one trip, then perhaps take a berth on shore as
waiters, stokers in hotel furnace-rooms, etc.,--to resume life on
board any other ship that is handy when the desire comes to go to sea
again. They can in no sense be regarded as part of a homogeneous crew,
subject to regular discipline and educated to appreciate the morale of
a particular liner, as a man of war's crew is.
_Searchlights_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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