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mariness1. My post about Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is finally up at Tor.com. The first comment is quite possibly the most awesome comment I have ever received on any of these Tor.com posts and has completely made my day.
2. Also, I finished reading Voyagers of the Titanic (2012), by Richard Davenport-Hines.
This is an interesting book, filled with anecdotes about many of the passengers and crew of the doomed Titanic, one short chapter about the ship's sinking, and one chapter mostly failing to describe the aftermath. If it is perhaps overly focused on the lives of the people responsible for designing and building the Titanic, one of whom, Pierpont Morgan, wasn't even on board, and on the first class passengers, that is perhaps understandable: many of the first class passengers were famous well before they boarded the Titanic, and others left lengthy memoirs and documents. The second class passengers, although educated and literate, tended to be less famous and more quiet afterwards; many of them did not survive. Many of the third class passengers documented the sinking, but not their lives before or afterwards.
Some of these lives are fascinating indeed: I didn’t know that two of the second class passengers were kidnapped children (they made it), or the sheer number of people on board who were cheating on spouses. Davenport-Hines' choices on what passengers to focus on are also interesting: he has a decided ear for scandal, for instance, so the nice and possibly uplifting stories of people heading to Florida to start citrus farms, or returning from missionary work, or fleeing political oppression get brief mentions, but we get a lot more about the cinematographer William Harbeck and the woman travelling with him who was decidedly not his wife. He also chooses to tell us very little about feminist writer Helen Churchill Dundee, who wrote one of the first eyewitness accounts of the sinking of the ship, giving us very little of her fascinating biography, but far more about Mauritz Bjornstorm-Steffansson. We also get more annoying bits from people who were nowhere near the ship; meant as comments on or illustrations of Edwardian society they are mostly a waste of time.
But this is a book with an agenda, or rather, agendas. First, Davenport-Hines desperately wants to counter lingering myths created by James Cameron's Titanic, most notably the way in his opinion the film portrays the first class passengers as evil leeches on society and the third class passengers as heroes. As Davenport-Hines correctly notes, this is a vast misreading of the initial portrayals of the Titanic sinking, where many of the first class passengers (not all) were lauded as heroes and many of the third class passengers (not all) derided as pond scum who had endangered passengers by panicking. Davenport-Hines also counters claims that the third class passengers were trapped behind gates as the Titanic sunk, unable to reach lifeboats until the first class passengers boarded. Although he admits that most ships travelling to New York did keep passenger classes segregated behind locked doors (a requirement of U.S. immigration law), he quotes third class statements showing that the gates were unlocked as the ship sank (these are disputed by other accounts) and notes that many third class passengers refused to leave the ship, either terrified of the lifeboats or unaware that the ship was really sinking because of language barriers. The lifeboat terror was quite real: as Davenport-Hines notes, many passengers on board were well aware of a recent disaster where a lifeboat had sunk, killing all on board.
So far, Davenport-Hines is plausible enough, especially since he is careful not to laud many of the first class passengers, and very careful to point out that many of them were in fact pond scum – confidence tricksters, gamblers, serial adulterers, and so on (not to mention the child kidnapper in second class). And I'll buy that Benjamin Guggenheim, deeply and personally aware of ongoing anti-Semitism in the United States and elsewhere, chose to go down with the ship in evening dress in part to counter anti-Semitism and charges that all Jews were cowards, but also to ensure that his mistress and her maid could escape on lifeboats.
But Davenport-Hines has a second agenda: to suggest that more lives on the Titanic would have been saved if the two officers directing the loading of the lifeboats had not insisted on "Women and children first," (Murdoch, on the starboard side) or "Women and children only" (Lightoller, on the port side.) As Davenport-Hines details, this led to several distressing scenes where wives initially or completely refused to leave without their husbands, which also led to delays as well as hellish moments later when the wives realized that their husbands and sons had sunk with the ship or were dying in the cold water. It also led to scenes where husbands attempted to board the lifeboats with their wives, only to forcibly removed, or scenes where husbands had to be prevented from joining their wives, or had to push their wives and children into a boat with reassurances that they would get on another boat, all arguments that wasted precious rescue time. Many wives never forgave themselves for believing that their husbands would be able to get on a later boat.
Davenport has a point here, but he misses something else: many of the wives and husbands were also parents, terrified of losing their children or leaving their children without one or both parents. He also half ignores a point he himself made earlier: the lifeboats for many seemed terrifying; not only the steep and long descent from the boat deck to the water, but also the knowledge that lifeboats could and did collapse or flip over, and that in at least one case a lifeboat almost landed on top of another lifeboat. (A few years later, people attempting to escape the torpedoed Lusitania also died on collapsing or splintering lifeboats.) People also fell out of the lifeboats, and the very first lifeboat to be lowered into the ocean almost immediately started filling with water (Davenport-Hines leaves this detail out).
Under the circumstances it is not really surprising that some women (particularly those travelling without children) preferred to stay with their husbands and die – or at least take the risk that a rescue ship might arrive soon. (The passengers were aware that other ships had been signaled by radio, and could also see the distress flares; given that another ship was in sight the entire time, their hopes for rescue were not unreasonable.)
Could ignoring the "women and children first" rule have saved more lives? Maybe, but it's also worth noting that the side that did allow men to board the lifeboats – (Murdoch) – was also the side that, to the horror of survivors and contemporaries alike, launched a lifeboat capable of holding 40 people with only 12 people aboard. Worse, this was one of the lifeboats capable of returning to the disaster area and rescuing some of the drowning, freezing passengers. It did not. The side that did not allow men boarded more passengers.
It's also worth noting that the men on the Titanic did not drown because of the "women and children first" rule. They drowned because:
1. A last minute change of ship officers meant that the binoculars used to spot icebergs were locked away.
2. The radio officers, focused on transmitting private messages on the Titanic, did not deliver all of the ice warning messages in a timely manner.
3. The officers largely ignored the ice warnings when they were received.
4. Thus, the Titanic continued to plow ahead into an ice field and had only a limited time to react to the iceberg sighting. The calm weather worsened matters since this meant a lack of waves to make the iceberg more visible.
5. Murdoch, the same guy that allowed a lifeboat to leave with only 12 passengers, panicked when he heard the iceberg sighting, and chose to slow down the ship instead of proceeding full speed ahead, which meant that the ship could not turn easily. It missed a head on collision and instead scraped the iceberg.
6. The ship's bulkheads were not designed to account for the amount of water the Titanic took in.
7. The ship did not have enough lifeboats.
8. The captain, partly to avoid panic, did not inform his crew of the seriousness of the situation, although he was aware that the ship would be sinking within two hours. The crew was therefore equally unable to inform passengers, which led to further delays in loading lifeboats, and the refusal of some passengers to board the lifeboats, figuring that even if the ship was sinking, it was still safer to remain on the ship for a few more hours while waiting for rescue.
9. No one had informed the two major officers in charge of loading the lifeboats just how many passengers the lifeboats could hold; the lifeboats were therefore not filled to capacity.
10. Almost no one had practiced loading and lowering the lifeboats.
11. There was a lack of people able to row/steer the lifeboats since many of the able bodied crew had already died investigating the accident or were attempting to organize/lower the lifeboats.
12. The captain delayed sending out distress signals via radio and flares; it is possible that the nearby ship would have responded if signals had been sent out a mere half hour earlier – before those officers went to sleep.
13. Probably because most people were not aware of how serious the situation was until about an hour before sinking, and most people (including most of the crew) did not realize that the ship did not have enough lifeboats, it seems that no one made the effort to throw deck chairs, tables, and wooden beds – all floatable things – and lower people on top of those. Although many of the deck chairs did appear on the surface after the sinking, and a few people managed to cling to them and other bits of furniture, this left their bodies in the water, causing hypothermia.
14. The water was really cold.
In other words, it was a combination of mistakes, bad judgement, poor engineering, poor planning, poor everything – much of it detailed in this book, and not a gendered policy to save women and children, that doomed the men of the Titanic.
But what makes this particularly annoying is that elsewhere in the book, Davenport-Hines actually seems to argue for a gendered reading of the passengers (as I noted in the previous entry) while then getting annoyed that the people on the ship followed that reading. Auugh.
For all of this, it's not a terrible book – parts are gripping, especially in that train wreck way that any Titanic account is gripping, and Davenport-Hines does an excellent job of discussing the racism and ethnic issues that also created problems on board and colored responses to the sinking and rescue efforts, detailing the stories of the single Japanese passenger (who survived) and the Chinese passengers (four survived) and the attitudes towards Eastern Europeans and Middle-Easterners. And if it sorta falters in its last chapter, well, this is a hard story to follow.
2. Also, I finished reading Voyagers of the Titanic (2012), by Richard Davenport-Hines.
This is an interesting book, filled with anecdotes about many of the passengers and crew of the doomed Titanic, one short chapter about the ship's sinking, and one chapter mostly failing to describe the aftermath. If it is perhaps overly focused on the lives of the people responsible for designing and building the Titanic, one of whom, Pierpont Morgan, wasn't even on board, and on the first class passengers, that is perhaps understandable: many of the first class passengers were famous well before they boarded the Titanic, and others left lengthy memoirs and documents. The second class passengers, although educated and literate, tended to be less famous and more quiet afterwards; many of them did not survive. Many of the third class passengers documented the sinking, but not their lives before or afterwards.
Some of these lives are fascinating indeed: I didn’t know that two of the second class passengers were kidnapped children (they made it), or the sheer number of people on board who were cheating on spouses. Davenport-Hines' choices on what passengers to focus on are also interesting: he has a decided ear for scandal, for instance, so the nice and possibly uplifting stories of people heading to Florida to start citrus farms, or returning from missionary work, or fleeing political oppression get brief mentions, but we get a lot more about the cinematographer William Harbeck and the woman travelling with him who was decidedly not his wife. He also chooses to tell us very little about feminist writer Helen Churchill Dundee, who wrote one of the first eyewitness accounts of the sinking of the ship, giving us very little of her fascinating biography, but far more about Mauritz Bjornstorm-Steffansson. We also get more annoying bits from people who were nowhere near the ship; meant as comments on or illustrations of Edwardian society they are mostly a waste of time.
But this is a book with an agenda, or rather, agendas. First, Davenport-Hines desperately wants to counter lingering myths created by James Cameron's Titanic, most notably the way in his opinion the film portrays the first class passengers as evil leeches on society and the third class passengers as heroes. As Davenport-Hines correctly notes, this is a vast misreading of the initial portrayals of the Titanic sinking, where many of the first class passengers (not all) were lauded as heroes and many of the third class passengers (not all) derided as pond scum who had endangered passengers by panicking. Davenport-Hines also counters claims that the third class passengers were trapped behind gates as the Titanic sunk, unable to reach lifeboats until the first class passengers boarded. Although he admits that most ships travelling to New York did keep passenger classes segregated behind locked doors (a requirement of U.S. immigration law), he quotes third class statements showing that the gates were unlocked as the ship sank (these are disputed by other accounts) and notes that many third class passengers refused to leave the ship, either terrified of the lifeboats or unaware that the ship was really sinking because of language barriers. The lifeboat terror was quite real: as Davenport-Hines notes, many passengers on board were well aware of a recent disaster where a lifeboat had sunk, killing all on board.
So far, Davenport-Hines is plausible enough, especially since he is careful not to laud many of the first class passengers, and very careful to point out that many of them were in fact pond scum – confidence tricksters, gamblers, serial adulterers, and so on (not to mention the child kidnapper in second class). And I'll buy that Benjamin Guggenheim, deeply and personally aware of ongoing anti-Semitism in the United States and elsewhere, chose to go down with the ship in evening dress in part to counter anti-Semitism and charges that all Jews were cowards, but also to ensure that his mistress and her maid could escape on lifeboats.
But Davenport-Hines has a second agenda: to suggest that more lives on the Titanic would have been saved if the two officers directing the loading of the lifeboats had not insisted on "Women and children first," (Murdoch, on the starboard side) or "Women and children only" (Lightoller, on the port side.) As Davenport-Hines details, this led to several distressing scenes where wives initially or completely refused to leave without their husbands, which also led to delays as well as hellish moments later when the wives realized that their husbands and sons had sunk with the ship or were dying in the cold water. It also led to scenes where husbands attempted to board the lifeboats with their wives, only to forcibly removed, or scenes where husbands had to be prevented from joining their wives, or had to push their wives and children into a boat with reassurances that they would get on another boat, all arguments that wasted precious rescue time. Many wives never forgave themselves for believing that their husbands would be able to get on a later boat.
Davenport has a point here, but he misses something else: many of the wives and husbands were also parents, terrified of losing their children or leaving their children without one or both parents. He also half ignores a point he himself made earlier: the lifeboats for many seemed terrifying; not only the steep and long descent from the boat deck to the water, but also the knowledge that lifeboats could and did collapse or flip over, and that in at least one case a lifeboat almost landed on top of another lifeboat. (A few years later, people attempting to escape the torpedoed Lusitania also died on collapsing or splintering lifeboats.) People also fell out of the lifeboats, and the very first lifeboat to be lowered into the ocean almost immediately started filling with water (Davenport-Hines leaves this detail out).
Under the circumstances it is not really surprising that some women (particularly those travelling without children) preferred to stay with their husbands and die – or at least take the risk that a rescue ship might arrive soon. (The passengers were aware that other ships had been signaled by radio, and could also see the distress flares; given that another ship was in sight the entire time, their hopes for rescue were not unreasonable.)
Could ignoring the "women and children first" rule have saved more lives? Maybe, but it's also worth noting that the side that did allow men to board the lifeboats – (Murdoch) – was also the side that, to the horror of survivors and contemporaries alike, launched a lifeboat capable of holding 40 people with only 12 people aboard. Worse, this was one of the lifeboats capable of returning to the disaster area and rescuing some of the drowning, freezing passengers. It did not. The side that did not allow men boarded more passengers.
It's also worth noting that the men on the Titanic did not drown because of the "women and children first" rule. They drowned because:
1. A last minute change of ship officers meant that the binoculars used to spot icebergs were locked away.
2. The radio officers, focused on transmitting private messages on the Titanic, did not deliver all of the ice warning messages in a timely manner.
3. The officers largely ignored the ice warnings when they were received.
4. Thus, the Titanic continued to plow ahead into an ice field and had only a limited time to react to the iceberg sighting. The calm weather worsened matters since this meant a lack of waves to make the iceberg more visible.
5. Murdoch, the same guy that allowed a lifeboat to leave with only 12 passengers, panicked when he heard the iceberg sighting, and chose to slow down the ship instead of proceeding full speed ahead, which meant that the ship could not turn easily. It missed a head on collision and instead scraped the iceberg.
6. The ship's bulkheads were not designed to account for the amount of water the Titanic took in.
7. The ship did not have enough lifeboats.
8. The captain, partly to avoid panic, did not inform his crew of the seriousness of the situation, although he was aware that the ship would be sinking within two hours. The crew was therefore equally unable to inform passengers, which led to further delays in loading lifeboats, and the refusal of some passengers to board the lifeboats, figuring that even if the ship was sinking, it was still safer to remain on the ship for a few more hours while waiting for rescue.
9. No one had informed the two major officers in charge of loading the lifeboats just how many passengers the lifeboats could hold; the lifeboats were therefore not filled to capacity.
10. Almost no one had practiced loading and lowering the lifeboats.
11. There was a lack of people able to row/steer the lifeboats since many of the able bodied crew had already died investigating the accident or were attempting to organize/lower the lifeboats.
12. The captain delayed sending out distress signals via radio and flares; it is possible that the nearby ship would have responded if signals had been sent out a mere half hour earlier – before those officers went to sleep.
13. Probably because most people were not aware of how serious the situation was until about an hour before sinking, and most people (including most of the crew) did not realize that the ship did not have enough lifeboats, it seems that no one made the effort to throw deck chairs, tables, and wooden beds – all floatable things – and lower people on top of those. Although many of the deck chairs did appear on the surface after the sinking, and a few people managed to cling to them and other bits of furniture, this left their bodies in the water, causing hypothermia.
14. The water was really cold.
In other words, it was a combination of mistakes, bad judgement, poor engineering, poor planning, poor everything – much of it detailed in this book, and not a gendered policy to save women and children, that doomed the men of the Titanic.
But what makes this particularly annoying is that elsewhere in the book, Davenport-Hines actually seems to argue for a gendered reading of the passengers (as I noted in the previous entry) while then getting annoyed that the people on the ship followed that reading. Auugh.
For all of this, it's not a terrible book – parts are gripping, especially in that train wreck way that any Titanic account is gripping, and Davenport-Hines does an excellent job of discussing the racism and ethnic issues that also created problems on board and colored responses to the sinking and rescue efforts, detailing the stories of the single Japanese passenger (who survived) and the Chinese passengers (four survived) and the attitudes towards Eastern Europeans and Middle-Easterners. And if it sorta falters in its last chapter, well, this is a hard story to follow.