As I said before, there is a distinction between a contributing factor and negligent conduct.
Titanic had received ample communications showing that
exceptional circumstances existed in the general vicinity of her path, not the typical scattered icebergs but a dense ice floe. A certain laxness with regard to generally established (if in some cases not required) procedures and lack of situational awareness prevailed in
Titanic's command staff. It is probable this was caused by a lack of familiarity, particularly by Captain Smith, who had spent the great majority of his career without it, in incorporating real-time wireless information into his decision-making process.
None of that is
negligent. Nor is it to say that the existing of dense pack ice somewhere near
Titanic's course would have led them to alter course. But
@Julian Atkins has a strong argument that the information existed and a failure to account for it was a hole in the swiss cheese that brought us to the disaster. Certainly, it's wrong to simply dismiss it all as being something men of the time weren't prepared for. Captains are supposed to manage exceptional circumstances; we know that one prevailed in the North Atlantic that night. Since most people cannot be exceptional, they do so through caution and strict adherence to training and procedures. You quoted Roosevelt as if to imply, at least to me, that Captain Smith was brave. But the brave man would have reviewed the situation based on the wireless and the conditions and after the conversation with Lightoller ordered a reduction in speed, and faced his boss by explaining his reasoning with calm courage. Captain Smith instead executed his duties professionally and competently within a reasonable and normative standard that night. A presumptive violation of Rule 5 assigned because of a lack of understanding of human capability is not negligence in fact. But his actions before the allision are those of a man who failed to use all the information at hand and failed to develop awareness of the situation into which his ship was rapidly heading.
The crew of the Gimli Glider were both awarded and punished. They made the mistake, they also put the machine down. Captain Smith did everything right for a normal night on the North Atlantic; you could get by with a little bit of laxness on such a night, and none of it would bear any comment on a different night. But that night actually called for his A game, and it wasn't there.
Well, humans are fallible, and the vast majority of the time, those mistakes are trivial and hurt no-one. Many more mistakes can hurt a single person. Captains, air crew, to some extent train drivers are all in professions where that is not true. Those mistakes can kill hundreds of people there. And so we scrutinize them so that we may learn. The only useful lessons from the
Titanic left to be learned are those which relate to human factors, because those remain relevant to modern industry.
The majority of Captains wouldn't have done better than Captain Smith on that night. And even those who did might have still hit ice. His ship was traveling much faster than that of most Captains who evaded it. All of this attributes the primary cause to a failure to recognise the limits of human vision that guaranteed the flawed see-and-avoid method the Captains on the liner trade used. In that sense, Captain Smith did nothing exceptional.
Conversely, the information to
be exceptional did exist -- but was mismanaged and so any notional chance was lost. It is not reasonable to ask people to be exceptional; procedures, checklists and training exist for a reason. But Julian is right that the information was mismanaged, even if the chance of it changing the outcome is remote.
