It will take a while to read and digest everything in the above article, especially as there is a Part 2 coming as well.
But after a quick look, I noticed this comment.
This is yet another first-hand account that agrees with what Ella White, Margaret Swift, Alice Leader, and Emma Bucknell had to say.
But that also
disagrees with equally "First Hand" comments by Martha Stone, Major Peuchen, Fahim Al-Zainni, Julia Cavendish and Mary Smith. How is one group necessarily more reliable than the other? If anything, there is the fact that Margaret Swift and Alice Leader shared a
starboard cabin - D17 - which raises the question of which side of the boat deck they first arrived and hence which was really the 'first boat' that they saw. Since both those women were rescued on Lifeboat #8, a port side boat, they could have crossed over.
Martha Stone, who was rescued on Lifeboat #6, made a very simple statement which IMO is quite relevant and not easy to dismiss. She said that just before she boarded her lifeboat, she leaned over the railing and saw another partially filled lifeboat already in the water; it could not have been any other but Lifeboat #8.
I have read the testimonies of Hichens and Fleet on both sides of the Atlantic and Fleet did not come across as any more reliable than Hichens and so one cannot comment which of the two was more "confused" or "mistaken".
Other than the witness accounts already mentioned, another major stumbling block for me in the theory that Lifeboat #6 was launched at 12:55am and before Lifeboat #8 is the Peuchen angle. If Lifeboat #6 was really the first lifeboat lowered on the port side, it meant that Lightoller was already short of seamen before he had lowered any boat, which seems highly improbable. Major Peuchen was allowed into Lifeboat #6 precisely to cover that shortage. We cannot use the excuse that Lightoller sent some seamen with Nichols on the latter's gangway door expedition here to 'explain' that shortage; the 2/O did
not do so. He testified that he ordered the Boatswain to take an unspecified number of men (ie choose the men himself) and go down to the gangway door, and when the boatswain said "Aye, aye Sir" and left, assumed that the latter was carrying out the order. Nichols could have chosen his men from anywhere, including the starboard side where he had helped with the lifeboats earlier. In fact, considering that Nichols had worked with Murdoch et al on the starboard side till a few minutes before arriving on the port side, the boatswain was likely more familiar with the way the crewmen were distributed on the starboard side much better and could well have picked his helpers from there.
Also Sam, IMO the title and some statements of the chapter "Some Fallacious Arguments" are harsh. The one thing that I have noticed since W-F-B published their very first version of the Lifeboat Launching Sequence is to mention both sides of the argument, which included consideration of survivor accounts that did not tally with their conclusions. I did not find their approach to evidence "selective" at any stage; quite the contrary, as a matter of fact.
