In my view the idea that the iceberg somehow opened the side of Titanic during a sideswipe doesn’t – pardon the pun – hold water. Steel is harder than ice. This is particularly true of icebergs that are under the influence of the relatively warm North Atlantic Drift. While true that 1909 steel was brittle at freezing compared to modern metal, it was not as brittle as ice. Proof lies in the iron guards on bridge abutments and steel icepicks which were both common at the time. They simply did not fail when struck by ice or when picking apart blocks into chunks of ice. And, that’s not to mention the appearance of ice breaking ships made of steel. Then as now – when steel and ice meet, it’s the ice that gets the worst of the deal.
The grounding theory was originally contained in a paper authored by myself and Parks Stephenson about a decade ago. You can read it on his "Marconigraph" web site:
Grounding of the Titanic Due to my closer location to Washington, D.C., I presented it to an august maritime forensic committee. That was a curious experience. Prior to the presenttion, one of the committee members admitted that our theory more closely matched what he had seen on the wreck during his work on an early TV documentary. Yet, when I stood up in the presentation room he led a most undignified shouting attack on the White Paper which Parks and I prepared. It was obvious a plan had been formulated among members of the committee to quite literally shout me down. I tried to answer, but realizing the futility simply closed my books, turned off the overhead projector, and left. I must add that the only gentleman in the room to properly question me was the late Roy Mengot.
Over the years I've uncovered much more questionable "forensics" surrounding Titanic. In my first book, "
The Last Log Of The Titanic" I wrote about a TV documentary that claimed it had discovered "the damage that sank Titanic." They allegedly used mud-penetrating echosounding. Those echosounds have never been published for scrutiny, but are often parroted by wannabe historians. Unfortunately, a man connected with that effort told me to my face that while the did find the damage reported on the starboard side, they actually found MORE similar damage on the port. What they claimed was iceberg damage was more likely the result of the bow slamming into the mud. (No names here. I don't make personal attacks.)
Anyway, the popular “sideswipe” theory requires a sort of opposite reality to the universe we inhabit. In that upside-down world ice must be harder and more durable than steel. This alternate reality claims that ice can remain hard and sharp enough to damage hundreds of feet of steel hull. Yet, while doing so the ice is little changed, dulled, or broken apart. For if the ice was dulled, then the damage would not have been continuous over that distance. Not hardly likely as one second officer might say.
Another problem with the sideswipe theory is the claim that the hull damage is in a rather straight line some 9 feet above the keel. Titanic’s designed draft was about 34 feet. This puts the alleged ice knife somewhere near 25 feet below the surface. And, this raises an insoluable problem. The keel swept upward as it went forward from the after end of hold #1 to the stem. The peak tank which we know was damaged by the ice was not quite 20 feet beneath the surface. That should have given some 5 feet of clearance by which the peak tank should have avoided suffering damage. But, the tank did suffer damage and that requires a complete rethinking of any sideswipe. To have damaged both the peak tank and the holds as the sideswipe theory requires, the portion of the berg that did the damage had to be simultaneously less than 20 feet and more than 25 feet below the surface. The gap between those numbers is never discussed. It could have been the result of two identical ice knives just five feet apart. But, in that case the damage would have been two roughly parallel tracks of hull openings and this was not observed in Titanic. So, the sideswipe does not match reality. Something else must have happened.
The sideswipe theory has even more problems to overcome. One is the almost unnoticed impact by people in the bow area directly above the ice contact. Any discussion of Titanic’s encounter with the berg must account for the unusual softness of impact over about 200 feet of hull. According to Newton, a sideways impact should have created an equal and opposite reaction. The bow should have caromed to the left. Not being perfect, I’ve sideswiped a piling or two making dockings, so I’ve got some experience in the consequences. People in Titanic could well have been tossed out of fore-and-aft aligned bunks. And, my experience carrying passengers shows it would also have knocked the legs out from beneath people, particularly those facing forwared or aft. Yet in reality nobody seems to have been much bothered by this necessary carom effect from a sideswipe. None of the logical results of a sideswipe happened in the bow forward of the well deck. One oddity of the Titanic story is that so many people in the bow slept through the accident. The reality of Titanic's odd soft impact forces us to walk away from the sideswipe argument and consider other forms of interaction between the ship and berg which would likely result in what did occur. That interaction has to be something proven to cause great damage to ships, yet also shown to be quite gentle. To me the most likely cause was a grounding on an underwater shoulder of the iceberg.
I once discussed the grounding of a Mississippi paddlewheel passenger vessel with its captain. The incident had taken place several years previously when he was a senior officer in the ship. Still, he recalled it vividly. To set the stage we have to know something about river operations in North America. Sand bars and mud bars plague what are known as the Western Rivers. These bars form and disappear quickly – sometime over a few hours. Just because a vessel passed in deep water a day ago doesn’t mean that a bar hasn’t formed to catch the unwary captain on his return trip. Anyway, the officer I met said the ship went onto the mud (yes, it was Mississippi mud) so softly that the only way the crew knew a grounding had taken place was to look at the far bank. They noticed that the trees were no longer moving past the ship (an illusion in calm waters, but that’s what he said). Even though the paddle was working up a froth, the steamboat had come to a stop and remained in that conditions for perhaps a minute or longer before the situation was noticed by the wheelhouse crew.
His recollection of the incident matched my experiences landing boatloads of bird watchers on a riverbank to allow them to visit a heronry. The sounds and motions of these landings are what originally caused me to consider grounding as the type of impact between Titanic and the iceberg. Even so, I knew the grounding theory had to clear one substantial hurdle. `A soft grounding can do little or no damage to the hull. And, while I heard sounds like those described in Titanic when intentionally grounding my boat, its hull was stout enough to withstand deliberate running over the mud and gravel riverbank. The U.S. Coast Guard even examined my boat’s hull and gave me specific permission to deliberately run onto the river bank. These two incidents raised problems for my grounding idea. If grounding was so harmless, why did Titanic suffer so much damage?
I found a likely answer when I examined what happens to a ship’s hull when it is improperly blocked in a dry dock. While floating, the weight of the ship and its cargo are spread out evenly across the bottom of the hull. No one area on the shell gets more strain than another. However, when a vessel is dried out it rests on small portions of the hull which are supported by blocks beneath the ship. This arrangement puts large amounts of weight on relatively small areas of the bottom. If things aren’t done correctly, the shell plating and internal framework can be badly damaged. Naval architects prevent this by arranging strong places for ship to rest on the blocks. And, they prepare a special plan showing where those blocks are to be placed. If things are not done correctly quite a bit can go wrong. Here's what I found in just one book:
"The dockmaster must first obtain a docking blueprint or docking plan of the vessel. ...this plan tells him how to set up the keel and bilge blocks to support the vessel. The ajor weight is supported by keel blocks along the keel.
"When a vessel is dry-docked...the total weight of the vessel may have to be borne by small portions of the ship’s bottom. ...special cribs are placed at strategic locations, such as under longitudinals and under transverse bulkheads to take the load... ...most insurance companies do not permit the dockmaster to load the blocking over 15 tons to the square foot of supporting materials.
"...the dockmaster of docking officer fis refers to the ship’s docking plan. This furnishes necessary information concerning the underwater hul for docking purposes. ...every ship should carry its own docking plan. During the period when the ship is in dock, no change of any kind should be made... Improper changes in weights may cause the ship to do serious damage to herself." (Hayler, William B, Merchant Marine Officer’s Handbook, Cornell Maritime Press, Centreville, MD, 1989, page 410).
It should be apparent that damage from grounding would be quite similar from improper blocking in a drydock. Both situations cause relatively small areas of the hull to support an excess amount of the ship’s weight. And, great damage can be done if that area is not properly braced by the ship’s own internal structure. Now, imagine that if instead of sitting still, that improperly placed blocking were to be moved from the bow aft along the bottom several hundred feet. The damage described by Haler would follow the movement of that errant block. Likewise, rolling over an underwater obstruction like the submerged shoulder of an iceberg should have created exactly the damage incurred by Titanic. And experiences of real vessels show it could have done so without raising enough of a ruckus (bumping and thumping) to awaken passengers.
Support for my idea comes from the testimony of the lookouts who described the starboard side as being lifted slightly during the accident, causing their crow’s nest to lean off to port. The lifting of the hull was not uniform, but rather confined to a small area that corresponded to the shape of the iceberg. The result was what naval architects call “rolling shear.” In my view, the result would have been sheared-off rivets in the seam above the turn of the bilge (above the margin brackets). As Jim said, I also agree that while the result was a loss of watertight integrity it caused minimal visible damage.
In another thread, Jim said that the portion of a ship’s hull at the turn of the bilge is one of its strongest areas. Yes, and doubly so in the case of Titanic. The curve of Titanic’s bilge was protected along most of its length by doubled shell plating. While this would have protected that vulnerable area from iceberg damage it may well have made things worse for the shell plating just above the doubling. This created what engineers often call a "hard spot" where the less flexible doubled plating met the single thickness skin of the topsides. If the lifting described by Fleet was the result of rolling over the iceberg (i.e. a “grounding”), then the result would have been unfair strains on the hull from forepeak to well deck along the top edge of the double plating. The area of the ship's bottom as well as the turn of the bilge should have flexed enough to escape major damage other than the odd shell plate crack or missing rivet. Any resulting ingress would have been into the double bottom tanks and void spaces where it would not have posed an immediate threat to the safety of the ship.
Unfortunately, that "hard spot" designed to protect the turn of the bilge against grounding on rocks became a liability. It focused the moving strain on the seams in the vertical side plates in the vertical side. Most precisely, the strain would have focused on the first seam above the double plating and on the rivets that held things together. The result should have been sprung seam as described by survivors. (I must point out that seams run fore-and aft. In the portion of the hull aft of hold #1 they are roughly parallel to the surface of the water. Hence, the straight-line damage so often described.)
Something else that works against the bow sideswipe theory was the what appears to be the only actual sideswipe damage to the ship. It came in way of boiler room #4. This is the compartment where hard impact against the berg caused an avalanche of coal to tumble down around trimmer Cavelle. It also drove pieces of ice onto the decks and scraped ice into port hole sills. The scraping of ice is indicative that this was truly a sideswipe event. It is my belief that this impact – not the grounding of the bow – was the motion felt by men in the first class smoking room and elsewhere aft of the well deck. The soft rumbling of grounding on the ice did not cause coal to tumble about in boiler roooms #5 or #6. But the shock of sideswipe did rumble through the ship and knock down coal around the hapless trimmer. This short-lived sideswipe created far less water ingress in boiler room #4 than in the holds or peak tank forward. So, the actual damages of a sideswipe – big impact with little water ingress – does not match the soft impact and extended damage in the bow.
– David G. Brown
