We have Dan on another thread awhile back and others awhile back quoting Captain Pritchard and other Captains that they would proceed ‘full steam’ ahead into a region of reported ice, but unless I am mistaken, no questioning of other precautionary measures that they would have taken which
Captain Smith did not order.
I believe Sam has explained the mindset behind the belief of Captain Pritchard
et al that it was the right thing to proceed at full speed through an ice field because they believed that they - or at least the Lookouts and/or the OOW - would have spotted the iceberg in time to avoid impact. As Sam said in an another post a few months ago, they were all wrong; I agree that all 14 of them grossly overestimated the ability of their crew to see a medium-sized iceberg in flat-calm conditions on a very dark & moonless night like the one the
Titanic was sailing that Sunday.
As far as explaining their desire to maintain maximum speed through an ice-field so that they could get out of it as quickly as possible makes no sense whatever - it is worse than moronic. It is like a bus driver wanting to drive through the Swiss Alpine Pass Roads at full speed so that he could get his passengers to safety as quickly as possible. As you have pointed out - and I agree - that defending comments by a group of men simply because they were all Captains of experience is meaningless; over 100 years down the line, we can never know the convoluted motivations that might have been there for them to have made such statements.
The same thing applies to considering as Gospel the impressions offered by another experienced person over a dinner table.
The simple fact is that Murdoch should not have been alone on the bridge, and if he anticipated things correctly he would not have excused
Boxhall, and surely would have been told either by
Lightoller or
Moody himself that
Moody expected ice around 11pm that Sunday night.
On principle that is logical but considering how vague, contradictory and unreliable
Boxhall's statements were after the accident - both during the official Inquiries and elsewhere over the years - we don't know what transpired between him and Murdoch between 11pm and 11:40pm. It would be difficult to provide evidence for or against for something like this, but
if, as I have presumed, Boxhall was in the toilet when the
Titanic collided with the iceberg, he might have gone in there only a few minutes before. In other words, it is possible Boxhall was on the bridge with Murdoch before then and obtained the 1/O's permission to get a break, his position being taken over by Moody. Such an exchange would have been brief and not particularly overheard by Hichens enclosed in his wheelhouse and of course, Moody died with Murdoch in the sinking. If that had happened, why Boxhall did not mention it himself would be anyone's guess, of course.
I accept that it is a major presumption on my part about Boxhall's whereabouts but it is one way of explaining the sequence of events during the 30 minutes or so leading up to the collision.
But whether Boxhall or Moody had provided their eyes on watch in that timeframe, I do not believe that it would have made any difference. It was way too dark, the ship had too much momentum and whoever had spotted "it" on the horizon first - Fleet, Lee, Murdoch, Moody - it would have already been too late. At most, they might have gained 5 seconds and we've already discussed above why
that would not have avoided the impact.
The only certain way that berg could have been avoided is if they had come to full stop at sunset and remained that way until dawn
In theory that is correct, but I don't believe they had to go that far. Unlike the
Californian, the
Titanic was not surrounded by ice - it had not even encountered any as yet. But they knew that they were approaching the ice field and so reducing speed and perhaps additional lookouts might have avoided the accident.
