First, on behalf of Erik and Tracy as well as myself, I would like to thank everyone thus far for their interest in the article we wrote...and also for the constructive peer review were getting here. As it was a collaberative effort, I'll be the first one to fess up that not everything was as consistant as perhaps it should have been. That's one of the problems of trying to harmonize the works of different people on the same subject of interest. It's entirely possible that we may be able to do further work on it, and I intend to take full advantage of whatever comments and insights anyone has to offer to make it better!
To some of the points raised;
John Feeney:I'll take the mea culpa on the lifeboats that went back to the rescue insofar as the contradiction goes. I had an opportunity to catch it, correct it, and I blew it. On the actual actions of Boat#4 under Perkis, my source was Don Lynche's "Titanic, An Illustrated History". I tried to second source it as best I could, but I found what was available to be a little muddy. If we do anything else, I'll certainly check Colonel Gracies account to fill in the additional details.
David Gleicher:In retrospect, I concur that we need to do some housecleaning on this one. Tracy contacted me last night to let me know that there is another party interested in putting our work in print. I'm not free to go into the details and it may come to nothing. However, if we can do anything else with this, we will give it our fullest attention.
General comments (My own); The Californian incident is one that tends to provoke some very strong reactions and diversions of opinion, and it's one of the very few controversies I've seen which actually destroys friendships among Titanic researchers. As passionately as arguements are put forward by both sides, it's almost as if some believe that if they make their points forcefully enough, we can force history to have a better outcome. Regretably, that's not going to happen. 89 years after the fact, what happened is a done deal. We can't alter the outcome, but what we can do is try to better understand what happened.
My position is that of one of Lord's critics, and Tracy's, as everyone knows...she's hardly kept it a secret...is that of one of Lord'ssupporters. I'm not sure where Erik stands on this. I suspect he's more of a middle of the road sort of chap. What we wanted to do was take a look at the whole thing and explore what realistically could have been accomplished.
The answer to that is, unfortunately, not as much as we might all wish to believe. I wish it were otherwise.
Could the Californian have gotten underway? Absolutely yes. Steam was kept up and the watch maintained for doing just that in case they were forced to do so.
Could the Californian have made it on scene befor the Titanic foundered? opinions differ sharply on that one and it seems no resolution is in sight. I think they could have...barely.
Would it have been a worthy effort to do so? Absolutely yes! Saving even a few additonal lives would certainly have been worthwhile. And even if Captain Lord;s suporters turn out to be right and the ship was just too far away, the effort alone would have spared Captain Lord some incredible grief.
Could they have improvised as they went along? Yes, they could have. Any rescue effort on the Californian's part would have been an all hands evolution, and I think that Lord would have manned the essential watches with skeleton crews. He would have had to in order to adaquately man up and launch even two boats.
Could they have saved most if not everybody on board the Titanic if they were as close as Lord's critics believe?
Nope. Not a chance. Some, yes, but not all. The problems with boat operations don't go away, especially when the resources available are little more then overgrown rowboats which was all either ship had available. It's a time and labour intensive operation and a dangerous one even under the best of conditions. Assuming they could have arrived befor the Titanic foundered, it would have been just in time to watch the ship sink. That alone rules out going anywhere near the sinking ship That leaves the boats to go fishing for frightened and paniked survivors in 28 degree water with a clock mercilessly ticking away. Further, the crews would have had to face the agonizing choice of deciding who to pick up and who to beat off. Who lives and who dies in other words.
The effort would have been complicated later on by the scores of corpses that the rescue craft would have had to work their way through to get at the few who would have remained alive. This was exactly the problem Boat#14 faced when trying to get at one man (Bath attendant Harold Phillmore) clinging to a piece of wreckage. It took half an hour to get to him.
I'm not going to try to minimise anyone's accountablity on this. There were a lot of mistakes made that night, and Captain Lord's as well as those of his officers have been the subject of valid debate for almost a century now. However, befor anyone get's too emotionally wrapped up in all of this, It would be wise to take into account the harsh realities they were facing.
Cordially,
Michael H. Standart
