Titanic’s Aft Lifeboats

[Encyclopedia Titanica]

How Boats 9-16 saved lives in the sinking.... Titanica! Fri, 02 Jun 2023

Titanic’s Aft Lifeboats

How Boats 9-16 saved lives in the sinking.

www.encyclopedia-titanica.org

 

[Arun Vajpey]

Interesting article.

Boat 16 was also the first to hold only Second and Third Class women and children. Some Third Class men managed to slip by unobserved until later; those in No. 16 had entered unbeknownst to Moody

Might that have included Bernard McCoy? There is some uncertainty about the lifeboat in which the McCoys were rescued, but Lifeboat #16 is often mentioned. But the story of Bernard jumping into the water after the boat and then his sisters persuading other occupants to help him on board could well be newspaper embellishment.

Also, an unidentified man from Third Class is believed to have jumped into No. 12 from the Boat Deck.

And at No. 12, Second Class passenger Lutie Parrish, seated beside her daughter Imanita Shelley, was also struck by a man jumping from the Boat Deck.

Quoted from two separate sections of the article; likely to have been the same man. Could it have been Gurshon "Gus the Cat" Cohen?

 

[William Oakes]

I've always wondered, since she was sinking down by the head, why didn't the officers fill the forward boats first and then work their way back?

 

[Arun Vajpey]

Why didn't the officers fill the forward boats first and then work their way back?

That's what they did, at least on the starboard side. If you meant why the reverse order of #7, #5, #3 and #1, at that time the Titanic was not that far down at the head. It might also have something to do with availability of willing passengers to board; although Lifeboat #1 was the last of the four forward starboard lifeboats to be lowered, Symons, who was saved on it himself, said that there was no one else in the vicinity to get on board the boat just before it started to lower.

On the port side, things were done........well, differently. Lightoller, seemingly with Smith's consent, lowered Lifeboat #4 to the A-deck with the intention of loading it from there, perhaps overlooking that the area was enclosed and windows locked. There is an article with a video somewhere here on ET about the reasons for delay with Lifeboat #2.

 

[AFL23]

"Misapplied"? The captain was seeing Lightoller loading Boat 6 and even he prevented one woman from allowing her husband into the boat. If he had seen that and this was "misapplied," Lightoller would have been charged with mutiny. We're talking about a subordinate here, he had to listen to the captain. I would prefer that Lightoller and Murdoch were told by the captain to do what they could do with the orders they were given and left it vague, Lightoller might have simply told all of the men to wait until the rescue ship arrived or until the boats may come back or he might have simply been under the impression that they would have simply went to Murdoch's side, since he was probably reserving them for all of the women and children travelling without male relatives (and there were plenty of them). He was a husband and father after all, so he wouldn't have felt that families should be separated like that. The blame should be on the men themselves as they got what was coming to them just by being this incredibly stupid. Seriously, I did not think for a second that a research article would have stooped this low in considering a subordinate crew member whose main fault was a poorly done evacuation procedure a murderer, on par with Jeffrey Dahmer (last time I checked, Dahmer killed and ate lower class gay men of colour because he knew police officers wouldn't care about their deaths: here, we have men with wealth and privilege, and thus their families would have cared about their survival, and would not have taken kindly for their relative to be killed by an officer just because of a Y-chromosome).