The Last Log Of The Titanic is not intended for readers who believe in impossible shipboard romances or giant blue gems. Nor is it for anyone seeking to rewrite history with lurid flights of imagination. The Last Log Of The Titanic is a serious attempt to unravel the events on Titanic's bridge and in its engine rooms that led to the accident and the ship's eventual foundering. To do that, I spent four years researching original sources--mostly the 1912 testimony of the crew who survived. There are no new "discoveries" in this book. The facts it contains were put into the public record in 1912. However, what I discovered is that the real story of Titanic is totally different from the official myths pushed onto a gullible public nearly 90 years ago. As usual, the truth is far more compelling than myth and legend.

This project started out as part of a article on boat handling for Boating World magazine. My intention was to use the scene from the then-popular movie which showed Titanic's starboard bow grazing the iceberg to illustrate how boats do NOT maneuver. It is impossible for a rudder-steered vessel to damage only its starboard bow as depicted in the movie during a left turn. This is because of the location of the pivot point around which the hull rotates during a turn. If Titanic had struck the berg as shown on the movie screen, damage would have occurred to its entire starboard side, not just the bow.

Murdoch's "Port Around"

We know that after Lookout Fleet's final iceberg warning, Second Officer William Murdoch initially ordered the ship to turn to its left (starboard helm in 1912). Titanic undoubtedly turned slightly faster to the left than to the right because it was driven by three propellers. Every propeller delivers both forward thrust and sideways pressure. A propeller that rotates to the left in forward also pushes the stern to the left. Conversely, a propeller that rotates to the right pushes the stern to the right when the ship is moving forward. Two of Titanic's propellers rotated to the right, giving the ship a slight tendency to swing its stern to the right (turning the bow to the left) when steaming forward. This meant the ship turned a bit faster to the left (starboard helm in 1912) than to the right. By ordering a left turn, Murdoch took advantage of the ship's natural tendency.

Virtually every report, book, TV documentary and motion picture has depicted Titanic sideswiping its starboard bow on the iceberg while turning left, away from danger. Not only did this not happen, but it could not have happened under any circumstances. A starboard bow sideswipe "collision" while turning left was impossible for a conventional ship in 1912. (Nor can it be done today.) The manner in which rudder-steered ships pivot in the water does not allow the actual damage received by Titanic's bow to have occurred during a left turn. Iceberg damage to the starboard bow while turning to the left absolutely would have necessitated bumping and grinding of the ice along the ship's starboard side all the way to its stern.

Every conventional power-driven vessel has a "pivot point" located on its centerline roughly one-third of its length aft from the bow. The vessel rotates around this point when its rudder is put over. Because the pivot point is not amidships but is offset toward the bow, the vessel's stern swings a larger arc than the bow.1 Turning only to the left (or right) avoid a close-aboard object swings the vessel's stern toward that object even though the bow points clear. A side-on impact cannot be avoided. The object then bumps and grinds along the side of the ship doing damage along the entire length of the hull from the initial point of impact to the stern.

The impossible "left turn only" scenario would have caused damage to the majority of the ship's 16 primary watertight compartments. The truth is, Titanic did not receive ice damage aft of Boiler Room #5 which was approximately below the bridge. This is proof the ship was turning to the right at the time of the accident, turning toward the iceberg.

Immediately following the accident, Murdoch told Captain Smith that he attempted to "port around" the deadly berg. This maneuver for dodging an obsticle is familiar to every mariner. The bow is first turned away from the object, then the helm is shifted (turned the other way) to clear the stern. That is exactly what Murdoch must have done, because the ship did not suffer any ice damage aft of boiler room #5. In truth, the bow was clear of the ice until Murdoch executed his second turn, back toward the berg. This second turn was not a mistake. Even though the bow had been pointed away from the ice, Titanic's stern was sliding dangerously toward the berg when Murdoch shifted the helm. Only when he initiated a turn to the right did the fragile stern swing away from the iceberg and certain disaster.

Murdoch's "port around" maneuver required the ship to be extremely close to the berg before initiating the second turn. As a result, the iceberg would have appeared to be off the starboard bow when Murdoch called for port helm to turn the ship to the right. Quartermaster Olliver apparently was fooled by the angle of the ship to berg when he said Murdoch's port helm order came after the berg passed the bridge. "The iceberg was away up astern," he told Senator Burton at the U.S. hearings.

If Titanic had been turning left (starboard helm in 1912) at the moment of contact, ice and metal should have met roughly in the way of the bulkhead between Boiler Rooms #5 and #6. In reality, this is about the location on the hull where damage from the ice ended. In the mythical left turn, the berg would have bumped and crashed along the ship's entire starboard side starting at Boiler Room #5 and continuing aft into Boiler Rooms #4, #3, #2, #1 and the two engine rooms. Compartments forward of Boiler Room #5 would have remained undamaged and free of water. Titanic still would have foundered, but stern first. Of course, the pattern of damage to be expected during a left turn collision is exactly the opposite to what actually occurred.

The timing of Murdoch's second turn in his "port around" maneuver, the one back toward the danger, was critical. Unfortunately, he started his turn a bit too soon and the bow came a few yards too close to the berg. Actual damage received by the starboard bow during the accident is irrefutable proof that Titanic was under port helm and turning to the right (starboard) at the moment of impact. Murdoch did, in fact, "port around" the portion of the berg above the water.

One witness at the British proceedings knew the impossibility of explaining Titanic's starboard bow damage with only a single left turn. Edward Wilding, an employee of Harland and Wolff and one of the ship's designers, appeared to recognize that the lack of damage to compartments aft of Boiler Room #5 did not fit the left-turn-only scenario. His testimony gives the impression that Wilding was struggling to accept the conventional version of the accident. He was troubled by the left-turn-only theory because it required damage to parts of the hull that were not involved in the real accident.

MR. WILDING: ...after the ship had finished tearing herself at the forward end of No. 5, she would tend to push herself against the iceberg a little, or push herself up the iceberg, and there would be a certain tendency, as the stern came round to aft under the helm, to bang against the iceberg again further aft.

-- British Board of Trade
Wreck Commission Hearing
June, 1912

Having found the conventional story of the accident is physically impossible, I began a quest to learn if any other commonly-believed details of the accident were wrong. That took me on a nearly four-year adventure through testimony from hearings on both sides of the Atlantic as well as into the dusty archives of libraries. What I uncovered astounded me because, at the time, I still believed the conventional story of the isolated iceberg, the failed left turn, the engines pounding in reverse, and the ship remaining stopped until it sank.

All of that turned out to be myth and legend.

Late at night I often found myself too excited to sleep as Titanic's crew spoke to me through their 1912 testimony. Time after time I would suspect a quartermaster, fireman or lookout of lying -- only to find overwhelming evidence supporting those claims. It became obvious to me that the events experienced by the crew were not those etched into history by either the U.S. Senate or the British Board of Trade inquiry.

No "Crash Stop"

According to Fourth Officer Boxhall, First Officer Murdoch changed the orders to the two outboard propellers from AHEAD FULL to ASTERN FULL, requesting what sailors call a "crash stop." This is a violent maneuver that can damage the ship's engines, drive shafts, or propellers. For that reason, it is reserved only for the worst of emergencies. Testifying in London, Boxhall said the engine order telegraphs read "full speed astern" when he stepped into the enclosed section of the bridge.

Unfortunately Boxhall's recollection seems faulty. Titanic never attempted the crash stop that people on land still believe was the obvious way to prevent the ship from slamming into the iceberg. Reverse thrust from the propellers would have eliminated the ability of the single rudder to steer the ship. Murdoch knew this. Under full reverse power the ship could not have pivoted to the right, but would have begun a sideways slide into the iceberg2.

The toil of those sweaty men feeding the fires in the ship's boiler rooms was by red warning lights and clanging bells moments before the accident. "Shut the dampers," sang out Leading Stoker Frederick Barrett. He and Second Engineer James H. Hesketh had been talking in Boiler Room #6 when the alarms clanged and the lights on the stoking indicators changed from white to red. Chatter among the men stopped in mid-sentence as they turned to this unexpected work. Closing the dampers on the furnaces was an ordinary precaution to reduce the fires to prevent generating excess steam pressure while the engineers stopped the engines. There were safety valves, of course, but these were not foolproof and had been known to stick on occasion. Nobody wanted to risk building up excessive steam pressure.

The command to close the dampers came just prior to impact when Titanic was perhaps 700 feet from the berg. Closing the furnace dampers is yet another indication that a crash stop was never performed. Full reverse power would have required as much steam as possible from the boilers. Shutting the dampers would have been the worst possible thing to do during a crash stop. Instead, stokers would have been asked to rake the coals in their furnaces to increase steam output from the boilers in order to get maximum power out of the engines.

Titanic's engines and associated drive shafts and propeller blades were designed to withstand an instant shift from forward into reverse at harbor speeds. They might have had strength enough to withstand the strain of instant reversal at 22.5 knots, but only if every part from cylinder to tail shaft was totally free of defects. Ships have been known to snap shafts and propeller blades during crash stops. If nothing broke on Titanic, a crash stop would have caused a rumbling shudder to convulse through the after third of the hull.

In 1951, the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Tarawa was passing through the Straits of Messena. A passenger ferry suddenly cut across the warship's bow. "All back emergency!" was the instant commande and the carrier's engines began pounding in reverse. The stern of the ship began jumping up and down, some of the crew later said the jumps were six feet or more. The collision was avoided. Next morning, dozens of the carrier's crew were sporting slings, casts and neck braces from being flung to the deck by their ship's successful "crash stop." So much china was broken by the maneuver that it was necessary to put into port to buy more in order to feed the crew. Within a few weeks, the ship itself was drydocked to repair damage done to the at least one propeller shaft.

Since none of the seven-hundred Titanic survivors described such a memorable event, and because the firebox dampers were ordered shut, the engineers could not have performed a crash stop3. They just closed the throttles to the engines to stop them from pushing the liner forward. In sailor terms, Titanic was "shooting," or coasting forward without power when it contacted the iceberg.

Fatal Contact

Where was the fatal ice damage done to the ship? "To the side," history has answered for 88 years--despite both the physical impossibility of such damage and the direct testimony to the contrary by members of the crew. Scenes in the movies show the starboard bow of the giant liner slamming against a wall of ice much like an automobile sideswiping a highway bridge abutment. Nothing could be further from the truth. If the ship had collided with the berg in that manner, the impact would have been devastating. Men sleeping in the bow would have been thrown out of their bunks to the hard steel decks. Anyone standing in the grand First Class entrance likely would have had their feet knocked from beneath them. Certainly there would have been dozens (if not scores) of injuries: broken arms, legs and even skulls. More than a few people would have been killed outright as the steel bow collapsed around them.

None of that happened.

With full right rudder (port helm in 1912) Titanic was turning to the right as it contacted the ice. There had been those few quick seconds when it appeared the daring S-curve would succeed. However, as every child learns in school, the bulk of an iceberg lies beneath the water. Murdoch knew it, too. He fully expected what happened next. Titanic's fragile underbelly scraped across an underwater shelf called an "ice ram." These shelves are common enough to warrant special attention in Bowditch. "It is dangerous to approach close to an iceberg of any size because of the possibility of encountering underwater extensions," the navigation text cautions. The great danger of icebergs is "underwater extensions, called rams, which are usually formed due to the more intensive melting or erosion of the unsubmerged portion."4

Physical evidence and eyewitness accounts point to the accident being a grounding, not a collision. Titanic did not run into an iceberg; it ran over an iceberg. The initial pattern of flooding and testimony from surviving crew members are consistent on one point: the bottom of the ship--not the side--made solid contact with the ice. Survivors unanimously described the sound and vibration of a ship running aground. There was no sharp jolt of a ship slamming horizontally into an immovable object. Instead, the slight tremble was barely enough to rattle silverware set out for breakfast in the First Class dining saloon.

The difference between a grounding and a collision is far more significant than it appears. Head-on impact with the berg would have sent all of Titanic's 52,310 displacement tons5 smashing into the ice at a speed of almost 36 feet per second6. In the crunch of a head-on impact, the ship's speed would have effectively dropped to zero. Everything inside the bow that was not tied down--people, chairs, bottles of wine, soup tureens--everything would have continued moving. Sleeping immigrant men near the bow would have been sent flying out of their bunks. Farther aft, the impact would have been less, but still substantial. Women could have been hurled down the grand staircase in First Class to land twisted and broken in a pile of taffeta. In the Second Class smoking room behind the fourth funnel men might have felt their chairs move beneath them.

Edward Wilding, one of the naval architects who designed Titanic, testified in London about the effect of a head-on collision. "If she struck a fair blow I think we should have heard a great deal more about the severity of it, and probably the ship would have come into harbor," he said. "I am afraid she would have killed every firemen down in the firemen's quarters, but I feel sure the ship would come in." At the U.S. Senate hearings Captain John J. Knapp, the U.S. Navy's hydrographer, tried to imagine such an impact for Senator Smith:

MR. KNAPP: ...an idea may be formed as to the possible blow by using the accepted formula, the weight multiplied by the square of the velocity divided by twice the gravity. Multiplying...will give the blow that would have been struck if she had kept straight on her course against this apparently solid mass of ice, which, at a speed of 21 knots, would have been equal to 1,173,200 foot tons, or energy enough to lift 14 monuments the size of the Washington Monument in one second of time.

-- U.S. Senate Hearings
May 18, 1912

Naval architect Wilding raised an interesting point about a head-on accident involving an extremely large ship. The bow of Titanic would have crumpled much like the "crumple zone" of a modern automobile. Crumpling would have absorbed much of the force of the blow by spreading it out over time. According to Wilding, telescoping of the ship in this manner would have reduced injuries among the passengers and crew who were lucky enough not to have been trapped in crumpled sections of the bow.

While less dramatic, the more often invoked "glancing blow" at 22.5 knots would have created its own kind of havoc. At impact, the deck would have jumped sideways relative to anything not rivetted to it. This "rebound effect" should have been as disruptive to people living in the forward third of the ship as a major earthquake in a large hotel ashore: sleeping Third Class passengers tossed to the hard steel decks; personal items tumbled off shelves; people thrown down. There would have been fewer injuries and less spilled drinks than during a head-on collision, but some deaths and broken bones. Either type of horizontal impact--head-on or glancing blow--would have been unforgettable from the point of view of a passenger. None of the more than 700 survivors remembered as dramatic as either a head-on or "glancing blow" impact that happening.

What a sailor calls "rebound" is known scientifically as "impulse and momentum." These are the words naval architect Bill Garzke used to explain the traditional bow sideswipe to the Discovery Channel. He envisioned the hull striking the ice, then rebounding to strike again...and again...for nearly 300 feet along the bow7. Garzke's description of events may have been inspired by Lightoller who described essentially the same type of accident in his autobiography.

The impact flung her bow off, but only by the whip or spring of the ship. Again she struck, this time a little further aft. Each blow stove in a plate, below the water line, as the ship had not the inherent strength to resist.

-- Charles H. Lightoller
Titanic And Other Ships, 1935

Lightoller and Garzke undoubtedly got their Newtonian physics correct. In theory, Titanic could have been so unlucky that it pushed its side against an underwater ram with exactly enough force to crack its steel shell plating, but not enough to throw people out of bed. A single light bump or two against the berg could have accomplished that if the ship came to a stop against the ice in the same manner as a hard landing against a pier when docking. A few light taps seem highly unlikely considering the ship was making more than 22 knots at impact and continued moving throughout the encounter with the ice.

Alternatively, a single hard sideswipe of the iceberg might have caused enough crumpling of the ship's hull to have cushioned the blow. In this impact the bending, twisting and shattering of steel would have produced a single huge hole at the point of contact with no damage anywhere else. Of course, Titanic did not receive damage to only one spot on the bow. Damage extended over a distance of nearly 250 feet from the forepeak all the way into Boiler Room #5. It is the extended nature of this damage that argues most effectively against the "impulse and momentum" type of rebounding impact.

More to the point, the theory of multiple impacts does not fit the experiences described by survivors. Each impulse and rebound would have whipped the deck sideways beneath the feet of passengers and crew. That is not the type of impact anyone reported. The universal description of the accident was a rumbling or vibration, not side-to-side motion of the deck.

Rapid horizontal motion of a deck knocks people off their feet much quicker than large a large roll of the ship. This is because friction keeps the person's feet in place on the deck when it jerks sideways. The victim's torso has inertia which resists sideways movement, with the result that the feet move out from beneath the individual's body. The person's center of gravity is suddenly and unexpectedly no longer supported in a straight line by the legs. A fall is almost inevitable.

If the Lightoller/Garzke horizontal impact took place, an indelible memory of a large percentage of surviving Third Class men who happened to be standing upright in their cabins near the bow would have been an unexpected tumble to the deck. Crew members in their quarters at the very front of the ship would have had the same disquieting experience. Instead, except for one man, they universally recalled only a slight trembling as the ship passed over the ice.

When a ship "strikes the ground," the action can be quite stately. Speed often drops gradually, so gradually that the first moments of a grounding go unnoticed even by professional seamen8. Sliding onto mud or sand may produce almost no sound or vibration. Striking on a hard surface can sound like pouring marbles over sheet metal. Neither type of grounding is the smashing impact of iron against an immovable object. Soft or hard, a grounding is exactly what passengers and crew aboard Titanic experienced during the seven seconds when the ship was in contact with the ice9.

Author Lawrence Beesley, a teacher on his way to America for holiday, was in Cabin D-56 just aft of the Second Class dining saloon when the ship slid over the ice. His personal experience is a perfect illustration of a ship going aground, not colliding head-on:

...there came what seemed to me nothing more than an extra heave of the engines and a more than usually obvious dancing motion of the mattress on which I sat. Nothing more than that--no sound of a crash or anything else: no sense of shock, no jar that felt like one heavy body meeting another.

-- Lawrence Beesley, The Loss of The S.S. Titanic, Its Story and Its Lessons, Houghton Mifflin, 1912

A grounding such as Beesley described is soft because it does not take place in an instant. Only a small portion of the vessel's displacement weight is involved at the beginning. That increases as the ship slides onto the ground, but this increase is spread over time. The event is not instantaneous like a head-on collision, but takes several seconds from first touch until the ship either stops or breaks free.

Ice On The Deck

A full-size iceberg10 has hundreds of times more mass than Titanic. Each cubic yard of berg is roughly a ton of solid ice. The ship was a hollow metal structure filled mostly with air. In a head-on collision, there would not have been enough time for the energy of Titanic to overcome the inertia of the ice and push the berg sideways. But, the ship didn't hit the berg. It spent those seven seconds grinding across the top of an underwater ice shelf. There was plenty of time for the berg to move a bit under the ship's weight. Ice felt the ship as much as the ship felt the ice, and the berg rolled ever so slightly toward Titanic.

It rolled because icebergs are notoriously unstable. Just as Captain Smith told his New York friends, the upper part extending into the atmosphere melts at a different rate from the underwater portions. This upsets the equilibrium of a berg, which often compensates by suddenly capsizing. "Icebergs that are in the process of disintegrating may suddenly capsize or readjust their masses," warns Bowditch. When the ship rode onto the shelf, the berg was forced to support increasing tons of steel, rivets and passengers well outboard of its center of gravity. Like any other floating object, the berg tipped toward this extra weight.

As it tipped, the upper portions of the berg brushed against the ship's topsides at the forward end of the well deck. This contact precipitated the famous mini-avalanche of ice. Brushing against the top of the berg probably didn't scratch the liner's fresh paint. During the middle 1990s, scientists studied the impact of icebergs against iron or steel objects.11 This research was aimed at developing offshore oil rigs for use on the Grand Banks near the spot where Titanic now lies. Experiments have shown that ice above a berg's waterline can be relatively soft and often crumbles upon impact. Crumbling produced the broken pieces of ice that littered the ship's forward well deck.

"There was quite a lot of ice on the starboard part of the ship," 26-year-old Olaus Abelseth told the U.S. investigation. The young Norwegian was sleeping in the Third Class open berthing area on Lower Deck G near the bow of the ship. Also near the bow was Frank O. Evans, a 27-year-old Able Seaman. "I was sitting at the table reading a book, and all of a sudden I felt a slight jar," he testified in New York. "I did not take any notice of it for a few minutes until one of the other able seamen came down with a big lump of ice in his hands."

Fatal Damage

Although passengers were largely unaffected by the brush with the iceberg, the black gang in the boiler rooms was not so lucky. After seven seconds of screaming metal, they now found themselves in a fiery twilight caused by a temporary electric blackout. A few men were dispatched from each stokehold to make the long climb to E Deck in search of portable lights. That turned out to be unnecessary as the main electric power came back on after a few dark minutes and the stokeholds were flooded with light again.

Stokers and trimmers probably feared for their lives as water poured into Boiler Room #6. Most likely, however, everyone survived the initial scramble to escape the freezing water. "We heard a crash," Fireman Frederick Barrett recalled. "The engineer and I jumped to the next section (Boiler Room #5)." Barrett became one of the few people to survive after seeing first-hand the damage done to Titanic by the iceberg. He told the U.S. Senate that a horizontal opening:

...ran past the bulkhead between sections 5 and 6, [Boiler Rooms #5 and #6] and it was a hole two feet into the coal bunkers. She was torn through Number 6 and also through two feet abaft of the bulkhead at the forward head of Number 5 section.

-- Frederick Barrett, U.S. Senate Hearings, May 25, 1912

In London, Barrett told essentially the same tale. "Water came pouring in two feet above the stokehold plate; the ship's side was torn from the third stokehold to the forward end," he testified12. (The "third stokehold" in Barrett's testimony was the forward end of Boiler Room #5.) The fireman's experience was as frightening as his testimony is illuminating. He did not mention Boiler Room #6 as suffering any great structural damage despite the tremendous noise and sudden deluge of freezing sea water. Most important, he did not report that mythical dagger of ice ripping open the side of the ship.

Barrett placed the open seam at "two feet above the floor plates." Those plates were light metal decking to give stokers easier access to the furnace openings. The stokers actually worked standing a few feet above the tank top deck, the upper side of Titanic's watertight double bottom. This means the open seam was about four feet above the tank top. On the outside of the ship it would have been in the single-thickness vertical side plating just above the turn of the bilge. Barrett's observation confirms that the opening in the side was confined to the very lowest portion of the hull, no more than ten feet above the keel.

Sprung seams also must have occurred in the four compartments forward of Barrett's position. Recent dives to the wreck have brought back evidence of six or more horizontal openings in the ship's side in the area from Boiler Room #6 to the bow.

Unfortunately for the hypotheses of modern researchers, however, the ship's crew did not believe the open seams in the side of Titanic allowed significant amounts of water into the hull. Surviving crew members knew the more exact location of their vessel's mortal wounds: the bottom beneath their feet. Seaman Edward J. Buley was precise about where the fatal water entered the hull. It was not coming through the side, but up through the bottom. When the interrogator made a mistake on this, Buley pointedly corrected him.

MR. BULEY: ...down where we were there was a hatchway, right down below, and there was a tarpaulin across it, with an iron batten. You could hear the water rushing in, and the pressure of air underneath it was such that you could see this bending. In the finish I was told it blew off.

SENATOR FLETCHER: What part of the ship would you call that?

MR. BULEY: The forecastle head.

SENATOR FLETCHER: How far was that from the bow?

MR. BULEY: About 20 yards, I should think.

SENATOR FLETCHER: That condition could not have obtained unless the steel plates had been torn off the side of the ship?

MR. BULEY: From the bottom of the ship. It was well underneath the water line.

U.S. Senate Hearings, Thursday, April 25, 1912

The ice was cruel. Rivets must have been stretched and even ripped out of the plating. Seams would have been forced open and butt joints misaligned. Damage on the outside undoubtedly was random. Although horrible to look at (if that could have been done), it is unlikely that this exterior ice damage was life-threatening to the ship. The most immediate result of damage to the exterior was flooding of the starboard side tankage located beneath the tank top deck.

There is one place where there was evidence of direct internal damage from the ice. This is at the forward end of Hold #2 directly above the spot on the keel where the ship would have first fel