I had a look at the business of the schooner seen from Mount Temple. I did not work it all out with great precision because it is obvious at a glance that it is of no importance to the Titanic story.
Moore was steering for the erroneous SOS position given by
Boxhall. He started from a point about 49 miles from that position and about 61 miles from the real scene of the wreck.
He sighted the light of the schooner at 3-00 a.m. His clock was set to much the same time as Titanic’s. (We can’t be dead sure of the details) In round figures, he was still a good 30 miles from the wreck. The schooner coming away from the SOS position but was nearly stationary in the calm weather, so there is no way that it could have been anywhere near Titanic during the sinking. It was probably just beyond the visible range of Titanic’s distress signals.
Moore was accompanied by a mysterious steamer that seems to have had no radio. She left the western side of the icefield and her captain was oblivious to the night’s events. She was never identified, in spite of serious efforts by both the British and the Americans. She too, was never close to Titanic during the sinking, as she arrived with Mount Temple.
Another ship in the area was seen by
Carpathia. Rostron gave the time as 3-00 a.m. but as I have shown elsewhere, Rostron’s times are suspect. If this one is correct, he was over 10 miles from the boats when a steamer crossed his bow. It was heading perhaps W or SW. Assuming it was going at a reasonable speed, say 11 or 12 knots, it would have been well away from the sinking too.
Note that all the ships, other than Californian, that were seen somewhere about the area were to the south of Titanic’s latitude. The lights seen from Titanic were in the northerly quadrant.
Mystery surrounds the doings of a ship with a pink funnel with a black top that was on the western side of the ice on the morning of April 15th.
Captain Lord later identified her as Almerian, a fellow Leyland Line ship with no radio. I believe nobody has found how she reached the scene. One wonders whether Captain Moore was mistaken in thinking that the ship he saw had a black funnel with a white band. Nobody else seems to have noticed such a ship in the morning but Cyril Evans noticed Almerian and Rostron saw a ship of her type near Mount Temple. In the absence of the ship with the black funnel, I’m inclined to think that Moore saw Almerian.