Hello everyone,
How are all of you doing? Good I hope. John, I must agree with you regarding Archibald Gracie's book. While it is an excellent contemporary work on the disaster, and most, including myself, rank it right up there with Beesley's account, there are a number of errors in the book. One example is how Colonel Gracie furvently claims that the ship did not break in two, because when he quite literally went down with the ship when the boat deck submerged, there was "no sign of any impending breakup of the deck or ship." We know that the ship did break in two, but Gracie did not see it, so he did not believe the stories, instead relying on Lightoller's words about this, amongst others.
Max, while Colonel Gracie states definitively in the one section of your book that you quoted above that he was in the same section of the boat deck as First Officer Murdoch, earlier in his book he states that Clinch Smith and he went to the forward starboard side of the boat deck where as he "afterwards learned," the officer in command was First Officer Murdoch. In other places in the book, he makes it clear that he did not know several of the officers personally at the time of the sinking, so he would have been unable to say with any certainty who he saw at Collapsible A, and how they died. We know that what he was told about Murdoch working at Collapsible A is correct, but Gracie was not on the forward section of the boat deck when it plunged under, but had moved aft near the expansion joint with Clinch Smith, and was deep in a crowd of third class passengers who had just come up from below. He states that he did not think the distance was so great as to prevent him from hearing a gunshot, but who knows with the noise and chaos at the time? Earlier in his account, Gracie neglects to mention hearing the warning shots that had been fired at Collapsible C, that over 12 people were witnesses to. Gracie had moved aft before the boat deck began plunging under, and he did not see the officers actually swept overboard, so he is not a first hand witness to their death, although his word about not hearing a gunshot must be taken into account. Remember that R.N. Williams, in his private account of the sinking, mentioned that while he was on the very front of the boat deck as it began to plunge under, he heard gunshots behind him, but he did not look around to see what had happened, and refused to speculate about it.
Peter wrote:
"I must agree with Max here; the only two people who actually claim they SAW an officer shoot himself or other people were George Rheims and Eugene Daly. Two witnesses."
Peter, that statement is entirely innacurate. There were several more people who claim to have witnessed an officer shoot himself. Have you ever visited Bill's or George Behe's webpages dealing with this subject? I personally have informed you in the past that these two witnesses are not the only two to the alleged incident, but you seem to have ignored this again. While I agree that we will never know for certain if the shooting/suicide actually took place, there are certainly more than two people who were on the ship at the time and claim to have witnessed the incident.
"One of whom, Eugene Daly, may and may not have been on the ship the last ten-twenty minutes."
Again, Peter, you know that this statement is innacurate. As I have told you several times in the past, and you have ignored, Eugene Daly was in a hospital after the disaster, and in his claim filed in 1913 and in his 1915 limitation of liability testimony, he details these injuries, which were "from the waist down" and deemed of "the permanent nature." Carpathia passenger Dr. Blackmarr stated both in his handwritten notes and his manuscript that Daly was brought aboard the ship unconscious, and kept lapsing into unconsciousness after he was revived. These are symptoms of hypothermia. In edition, as you already know since I sent you it previously, Edward Dorking mentioned an Irish passenger who he did not recognize, but was on Collapsible B with him, and was not referring to Mr. O'Keefe, who he mentioned by name earlier in the article.
I agree with all of you that we will never know for certain exactly what happened that night, or who was involved, but *all* the evidence should be taken into consideration regardless of how someone feels about it personally. Again, I urge all of you to visit Bill's webpage on this subject if you have not done so already.
All my best,
Tad Fitch
