Hello folks!
Here's my take on Beesley and the ship "not breaking in two" -
Beesley had, indeed, very keen powers of observation. However, by his own account, his vantage point lay behind the great ship as it went down: "she tilted slowly up, revolving apparently about a center of gravity just astern of amidships, until she attained a vertically upright position; and there she remained - motionless!"
Obviously, Lifeboat #13, in its haste to leave the ship, more than likely rowed perpendicular to the ship's axis. This gave Beesley the view he describes earlier on: "The sea level and the rows of lights should have been parallel - should never have met - and now they met at an angle inside the black hull of the ship." Thus, when the ship rotated as Beesley claimed, it seems logical that the stern would have ended up facing him (a very bland view for the most part; had the ship revolved so that the smokestacks were facing Beesley, it's almost certain that he would have described that sight).
And there's more.
Beesley relates that tremendous noises followed the ship's blackout, with his description particularly eerie: "...partly a roar, partly a groan, partly a rattle, and partly a smash, and it was not a sudden roar as an explosion would be; it went on successively for some seconds, possibly fifteen to twenty, as the heavy machinery dropped down to the bottom (now the bows) of the ship... It was a noise no one had heard before, and no one wishes to hear again...."
My guess is that what Beesley heard was, in fact, the ripping apart of the hull, coupled with the inevitable crashing/bursting of the boilers. (You can just imagine what happened to the people in the immediate area.) Since his view was from the rear, however, it was hard for him to conceive that the ship had broken in two, especially after seeing Jack Thayer's drawing which, in many ways, still does not make sense even with what we know today. Beesley, being a man of practicality and science, thus put together what made sense as far as he could make out, and subsequently explained the ominous, drawn-out noise as everything coming loose in the ship and going forward.
As Pat Cook cited, Steward Frederick Ray, in his testimony, makes no mention of the ship breaking, but then again, Steward Ray was in #13 along with Beesley.
The only passenger in #13 who says otherwise is Ruth Becker. Now, Ruth, I'm surmising, saw the break because she, being a child, was looking while trying not to look. While all the adults in #13 were awestruck and looking up at the rising, teetering stern, Ruth eye's may have wanted to avoid the spectacle of people hanging from the stern, and instead remained at water level, enabling her to catch a glimpse of the beginning of the split as the ship rotated.
Charlotte Collyer, on the other hand, in another lifeboat which left from the port side, claimed not only that the ship broke in two but that fire and sparks shot out from the split, followed by two distinct explosions. Her account brings up an interesting question: "Did the Titanic break because of stress due to the angle of tilt? Or did the blowing up of a boiler or two initiate the split?"
Finally - what I find truly remarkable - is that no one here has cited Eva Hart's comments from Discovery's "Death of a Dream" special. With trademark fortitude, good ol' Eva remarks: "I knew it! I saw it! That ship broke at the waterline!" With or without Ballard's discovery, the truth was available to us all along in the form of TITANIC's most outspoken and colorful survivor.
Bob
