No, Samuel, Bisset did not give evidence in 1912. His book was ghostwritten, came out in 1959 in a hopelessly compromised environment, and I dismiss all memoirs of the sort, with attendant sales pressure.
There were no bodies there. There was no supercharged current.
It would have been Bisset's duty to barge into court and tell the truth if there had been a conspiracy to keep quiet about bodies.
Why would anyone shun that disclosure? Rostron and Boxhall both spoke quite a lot about the single body they saw. It certainly did not drift, alone, on a supercharged current down to where the lifeboats were picked up.
The lifeboats got down there because they went down there. Not to the north.
I was suggesting earlier that Crawford, combined with Boxhall suggested that the lifeboats were only scattered over a four mile area.
I now find confirmation from Rostron:
25500. The Commissioner: I understand you to say those (life)boats were spread over an area of five miles?
Rostron: Four to five miles, yes.
[earlier having said:
25491. “They were within a range of four or five miles.”]
That wraps it all up for anyone to see.
Human witnesses harangued in the witness box, as Lord was, make all sorts of mistakes, slips of the tongue, agree with things without fully understanding the question, get tired...
I have covered tribunals, courts and Inquiries, given evidence myself several times, and know what I'm talking about. I can also read the cadence of evidence, and that is not a boast.
It is just experience.
If I am unsure about any sinking testimony I read, I say something aloud, tape it, think about it. Read the whole thing again. Word-searching will only ever rip words in bleeding chunks out of their context.
And the key problem here is that people do not take the time to read the evidence, to know the nuances, to read the map.
Some lifeboat occupants will always talk BS on the basic human-nature scale.
But the lifeboats themselves don't lie!
Similarly, there will be differences in human estimates of how far away the Mystery Ship was. But we know the sidelights were visible.
When you aggregate and average out ALL the accounts, as I have done, you will see that the distance is 5.6 miles.
That is PROVEN in a legal sense of proof because it is an aggregate of testimony entered into evidence.
Of course Lord Mersey ignored all that and decided that he knew better.
I could write a whole separate article on that.
But after his report came out with its nonsensical 8-10 mile estimate - which flew in the face of all the evidence - the
Titanic officers, the very next year, in Ryan v. OSNC, kept to their very small estimates of the distance given. Some got lower.
Nothing could be sturdier than the evidence of the Mystery Ship approaching, coming close, and later moving off.
If she's that close, she ain't
Californian.
And she's close.
If she's moving at all, she ain't
Californian.
But she's moving.
If she's showing and early red light, and she is, she ain't
Californian.
Californian was showing green.
If Captain Moore [Independent witness] is right, she ain't
Californian.
If Captain Rostron [Independent witness] is right, she ain't
Californian.
Square pegs go in square holes, and round pegs in round ones.
We've had enough assumptions since 1912. Talk about the
Californian again if you must...
I am much more interested in probing, and thinking and learning as much as I can about the Mystery Ship.
