Welcome,
Welcome to the most contentious issue of the whole Titanic discussion forum. I admire your willingness to debate, and your courage in taking up the cudgel on behalf of the officers of
the Californian.
I was once like you, y’know. It seemed impossible to me that a professional seaman with the years of experience of Stanley Lord would willingly stand-by and watch the world’s largest passenger vessel sink.
And of course, it is. No-one would do that.
For years I believed that Lord and his men were unfairly blamed for taking no action, that some other ship lay between them and the stricken liner, mysterious and un-named, and confusing to all observers that night.
However, what I learned both from reading many, many books on the subject and from the wise men and women on this very site is that the problem is not whether
Captain Lord and the wretched Stone and Gibson ignored the distress of the Titanic — but whether Stone, Gibson and Lord were capable of realizing that the worst shipping disaster was actually happening a few miles away from them. Whether they had the necessary skills, abilities and intelligence not just as seamen but as ordinary fallible human beings to interpret what they were seeing, in Stone and Gibson’s case, or being told, in Lord’s.
My own belief is that a combination of exhaustion, lack of imagination, and an undue, but typical of the time, deference to the voice of authority on the part of the junior officers led to a genuine failure to communicate — first between the Titanic and the Californian, then between the bridge-crew and commander of the latter. Now, you might still believe that Lord and his men are thus unduly heaped with opprobrium for what was an error terrible in its magnitude but understandable in its context, and I would agree with you.
But where I have problems, and I invite you to consider this yourself, is the behaviour of the officers of the Californian after they discover the Titanic had sunk.
Even if there was a ship lying between the two ships that night, as you hold, by the morning after they must surely have realized that on the night when something terrible and strange had happened they had been in proximity to — well - something very strange and possibly terrible happening. To whit — a ship firing off rockets.
So surely at some point each of them must have considered the possibility that their “stranger” was the Titanic ? But right from the word go, and Paul Lee shows this very nicely in his work, Lord plays down the possibility- even before its put to him ! Stone spends the rest of his life refusing to discuss it, Lord also avoids the subject until he thinks its safe to re-emerge forty-five years later and tell his tales without anyone challenging them, and on the whole they come over as men with something — well, if not to hide, then in possession of some knowledge that makes them very uncomfortable. Perhaps simply the knowledge that they failed to respond.
So whilst anyone could, possibly, have repeated their errors that night, their subsequent behaviour from the moment they realize Titanic doesn’t reflect well on them, and simply raises the question of what they felt they had to hide. Add to that their own testimonies — and be clear here that the evidence that condemns emerges only from the mouths of the men themselves — and I’m afraid that even with another ship there, one cannot remove Californian.
Best wishes
Dave Moran
