No one knows exactly where Captain EJ Smith was at 11:40 p.m. on Sunday April 14, 1912. But witnesses said he appeared on the deck of the Titanic moments later, asking what the legendary ship was doing on its voyage. inaugural across the Atlantic. , had struck.
“An iceberg, sir,” replied First Officer William Murdoch.
So began the worst night of the otherwise charmed life of Edward John Smith. In more than 40 years at sea, he had rarely been involved in an accident and never held responsible for a single one. He was now on the verge of presiding over one of the worst maritime disasters of all time. Within hours, more than 1,500 passengers and crew would have died, including Smith himself.
Smith’s body has never been found and his final moments remain a mystery, there are no shortage of conflicting accounts, including the one in which he jumped off the ship holding a baby. As Wyn Craig Wade wrote in the Titanic: the end of a dream, “Captain Smith had at least five different deaths, from heroic to ignominious.” Rumors about his survival have also circulated.
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Captain of the White Star Liner, RMS Titanic, Commander Edward J. Smith, c. 1911.
Universal Images Group / Getty Images
Conflicting damage reports
At first it looked like Smith’s luck would hold. Fourth Officer Joseph G. Boxhall made a quick inspection of the vessel and returned to the bridge to report that he had found no damage. But whatever relief Smith might have felt at the time, he was quickly overwhelmed. Thomas Andrews, the Titanic’s chief designer, reported that his inspection revealed flooding in at least five of the Titanic’s 16 watertight compartments. While the ship could have remained afloat with up to four compartments flooded, depending on their location, five fell into catastrophic territory. Around midnight, Andrews reportedly told Smith that the Titanic could last another 60 to 90 minutes.
Smith now knew the Titanic was doomed. He also knew that his 20 lifeboats, with a total capacity of 1,178, could not begin to accommodate the more than 2,200 passengers and crew on board.
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The ghost rescue ship
The captain still had hopes of averting total disaster. Shortly after the collision, he and other officers saw what they believed to be the lights of a nearby ship. Several estimated it was no more than eight kilometers away.
At 12:05 am, Smith gave the order to uncover the lifeboats and alert the passengers. Meanwhile, he told the ship’s two wireless operators to prepare to transmit distress signals. Ten minutes later, according to the surviving operator’s estimate, he returned and ordered them to send a CQD, the universal distress call which was soon replaced by an SOS.
The ship they spotted in the distance did not respond, but several others did. The closest, RMS Carpathia, replied that he would change course and rush towards the position of the Titanic. But the Carpathia was 58 miles – or about four hours – away. It was now just after 12:30 p.m.
Still hoping to attract the attention of the mysterious vessel nearby, the captain ordered distress rockets to be fired at 12:45 p.m. At the same time, Boxhall attempted to contact him with a signal lamp, flashing a call for the help in Morse code. There was no response to either.
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A state of shock?
It was also around 12:45 a.m. that crew members lowered the first of the Titanic’s lifeboats to the ocean surface. Although Smith ordered the boats to be discovered some 40 minutes earlier, he did not give the order to start loading and lowering them until Second Officer Charles Lightoller called him back asking: “If we hadn’t put the women and children on the boats better, sir?”
It was one of many incidents that have led some historians to question whether Smith had gone into shock.
In another case, Smith ordered a lifeboat to be lowered from the boat deck to the promenade deck, so passengers could get on more easily. “Haven’t you forgotten, sir, that all those glass windows are closed?” softly reminded him of a passenger. “By God, you are right!” Smith replied. He had apparently confused the partially enclosed promenade deck of the Titanic with the fully open one of his sister ship, the Olympic, which he had previously commanded.
From this point on, Smith’s activities become more blurred. He did not abandon the mysterious ship, ordering the crew of at least one lifeboat to row towards the lights, drop off passengers, and return to the Titanic to find out more.
Smith also checked in with the wireless carriers periodically until, around 2 a.m., he released them from their duties and told them to try to escape.
Outwardly, Smith appears to have maintained a brave front, appearing as a captain to the last, at least to most observers. “I saw Captain Smith get excited; passengers wouldn’t have noticed, but I did, ”May Sloan, a surviving Titanic flight attendant, wrote in a letter shortly after the disaster. “I knew then that we were going soon.”
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The many deaths of Captain Smith
At 2:20 am, the last portion of the Titanic disappeared between the waves. Smith’s final moments aren’t definitively known, but reports vary widely.
Some early newspaper articles, allegedly supported by eyewitnesses, say he shot himself a pistol, although few historians give them any credit. Surviving wireless operator Harold Bride, a more reliable witness, said he saw Smith “dive from the bridge into the sea”. Others said he was swept away by a wave or – after being swept away – swam towards the Titanic to meet his end.
Several witnesses claimed to have seen him in the water. In an account attributed to Titanic firefighter Harry Sr., Smith jumped off the ship with “a baby gripped tenderly in his arms,” swam to a nearby lifeboat, handed the child over and swam back to the Titanic , saying, “I will follow the ship.”
Still others believed he had surrendered to an overturned lifeboat but lost his grip, possibly when one of the Titanic’s huge funnels broke off and crashed into the water. near.
WATCH: Titanic survivor eyewitness account
A vintage In Memoriam postcard featuring the Titanic which sank after hitting an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York on April 14, 1912 and commemorating its captain, Edward Smith and brave musicians, published in Redruth, c. May 1912.
Paul Popper / Popperfoto / Getty Images
But is he really dead?
Stranger still, there are several widely publicized reports that he is not dead at all. For example, three months after the Titanic disaster, in July 1912, a Baltimore man named Peter Pryal reported seeing Smith on the streets of that city. Pryal was no ordinary crank, but a highly regarded local businessman who claimed to have been an officer aboard the liner White Star Majestic some 30 years ago, when Smith was its captain. In addition, Pryal’s doctor testified that he was “absolutely sane and had no hallucinations.”
In fact, Pryal said he saw Smith twice, once on a Wednesday and again on the following Saturday, when he returned to the same location to look for him. After an hour of waiting, he said he saw Smith coming, approached him and asked him how we were doing. “Alright, Pryal,” the man reportedly replied, “but please don’t hold me back. I am on business.”
Pryal said he dragged Smith to a train station. Just before boarding a train to Washington, Pryal reported, the man smiled at him and said, “Be nice, shipmate, until we meet again.
“There is no way I am wrong.” Pryal told a reporter. “I would know him even without his beard.”
Smith was back in the news in 1940 when a letter Life The magazine suggested the captain ended his days as an abandoned old man in Lima, Ohio, known as “Silent Smith.” Among the evidence: the man had arrived in town three years after the Titanic disaster, gave only his name Smith, was about Smith’s age and height, and had the kind of tattoos common in seamen. Life does not seem to have known that immediately after Silent Smith’s death in 1915, the Lima News had identified the man as Michael McKenna.
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The verdict on Captain Smith
Immediately after the disaster, the newspapers made a hero of Smith, the brave captain who went down with his ship. For a villain, there was J. Bruce Ismay, the president of White Star, who got off in a lifeboat and was accused of pressuring Smith to maintain reckless speed.
In the British and American surveys that followed, a more complicated picture emerged. Smith was accused of ignoring ice warnings from other ships and failing to reduce the ship’s speed to adapt to the conditions at the time. The British investigation essentially exonerated him, saying he had done nothing the other captains would not have done. The US investigation was only slightly more severe in its judgment. Michigan Senator William Alden Smith, who chaired the Senate Inquiry Committee, said “Captain Smith’s indifference to danger was one of the direct and contributing causes of this unnecessary tragedy.”
But the senator also recognized his “virility and tender concern for the safety of women and children” as well as his “will to die”.
