6 Wilde, Search- Lights and the ''Titanic'' Disaster. 



The final objection to search-lights in the Report of 

 the Advisory Committee is as follows: — "The disadvan- 

 tages of search-lights seem to us so greatly to outweigh 

 their advantages that their adoption in the mercantile 

 marine would, in our opinion, be most inadvisable." Now 

 any person of ordinary intelligence may well observe that, 

 if search-lights are indispensable in the Royal Navy, thev 

 are no less so on large passenger vessels. The effrontery 

 of the dominant personalities who are responsible for the 

 above conclusions is fitly comparable with that of the 

 lookout man of the "Titanic," who, to save his credit (as 

 remarked by the President), declared before the Court 

 that the vessel struck the iceberg during a fog, notwith- 

 standing the direct evidence of the officers and other 

 survivors to the contrary. 



The statement in the first paragraph of the Report on 

 Search-lights that the Committee have had the assistance 

 of information supplied by the Admiralty is significant in 

 explaining the aberrations of the Committee, and reveals 

 a settled purpose of the Admiralty to monopolise search- 

 lights as an arm in naval operations, regardless of the 

 requirements of the ocean-going public and of the mer- 

 cantile marine. It will be necessary for Parliament to 

 defeat this object. 



That the Advisory Committee and the Admiralty are 

 in close alliance in excluding search-lights from the 

 Merchant Service is abundantly evident from the fact 

 that the whole of the matter contained in the Report of 

 this Committee on Search-lights is copied from the 

 printed evidence of the Assistant Hydrographer to the 

 Admiralty before the " Titanic " Investigation Committee 

 on the nth of June, two months before the issue of the 

 Report of the Advisory Committee as a Blue-book. 



