5¢2 
NATRGRE 
[AucusT 8, 1912 
the Rules and Regulations made by the Board of 
Trade under the Merchant Shipping Acts, and on 
their administration; and finally for any recom- 
mendations to obviate similar disasters which may 
appear to the Court to be desirable.” The field 
of inquiry thus opened was very extensive; many 
of the questions involved matters of personal re- 
sponsibility and conduct; even as regards matters 
of fact there were considerable differences of 
opinion and evidence, as was inevitable in the 
circumstances. All who followed the course of 
this difficult and prolonged inquiry must have been 
impressed with the firmness, impartiality, and 
judicial ability displayed by Lord Mersey through- 
out the proceedings. His readiness to accept any 
valuable contributions of fact or personal opinion 
from those qualified to assist the Court; the sum- 
mary but thorough manner in which questions of 
a personal nature—especially those affecting Mr. 
Bruce Ismay and Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff- 
Gordon—were dealt with; the frank announcement 
of decisions reached by Lord Mersey on certain 
points at comparatively early stages of the in- 
vestigation, and the consequent saving of time; 
the courage with which attempts to give dispro- 
portionate importance to side issues or to class 
interests were rendered futile; the patience and 
fairness with which many of the witnesses, espe- 
cially those of the seaman class, were treated and 
their evidence made clearer; the mastery of tech- 
nical details displayed; and many other character- 
istics of procedure which cannot be mentioned, 
gave distinction to this memorable inquiry, and 
demonstrated the great advantages secured by the 
selection of an experienced judge as Wreck Com- 
missioner. Long as the proceedings lasted, it 
could not be said that there was any avoidable 
waste of time, unless it occurred in the speeches 
of counsel. Great industry must have been ap- 
plied to the analysis of the evidence and the 
preparation of the report; otherwise it could not 
have been produced so promptly. There are, how- 
ever, no traces of haste or lack of mature con- 
sideration in its contents and recommendations ; 
it epitomises the history of the Titanic and makes 
clear the causes of her loss; it contains valuable 
suggestions for increasing the safety of life and 
property at sea, and in other ways is a most 
important and valuable document. 
The report proper is one of the briefest ever 
made: it runs as follows: “The Court, having 
carefully inquired into the circumstances of the 
above-mentioned shipping casualty, finds, for 
the reasons appearing in the Annex hereto, that 
the loss of the said ship was due to collision with 
an iceberg, brought about by the excessive speed 
at which the ship was being navigated.” The 
annex to the report is a closely reasoned and 
highly condensed document of more than seventy 
foolscap-sized pages of print, and well deserves 
careful study. There has been some criticism of 
the “form of words” used in the report proper, 
but. most people will be disposed to regard it as 
hyper-criticism, and to concur with the view that 
the loss of the ship was primarily due to the ex- 
NO. 2232, VOL. 89] 
tremely high speed (twenty-two knots) which was 
maintained after it was known that the Titanic 
had entered upon a region where icebergs and ice 
had been reported to be present by means of 
wireless messages sent from other ships and re- 
ceived on board the Titanic. Some of these 
messages, including one or two of the most im- 
portant, do not seem to have been handed to the 
captain or officers of the Titanic by the operator 
in charge of the Marconi apparatus. This ought 
not to have happened, and any similar occurrence 
should be made impossible in future; but Lord 
Mersey shows conclusively that Captain Smith and 
his chief officers “all knew on the Sunday evening 
that the vessel was entering a region where ice might 
be expected.”” In such circumstances, adds Lord 
Mersey, “I am advised that with the knowledge 
of the proximity of ice which the master had, two 
courses were open to him: the one was to stand 
well to the southward instead of turning up to 
a westerly course, the other was to reduce speed 
materially as night approached. He did neither.” 
In face of the evidence given by experienced sea- 
men, long engaged on the trans-Atlantic service 
to New York, Lord Mersey admits that the captain 
of the Titanic only did what has been usually done 
for a long period, in holding to the usual course 
and maintaining full speed, and states that this 
common practice on the New York ocean routes 
had not been accompanied by casualties. It is 
well known that this year ice has been met much 
further south than it is ordinarily found at the 
season when the Titanic was lost. Lord Mersey 
tersely sums up his conclusion in the statement 
that Captain Smith “was exercising his own dis- 
cretion in the way he thought best. He made 
a mistake, a very grievous mistake, but one in 
which, in face of practice and of past experience, 
negligence cannot be said to have any part; and 
in the absence of negligence it is, in my opinion, 
impossible to fix Captain Smith with blame.” 
So much for the past; as to the future, Lord 
Mersey significantly adds: “it is to be hoped that 
the last has been heard of the practice [i.e., main- 
taining full speed in a region where ice is likely 
to be met], and that for the future it will be 
abandoned for what we now know to be more 
prudent and wiser measures.” 
It may be interesting to illustrate what the high 
speed above mentioned involved in the case of the 
Titanic’s approach to and collision with the ice- 
berg, although this section of the annex to the - 
report had been to a great extent anticipated by 
an analysis of evidence given before the Senatorial 
Committee in the United States. About thirty- 
seven seconds only elapsed between the moment 
when the iceberg was first sighted and that when 
collision took place. That collision caused 
damage to the bottom of the starboard side of 
the vessel, about ten feet above the level of the 
keel: the damage extended over a length of about 
300 feet from the bow, and in consequence of the 
high speed, it was done in about ten seconds. In 
other words, the fate of the great ship was sealed 
in less than one minute from the moment wher 
