IMM needed the new ships. The huge holding company had been founded on the idea that combining international shipping lines would both stabilize rates and drive independent companies not part of the trust out of business. Quite the opposite happened. After IMM was formed, Cunard and HAPAG declared war on Morgan. In 1904, Cunard announced a “sweeping reduction in the price of eastbound first and second class tickets.”5 Morgan’s White Star met Cunard’s price reductions almost immediately. Then Griscom slashed fares for the American Line to a mere fifty-five dollars for a first-class berth. Germany’s HAPAG, apparently cooperating with Morgan, followed suit by slicing their rates. The timing for all companies could not have been worse. The Panic of 1907 disrupted the flow of immigrants to America, which peaked that year at just over 1.7 million passengers.
Cunard’s construction of the Lusitania-Mauretania duo using British government money had been an affront to Morgan’s ego, and the rate war was the last straw. As the mastermind of America’s biggest trusts, he was accustomed to getting his own way. Not only that, but it appeared that Ballin was in talks with the Kaiser about building a new trio of big ships for HAPAG. Cunard could hold a silly speed record if it wanted, but Morgan was determined to carry more passengers. But because he could not squeeze a subsidy out of Congress as his partner Griscom had a decade earlier, he decided to finance the construction of bigger ships out of his own deep pockets. The keel of IMM’s White Star Line steamer Olympic was laid in 1908 in Belfast, Ireland. The construction of Titanic, her slightly larger and more refined second sister, began three months later. Their cruising speed would be 21 knots—too slow to capture the Blue Riband from the Cunarders, but they would be much cheaper to operate. White Star advertised them as the most modern and magnificent liners afloat, as well as the safest.
When Titanic set sail from Southampton, England, on her maiden voyage on April 10, 1912, the liner was carrying a total of 2,228 passengers and crew, or about two-thirds capacity. But she carried only twenty lifeboats: sixteen wooden craft and four canvas-sided collapsible rafts—equipment approved by the British Board of Trade shortly before departure. Four days later, she struck an iceberg and six of her sixteen watertight compartments were open to the sea. With so much water pulling the ship down by the bow, veteran captain Edward J. Smith and chief designer Thomas Andrews knew that Titanic was doomed. They also knew the lifeboats had seats for only 1,200 people.
News of the Titanic disaster struck IMM leadership like a hammer. By midnight of April 15, twenty-four hours after Titanic sank, wireless messages relayed from the small Cunard liner Carpathia, which had picked up all of the survivors, confirmed the worst. IMM vice president Franklin finally admitted the death toll was well over one thousand. “I thought her unsinkable,” he said, crying. “I based my opinion on the best expert advice. I do not understand it.”6
The rescue ship Carpathia did not arrive in New York until the evening of April 18. Officials, reporters, and families were there to meet her when she docked at New York’s Pier 54 on that rainy night. Senator William Alden Smith of Michigan, head of the U.S. government disaster inquiry, kept a close eye on everybody who walked off the plain, sturdy vessel. First came Carpathia’s own passengers, well dressed but looking shaken. Then followed a steady stream of pale, bedraggled people, most of them women. Some were lucky to meet relatives, whom they tearfully embraced. Others were alone and destitute, not long ago in steerage. These were the 705 Titanic survivors.
J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line and IMM’s president, was known to be a survivor, as he had climbed into the last lifeboat lowered from Titanic before she went down. When Ismay was not among those who got off the ship, Senator Smith boarded to find him. He asked Carpathia’s captain, Arthur H. Rostron, for Ismay and was led to the captain’s stateroom. Knocking on the door, Smith found himself staring at Philip Franklin’s haggard face. The IMM vice president had hurried from company headquarters and boarded the rescue ship as soon as she had docked. His mission: protect the White Star chairman from the prying press.
Faced not by a reporter but by a United States senator, Franklin still insisted that Mr. Ismay was “way too ill” for anyone to see him.
“I’m sorry,” Smith barked, “but I will have to see that myself.” He pushed past Franklin, and found the pale J. Bruce Ismay lying in the captain’s berth. The slightly built Englishman appeared to be drugged. Smith gruffly introduced himself and announced that Ismay was to appear before the official American inquiry into the Titanic disaster the following morning at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Ismay quietly begged to be allowed to go back to England, but Smith said no. All surviving crew members were also served subpoenas to prevent them from sailing back to England, where they would be immune from any American legal action.7
Ismay spoke first at the Senate inquiry the next day. When asked if the number of lifeboats was standard British practice, Ismay responded, “I could not tell you that, sir. That is covered by the Board of Trade regulations. She may have exceeded the Board of Trade regulations, for all I know.”8
As the proceedings continued, Senator Smith and his board learned that neither Titanic’s captain nor the officers gave any clear warning to the passengers that the ship was sinking until very late. To make matters worse, many of the officers had been afraid to load the lifeboats to their certified capacity of sixty-five fully grown men, fearing they would buckle and send their occupants into the water. Worse still, many of the passengers refused to leave. It seemed safer aboard the big, warm vessel than to get into a rowboat and be lowered sixty feet into the dark ocean. Many of the boats left half full. It was not until the ship’s bow was awash that many of her passengers began fighting for a precious seat. Just then, a group of terrified steerage passengers emerged from below. The last lifeboat, bearing Ismay, left the ship at 2:05 A.M., a scant fifteen minutes before Titanic sank. The ship’s captain, her chief designer, and more than 1,500 men, women, and children perished.
Fifty miles from the foundering Titanic, Carpathia had received the White Star liner’s distress signals shortly after midnight. Her captain turned the ship around and raced to the scene, dodging icebergs all the way. Carpathia’s crew began picking up the 705 survivors as the first rays of a pink sun tinted the gray North Atlantic on the freezing morning of April 15. As the survivors rowed close to the rescue ship, those on board Carpathia could not help notice that many of the bobbing lifeboats were only partially filled. Five hundred more lives could have been saved.
Then there was the matter of the ship’s speed at the time of the accident. Contrary to speculation in the press, there was no way Titanic could have captured the Atlantic speed record from Mauretania. But rumors still ran rampant that Ismay had put pressure on Titanic’s captain to maintain her top speed of 22.5 knots through a known ice field so that she could beat her older sister ship Olympic’s maiden voyage crossing time of just over five days. Above all, Smith wanted to find out if Titanic had been going too fast.