Titanic: Ship of Dreams - 2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

Titanic is cleared for departure, but no one tells the inspector that a fire is raging in one of the coal bunkers. Extra lifeboats are proposed then rejected, as the first and only lifeboat drill takes place. White Star boss J. Bruce Ismay makes himself at home in his deluxe suite, as Titanic’s first-class facilities are unveiled in all their glory. And on the way out of Southampton Harbour there’s a nail-biting near miss. One that almost scuppers the maiden voyage before it’s begun… A Noiser podcast production. Narrated by Paul McGann. Featuring Stephanie Barczewski, Julian Fellowes, Clifford Ismay, Tim Maltin, Susie Millar. Written by Duncan Barrett | Produced by Miriam Baines and Duncan Barrett | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design & audio editing by Miri Latham | Assembly editing by Dorry Macaulay, Anisha Deva, Liam Cameron | Compositions by Oliver Baines and Dorry Macaulay | Mix & mastering: Cian Ryan-Morgan | Recording engineer: Joseph McGann | Nautical consultant: Aaron Todd. Get every episode of Titanic: Ship of Dreams two weeks early, as well as ad-free listening, by joining Noiser+. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Whether it's a family member, friend or furry companion joining your summer road trip, enjoy the peace of mind that comes with Volvo's legendary safety. During Volvo Discover Days, enjoy limited time savings as you make plans to cruise through Muskoka or down Toronto's bustling streets. From now until June 30th, lease a 2025 Volvo XC60 from 1.74% and save up to $4,000. Conditions apply. Visit your GTA Volvo retailer It's September 20th, 1911. We're in Southampton, on the south coast of England. In seven months' time, from this exact spot, RMS Titanic will depart on her ill-fated maiden voyage.

Right now, though, it's another almost identical vessel that's about to weigh anchor. While Titanic is still in Belfast, being fitted out with all the bells and whistles that will turn her into a floating five-star hotel, her sister ship, RMS Olympic, is ready to set off for New York. Olympic has been plying the transatlantic route for three months already. A total of eight crossings back and forth without incident. Unless you count a minor scrape with a tugboat in the Hudson River, which left a few scratches on her paintwork. Her commander, White Star Commodore Edward Smith, is regarded as the safest possible pair of hands. When asked by a reporter to describe his 40-year career, he can honestly reply, uneventful.

But Smith is about to receive a rude awakening. At 11.25 am, Olympic weighs anchor. Some of her 1300 passengers gather on deck, watching the quayside slowly recede into the distance. Others remain in their cabins. It's a wet, windy morning morning not the best time to take the sea air before long the giant ship approaches the Solent the strait of water separating mainland Britain from the Isle of Wight it's a busy passage with clear shipping lanes marked out by boys at 1243 12.43pm, Olympic makes the turn to port, signalling her intention

to any other ships in the vicinity with two sharp blasts of the whistle. Captain Smith orders an increase in speed from 11 to 16 knots. But another ship is traversing the same narrow stretch of water on a parallel course, a naval warship, HMS Hawk. And the Hawk is equipped with a battering ram. As Olympic gains on Hawk and begins to overtake her, the narrow waterway grows increasingly cramped. The Hawk's commander, William Blount, takes evasive action, ordering his helmsman to turn the warship to starboard. But something goes wrong. Rather than moving away from the Olympic, the Hawk begins drifting towards her. She's turning all right, but to port, her armoured bow swinging round towards the liner. After a few anxious seconds, Hawk drives headfirst into the side of Olympic.

Her battering ram crumples flat. It leaves a 12-foot triangular hole in the side of the liner. Olympic's starboard propeller shaft is crippled. Mercifully there are no injuries reported on either ship. Both limp back to harbor for repairs. Olympic's passengers are transferred to an older White Star vessel, Adriatic. They continue their journey to New York in less stylish environs. It'll be another two months before Olympic is seaworthy again, and the emergency patch-up

will mean plundering parts from her sister ship, Titanic, including her propeller shaft. The result of that is that Titanic's maiden voyage will be delayed. Just a few weeks, but long enough for an ice shelf off Greenland to begin to melt, disgorging hundreds of bergs into the Atlantic. From the Noisa Podcast Network, this is Titanic Ship of Dreams, part two. The Collision with HMS Hawk leads to a costly legal battle for White Star. Although most press coverage at the time blames the Royal Navy for the accident,

the official inquiry holds Captain Smith responsible. But White Star don't take the judgment lying down. Author Tim Moulton White Star backed Smith 100%. They knew how safe he was. They knew how good he was. He had an absolutely perfect safety record. On March the 13th, 1912, less than a month before Titanic departs for New York, White Star take the Navy to court, arguing that Hawke's Captain William Blunt steered his ship into the side of Olympic. But the Navy's lawyers introduce an intriguing new theory to account for the collision. Suction. Using a pair of wax models, scientists at the National Physical Laboratory in Tellington demonstrate that a ship the size of Olympic, travelling close enough to the hawk,

could displace enough water to literally suck the smaller vessel into it. In the end, Smith lost the case and the White Star had to pay compensation to the Navy, enough water to literally suck the smaller vessel into it. In the end, Smith lost the case and the White Star had to pay compensation to the Navy. To be fair to Captain Smith and his previously unblemished safety record, White Star's new Olympic-class vessels are very hard to steer. They're one and a half times as heavy as their closest rivals, Cunard's Mauritania and Lusitania, and almost three times the weight of Smith's previous command, the Adriatic. Forget too big to fail.

The Olympic-class may be too big to succeed. Professor Stephanie Baczewski. This race to build bigger, better, different ships that are competing for sort of different markets and in different ways, it's causing them to kind of push up against the limits of what they can do in terms of maritime technology. It's not actually so much the Titanic

that comes to mind here. I think if we think about the Lusitania. So when the Lusitania gets hit by a German torpedo in 1915, the problem is that V-shaped hull of the Lusitania that has been designed to make the ship very fast, it becomes a major liability because what happens is that the torpedo hits the ship on one side, right? So it's tilting. And a huge problem why people can't get off the Lusitania is because when it starts to tilt, what happens with the lifeboats, the lifeboats on one side are swinging out so far

away from the side of the ship that you can't get from the ship to the lifeboat, right? Because the lifeboat's too far away. And so, you know, I'm not going to say that it's because of the shape of the Lusitania's hull that all these people die on the Lusitania. But it's a contributing factor. You can't design for sort of every eventuality, but I think we can certainly see in these stories the kind of limits of shipbuilding technology. And I think that, you know, the Titanic was a good example of that. Again, I don't want to overstate this. I don't want to make it sound like this is why it crashed, but they were pushing a little

bit against the limits of like what maritime technology could do. When it comes to the general public, the collision with the Hawk actually makes the Olympic-class vessels seem safer. Rather like parents who do the school run in hulking Range Rovers, confident that if they hit anything, it's the other car that's going to crumple. White Star's passengers might reasonably conclude that the bigger the ship they're on, the safer they'll be if anything goes wrong. After all, photographs of the two ships after

the incident make it clear that the Hawk suffered the brunt of the damage. A warship, equipped with a battering ram no less, struck the Titanic's eldest sister at speed and failed to sink her. Not for nothing are the Olympic class referred to in the trade press as unsinkable. Susie Miller The interesting thing about the unsinkable moniker is that the builders, Harland and Wolf, never claimed that. This was something that came about by a magazine called Shipbuilder Magazine where they said, this ship cannot be sunk.

But neither Harland and Wolf nor White Star do anything to correct the exaggerated claims made in the press. In the public imagination, the idea of an unsinkable ship takes hold. At a time when technological progress is at its zenith, it seems relatively plausible. And in the case of Titanic and her sisters, it's supported by a number of well-publicized new safety features shared by all the Olympic-class ships. A double hull to prevent them from scraping open along the bottom, and a series of transverse

bulkheads, dividing them up into separate compartments, each one capable of being sealed at the press of a button to prevent water from moving around the ship. They tried to make Titanic as safe as was practicably possible. They gave her a double bottom, for example. They also made sure that she could survive a collision between two bulkheads. They even made sure that she could survive the first four bulkheads being taken out. It was built basically to withstand a head-on collision. It was built to withstand if another ship hit it

and hit precisely at the juncture of two compartments. It was built to withstand that. But what they didn't put within the design envelope of Titanic was a sideswipe disaster over 200 feet that would affect the first five compartments. And to be very fair to them, it is a very fluky, precise set of circumstances that causes it. If Titanic's designers are guilty of anything,

it's a lack of imagination, a failure to think outside the box, or rather, outside the sealed compartment. They were thinking the ship could smash into something or something could smash into it. They weren't thinking it was going to scrape along the side of something. Screenwriter Julian Fellows. It didn't occur to anyone that a gash that long would be made in the side of a ship. And in fact, the truth is that if they had not tried to steer out of the way of the iceberg, if they had simply headed straight on into it, they wouldn't have sunk.

I mean, there wasn't a ship that could have done that damage. Only an iceberg could do it. So it wasn't really that they made a mistake in building her as they did. It was just that they didn't envisage having to make her be watertight in this type of damage. There were 9,000 other ways that it could have hit the iceberg and it wouldn't have had the incredibly catastrophic result that it had. It's just this complete, you know, kind of butterfly effect of, you know, eight

million tiny little things happen from the moment they laid the keel in Belfast to the time that it hit the iceberg. And if one of those eight million things hadn't happened, then maybe it wouldn't have actually hit that iceberg. I think that bothers us. We don't like to believe that life is that random. Curator Klaus-Johan Wetterholm. The British shipping journal, the ship builder wrote afterwards, in the case of the Titanic, the unlikely happened. And I usually say that when a ship goes down, it's unlikely.

Every time it goes down, it's unlikely. But there was so many things that, let's say, prepared for the disaster. There's another reason that passengers in 1912 aren't particularly worried about a disaster at sea. Because at the time, a liner going down in the Atlantic is known to be eminently survivable. Three years before Titanic sets off on her maiden voyage, another White Star vessel, the Republic, sank following a collision with another ship. Only three passengers were killed, and all of them as a result of the initial impact.

The ship's 739 survivors, rescued thanks to a distress call from the Republic's new Marconi wireless set, were seen as proof of the relative safety of modern sea travel. The Republic's young wireless operator, Jack Binns, was hailed as a hero, thanks in no small part to Mr. Marconi's press contacts, and I for a juicy story. Binns' distress call summoned a dozen other ships to the scene of the accident, long before the Republic eventually sank 40 fathoms beneath the surface. Plenty of time to ferry the passengers across in lifeboats to the rescue vessels. The fact that the lifeboats only had room for half the Republic's passengers at the time was never an issue.

People often wonder if the Titanic had had more lifeboats, would more lives have been saved? Well, in fact, what most people don't know is that even though Titanic only had 20 lifeboats, in fact, she didn't have time to launch even the 20 that she did have. Like everything, the truth is a little more complicated. The reason there were too few lifeboats was that it never occurred to anyone that the lifeboats would be any more than ferries, because liners, when they sank, took a very long time to do it. They had these lanes in the Atlantic with ships on them.

They had an eastbound lane and a westbound lane, like railway tracks 60 miles apart. And they knew there was always going to be a ship coming along or a ship nearby. Plus, they knew about radio. So lifeboats were not for, you know, chilling out on the ocean for a few days. Lifeboats were for a short period of transshipment

between a rescue vessel and a stricken vessel. Nonetheless, by the early 1910s, when Titanic and her sisters were under construction, the question of how many lifeboats a ship should carry remains an active one. In Britain, the minimum legal requirements are set by the Board of Trade. And, for now at least, Titanic's 20 lifeboats,

providing seats for approximately half those on board, are more than enough to satisfy the inspectors. The Board of Trade didn't want unsafe ships that were going to sink piled high with lifeboats just to make people think they were safe. What the Board of Trade wanted was to incentivize well-subdivided and well-built ships like Titanic to be able to carry enough lifeboats to be able to ferry passengers from a stricken vessel to a nearby rescue vessel. Titanic had 20 lifeboats. There were 16 full size and four what they call collapsible, so smaller ones that were kept up on deck. And that was actually more than she needed to have by the regulations of the day. The regulations, unfortunately, were based on the tonnage of the

ship and had not been updated for many years. The laws of ships had just simply not kept up with the expansion in size of ships over time. In fact, Titanic's designers are planning several steps ahead. They are determined that the new Olympic-class ships should be future-proof. That's why the davits, or cranes, installed on the ships to lower the lifeboats are actually designed to be double-banked. You can easily fit two lifeboats onto each, doubling the overall capacity.

That way when the Board of Trade do get round to updating their rulebook, passing the new building code will be a cinch. But in the meantime, the idea of adding extra boats is not a popular one. In fact, when Titanic's chief designer Thomas Andrews suggests doing so, he's shot down. As far as White Star chairman Bruce Ismay is concerned, more lifeboats would be just an eyesore, spoiling the sleek look of his new liners, as well as limiting the amount of space on deck for first-class passengers to stretch their legs. Board of Trade Inspector Morris Clark disagrees. He comes on board early in the morning of April 10, 1912, to conduct the final safety check before departure.

Although it's not a legal requirement, Clark strongly recommends that they increase the number of boats on board by 50%. But the request is rejected by White Star. Clark can't press the issue any further, for fear he might lose his job. What he can do is watch as a handful of crew members rehearse lowering two of the lifeboats they do have, swinging out the davits so they hang precariously over the starboard side of the ship, and then teasing out the ropes at each end until they reach the water below. The procedure goes smoothly. Clark passes the ship fit for departure.

It's the only lifeboat drill that will ever take place on board Titanic. And there's something else that Clark doesn't know about. An inconvenient truth buried deep in the bowels of the ship. One that if it came to light would almost certainly delay the maiden voyage. Almost a hundred feet below deck, one of the cold storage bunkers is on fire. There was a fire on board Titanic in one of her bunkers and in fact they worked night and day to put the fire out between leading Belfast and all the way through Southampton it was raging all the way along her route across the North Atlantic. It was in fact not put out until

the Saturday before the accident. It'll be the ship's trimmers, among them my own great uncle, Jimmy McGann, who are responsible for putting out the fire during the voyage. Coal fires are so hot that you can't just play a hose on them to put them out. So the only way to get rid of the coal fire is actually to rake out all the burning coal and throw it on the furnaces. So it would have been up to the trimmers

to make sure that they got the coal out of the hot bunker, as it were, first, and then they cleaned it all out and sprayed it all off with cold water afterwards. Ultimately, the fire in the coal bunker will have little impact on Titanic's fate, beyond the fact that its discovery by the Board of Trade Inspector could have delayed the voyage long enough for the ship to miss the iceberg. But it does mean that even before the fateful impact, Titanic is already taking on water. In the inquiry after the sinking,

it was talked about the damage that the fire had caused to the bunker. And it was noticed that the plates had been bent by the heat of the fire and some of the paint had come off as well. And in fact, it was equivalent to about one bucket an hour. So if you take a typical bucket of water, it was filling one of those about every hour. That was the size of the damage. So not significant. And equally, of course, as Titanic sank, with every open porthole, it was doubling and tripling the damage to the vessel. And so this weeping of this wound, if you like, caused by the fire earlier, was a drop in the ocean. On Wednesday morning, with Titanic due to depart in a matter of hours, few of those who'll be travelling on the maiden voyage are aware

of the fire raging down below. One man who does know about it is Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line. But he is not concerned, and he certainly sees no need to inform the passengers. Some of them might start asking for refunds on their tickets. It's 9.30am when Ismay steps aboard Titanic at Southampton, dressed in a smart double-breasted suit, with his handlebar moustache carefully waxed. Ismay will be representing White Star throughout the voyage, so it's important that he is as finely turned out as the ship is. He's brought two servants with him, William Harrison and John Richard Fry. While their boss steps off the gangplank on B deck and is greeted by the glorious sight of the grand staircase, they are the ones charged with unpacking his luggage in

the magnificent parlour suite just metres away. Cabins B52 to B56 are the most expensive set of rooms on the Titanic. Decorated in Louis XVI style, with walnut and sycamore panelling, Ismay has his own living room for entertaining guests, a luxurious roll-top bath with bespoke cigar holders, and even a private promenade deck, complete with wicker deck chairs and pot plants. The furniture is all top drawer. A card table, sofas, sideboards and two walk-in wardrobes.

Even a fake fireplace. Enough to make you forget you're actually on a ship at sea. Little does Bruce Ismay know that in less than a week's time, it'll all be resting at the bottom of the ocean, along with 1,500 men, women and children. He won't be among them. His decision to take up a place in a lifeboat rather than go down with the ship

will dog him for the rest of his life earning him a popular nickname the Coward of the Titanic. Right now though danger is the last thing on Bruce Ismay's mind. What he's focused on is selling tickets. Titanic's return journey from New York to Southampton is almost fully booked. But, with only hours to go until departure, the outward leg still has room for a thousand more passengers.

Ismay's been doing his best to drum up interest in his new ship, especially among the wealthiest first-class travellers. But many veteran transatlantic tourists feel like they've seen it all before. You know, Titanic was the second ship in the line. At the time, nearly all of the hype was around Olympic as the first of her class. Titanic, yes, she was slightly bigger, slightly heavier than Olympic, so she draws attention for that reason because she's the biggest ship in the world. But most of the hype at the time and the publicity was around Olympic. To make matters worse, White Star's main rival, Cunard,

is being heavily subsidised by the British government White Star might have the ships to compete with Cunard now But in business terms, that's only part of the equation For Bruce Ismay, helming the company his father built four decades earlier is far from easy Keeping White Star afloat means taking some tough decisions. I think the White Star line felt slightly hard done by that the Cunard line had in fact secured government funding to build the Lusitania and the Mauritania. But in order to around this problem of funding, Ismay actually went to one of the richest people in the world, J.P. Morgan, and he actually bankrolled the building of the Titanic and the Olympic.

So, in fact, in a vast imperial power at that time, and America, which was, you know, becoming the greatest economy of the Western world or the world. And people, in a way, I think, were pretending that it was about snobbery and being well-bred and good manners and grace and knowing how to do things properly and all those phrases snobs use. But of course, it wasn't really. It was about power. And the British were starting to see that the Americans were more powerful than they were. The world is changing, right? When we talk about it being the kind of millionaire special, we are talking about American plutocrats

more than we're talking about British aristocrats. There are a handful. The Countess of Roth has done a few other kind of wealthy, upper-class British people are on board the ship. But mostly when we talk about wealth on the Titanic, we're talking about American wealth. America had started to develop its own society. It wasn't anymore imitating Europe.

It wasn't based on leading families who were the younger sons of Scottish gentry or Dutch gentry or whatever it was. These were new people who'd come along and they'd invented, you know, doorknobs or trains or yachts or whatever. And they were vastly rich, and they weren't about to be told what to do by the youngest son of someone from Argyllshire. You know, they could piss off as far as they were concerned. And they made a new society. And you see that on the Titanic, that actually Titanic First Class was dominated by Americans.

Specifically, for this maiden voyage at least, New York royalty. Financier Benjamin Guggenheim, whose brother founded the famous art gallery. Ida and Isidore Strauss, the owners of Macy's department store, and at the top of the tree, John Jacob Astor IV, who gave his name to the Astoria Hotel on Fifth Avenue. One of the richest men in the world, and certainly the richest on board, Astor's net worth is estimated at $90 million. In today's money, he'd be a billionaire. But as Titanic prepares for departure, there is one man missing from this fabulously wealthy group. The owner of the ship, J.P. Morgan.

The bullish 74-year-old financier has changed his travel plans at the last minute, citing illness. In fact, he's extended his stay at a spa hotel in Aix-les-Bains so he can spend more time with his 30-something French mistress. For Bruce Ismay, who is not only chairman of White Star, but also President of Morgan's International Mercantile Marine, the boss's decision means a significant upgrade. It's Titanic's owner who was originally supposed to occupy the deluxe parlour suite on B deck. Now that privilege goes to Ismay instead. The two men have worked together for the best part of a decade,

but their professional relationship hasn't always been easy, especially for Ismay, who at 49 years old is still struggling to live up to his father's legacy. Clifford Ismay is Bruce's fifth cousin and the author of Understanding J. Bruce Ismay, the true story of the man they called the Coward of Titanic. There was a lot of pressure on him at that time to perform. His father's shoes were very big shoes to fill. I sometimes wondered if Bruce perhaps felt

that he wasn't quite the man to follow in his father's footsteps. Ten years earlier, when Morgan first proposed incorporating White Star into his new shipping consortium, Ismay was understandably apprehensive. The White Star line was his father's baby, and Bruce fought off the takeover bid as best that he could, but unfortunately the shareholders couldn't resist

the high prices that were being offered for the shares. To sweeten the deal, Morgan agreed to make Ismay president of his international mercantile marine. A generous offer, but one that, to Ismay at least, felt like a poisoned chalice. He didn't want to do that. He didn't want to be president of this huge American organisation responsible for so many other shipping companies. However, he didn't want to lose the White Star Line. So I think he was thrust into a position that he didn't really want,

but he felt that he had to take it. Unlike his late father, Bruce Ismay is not a natural businessman, and certainly not a tycoon in the mold of J.P. Morgan. For such a powerful man, he cuts a surprisingly awkward figure. He's tall, cool, reserved. Those who work with him find him difficult, detached, aloof. And for those who work for him, it's even worse.

I think a lot of people feared him because he had this abruptness. If one of the staff had an appointment with him in the office, if it was at say 12 noon, they couldn't knock on the door one minute before 12. They couldn't knock one minute past 12. It had to be exactly 12 o'clock. I often wondered if he might have had a little bit of autism going on there. He was a very complicated man. When Bruce's father was still alive, the two of them never quite saw eye to eye. Thomas Ismay was a brutal domineering figure. When Bruce first began working for him, as an apprentice at White Star Headquarters in Liverpool, his father insisted on referring to him as the new office boy.

After one long day at the office, Bruce returned to the family home in Crosby and saddled up his father's favourite horse for a ride along the sands. The horse stumbled and fell, breaking one of its legs. When Thomas came home and realized what had happened, it was absolutely livid. It wasn't just the fact that the horse had to be destroyed afterwards. It was the fact that Bruce shouldn't have done it without his father's permission. A decade later, Bruce was married and living in New York with his wife and children His father didn't attend the wedding It clashed with a dinner invitation from Samuel Cunard

But when Thomas Ismay's thoughts started turning to his succession He summoned Bruce back to Liverpool to take over his company Threatening that if he didn't come right, he would hand the reins to his younger brother instead. Bruce, his wife Florence and their baby boy Henry boarded a ship for England. It was a very rough crossing. The child was sick when they left New York, however the doctors didn't seem to think it was much of a problem and advised that the baby was well enough to travel. During the voyage the baby's health declined day by day.

Once they arrived back in Liverpool, Thomas looked at the baby and he just said that baby is not well. Sent for a doctor straight away. And it was only a few days after that, sadly, they lost the first child. Ismay is often characterized as the villain of the piece, the baddie in the Titanic story. In fact, everyone is a mixture of good and bad, and that's the same for everyone $2.50 a month. Learn more at pcexpress.ca.

Just after midday on Wednesday, April the 10th, Titanic clears her moorings at Southampton Harbour and begins to move slowly away from the quayside. There's jaunty music from the band stationed on deck. But the next few minutes will prove anything but plain sailing. As the giant liner makes her way through the busy harbour, she starts to suck other ships moored there towards her, just like the scientists at the National Physical Laboratory predicted. So they're leaving Southampton and the suction that the Titanic creates as it's sort of backing out of its berth starts to pull the ropes of all the other ships that are docked in Southampton.

There's a lot of them docked there because there's a coal strike at the time so a lot of ships are actually unable to sail. They've had to cannibalize coal from other White Star ships so that the Titanic can actually go on its first voyage. One ship in particular, ironically named the New York, is pulled so hard that the stays holding her in position are broken. People say the ropes went off like cannon shots, right? And the ropes snap. They're holding the stern of the New York to the dock.

And the stern of it starts to swing out towards the Titanic. Captain Smith has seen this scenario before. Seven months earlier, just before the collision between HMS Hawk and Olympic. It looks like history is about to repeat itself. The New York comes within four feet of Titanic's hull before quick thinking on Captain Smith's part saves the day.

Captain Smith performs really well. He knows what to do. He just gives a little burst on the propeller on one side of the Titanic and it actually pushes the New York back towards the dock and everything's okay. But it does actually delay the Titanic by like an hour and a half. Now, it was only Captain Smith's quick thinking in washing a little bit of thrust on the port

propeller that actually saved the day there. Now, had Captain Smith ironically not been rather brilliant and quick thinking in Southampton, of course, they'd have had to transship at the Isle of Wight and everyone would have been saved. Just minutes into Titanic's maiden voyage, already the what-ifs are beginning to multiply. You think, oh, that just hadn't have happened if they'd just been, that iceberg wouldn't have been right in that place, right? Right in exactly that way where it crossed the Titanic's path. Captain Smith may have avoided a second nasty collision for the Olympic class. But as Titanic leaves one New York in search of another,

questions about the size and maneuverability of White Star's new vessels remain. After all, as Oscar Wilde almost wrote, crashing one 45,000-ton vessel may be regarded as a misfortune. Crashing two looks like carelessness. Within a week, Captain Smith will find that bad luck comes in threes. In the next episode, Titanic stops off in France and Ireland to pick up more passengers, along with some overpriced souvenirs. Several hundred economic migrants come on board, ready to begin their passage to America. And, as the ship sets sail across the Atlantic, questions remain about Bruce Ismay's judgement, Captain Smith's competence, and how ready Titanic's crew are for an unexpected disaster

at sea. That's next time. To be continued...