Titanic: Ship of Dreams - 4. Iceberg Dead Ahead

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

A retirement party is held in Captain Smith’s honour. But as ice warnings come in over the radio, he must decide what to do about them. The richest man on board and his mistress do their best to dodge scandal. Titanic’s engines are put through their paces, as passengers place bets on how fast the ship can go. And at 11.39pm, on Sunday April 14th, something large is spotted, dead ahead… A Noiser podcast production. Narrated by Paul McGann. Featuring Stephanie Barczewski, Jerome Chertkoff, Julian Fellowes, Veronica Hinke, Clifford Ismay, Tim Maltin, Stephen McGann, 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 and Rob Plummer | Compositions by Oliver Baines and Dorry Macaulay | Mix & mastering: Tom Pink | 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

No Frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrills.ca. It's April the 14th, 1912. The early hours of Sunday morning. RMS Titanic is somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, ploughing through the black night at more than 20 knots. Most of the passengers aboard the ship are sleeping soundly, but in her second-class cabin on

E-deck, Esther Hart is wide awake. Since the ship left Southampton she's refused to sleep a wink at night gripped by an irrational fear that something terrible is going to happen mrs. Hart keeps during the daytimes instead while her husband takes their daughter Eva around the ship exploring. Right now the two of them are sound asleep in their bunks. Mrs Hart, exhausted from her repeated nocturnal vigils, has forsaken her reading table for her own bunk underneath her husband's. She won't sleep, just rest her head a little. The night is as quiet and still as the previous three have been.

Only the throbbing of the ship's engines, and a gentle creaking noise that she's heard every night of the voyage. Too subtle for anyone to notice in the bustling daylight hours. But at night, even the tiniest noises are magnified. Mrs. Hart jolts upright in her bunk. Was she asleep? She can't be sure, but she's certain she just felt the ship move in an unnatural way. Ben, she hisses. Get up. Something dreadful has happened. Groggily, Mr. Hart slides down from his own bunk to join her.

Even in the dark, she can see that he's annoyed at being woken. But when she begs him to go on deck and investigate the sudden strange movement, there's no hiding how terrified she feels. Reluctantly, her husband pulls on his trousers and exits the cabin, taking care not to wake little Eva. Mrs. Hart waits anxiously for him to return. When he does, the irritation on his face has given way to a more patient expression. Everything's all right, he reassures her. The sea is calm.

The ship is traveling smoothly. Mr. Hart undresses and climbs back into bed. Within minutes, his wife can tell he's asleep again. She knows perfectly well what he thinks of her. The same thing the rest of the passengers at the breakfast table think. That she's a silly, superstitious woman, obsessed with the idea of impending disaster. Like Cassandra, prophesying the fall of Troy, or in this case the sinking of a so-called unsinkable ship. Perhaps they're right. But then Cassandra turned out to be correct.

And in less than twenty-four hours, Mrs. Hart's fears will also come to pass. This time tomorrow, many of those who laughed at her superstitions will be dead, and RMS Titanic will be lying, torn in half, at the bottom of the ocean. From the Noisa Podcast Network, this is Titanic Ship of Dreams, Part 4. To be continued... There's a little printing press down on D-Deck where the menus for the dining saloons are produced. And when they're not busy laying out the latest offering of consomme Olga or apricot Bordelou, the men who work there turn their hands to a bit of journalism. Their daily newspaper is delivered by stewards to everyone in first and second class.

It includes the latest news from both sides of the Atlantic, as well as other information of interest to the ship's passengers, stock exchange prices, horse racing results, and more. That Titanic can stay so up to date, even in the middle of the ocean, is testament to the work of the ship's two wireless operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride. From their little office on the boat deck, one of the highest spots on the ship, these young men are in almost constant contact with the outside world. Either through direct communication with wireless stations on shore,

or piggybacking messages via other vessels plying the same transatlantic route. Author Tim Moulton. There was a map of where all the ships would be that had radio at the time, because radio didn't have a range right the way across the Atlantic. So if you wanted to get messages to shore, you would have to jump from ship to ship by saying, hey, can you send this message to America? And they'd say, yeah, OK, I'll tell Fred, and then it would get there. The Marconi Wireless Company has placed its operators on dozens of transatlantic vessels.

Though Titanic is unusual in having two of the young whiz kids on board. They were the equivalent of, if you like, tech geeks today. They were involved in a technology that was cutting edge. They'd all trained together in a place called the Tim Tagman Accord. They all knew each other and were mates, and they were all quite intelligent, well-educated young men who cared about this new technology. These Edwardian tech bros even have their own professional banter. In their messages, they jokingly call each other Old Man.

In fact, Mr Marconi almost exclusively hires bright young twenty-somethings. At twenty-five, Titanic's Jack Phillips is a veteran. He's been working for the company for six years. His assistant, Harold Bride, is just twenty-two. For these young men, Titanic is a plum assignment. But it's the Marconi Company, not White Star, that pays their wages. And, as will prove crucial, they are on board

to serve the passengers, not the crew. Most of their time is spent transmitting short messages to family back home, or instructions to business colleagues, at a rate of nine pence a word. Delivering weather warnings to the bridge is very much secondary responsibility.

There was an element of a problem of dual responsibilities, because they were being paid by Marconi, and the passengers were actually paying them to send messages, whereas no one was actually paying them to take, you know, weather warnings to the bridge. Most of the weather warnings were sent to the bridge, but they didn't tend to get the priority that the paying messages got. On Sunday morning, Titanic's wireless men are playing catch-up. There have been some teething problems with their equipment,

and they now have a huge backlog of messages. The Marconi manual forbids operators from interfering with the machines themselves. That's a job for experienced technicians on shore. But Phillips and Bride have just spent seven hours carrying out repairs. I think some of the fixes they made probably wouldn't have been advised by the company, but they were perfectly capable of making do and mending on the North Atlantic. In fact, had they not fixed the radio just before the collision, of course, they would have been without it during the collision. And it's likely that no one would have survived,

and no one would have been saved, and Titanic would have been like the Mary Celeste, and no one would have known what happened to her after she left Ireland on her maiden voyage. At 9.12 on Sunday morning, Phillips is at his post in the telegraph office when a message comes in from a Cunard liner, the Caronia. Captain Titanic, westbound steamers report bergs, growlers and field ice in 42 degrees north from 49 to 51 degrees west. A growler is a small iceberg,

roughly the size of a grand piano. Extending only a foot or two above the surface, they can be hard to spot. Phillips takes the coronia's message to the bridge. Not that an iceberg warning is a particular cause for concern. In 1912, all captains on the North Atlantic Not that an iceberg warning is a particular cause for concern. In 1912, all captains on the North Atlantic believed that in clear weather, which they had, that they would be able to see ice in time to take avoiding action.

The coordinates given in Coronia's message won't be reached until this evening at the earliest. In the meantime, Captain Smith has more pressing business to attend to. He's conducting a Sunday service in the first-class dining saloon. Some of the hymns are eerily appropriate to a sea crossing. O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home. Ironically, Captain Smith's service clashes with the original plan for Sunday morning, Titanic's first and only lifeboat drill at sea. Smith presumably thinks his sermon will be more edifying.

Professor Jerome Cherkov. There was a lifeboat drill planned on the Titanic, but that was cancelled by Smith. So there was absolutely no practice while the ship was traveling on the transatlantic passage. Susie Miller. the ship was traveling on the transatlantic passes. You know, to not even have had a lifeboat drill was just crazy. Today, we just wouldn't tolerate that. Even if you're on a cross-channel ferry,

you want to know where your muster station is and what the rules are for when things go wrong. 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 or go to volvocars.ca for full details. Oh, excuse me. Why are you walking so close behind me?

Well, you're a tall guy. You throw a decent shadow when I'm walking in it to keep out of this bright sun. It hurts my eyes. Okay, well, you know what? Spec Savers, you can get two pairs of glasses from $149. And oh, you'll like this. One can be a pair of prescription sunglasses. Sounds great. Where's the nearest store? Not far. Come on. Let's hurry then. To my count. One, two, one, two, one, two. Visit specsavers.ca for details. At 11.47am, Phillips and Bride receive a second iceberg warning. This time from Captain Kroll of the SS Nordam, sailing from New York to Rotterdam. Captain SS Titanic, congratulations on new command. Had moderate westerly winds fair weather no fog much ice reported in latitude 42 24 to 42 45 and longitude 49 50 to 50 20 compliments crawl

captain smith instructs phillips Bride to send a reply. Captain Nordam, many thanks. Add moderate variable weather throughout. Compliments, Smith. Professor Stephanie Baczewski. It was a really bad season for ice. It had been quite a warm winter, and so a lot of ice had broken off of the glaciers in the Arctic and had drifted into the North Atlantic shipping lanes. You know, everybody knew that.

But again, it was something that they thought of as that sort of modern shipbuilding technology had conquered that. You know, maybe 20 years ago, some ship disappeared and was never heard from again. And maybe it hit an iceberg. But there's really no record of an iceberg being able to do that kind of damage to a ship. It's always been fine. Screenwriter Julian Fellows. Well, obviously the Titanic has changed the way we view icebergs, but it wasn't unknown.

I had a great, great, great, great uncle called William Dorset Fellows, who was the captain of a ship called the Lady Hubbell, which was sunk by an iceberg in 1817. So it wasn't that nobody thought an iceberg could sink a ship. They knew it could, but they didn't think it could sink a ship like Titanic. They did know icebergs were dangerous, and that's why there were iceberg warnings. You know, a big part of the Titanic story is that these iceberg warnings were coming in and they were largely being ignored. And that's the Titanic disaster, a central question will be what speed the ship was traveling in the run-up to the collision,

and specifically whether Captain Smith should have slowed down. But at the time, slowing down for icebergs goes very much against the White Star Handbook. It was assumed by sailors at the time that if you came across an iceberg dead ahead, you would see it in enough time to be able to avoid it. Captains didn't slow down or change their routes. They just told the lookouts to be alert. They were getting all these ice warnings, why not stop?

It's unthinkable that they would have stopped. It's just unthinkable. It's unthinkable they would have slowed down by the kind of sailing conventions of the time. It just looks very, very different with hindsight. Titanic might not be chasing the Blue Ribbon, the prize for the fastest Atlantic crossing. That's very much Cunard territory, with their streamlined Mauritania and Lusitania.

But White Star are invested in making speedy progress. And it's not just the captain who has his eye on how fast they're going. Shortly after noon, a crowd of first-class passengers gathers outside the purser's office on Seadeck, just off the Grand Staircase. Here, the latest figures are posted daily, giving the distance travelled in the past 24 hours. Some of them are even gambling on the results.

The speed was absolutely driven by the passengers. You know, they demanded to be there fast, absolutely demanded it. There were sweepstakes being run on how fast the ship was going to go. So I would say the main topic of conversation on Titanic was the speed of the vessel. The figures posted on Sunday afternoon are impressive. An average speed of 22 knots over a distance of 546 miles. That's a 5% improvement on the previous day. But what about the next 24 hours? So far, only 26 of Titanic's 29 boilers have been lit. With the other three online, she should be able to go even faster. She wore the very fast shit and they were due to do a speed trial on the Monday morning.

My hunch is she probably done 25 knots. It's around half past one on Sunday afternoon that one of the most controversial moments in the Titanic story either does or doesn't happen. A conversation between Captain Smith and White Star Chairman Bruce Ismay. First-class passenger Elizabeth Lines will later testify that she heard the two men discussing Titanic's speed, specifically in comparison to her sister ship, Olympic. According to Lines, Ismael tells Smith, we will beat the Olympic and get into New York on Tuesday. That's a day earlier than scheduled.

Lines describes the chairman's demeanor as dictatorial it's a claim that has puzzled historians for more than a century titanic was due to arrive on wednesday morning and what they wanted to do was arrive on tuesday night so that as the mislifted in new york she would be on her birth and then all the press in new york would like, wow, this Titanic's really fast. So there was one eyewitness account that said this. I think most Titanic historians, including myself, have always found it very implausible that they were going to try to dock a ship the size of Titanic in New York at night, right? In the dark, essentially. If we think about particularly the quality of like electric lighting that would have been available at the time. And also that there would have been a big kind of welcome ceremony arranged for the

following morning. So in fact, it probably would have garnered less publicity, not more for the Titanic to arrive at night. So all of this seems highly implausible. I do believe Elizabeth Lyons, actually, because I think that both Ismay and Smith wanted to have the headlines. They both loved headlines. They weren't racing for the blue ribbon, but the Titanic was in a race, and she was racing her sister's maiden voyage. So what they were doing is they were watching the charts, and they were looking at where was Olympic on her maiden voyage, and where are we?

And they were like, great, we're way ahead. Whatever their aspirations, the relationship between Captain Smith and Bruce Ismay is critical to what happens next and who is to blame for it. They'd known each other for years. Smith had known his father, Thomas Ismay. Does Ismay push Captain Smith to drive the ship even faster on Sunday? Just as Titanic is entering a part of the ocean already known to contain icebergs. And if he does, is it an order the captain is bound to follow?

In the years to come, Ismay's role on Titanic will be hotly debated. Ismay had quite a confusing status aboard Titanic because he was travelling on a first-class ticket and therefore was technically a passenger. But of course, as the ultimate boss, he even employed the captain, as it were. He really was also a sort of super captain or, if you like, another member of the crew.

And what we see is we see him flipping between these roles throughout the voyage so sometimes he's eating and dining with the passengers sometimes he's carrying a message from the bridge he's walking between these two worlds clifford ismay bruce's fifth cousin and biographer. So technically he was a passenger. Technically he had no control over what happened on board the ship in terms of navigation, etc, etc. However, Bruce Ismay, like his father before him, always tried to travel on the maiden voyage of any of the White Star Line's ships. What he would do was walk around, speaking to the first-class passengers, second- and third-class passengers, and see how they felt about the ship.

Ismay's ambiguous position harks back to an old White Star tradition, started by his father four decades earlier. In 1872, Thomas Ismay received a complaint from a passenger on his ship Oceanic. In response, he sent one of his men undercover to find out what life was really like on board. These days we'll call them a secret shopper. He wouldn't be listed as part of the white Star Line, he'd be listed as a passenger. He did find a few problems, so as soon as Thomas learned of these problems he immediately had them rectified and issued letters to all of the captains of the White Star Line advising them of the problems that they'd found, also upgrading certain parts of the ships as well.

Obviously, on Titanic, Bruce Ismay is hardly travelling incognito. He's one of the most recognisable faces on board, but he is making it his business to chat with as many passengers as he can. A detached, awkward man, Ismay is not a natural conversationalist, but he shows flashes of compassion and kindness.

He's already had one couple, Emily and Arthur Ryerson, upgraded to a better cabin when he learned the reason for their last-minute voyage. The Ryersons are rushing home to New York to arrange a funeral for their son, Arthur Junior, who died in a car crash six days earlier. On Sunday afternoon, after finishing up with Captain Smith, Ismay spots Emily Ryerson seated outside the companionway on A-Deck. His attempt at small talk is typically awkward.

We are in amongst the icebergs, he tells her cheerfully. To prove his point, Ismay plucks a wireless message out of his pocket, one that Captain Smith gave him to look at during the conversation overheard by Elizabeth Lyons. The message is from another white star liner, the Baltic. Greek steamer Athena reports passing icebergs and large quantities of field ice today. He's kind of showing off this new technology of radio that they have on board that, you know, he can actually get these messages. You know, they've never been able to do this before. He's sort of showing them off to passengers, right, to say, hey, look, you know, we're going to be entering an ice field soon. Isn't that exciting?

And I think some of the passengers are like, are we going to slow down? He's like, of course not. We're not going to slow down. The message from the Baltic isn't the only iceberg warning that's come in that afternoon. At 1.49 p.m., Harold Bride picked up a transmission

from the America, reporting that they'd just passed a pair of large bergs. There was no MSG, or Master's Service Gram, attached to it, the prefix that means a message should be brought to the captain's attention. So Bride never passed it on to Captain Smith. At a quarter to six that evening, Titanic changes course.

The ship has reached the corner, the point where the northern and southern Atlantic shipping lanes diverge. At this time of year, all vessels will be taking the longer southern route, the one that's supposed to be free of icebergs. But even on the southern route, the one that's supposed to be free of icebergs. But even on the southern route it's getting colder. Titanic's outdoor spaces have been all but abandoned as passengers throng to cozier spots indoors. Someone who has braved the chilly evening air is journalist Edith Rosenbaum. She's on the boat deck, taking in the stunning view off Titanic's bow. She vividly describes what she sees that evening. The foam whirled

in a great cascade, made blood-red by the rays of a setting sun. It looked like a crimson carpet stretching from the ship to the horizon. By 7pm the sun has disappeared altogether, and Edith Rosenbaum has retreated inside. As the light fades, First Officer William Murdoch orders the foc'sle hatch to be closed. The glow from the hatch is making it hard to see what's ahead. Out on deck, the temperature has dropped to 6 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, eight decks below, things are hotting up. Titanic's last three boilers are ready to come online. They've been gradually warming up over the past few hours.

Now the time has come to connect them to the engines. The boiler rooms were several decks deep and they occupied the area of the ship on top of what we call the tank top. And underneath that you had the bilges and things like that. So in other words, it's the lowest deck that there is on the ship, but going up several heights of decks to accommodate the size of the boilers. And then towards the stern of the ship, you had the engine room proper, if you like. And that's where these two giant reciprocating engines were. Down in the bowels of the ship,

men like my great-uncle Jimmy McGann are hard at work. My brother Stephen has researched Jimmy's story. It was a filthy job. They would do four hours on, I think, for real back-breaking work. Then they would take four hours off, then they might be on standby. It was a very strict rotor, so you'd go back to bed exhausted.

You wouldn't know where you were, what time of day it was. You'd wake up again, they'd call you beforehand and you'd go down. They had a bell, which a bit like that great scene in Ben-Hur with the Roman galley, with the galley man banging the drum. They literally used to run by a metronome, so they would then be forced, if it was full steam ahead as it was, they would have to work to an ever more rapid noise. As a trimmer, Uncle Jimmy's job is to bring the stokers, who feed the giant furnaces, a constant supply of coal.

They were called trimmers because they literally trimmed the coal from the bunkers at the sides of the ship and then fed it into the boilers. And if they trimmed it unevenly, then the ship would actually develop a list because Titanic used 600 tons of coal a day. So the trimmers worked wheelbarrows and actually went from the bunkers, collected the coal and then wheeled the coal to the stokers who would then shovel it into the hot furnace. Extremely hot work, very dusty, very physical work. They did such a troglodyte job, you know, life for a black ganger down in the engine room. Many of them were stark naked in the room because it was so hot. There'd be dangly bits everywhere because it was, you know, nobody cared.

They would absolutely not meet and frighten the ordinary paying passenger. But also, when they're working, they're really working. There's no food bricks for hours on end. What used to happen was the scraps of food from the first and second class tables would be put into a sort of big dump a mix of food and they would eat it to keep their to keep their calories up so they'd send it down to the black gang but no they weren't allowed to see them no one was supposed to see these these beasts

and it's not just food breaks that men like Uncle Jimmy don't have time for. When you're on duty, there's no time to pop to the toilet either. They used to defecate on their shovels and shove it into the furnace. That's what they used to do. You know, it's not delicate. When you're doing family history, this isn't Brideshead Revisit. The Megane story isn't pedigree stuff, you know. But I love this kind of detail. While men like my great-uncle toil away on the lower decks, Titanic's richest passengers are living the high life.

For first class, for example, you had a swimming pool, indoor swimming pool, which was new for ships that hadn't been around before. You had the gym, you had squash courts, you had all sorts of leisure facilities. These people in first class were the super, super wealthy at the time, the Jeff Bezos of the time.

Many of them were the kind of wealth that we can't even imagine. Their lifestyles were palatial. Life on board Titanic for those few days seems to have been like a big party, definitely for the first class passengers. They were all sizing each other up to begin with. A lot of them were, you know, coming back from business trips from London back to New York. So, you know, there was a kind of pecking order even amongst the first classes as to, you know, who was the most important there. There was a lot of networking going on. For many travellers, Titanic is not just a booze cruise,

but a schmooze cruise. And the pecking order among the richest guests is a complex one. It wasn't that all these people were the same and they all came from the same club. They didn't. Any more than everyone in first class today on an airliner is someone you want to have to dinner next Thursday. First class on Titanic is dominated by wealthy Americans. Richest of all is John Jacob Astor IV,

a man whose family have topped the New York rich list for generations. His ancestor, the first John Jacob Astor, built his first fortune on fur, which was then a very important ingredient in fashion, and he made a very, very large sum of money. By the turn of the 20th century, the Astors have amassed a vast property empire, including the famous Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Fifth Avenue. John Jacob IV has grown up in the lap of luxury, but all the privilege in the world has done nothing to protect him from scandal. His mother had built this enormous palace for herself. So he was then living in a house, you know, not much smaller than Buckingham Palace, with a ballroom on the back.

And he had this tremendously socially active wife who was very good looking and a great leader and a clever woman. And everything was tickety-boo until he fell in love with his second wife, Madeleine, who was very much younger. She was about 18. And nobody could believe that he was going to divorce his very prominent and important wife for this sort of slip of a girl. That is exactly what he did. Shunned by New York society, Astor and his new wife have been lying low, taking an extended honeymoon across the pond. He's sort of gone to Europe for a while to kind of escape the press hostility.

And then they're actually finally decided that it's going to be safe to come back to New York, that they can come back and at least begin to get out from under the scandal that's been surrounding him with this young wife. One first-class passenger unfazed by the Astor's scandalous reputation is Margaret Brown, a woman who struck it rich much more recently when her husband developed a new technique to mine for gold. The so-called unsinkable Molly Brown will become the subject of a 1960 Broadway musical, so no prizes for guessing whether or not she survived the disaster. The unsinkable Molly Brown was quite a character. I mean, she wasn't at all well-received by American society. You know, they thought she was ghastly. But ghastly or not, she was unsinkable. And she got what she wanted, and she made her life for herself. And I think we love her for it.

On Sunday evening, the Astors are joined for dinner by Ida and Isidore Strauss, the elderly owners of Macy's department store. They've forsaken the sprawling first-class dining saloon for the more intimate à la carte restaurant. Just a few tables over, another top-drawer dinner party is in progress. This one has been scheduled to celebrate Captain Smith's upcoming retirement, and it's very much invitation only. The hosts for the evening are George Widener,

heir to the largest fortune in Philadelphia, and his socialite wife, Eleanor. And aside from their guest of honor, Captain Smith, they've been joined by the great and good of Titanic's first class. The Widener dinner party was attended by the Thayers, the Carters, President Taft's aide, Major Archibald Butt, and Clarence Moore, who was a traveling master of hounds that was well-known at the time. There are no menus that survive, so we don't know what they had to eat that night. But we do know that it was a very beautiful setting, as all of these restaurants were in

first class. Footing the bill for such a meal is quite an undertaking fortunately the wideners have deep pockets one thing of note about eleanor widener is that she had three necklaces with her on board the titanic which were worth seven hundred thousand dollars this is in 1912 not for nothing is captain smith known as the millionaire's captain. His years of service to the White Star Fleet have seen him mingle with some of the world's wealthiest people. And all of them seem to love him. He was the most experienced captain on the North Atlantic. He was quite a good looking man with a big rough sort of moustache, which was typical of captains of the time. And yet he spoke in very hushed, very calm tones.

He had sparkly blue eyes. And passengers loved him. They would change their passages to actually sail with him. He was urbane. He was sophisticated. He could talk about all the court cases of the day, you know, with the wealthiest people of the day. I think he was a very congenial figure. I think he was good fun and chatty and he rotated the first class passengers around. So he got to know them all and he sat with them all and he was very pleasant. But of course,

his job was to sail the ship. His job was not to keep the passengers happy any more than it would be to load the lifeboat. That wasn't what he was there for. He was there to sail the ship. Wagovi. Wagovi? Yeah. Wagovi. What about it? On second thought, I might not be the right person to tell you. Oh, you're not? No. Just ask your doctor. About Wagovi? Yeah. Ask for it by name. Okay. So why did you bring me to this circus? Oh, I'm really into lion tamers.

You know, with the chair and everything. Ask your doctor for Wagovi by name. Visit wagovi.ca for savings. Exclusions may apply. A little before 9pm on Sunday, Captain Smith does return to the bridge, but not for long. He has a brief conversation with Officer of the Watch Charles Lightoller. Lightoller is an experienced sailor with quite the personal history. He's been shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean, worked as a cowboy in Canada, even walked the American railroads as a hobo. He's a hard nut, but also an extremely competent officer.

By now, the air on Titanic's bridge, which is open to the elements on both sides, has dropped to just one degree above freezing. And that's not the only thing that's happened while Captain Smith was dining with the wideners. Telegraph operator Harold Bride has received yet another iceberg warning, the sixth of the day so far. This one is from Captain Lord of the Californian. Three large bergs, five miles southward of us. Titanic's lookouts haven't spotted any icebergs, but in these conditions they aren't always easy to make out. It's a still, cold night. No wind. That means no

ripples at the base of the bergs, one of the usual giveaways. Lightoller doesn't like it. He tells Captain Smith as much. But Smith seems relatively unconcerned. If it becomes at all doubtful, let me know at once, he tells his second officer. I'll be just inside. He then retreats to his cabin, leaving Lightoller in charge on the bridge. There was talk that Captain Smith may have been drunk at the time that Titanic hit the iceberg.

Well, he was in his cabin, he was retired. Why? I don't believe for one moment that he was drunk. He will have had a drink with the passengers, there's no doubt about it. Maybe had a couple of drinks. But one might say the commander of the ship is always in command even when he's off duty. That was one of the stipulations

in the White Star Line handbook that sobriety must be maintained at all times by all members of the crew, especially the captain. They had to be congenial with the passengers and it would be very rude of the captain to refuse to drink with them, I guess. But exactly how much, whether it would influence the captain's decision-making at sea, I think

any captain worth his salt would have avoided putting himself in that situation. Knowing what we do now, it's hard not to question Captain Smith's judgment. But by the standards of 1912, it's unclear whether he actually does anything wrong on Sunday evening. In hindsight, you'd say they should have stopped it on the night. They didn't. If they had, then obviously it would have been a totally different story. But I think he just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. It's hard to point to anything that Captain Smith does or doesn't do that is radically different from any other captain at the time. You know, if something's

working against him, right, it's his long experience. Experience can be a great thing. It can, you know, teach us all kinds of things about what to do and what not to do. In his case, I think it did breed a certain complacency, right? That he'd always done things in this way and he was going to continue to do them this way. But I don't think a younger captain probably would have behaved particularly differently. I think what he does is very standard practice of the time. So it's that standard practice we probably need to criticize and not anything that Smith does or doesn't do. Every action I undertook was within the guidelines

of the White Star Line. The rule was that if a ship was in the vicinity of ice, it should proceed at its normal speed or maybe even increased speed to get out of that area as quickly as possible. Having signed off for the night, Captain Smith is relaxing in his cabin, just metres away from the bridge. Meanwhile, down below, a number of lively events are taking place.

There's an Irish party in the third-class dining room on Eftek, a number of lively events are taking place. There's an Irish party in the third-class dining room on Eftek, with music courtesy of pipe player Eugene Daly. And two floors above, a more sombre gathering. The second-class dining room is playing host to a hymn service, organised by Reverend Ernest Carter. It is Sunday after all. Nearly a hundred passengers came to the service and sang and what was really ironic is the songs that they ended up singing were almost in hindsight telling of what they would experience later that night. Probably the most coincidental is

for those in peril on the sea. Eternal father strong to save, whose arm hath bound the restless wave, who bids in the mighty ocean deep, its own appointed limits keep. O hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea. All of these songs, as you look back on that hymn service, and the fact that it was within a few hours of what they were going to experience was

really remarkable. Though nobody has seen one yet, Titanic has been sailing To be continued... tail mineral odour that signals a berg is nearby. First class passenger Elisabeth Schuetz has noticed it too. She remembers the sinister aroma from a visit to the Eiger glacier in Switzerland. By now the temperature on deck has dropped below freezing. There are ice crystals forming on the portholes of empty, unheated cabins, as well as around the lamps at the front of the ship. The effect is strangely beautiful. Quartermaster Road said you could see whiskers around the light,

which means little ice crystals floating in the still air, which made beautiful rainbows around all of Titanic's deck lights. Another point while we're talking about the incredible beauty and majesty of that night is that there was a lot of phosphorescence in the water. So as Titanic plowed on to her destiny, if you like, on this black ocean that was absolutely calm, there was a green V shape, almost like geese flying, if you like, but a green V coming out from her bow. At 9.52pm, Titanic's wireless room receives another warning. It's from a freighter, the SS Masaba.

Soar much heavy pack ice and a great number large icebergs. Wireless operator Jack Phillips is too busy to take it to the bridge. He's still trying to clear his backlog of passengers' messages. He puts it under a paperweight to deal with later. At 10pm the pipe party down in Steerage wraps up. The stewards arrive to turn off the lights. Most of the third-class passengers go to bed. In first class, meanwhile, lights out won't come for another hour and a half.

Actress Dorothy Gibson is in the reading and writing room on A-Deck, enjoying a game of bridge with her mother and a couple of New York bankers. At ten past eleven, Jack Phillips receives another message on the wireless. It's the Californian again, the same ship that issued an iceberg warning two hours ago. Now the Californian's captain, Stanley Lord, has been forced to stop for the night. His path is blocked by an impassable ice field. But when Lord's wireless operator Cyril Evans tries to communicate this to Titanic, he receives short shrift from Phillips. Titanic's chief Marconi operator has recently established communication with the shore station at Cape Race in Newfoundland.

He has the volume on his headset turned up to the maximum. They had just been able to make contact with America for the first time since leaving Europe, 400 miles away, and it was very faint. So then when this ship, the Californian, comes in, hey, I'm stopped in ice, it blasts Phillips' ears off. Annoyed, Phillips taps back a reply. He says, K-O-O-M. And what that means is keep out, old man. So it's been translated in modern parlance to be shut up, but it wasn't.

It was banter between two young people. He didn't know the importance of the message. It brassed his ears off. And in the haste of the moment, he just said, keep out, old man. K-O-O-M. Suitably chastened, Evans does as he's told. Twenty minutes later, he shuts down his machine for the night and goes to bed. The Californian's final message never makes it to Titanic's bridge.

It lacks the emergency MSG prefix, so Philip sees no need to pass it on. He goes back to his own passenger's messages instead. Get to Toronto's main venues like Budweiser Stage and the new Rogers Stadium with Go Transit. Thanks to Go Transit's special online e-ticket fares, a $10 one-day weekend pass offers unlimited travel on any weekend day or holiday anywhere along the Go network. And the weekday group passes offer the same weekday travel flexibility across the network, starting at $30 for two people and up to $60 for a group of five. Buy your online Go Pass ahead of the show at gotransit.com slash tickets. We tend to think of Titanic as hitting a random rogue iceberg. In fact, she's sailing through a sea of them, and they're creating an unusual microclimate.

There were about 200 icebergs in a giant circle, 360 degrees around Titanic, when she sank. And a lot of the birds were more than 200 feet high. So what you have to imagine is any warmer air is just blowing over the top of all these birds. And inside, you've got this little microcosm of a mill pond that's freezing with still air. And of course, this barrier of ice all

the way around really protected the environment titanic curator klaus joran vetterholm the ocean that night was so absolute still there were no clouds no nothing no waves breaking against the iceberg summit you could hardly see where the ocean ended and the sky started. It was as if the nature had prepared this big drama with an enormous ocean liner as if it was floating over glass and then meeting its enemy. Even though there was no moon, the stars were extraordinarily bright. People said that you could read your watch by the starlight. You could see the whole Milky Way.

Someone said there were more points of light than there was black between them. And actually, not only could Titanic's funnels be seen when her lights went out, silhouetted against the stars, but even her masts, her thin masts all the way up, could actually be seen as blocking out stars. It was a night almost where you're looking at the universe. Beautiful it may be, but these strange conditions are also highly dangerous.

And at the time of Titanic's maiden voyage, they're poorly understood. In fact, it's not until relatively recently that experts have managed to piece together an exact account of what happened, atmospherically speaking, on the 14th of April 1912. An account that helps explain what caused the sinking of Titanic. So far in this series, we've followed the famous ship all the way from Belfast via Southampton, Cherbourg and Queenstown, and most of the way across the Atlantic Ocean. But now, we need to consider the movement of the iceberg as well, because it too has been on a journey. There had been quite a warm winter in the Arctic in 1911 and a lot of ice had come out of Bathin Bay and was actually sort of marooned if you like along the shore around Newfoundland. And then what

happened was there was quite a high tide and what happened was that the high tide lifted all the icebergs and then they suddenly floated in a giant rush down the Labrador Current. The Labrador Current flows down the east coast of Canada and out to sea, where it meets the warmer Gulf Stream. So what happened was the cold water flowed a bit like a cold snake wriggling over the hot desert floor. That's how the Labrador current that was freezing flowed over or into the Gulf Stream, but without mixing. When you get very, very cold water of the type I've been describing,

you get the opposite of a desert mirage. So in the desert, the surface is very hot and light travels faster along the surface and slower in the colder air, slightly higher up. And that causes the light beam to bend upwards. And what that means is it brings a sliver of the sky, bends it down and sort of paints it on the ground in front of you. And then it's your brain that actually thinks it's water the exact same things happens but in reverse when it's very very cold on the

surface so what happened is as you get into this very very cold labrador current area the light instead of bending upwards and showing you the sky, it bends downwards around the curvature of the Earth and shows you a bit more beyond the horizon. It has the effect of raising the horizon slightly. What they started to see when they got into the Labrador current was a very thin layer of what looked like haze, a band of haze all around the horizon. It had the effect of camouflaging the iceberg. And so this little band of haze all around the horizon just meant they probably picked up the berg, I don't know, 15 seconds, 20 seconds later

than they would otherwise have done. It's not much, but those few seconds could be enough to make all the difference. At 11.39 on Sunday evening, all is quiet on RMS Titanic. Captain Smith is asleep in his cabin, as are most of the passengers on board. On the bridge, First Officer Murdockch is taken over from Lightoller. So far, it's been an uneventful watch. But then, suddenly, a harsh sound pierces the cold night air. Three dings from the bell in the crow's nest, as clear as day.

Murdock's blood runs cold. He knows what that signal means. The lookouts have sighted an obstacle, dead ahead. In the next episode, Murdoch takes evasive action, attempting to swerve around the iceberg. As Titanic sustains multiple hull breaches, water starts flooding in. And the ship's two Marconi operators broadcast their first ever SOS. That's next time. You can listen to the next two episodes of Titanic Ship of Dreams right now, without waiting, by subscribing to Noisa Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description to find out more.