April 14th, 1912 - 9:20pm ~ Captain Smith retires to his room after checking in on the bridge. At 9.40pm, the Titanic receives its final ice warning from the SS Mesaba. This warning never reached the bridge.
Lord, give me the unearned yet overwhelming confidence of Charles "the sea isn't wet enough to drown me" Lightoller 🤣
After watching Cameron's Titanic, and the 2012 Titanic mini series, I really want You're Wrong About to do a Titanic episode. Because there's SO much material there to explore, especially when it comes to questions of "who was to blame" and "what could/should have been done differently."
Fictionalized dramatizations love to lay blame at the feet of J. Bruce Ismay while martyrizing Thomas Andrews. I think this is in large part because Ismay survived to take the blame, while Andrews went down with the ship. But eyewitness testimony supports the idea that Ismay helped to prepare and load lifeboats for an hour before stepping into a lifeboat, and that he waited to be sure no more women were nearby before getting in the boat. There's no real evidence he pushed his way onto a lifeboat or acted out of cowardice. There's also no documented evidence that he encouraged a reluctant Captain Smith to raise the ship's speed in an effort to reach New York early.
There's also no documented evidence that anybody was shot during the evacuation, despite what's portrayed in the 1997 film. Eyewitness testimony claims that an officer (probably 5th Officer Lowe) fired warning shots into the air to prevent people from jumping into a full boat from the deck and possibly capsizing it.
2nd Officer Charles Lightoller is often maligned for his "women and children only" interpretation of evacuation procedures. This seems wrong to our 2023 sensibilities, but we forget the extremely strict gender mores of Edwardian Englandd. And the fact that after being washed off of the sinking ship along with a capsized Collapsible B, he saved the lives of almost 30 men by pulling them onto the boat and organizing them to keep the boat afloat until rescue. After the boat was full he spent much of the night standing on the most narrow part of the boat, in frozen clothes, to keep it from capsizing.
One last thing I'll touch on is the claim that more lifeboats on the ship would have equaled more lives saved. It's true that the ship only carried enough lifeboats for half of the passengers on board, but it's unlikely there would have been time to launch more than 20 boats before the ship went down. As it is the last 2 collapsible boats weren't launched, but were washed off the boat deck as the ship foundered, one of them upside down.
I think that we, as humans, have a strong desire for every story to have clear heroes and villains, and we have a hard time accepting that people aren't basically good or bad, but that they're basically people. That individuals can do their best with the information they have in the moment, and it won't really matter, and there's no individual action that could have stopped the tragedy from happening or changed the outcome. People are complex, and tragedies are multifaceted, and there weren't any Cal Hockleys aboard the real Titanic.
it obviously makes sense, but one of my friend’s kids is going into swim class, and all the parents got an email today going, “when little ones are scared, they cling on to instructors. PLEASE trim their nails.”
i don’t know why that’s so funny to me, but just. the idea of this poor, scratched swim instructor having to make sure to email before each class as a reminder to please declaw the children SENT me.
When I taught swim lessons I remember trying to delicately ask parents not to cover their child in shea/coconut/olive oil before lessons.
“I understand your skincare regimen and wanting to protect their tender baby flesh from the pool chemicals, but COULD YOU NOT OIL YOUR CHILD LIKE A GREASED PIG before tossing them in the POOL? Thanks EVER so much!”
@nakimochiku i CACKLED
Lightoller really be like “Luggage?? In this lifeboat?? I think not”
Why do I care so much more about the officers, who had a combined total of maybe 15 minutes of screentime in a 3 hour movie, than I do about Jack and Rose 🤣🤣🤣
I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a flat calm.
oh uh. scuse me. just a lil snail crossing your dash
I love how certain I am that I’m not the only person who stopped scrolling to let the snail finish crossing the dash.
In fact, I would bet small sums of money that the majority of Tumblr folk do.
Rb for the lil hops it does at the end before it finishes crossing 🥺💓
holding my own face in my own hands and screaming “there is no connection without an open heart! you must be brave! you must be honest! you must be true!” in the mirror
when you have to defend your faves-
A Night To Remember (1958) dir. Roy Ward Baker | Titanic (1997) dir. James Cameron
(aka James Cameron paying homage to the film that is said to have inspired him to make a Titanic film of his own)
I've just remembered how frustratingly close the SS Californians crew were to saving the RMS Titanics passengers and crew but they just couldn't peice together what exactly was going on with that strange light in the distance
And I understand that it's late, the rockets the Titanic were firing weren't in maratime timing and that you have to cut them some slack but HOT DAMN. THEY WERE FRUSTRATINGLY STUPID THAT NIGHT
Picture this, your on a boat and you see another light in the distance (presumably another ship considering how it's moving) halt for some reason in an ICE FIELD and it starts sending out DISTRESS ROCKETS as the light slowly gets dimmer. You think they would have BOTHERED to wake up the wireless operator by then bUT WHAT DID THE CALIFORNIAN CREW DO
"duHHhh itS pRoBabLy nUffIn"
I’ve doing a lot of reading about the real Charles Lightoller. Apparently he had a very sarcastic sense of humor, played a lot of practical jokes and was often known by his shipmates to be immature. When he was young, he carried a banjo across the Yukon while prospecting for gold, and was known to play it loudly and badly. And you know, I can see it in his face. He looks serious, but also like he laughs a lot (this is a real photo of him, I just ran it through an app that enhances old photos so you can see the faces better).
"If you go back to the genesis of where that came from, it goes back to William Randolph Hearst, the big newspaper magnate in the US. He and Ismay had fallen out years before over Ismay not cooperating with the press with regard to an accident that happened to a White Star Line ship." - James Lowden-Brown
