The californian was only ten miles away from Titanic, and they have seen the rocket and other signals too. Don't they understand something wrong is happening? And they were the one when send ice warning signal to Titanic at the first place. At least, they should have slightest sense about what Titanic may go through. Why they did not help?

-- april cheng (aprilcheng@hotmail.com), February 21, 1998

Answers

April: Yours is a question that has been asked since 1912 and there has been much speculation and reprocussions because of the Californians failure to respond to what they saw and heard. I won't go in to all of that here, but I will give you my own opinion. I believe that their failure to react in some way, any way, to the rockets that the lookouts observed being fired from the ship they saw was inexcusable. A vessel at sea does not fire rockets for no reason. Not in 1912, and not now! There are a lot of "sticking points" on the whole Californian incident but the above is just my own opinion.

Regards, Peter

-- Peter Nivling (pcnivling@capecod.net), February 21, 1998.

What goes on in someone's head is often a difficult thing to know, so understanding *why* Captain Lord didn't do the right thing when the Titanic sent up rockets will always be something of a mystery. He never admitted guilt, so we have no "confession" or explanation to help us. I think the best we can do is blame his actions on inertia and caution. There was danger to his ship, there in the ice field, he didn't *know* that there was another ship sinking, and as long as he didn't know that he could rationalize to himself that everything was o.k.

Certainly there was no conscious effort to let people die; if he had sat down for a moment and thought about the situtation clearly (ice field, big ship suddenly coming to a stop, white rockets being fired) he probably would have figured out that something was wrong. He chose not to know, an terrible error that has done great damage throughout history. Beyond that, there isn't much that can be said about "why".

-- Thomas Shoebotham (cathytom@ix.netcom.com), February 21, 1998.

Thomas: I agree that we don't know what was going on in the mind of Captain Lord at the time, and I do not exclusively blame him for the inaction of the ship. However, with all the talk amongst the lookouts as to what they were observing at the time, someone should have done something other than to just report to a half-asleep Captain as to what they observed. If the Captain was not available at the time, then a second in command should have been. If there was no second in command, then shame on them. To stand there and watch all of this going on and not seriously question it is absolutely beyond me. On any vessel at any time at sea, anything out of the ordinary demands attention and this, to me, is where they failed in a huge way. Just my opinion, but I have had it for many years.

Regards, Peter

-- Peter Nivling (pcnivling@capecod.net), February 21, 1998.

The california's radio was off and the Titanic had white rockets insted of red. The carpathia thought there was no distress.

-- Tommy Lynskey (tmt1219@aol.com), August 14, 2003.