For years there have been movies and books debating what really happened to the Titanic. Why did it really sink? This is simply another one, but one apparently done from the book of a survivor whose name isn't even in the passenger list. There are so many theories. One documentary even claimed evidence that the Titanic's sister ship was the one that actually went down. The Olympic was docked right next to where the Titanic was being finished and some speculate that the White Star Line wanted to let it sink under Titanic's name so they could get the insurance on a new ship since the Olympic had already been in two accidents. Personally I don't believe that anymore than I believe these theories. With that one they described the differences in the ships and I studied the two ships including the real footage of the Titanic taking off that begins James Cameron's famous films. I compared that to pictures and descriptions of the Olympic and other pictures of Titanic and I find it's highly unlikely. There were a terrible, tragic series of events that happened to bring Titanic down. Personally I think we can all look at the conspiracy theories till pigs fly but we won't know the real truth in this lifetime. The ship lies on the ocean floor and is disintegrating every day. Personally I believe that's where we'll find the true story. The only place that can show us what was wrong is with the ship itself and it doesn't change in the telling. The major problem however is how can researchers truly come to a conclusion based on a few facts that change in the telling and a ship they can barely access that is disintegrating day by day. There are a few things that do seem to be consistent, the lookouts had lost their binoculars, the water was crystal clear which meant that it wouldn't be splashing against an iceberg to warn them further in advance of the iceberg's location. In many versions there seem to have been some strange goings on with the distress flares. It's true that the crew would know better what color of flare to shoot, but that doesn't mean that the many eye witness accounts were wrong about what colors they were actually seeing. That's another thing that is consistent; the color of the flares that the people saw, whether they were the correct colors or not that doesn't change what people saw. Also the wire lines were clogged and the man on the nearby Californian had gone to bed for the night and did not get the distress signal from the Titanic. Many ships that did get it, thought it was a joke because Titanic was unsinkable. And even if Titanic hit an iceberg none of them thought she'd go down so fast that she'd be gone before help arrived. Also, at that time, there was some confusion in the actual distress signal. For years it had bed CQD, at the time that Titanic went down they were in the middle of changing the distress signal to the still used, S. O. S. Titanic, if I remember correctly, was actually putting out both just in case. There were far too few lifeboats and no drills on how to handle a calamity. One thing that they absolutely should have done that many other ships had already done, including the Californian, is that Titanic should have stopped for the night. They had so many iceberg warnings, a very clear sea that made icebergs harder to see, but instead of following the example of others, in their hubris, they sped up. Thankfully because of this tragedy every ship that goes out now has to have enough lifeboats and they have to do drills on how to get into those lifeboats in case of an emergency so that there won't be the chaos that went on that night when people finally realized that they really were going down. I can't say that I know much about the fires that were already going on in the boiler room. I'm woefully ignorant on such things but it makes sense to me that they may have been deliberately set in order to get the large ocean liner started warming up and getting the fuel working before hand. I don't know, I'm not an expert but I know that it took a bit to get the older cars started and Titanic was the biggest ship of her day. It's just a thought and probably completely wrong.
If you want to read a really good and accurate first hand witness account of the sinking of the Titanic, read Colonel Archibald Gracie's account, rather than relying on one given years later by someone who wasn't even on the ship's list. Colonel Gracie wrote his as soon as he reached home while it was fresh in his mind. He went through all views of the sinking. He helped load the lifeboats with 2nd Officer Lighttoller and helped get down the ones that were upside down. Then when the ship was really going down and they hadn't gotten the last lifeboat that they'd cut loose right side up, he and Lighttoller clung to the bottom of it with others until he was finally rescued by another lifeboat after he watched from a relatively close vantage point the Titanic actually go down. He died 8 months later from complications of hypothermia and diabetes and he was still so upset by the sinking that his last words were, "get them on the boats. Get them on the boats." He was a historian and a great reader and loved to tell everyone about history so his book is extremely detailed, and you can actually be certain that he was on the Titanic and that he watched it go down.
