She said the error was quickly discovered, but not quickly enough to avert the collision. After the iceberg was spotted, the command was issued to turn "hard a starboard," but as the command was passed down the line, it was misinterpreted as meaning "make the ship turn right" rather than "push the tiller right to make the ship head left," Patten said. The steersman took a wrong turn: Did the Titanic's steersman turn the ship toward the iceberg, dooming the ship? That's the claim made in 2010 by Louise Patten, who said the story was passed down from her grandfather, the most senior ship officer to survive the disaster. Some historians have speculated that the fatal iceberg might have been spotted earlier if the binoculars were in use, but others say it wouldn't have made a difference. The binoculars were locked up: Corfield also says binoculars that could have been used by lookouts on the night of the collision were locked up aboard the ship - and the key was held by David Blair, an officer who was bumped from the crew before the ship's departure from Southampton. "Phillips interpreted it as non-urgent and returned to sending passenger messages to the receiver on shore at Cape Race, Newfoundland, before it went out of range," Corfield writes. That would have required a personal acknowledgment from the captain. Iceberg warnings went unheeded: The Titanic received multiple warnings about icefields in the North Atlantic over the wireless, but Corfield notes that the last and most specific warning was not passed along by senior radio operator Jack Phillips to Captain Smith, apparently because it didn't carry the prefix "MSG" (Masters' Service Gram). "Simply put, Titanic was traveling way too fast in an area known to contain ice that's the bottom line," says Mark Nichol, webmaster for the Titanic and Other White Star Ships website. For some, the fact that the Titanic was sailing full speed ahead despite concerns about icebergs was Smith's biggest misstep. Smith, was aiming to better the crossing time of the Olympic, the Titanic's older sibling in the White Star fleet. The ship was going too fast: Many Titanicologists have said that the ship's captain, Edward J. They speculated that the tides could have dislodged icebergs that were stuck in the Labrador Sea, sending more of them toward the waters traversed by the Titanic a couple of months later. Tides sent icebergs southward: Last month, astronomers at Texas State University at San Marcos noted that the sun, the moon and Earth were aligned in such a way that could have led to unusually high tides in January 1912. "Oceanographically, the upshot of that was that icebergs, sea ice and growlers were concentrated in the very position where the collision happened," Norris said. Here are nine other suggested circumstances from Corfield's article and other sources:Ĭlimate caused more icebergs: Weather conditions in the North Atlantic were particularly conducive for corralling icebergs at the intersection of the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream, due to warmer-than-usual waters in the Gulf Stream, Richard Norris of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography told Physics World. The iceberg that the Titanic struck on its way from Southampton to New York is No.
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