I thought that it was the foggy conditions that prevented them form seeing far enough ahead, with or without binoculars. Because they were going too fast to see far enough ahead.
But I’m surprised that any binoculars were actually found in the crows nest. I would have thought that they would have fallen out when the ship was sinking the 5 miles or so to the bottom. As I recall from the photos, the mast & crows nest is broken, and laying across the deck at the front of the ship. Surely they would have fallen out when it hit bottom, if not before. I suppose they could have been attached with a rope or something, but that must have rotted away by now.
The British inquiry regarding the sinking of the RMS Titanic attributed the collision with an iceberg was due solely to excessive speed.
The collision was recorded as happening at 11:40 pm on a flat calm sea, with clear visibility.
I seem to recall that the flat seas and low profile of the iceberg meant that is was difficult to spot (no waves crashing at the base and no silhouette against the sky) and the excessive speed and sluggish steering did the rest.
IIRC, the problem was that it was too dark to see very far.
I’m dubious that binoculars would have been found in the crows nest. As t-bonham@scc.net says, anything loose would have fallen out during the sinking.
Yea, it seems to be a pretty flat one. See a photo of it here, taken a couple days later. Paint scraped off the side of the Titanic is still visible on the iceberg. It seems like the iceberg would have barely come up to the railing on the deck of the Titanic.
I think that you’re absolutely correct about the ‘flat seas’=‘no waves crashing’ part, the lack of a visible moon probably contributed to the accident also, as far as visibility is concerned. But in the end, IMHO the excessive speed was the main cause of the accident.
Check my link. The photograph of the iceberg that was presumed to have been the one that was hit by the Titanic, doesn’t look to be all that low of a profile.
t-bonhamalso said,
.
FWIW, I’m wondering if there might have been a “pocket” or cubbyhole of some sort, specifically for the storage of a pair of binoculars?
(And on that note, why are binoculars referred to as a pair of binoculars?)
The crows nest looked like it needed a pretty good ‘climb’ to get there. I would think that making that climb with a pair of binoculars hanging from one’s neck wouldn’t be all that desirable. The ‘crow’s nest’ is for looking into the distance, as far as possible or necessary. Seems to me, you would want to insure that an aid to do so is always handy. Common sense and simple logic would dictate (to me) keeping the binoculars where you need them to be, would it not? WHY take them down, if someone else is just going to have to bring them BACK UP?!
WOW! That doesn’t look anything like the pic in the WIKI article.
I guess it’s possible the iceberg ‘rolled’ sometime during the interval between pictures.
If you google Titanic and binoculars, you can find a ton of stories claiming the lookouts didn’t have them, and that lack contributed to the collision. So I would agree with the OP – this is a pretty big mystery.
<hijack>
As an aside, in English, we use the word ‘pair’ quite unusually.
Pair of glasses, pair of pants, pair of binoculars.
But not pair of bras.
</hijack>
I agree. This is intriguing. I must assume that the binoculars were in some pouch or framework attached to the crow’s nest and that they stayed in place even when the ship went down.
Assuming, of course, that this isn’t all silliness.
Here’s an account of recovery of a pair of binoculars from the Titanic. There’s nothing in it about them being in the crow’s nest; they were recovered from near the bow section and the article suggests they had been on the bridge. It’s likely that the reference to the crow’s nest was just an assumption on the part of whoever wrote the copy.
