I was just watching Titanic tonight for the 3rd time. My question to everyone here is this: If there were limited # of lifeboats, why not just make a makeshift boat from all the wood on the ship. There were plenty of wooden deck chairs, and chaise lounges that I saw that could have been used. Also, there was an ax which appeared in the movie to free Jack from his cuffs. The ax could have been used to free some more wood from the doors, wall, deck, whereever. Has anyone ever thought about this?
At the time the movie came out, there was a newspaper article about a group of students in the US who had analyzed this, and found that if all the doors and other things on board were used, and the lifeboats fully occupied (which they were not), many more people could have survived. The myth that the ship was unsinkable led to more deaths than were necessary.
One major problem is that cold North Atlantic water will just kill you on its own in short order. It would be easy to put together things to let people float but that doesn’t do much good when they are going to die from hypothermia within an hour anyway. Building something that could actually hold one or two people above water would be much harder. Building something that won’t capsize when hundreds of drowning people start trying to claw their way on it is near impossible. All this ignores the uncertainty they had about what was happening, the pandemonium around them, and listing boat.
If you built something like that, how would you get yourself and the makeshift raft into the water? The life rafts had their own pulleys. You wouldn’t have something like that for your raft. You would have to drop it overboard and then jump in after it. Assuming that you built something that could withstand the that, your jump into the icy water would probably bring you most of the way to death on its own. If you waited until the ship was fully capsized like in the movie, how are you going to keep your raft intact during the violent end?