It’s not certain that the iceberg photographed is actually the one that the Titanic struck. In any case, it’s unlikely they’d have been able to find it again in the dark. It was a moonless night with very low visibility, hence the failure to spot it in time to avoid the collision.
According to a BBC documentary I saw a week ago they only lost two out of five boiler rooms to flooding, so they could still make headway. Indeed, Cpt. Smith ordered ahead slow a few minutes after the collision, although I cannot remember the reason for this. When the ahead slow was given, water started rushing into boiler room no. 5 more rapidly (this was the critical fifth compartment, if they could keep the water at bay there, they stood a chance), and the order for full stop was soon given. After this Titanic did not attempt to move again.
It wasn’t a joke: If the post I was responding to had said “The Californian” I might have recognised it as the name of the nearest ship, but “the California” didn’t ring any bells and I assumed it was a garbled reference to the state.
The actual iceberg the Titanic struck looks a good deal worse in that respect.
If I were you, I would have said it was a joke. Just sayin.
This is the key thing that makes a “lets offload onto the iceberg”, the most absurd suggestion.
If you’re the captain of the Titanic, who’s just had his ship crippled by hitting an iceberg, why in the world would you ever even contemplate going anywhere near another one? And similarly with any rescue ships, why would they place their ship, and their own passengers, in danger by going anywhere near the iceberg?
Has a ship ever unloaded it’s passengers on an iceberg when in danger of sinking?
Any rescue ship could just take the survivors off with their own lifeboats or other light craft. The Iceberg wrecked the Titanic because the Titanic was a heavy ship going twenty knots. If an oar powered lifeboat hit some undersea ice, its just going to bounce off.
As to getting the Titanic close enough to unload in the first place, I’m not convinced that’s as big a problem as people are making it out to be either. Note when looking for the original iceberg, two ships managed to find two different icebergs that had signs of an impact above the waterline. This suggests that in two seperate cases ships were able to get their above waterline structure close enough to the ice to touch. And that’s just in the general area of the Titanic collision. Icebergs get wider under the waterline, but I don’t think they “flare out” as rapidly as some people seem to be picturing.
Difficulty finding the iceberg again seems a little more likely. But if they’d only gone forward for five minutes or so after the impact as abel29a suggests, I wouldn’t think it would be that hard.
Why would you abandon an unsinkable ship?
Aren’t icebergs slippery?
If only they had a real expert aboard, someone who could get in really close, steering by eye and instinct, to that iceberg to unload people == someone like Francesco Schettino.
Unless the OP wishes to claim it, I hereby call rights to the blog name Evacuate to the Iceberg.
How do you climb up an iceberg? It’s made of ice.
Look people, what if the iceberg is then sunk by an even bigger ship? Where does it all end?
Many of the passengers on the sinking Titanic didn’t even want to get into the lifeboats, how could you possibly convince them to get onto the damned iceberg?
Not necessarily. You don’t have to get close enough to touch an iceberg to see marks from an impact on it. Especially not if you have binoculars. This picture, which may be of the iceberg that the Titanic hit, was clearly not taken by someone touching the above-water part of the iceberg. The iceberg got the photographer’s attention because it had a smear of red paint on it. I’d bet a smear of red paint on a white iceberg would be visible from some distance away.
If that was the iceberg that sank the Titanic, it doesn’t look like it would be easy to climb onto. There don’t appear to be nice flat areas near the water line. You’d probably need specialized gear for climbing on ice. Why would anyone on the Titanic have such gear ready at hand when they needed to evacuate the ship?
I’m going to go with “because the Titanic wasn’t carrying any pitons and everyone who boarded the iceberg would have fallen off and drowned.”
The iceberg probably didn’t come out of the collision with the Titanic unscathed. Damage from the collision could have caused part of the iceberg to fall off, possibly some time after the collision. Cracks can propagate through ice, so it’s not necessarily just the part near where the Titanic hit that is going to be in danger.
When pieces do fall off of icebergs or ice shelves, they can make a big splash when they fall into the water. This would create large and unpredictable waves, making it even more dangerous than usual to get close to the iceberg in a ship or lifeboat. You really wouldn’t want to get a ship near an iceberg that has recently been in a collision, making it possibly unstable.
Icebergs can even flip over. This might even be more likely to happen to a recently damaged iceberg. It would, of course, kill anyone who was on the iceberg at the time. Not only that, it would create large, chaotic waves that would pose a danger to any ship near the iceberg at the time.
It would not matter. By all accounts even if they had twice as many life boats they needed a shit load of people would have died. The crew did not take the evac seriously until it was to late. Their were to many conflicting orders. Their was only 1 drill the whole way and everyone thought it was a joke. Long story short the crew was really not all that good at their job and resulted in many people dieing. They did not even know how to lower some of the boats correctly nor knew their capiactiy.
And, as an added bonus, in addition to sinking an unsinkable ship, they could have set the record for the amount of times a ship crashed into the same iceberg in the one night.