The era (and White Star Lines) did not encourage employee thinking “out of the box.”
Given that the Captain and crew did not at the time even have the imagination and initiative to try to create makeshift floats for the passengers and crew that could not bet accommodated by the lifeboats, I really question if something as even more radical as using the iceberg as a lifeboat would have ever crossed their collective minds.
The case of the Titanic is one of the better examples of Murphy’s Law in action: If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.
The captain of the Titanic did not act in a quick and decisive manner after the collision with the iceberg. It had to be suggested to him by his second officer to start loading the lifeboats. He wasn’t going to think of something unprecedented like using the iceberg as a lifeboat, or quickly figure out what would need to be done if someone else had suggested it and he had agreed.
It’s easy for us now, on terra firma, to think of things the crew should have done on the Titanic. If most of us were actually on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg, we probably wouldn’t do as well at thinking up solutions. People tend to panic in situations like that, and panic does not generally improve people’s thought processes.
At sea, in the dark, with a damaged ocean liner taking on water.
Now add to that image the stark and bleak reality of what darkness at sea is really like. You cannot see.
Turning around to find an iceberg in the dark isn’t an option, because it is dark and you can’t see it until you are on top of it, even if you were lucky enough to cross its path by chance. The irony here is thick. Every conclusion people are jumping to after this issues (too dark) is moot.
When you see absolute darkness at sea, you won’t ask the OP’s question.
It’s not only the panic the passengers had - it was that belief that technology could not go wrong. There was no planning for “worst case” or thinking outside the box, because “was nicht sein darf, das nicht sein kann” (What is not allowed to happen, can not happen).
And that lesson wasn’t learned as thoroughly as necessary no matter how often the Titanic disaster is invoked for this kind of thinking - and usually after a big piece of technology fails in a spectacular way “nobody” could have foreseen. When it started, everybody was sure how safe it was, technology top of the line, the latest and bestest in safety. Any critics are just backwards technophobes. Until the skyscraper collapses, the nuclear plant blows up, the plane crashes …
And then a few platitudes about learning our lesson are made (maybe) or how it was a one-in-a-million chance of a chain of mistakes (it’s always a chain because we eliminate catastrophic single mistakes, but can’t eliminate small mistakes. And because everybody knows things are double-and triple safe, nobody takes the small stuff seriously anymore, until it forms a chain …)
And five years later, the next technological marvel comes along, and the next disaster waits to cross from “impossible to imagine, will never happen in a million years” into the realm of “holy shit how could that happen?”
They thought the Titanic was so safe, they didn’t even need to really plan for getting everybody into the lifeboats. They did one cursory lifeboat drill while the ship was docked. They canceled a lifeboat drill that was scheduled for the morning before the ship sank. They were not doing any kind of serious disaster planning.
They would definitely not have been thinking of stuff like using an iceberg as a lifeboat before they hit the iceberg, since they weren’t even thinking much about a normal evacuation. If anyone had brought up anything like that before they hit the iceberg, they would have thought that person was crazy to be worrying about the Titanic hitting an iceberg and sinking. They would have called it the 1912 equivalent of tin-foil-hattery (whatever that was). And it would be hard to come up with and implement a plan like that in only two hours.
In layman’s terms, even a ship like Titanic could pay out the entirety of the anchor chain and with relative ease disconnect it / them from the ship, if it was desired to discard them. Of course, I do not know the exact location of the chain lockers, nor the accessibility of the ‘bitter pins’ when the ship was bow down from flooding. Such an action may have been possible only for a short time at the beginning of the emergency.
As an earlier poster noted, thinking outside the box was not the done thing in 1912. (Even Picasso was still a Cubist then. :))
Good seamanship would have demanded taking evasive action at sight of a hazard - whatever the result. Had Capt. Smith rammed the iceberg head-on, he would probably have ruined his reputation and severely damaged his employer’s - however many lives and however much of his ship he might have saved. He probably would have had to a) have not believed fully in the soundness of his ship, and b) explain his action in a way that revealed he did not.
After visiting the titanic museum today. I had a little different question. Since the area had many icebergs in it, just go with lifeboats to the nearest floating iceberg, unload the people, and go to the ship and take more.
Besides I dont understand how the safty regulations allowed any ship to sail blindly into an area with icebergs. Yoi must stop and wait for the morning. And why is the titanic a so special ship if the olimpian was the same ship and built before it.
Icebergs weren’t so thick that others would have been visible, especially in the middle of the night. If they had been, the ship wouldn’t have been going so fast. And as has already been described in this thread, landing people on an iceberg presents great difficulties.
That was not the practice at the time. Icebergs weren’t considered to offer a great hazard, and would be detected by lookouts in time anyway.
The Olympic was less famous because it didn’t sink.
Remind me, she sunk faster then the Titanic did ok a mine will do that) yet had like 50 deaths out of 1000? That was due to warmer waters? Land being nearer? RN being more efficient than the IMM?
Ships can do this?