THE TITANIC AND THE EMPRESS OF IRELAND.

Press, Volume L, Issue 14983, 2 June 1914, Page 7

THE TITANIC AND THE EMPRESS OF IRELAND.

COMPARISON OF THE TWO

DISASTERS

Cable messages, necessarily brief, can convey but a faint idea of tho terrible suddenness of tho awful catastrophe in the St. Lawrence, which is surpassed in tho grim record of marine disasters of recent years only by that of tho Titanic, in which 1603 lives were lost. There is in some respects an extraordinary parallel between tho two disasters. The Titanic, which left Queenstown on April 11th, 1912, on her maiden voyage to New York, with 2206 sengers and erew —on board, at 11.40 p.m. on Sunday, April 14th, collided with an iceberg, ripping her hull open for a considerable length under water. There was an extraordinary combination of weather conditions at tho time, which were not likely to happen once in a hundred years. There-was no moon, it being a clear 6tarry night.; there waa not the slight-' est wind, and the most extraordinary circumstance was that there was no swell; the sea was as smooth as the top of a table. Although a strict look-out was kept, wireless intimation of tho ! presence of ice in tho locality where tho disaster occurred having been previously received, tho iceberg, a dark mass with just a white fringe along the top, was not sighted until it was less than half a mile away, right ahead. Within half a minute from the warning, tho helm was put hard-a-starboard, and the rudder was hard over just bo- j fore the vessel struck, when she had I turned through two points. Subse- j quently, by experiment with her sister- j ship, tho Olympic, going ahead at 21 i j knots, the distance required was found to be 1200 ft. Little or no shock was felt by any of the officers and crew when the Titanic struck, but it was soon found that the position was very serious. Water poured into the holds and boiler-rooms," and fifty minutes after the accident, tho fore part of the ship up to some 18ft above the usual waterline, was full of water. Tho total amoant of water which had entered the ship up till that time was about 15,000 tons, i.0., nearly one-third of the buoyancy had been Tost. The Titanic san. at 2.20 a.m., two hours forty minutes after 6he struck the iceberg. She carried fourteen lifeboats, two emergency boats, and four collapsible boats, a total of twenty, with a capacity of 1170 passengers. * One striking point was that several of the boat* were not filled to their maximum capacity, which wa<? due to the fact that ths ______!

sengers evidently fancied themselves safer in the big ship, while many women refused to leave their husbands. The Titanic carried 28 engineers, all of whom perished at their posts, while very few of' tho firemen were saved.

Had the Titanic carried boats sufficient to accommodate all on board, there is, no doubt that the death roll would have been very much smaller. She remained afloat long enough for every soul to be transferred to the boats, and the weather conditions for the boats were ideal.

! In the case of the Empress of Ire- ' land, the disaster occurred, not at sea. I but in shallow water in a rivej-, quite I close to hind. Sho was provided with ! every safety device and carried boats sufficient to accommodate every person jon board. But the disaster has shown i that there aro conditions likely to j arise which will nullify every safety precaution and device Had the cql- , lision occurred in mid-ocean and in I rough weather, it could not have had j worse results;, and the practical results j of the bitter lesson of the Titanic have | been proved to be of no avail in such I a case as that of the Ercor<--s of Ireland. Double-bottoms, double skins, and water-tight bulkheads, in any ship could not have saved her from sinking under similar conditions. Whether the Storstad was steaming fast, half-speed, or dead slow, is not yet known, but tho terrible details of the disaster show that the big liner was dealt a blow which no merchant ship could have survived. It came with appalling suddenness in the dead of night, and in a dense fog. With the exception of those members of tho crew who were actually on watch, probably every person in tho shin was in bed. and the steamer herself was lying-to stopped in the fog.

Suddenly tho big heavily-laden Storstad loomed up through the mirk, and crashed info the liner, her enormous weight, driving her bluff bows i.hrouch the steel plates which rended like paper. The cables indicate that the Storstad went astern, and backed out of the gaping hole, probably fifty feet wide in the Empress of Ireland, leaving a free ingress for tho torrents of water which rushed in. Tho liner was evidently holed in tho vicinity of the engineroom or stokehold, for the rush of steam followed quickly.