One of history’s greatest mysteries is what happened that sank the unsinkable ship. When the RMS Titanic went down in the northern Atlantic Ocean after hitting an iceberg, it was a blow to international passenger ferries and one of the biggest naval disasters that ever happened; what people debate is just how the ship went down. Well, according to the granddaughter of the Titanic’s second officer, Charles Lightoller, the ship went down for one major reason: pilot error. The pilot at the helm steered the ship in the wrong direction to avoid the iceberg, and the captain made the call to keep steaming forward.
The Titanic was built during a transitional period between steam-powered ship-style steering and sailing ship-style steering. On sailing ships, pushing the tiller to the right moved the ship left. On steaming ships, turning the wheel right means a right turn. The pilot at the helm, Robert Hitchins, simply turned the wrong way. “Crucially, the two steering systems were the complete opposite of one another,” said Louise Patten, Lightoller’s granddaughter. “So a command to turn ‘hard a-starboard’ meant turn the wheel right under one system and left under the other.” Lightroller lied to save jobs and keep his company afloat. Conspiracy theories need not apply.
Of course, Patten’s new book is fictional, but nobody would know more about how the Titanic sank than her grandfather, who was the ship’s second officer, the highest-ranking surviving ship officer, and the man who attended the very last officer’s meeting before the ship sank. Why she chose to sell her book by mixing a real account of the Titanic’s sinking with her fiction I’ll never know, but her book “Good As Gold” will be on sale shortly.
Tags: Titanic, how the Titanic sank, steering error sank the Titanic, RMS Titanic, Louise Patten, Charles Lightoller, steering error, pilot error sank the Titanic, Titanic sinking, Good As Gold, Robert Hitchins, why the titanic sank
