Great ocean liner Titanic sinks, and misinformation runs rampant
The British passenger liner RMS Titanic hit an iceberg 740 kilometres southeast of Newfoundland at about 11:40 p.m. (ship's time) on Sunday, April 14, 1912. It sank in about two hours and 40 minutes, killing an estimated 1,500 people.
Communication was excruciatingly slow at the time, especially from sea. So, when the Vancouver World went to press on April 15, the banner headline read: “TITANIC SINKING; NO LIVES LOST.”
The Daily Province had a similar headline: “TITANIC SINKING, BUT PROBABLY NO LIVES WILL BE LOST.”
The Vancouver Sun was only two months old at the time, but chose to go with straight facts, and not speculate: “Ships Rushing to Aid Titanic, Sinking in Mid-ocean, 1,300 Aboard.” In fact, there were just over 2,220 people on board.
But there was a lot of misinformation in the days after the tragedy.
“While badly damaged, the Titanic is still afloat and is reported to be making her way towards Halifax under her own steam, but with assistance from the Allan liner Parisian,” the World said on April 15. “The fact that the Titanic is the world's biggest vessel is probably the only thing that prevented great loss of life. It is not believed that any other vessel could have withstood the shock.”
The White Star Line's vice-president, Phillip Franklin, would come to regret his comments to the press.
“We place absolute confidence in the Titanic,” he said early on April 15. “We believe the boat is absolutely unsinkable, and although she may have sunk at the bow, we know she will remain afloat.
“We do not attach any significance to the fact that there are no Marconi messages being received from the boat. We think it denotes nothing but the fact that the boat is in communication with other ships, and she may have gotten off all the messages she wanted to send.”
In fact, the Titanic stopped sending messages because it had gone down eight hours before Franklin spoke.
On April 16, the World tried to make up for its mistakes by playing up the loss of life.
“NO HOPE NOW OF OTHER TITANIC SURVIVORS,” read the banner headline. “DEATH LIST GROWS MORE APPALLING HOURLY.”
“Reports received here up to noon today at the offices of the White Star Steamship Company indicated that 1,492 persons were lost in the wreck of the liner Titanic,” said a report from United Press. “The survivors, numbering 866 persons, mostly women and children, now steaming for New York on board the liner Carpathia, are all that remain of those who sailed aboard the Titanic on its maiden voyage from Southampton last Wednesday.
“Colonel John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, Isidor Straus, Colonel Washington Roebling, J.B. Thayer and George B. Widener, all multi-millionaires, are believed to have gone down with the Titanic.”
There was a report that another millionaire, railway tycoon Charles M. Hays, had been saved. But the White Star Line denied it had said that, and Hays was in fact among the dead.
White Star chairman Bruce Ismay had made it onto the lifeboats, however, which was heavily criticized by the press. The Titanic's captain, Edward Smith, went down with the ship.
Titanic stories dominated the front pages for days, and there were some incredible illustrations. On April 16, the World had a “sectional view” of its many decks showing where passengers slept, smoked, dined, swam, and played tennis.
The Province chose to run a grisly illustration of the Grim Reaper standing atop an iceberg, looking at a turbulent ocean where a banner
labelled “Titanic” is sinking beneath the waves.
Twenty Canadians were killed, including Vancouver's Thomas Mccaffry, the superintendent of the local branch of the Union Bank. Mccaffry had recently toured Egypt with his friends J. Hugo Ross, Mark Fortune and Thompson Beatty of Winnipeg, who all perished.
Mccaffry mailed a photo of friends posing in front of the Karnak Temple of Luxor in Egypt back to Vancouver, which arrived just before the Titanic sank. The Sun posted it on the front page.
The Americans and British both launched investigations into the disaster, which led to several changes in regulations, including that there should be enough lifeboats for everyone on board a ship. The Titanic's 20 lifeboats had a maximum capacity of about 1,200, for a ship that was carrying more than 2,220 people.