Titanic turn to disaster
QUESTION When the order ‘hard to port’ was issued in the film Titanic, the helmsman turned the wheel to the right. Did Titanic use a tiller steering system? THE White Star Line was a progressive and innovative shipping company, so it was strange that it still used antiquated sailing ship orders for steering until World War I. This was highlighted following the Titanic disaster of 1912.
The majority of its navigating officers were apprenticed in sail when the steering was done by tiller (the horizontal beam at the top of the rudder post).
If the ship’s heading was desired to be full over to port (left), the order was given hard to starboard (right). The ship’s wheel was spun to port, the tiller moved to starboard and the rudder and ship’s heading was also to port.
It was not until January 1, 1931, that most nations began to adopt the practice of relating helm orders to the rudder and no longer to the tiller. Thus an order of starboard 20 means turning the wheel, rudder and ship’s head to starboard, 20 degrees.
Richard de Kerbrech (author of Ships Of The White Star Line),
Gurnard, Isle of Wight. THE Titanic, which did not have a tiller steering system, was launched at a time when ships were changing from windpower to steam, but even some steamships were being sailed under the old tiller orders.
The incoming new rudder orders simply required the helmsman to turn the ship’s wheel in the direction of proposed travel.
But tiller orders required the officer in charge to tell the helmsman to port the helm if he actually wanted to turn to starboard. The helmsman would recognise that the officer had asked for a starboard turn and correctly interpret the order by turning the wheel to starboard.
This was confusing, but not too difficult on a wide open ocean with no traffic. However, if a huge iceberg was added to the equation, mistakes could happen.
According to author Lady Louise Patten — whose grandfather was Charles Lightoller, second officer of the Titanic and the most senior officer to survive — first officer William Murdoch gave the tiller order to go to port by asking for starboard, but the steersman Robert Hichens reacted instinctively to how he had been trained in rudder orders and steered to starboard, directly towards the iceberg.
Had the Titanic stopped dead after the collision, it could have stayed afloat for many hours, allowing time for a full rescue. But Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line, the owners of Titanic, ordered her to make best speed to port. This forced thousands of gallons of water through the rent in the hull.
The Lightoller family kept this secret in order to prevent White Star Line having to fight possible charges of negligence by the insurers of Titanic.
David Gilby, Shaftesbury, Dorset. QUESTION What are the earliest examples of trench warfare? Trench warfare began as an extension of siegecraft, the besieging of cities or fortresses to overcome their defences. It was not used as part of a battle on an open battlefield until the American Civil War.
As the use of firearms, especially artillery, became more common, it was necessary for troops attacking fortresses or fortified towns to be able to fight from safety to prevent casualties.
This was achieved in two ways: the building of redoubts, small fortresses with earth walls, where artillery could be mounted; or by digging trenches.
Trenches were also used to move troops forward to within attacking range to exploit the breaches made by artillery in defensive walls. They might even be used to allow engineers to undermine walls.
The tactical ancestor of modern trench warfare was Frenchman Sebastian Le Prestre de Vauban (16331707), who was a designer of fortresses, but who also came up with tactics to attack and overcome them. His system of using parallel lines of trenches was first used at the Siege of Maastricht (1673).
Trenches were used only in sieges until increases in the power of small arms and artillery forced both sides to use them during the American Civil War. The trench lines of PetersbergRichmond, in Virginia, were the most obvious forerunner of the trench warfare of World War I.
Bob Dillon, Edinburgh. QUESTION There have been three plague pandemics in the past two millennia. One was the Black Death of the Middle Ages, what were the other two? THE previous answer detailed the three plague pandemics, the Justinian Plague of 541544, the Black Death of the 14th century and the third pandemic that began in China in 1855 and waxed and waned worldwide for the next century. The bubonic plague bacillus is named
Yersinia pestis after French scientist Alexandre Yersin, but was first identified in Hong Kong in 1894 by Japanese scientist Shibasaburo Kitasato (18531931), head of what became the Imperial Japanese Institute for Infectious Diseases.
He published his findings in English in The Lancet in 1894. Yersin arrived in Hong Kong shortly after Kitasato and identified the bacillus independently.
In 1898, French physician PaulLouis Simond demonstrated that the rat flea was the way in which the disease was transmitted to humans, but this was not generally accepted until 1908.
However, after the death of the first Japanese plague victim in Hiroshima in 1899, local authorities adopted a policy of
nezumi-kaiage (buying up rats) to prevent the spread of the disease.
Dead rats were put by the police into galvanised iron boxes containing disinfectant, while live rats could be taken to borough offices, where they were drowned in a barrel of water.
In 1926, the anthropologist Yanagita Kunio wrote: ‘The sight of seven or eight small children, each dangling a rat by the tail, standing in front of a policebox, gazing up at the policeman, is now a thing of the past. For a while, children felt as warmly towards a policeman as they did towards a sweetshop owner.’
Graham Healey, School of East Asian Studies,
University of Sheffield.