Larger Liners & Lifeboats: Carpathia & Olympic
It is common to hear comments about the lifeboat regulations in force at the time of the Titanic disaster, which linked lifeboat provision to the size of the ship. Famously, the rules had come into force in 1894 when the largest liners afloat were Cunard’s Campania and Lucania. They provided for a scale of ship size based on gross registered tonnage and the largest category was ships of 10,000 gross tons and above. By 1901, the largest ship afloat was double that; by 1912, Titanic was more than four times that.
However, it’s often overlooked that a ship’s gross tonnage was not necessarily the best guide to how many passengers and crew she would carry. We can see an example of this in comparing Cunard’s Carpathia with Olympic as at April 1912. The number of passengers and crew capacity did not correlate to the fact that Olympic was three times Carpathia’s size. The reason for this is that the Cunard ship carried so many third class or steerage passengers, who were allocated significantly less space per person.
Above: One of many slides from my September 2021 presentation at PRONI, Olympic & Titanic: ‘A Very Remote Contingency’ – Lifeboats for All. (Author’s collection)