Captain Smith’s Titanic Quote
Titanic was headline news for weeks following the disaster. On 16 April 1912, the New York Times included an article about Captain Smith and his career in their coverage. Within that article were extracts from comments Smith had reportedly made on the conclusion of Adriatic‘s successful maiden voyage almost five years earlier, to the press in New York. It is easy to see why a newspaper reporter would want to quote Smith’s comments. He had spoken about his ‘uneventful’ career and the love of the ocean that he had had since childhood. Then, he went on to talk about the safety of modern passenger liners. Those comments had a sad irony given the recent disaster. One common quotation, used by historians in the decades to come, was:
I will say that I cannot imagine any condition which could cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.
Back in 2008, I began to worry that I had not been able to find Smith’s comments in newspaper coverage from that summer of 1907. I found it somewhat uncomfortable that our source seemed to be only a post-disaster publication. However, thanks to the effort of a number of researchers including the late Mark Baber, Smith biographer Gary Cooper, and Dr. Paul Lee, sources for the quotation were found from pre-disaster publications. These included press reports dating from later in 1907 through to a report in The World’s Work in April 1909 (shown in an extract from a slide in my presentation to the British Titanic Society in April 2024, below).
By comparison, the New York Times’ report published on 16 April 1912 had some interesting differences in emphasis. For example, rather than saying ‘modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that’, the pre-disaster quote was ‘modern shipbuilding has reduced that danger to a minimum’. The New York Times also summarised Smith’s preceding comments, paraphrasing him: ‘Captain Smith maintained that shipbuilding was such a perfect art nowadays that absolute disaster, involving the passengers on a great modern liner, was quite unthinkable. Whatever happened, he contended, there would be time before the vessel sank to save the lives of every person on board’. The paraphrased summary was broadly accurate, but it omitted the comment ‘I will not assert that she is unsinkable’ [emphasized above].
All of Smith’s reported comments are important and they need to be understood in their full context. It’s also important to recognise that even the pre-disaster quotations are from a secondary source and rely on a degree of assumption that what Smith said was reported with reasonable accuracy!