My luke-warm Titanic takes for this Sunday night that are pretty easy to substantiate even if they may seem counterintuitive:
1. The coal fire likely saved lives on the Titanic
2. If the Titanic had more life boats, more lives would have been lost.
1. The coal fire likely saved lives on the Titanic
2. If the Titanic had more life boats, more lives would have been lost.
Let me explain:
1. Because of the fire (a common occurrence at the time on liners), coal was shifted from starboard to port. This gave the ship a noticeable port list. When the ship flooded from the starboard side, rather than listing hard to starboard and...
1. Because of the fire (a common occurrence at the time on liners), coal was shifted from starboard to port. This gave the ship a noticeable port list. When the ship flooded from the starboard side, rather than listing hard to starboard and...
...potentially capsizing, the ship stayed at a relatively even keel allowing the boats to be lowered freely u like on the Lusitania which sunk with a heavy starboard list to the point where the boats swung out too far on the starboard side and scraped along the hull on port...
2. They didn’t even have enough time to launch the boats that they had. They launched 18/20. The last two collapsable just floated away. One of which, collapsable B, floated away upside down. Further early on in the sinking, passengers were reluctant to board them...
...causing boats to be launched well below capacity. On top of all of this, if there were more lifeboats that wouldn’t have been able to have been launched anyhow, they would have taken up space on the deck slowing down the launching of the boats even further.
Particularly with the second one though, it’s important to think of this in the context of the equipment at the time. The ship didn’t have electric davits which helped speed up their launching on the Britannic when she sank a few years later in WWI.
If this was a few years later with more boats and electric davits, then more boats could have been launched and more lives could have been saved. Not the case though with those davits.
Aside from witness testimony, we know that not all of the lifeboats were launched because the number 1 davit where Murdoch tried to launch collapsable At ~2:10 AM is still cranked in on the wreck. The davits that weren’t still trying to launch a boat were left swung out. 
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