New Developments and Additional Primaries

  
     

I would like to thank everyone for your useful feedback about my primary sources during our last class period. You raised a lot of good questions and helped me to realize that my topic was much too broad and my thesis too vague and uncertain. While thinking about this week's assignment, I have changed my thesis and the framework of my essay. Previously I had said there were many reasons, not only social class, which determined the survival rate of the Titanic, but now I have a much more precise thesis. Also previously I had wanted to examine primary documents from survivors of each of the social classes and the crew, but that task is too far-reaching and would probably require an entire book. I have changed my framework to include only the accounts of second class passengers and crew members as I have discovered they have been largely ignored in both popular and scholarly history. I was also interested in the second class because the second class men had the least percentage of survival rates, which was about 8%. My new thesis is "There were several significant reasons why passengers decided not to get on the lifeboats while the Titanic was sinking, but primary accounts from both surviving second class passengers and crew members reveal that the most substantial reason why so many people died that night was because they refused to believe the Titanic could sink, even after it was already sinking."

            I would also like to share some additional primary sources which I intend to use in my paper, and hopefully it will capture for you the direction in which I am going. The information that I analyzed for the two following sources are interviews of survivors which were included in a journal article called The Titanic and Southampton: The Oral Evidence by Donald Hyslop and Sheila Jemima, published in 1991 by the Oral History Society.

Edith Haisman

 

            Haisman was sixteen years old when she travelled as a second class passenger aboard the Titanic with her family. Her father was the only one in her family who did not survive.

 

            When asked if she was worried when she saw the iceberg next to the boat she replied, "No, I didn't realize anything at all, I thought it was wonderful to see the ice like that, you know... Just wondered what happened, like everybody else did. What happened to the boat? And everybody kept saying she's unsinkable, she won't go down. She's unsinkable" (Hyslop and Jemima 38). Later in her interview she stated that it took over an hour before anyone worried about what had happened, many passengers went back to bed not realizing they were in danger. 

            Haisman's interview provides crucial evidence for my thesis. She described how there was no panic aboard the Titanic for at least an hour after it hit the iceberg. One reason which she indicated for this was that the people could not feel the boat sinking. Her account shows how many people did not believe it could sink and went on about their business, not realizing the severity of the situation.

Sydney Daniels

            Daniels was eighteen years old and a member of the Titanic's crew. When the Titanic struck an iceberg, Daniels was fast asleep in his cabin and didn't hear of feel anything. Another crew member woke him up and told him "all hands on deck, get your lifebelt on” (Hyslop and Jemima 39). He thought it was a safety drill so he took his time getting up to the deck. Once there he was appointed to put women and children into lifeboats. After all of the boats had left except for one, Daniels was up to his knees in water and he decided to dive into the ocean and swim away for fear that the ship would create suction and drown him. He eventually found a group of about 20 people around an overturned lifeboat. The all climbed on top of the boat, it was too large to flip right side up and they were saved along with the other survivors later that morning by the crew of the Carpathia.

            Sydney Daniels’ amazing story of survival reveals how close to death many survivors came that night. Like Haisman, Daniels described how everyone was calm, and didn’t realize for a long time that the boat was sinking. His account also coincides with another crew member, Violet Jessop’s account which stated that they were told the filling of lifeboats was a precautionary measure, something which delayed panic as well as caused a higher amount of deaths. Another contributing factor to the low amount of male crew which survived was that they were dedicated to performing their duties until the very end. Along with most of the other passengers and crew, Daniels didn't believe the ship was sinking until he literally saw the water a few feet away.