THAT FRIDAY morning, Captain Turner left the ship and made his way south to Wall Street, to the City Investing Building at 165 Broadway, an immense, ungainly structure that happened to stand beside one of the city’s most beloved landmarks, the Singer Tower, built by the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Here Turner made his way up to the law offices of Hunt, Hill & Betts, where, at 11:00 A.M., he sat before eight lawyers for a deposition in one of the most compelling cases of the day, the attempt in U.S. Federal Court by the White Star Line, owners of the Titanic, to limit their financial liability in the face of claims by families of dead American passengers, who charged that the disaster had resulted from the company’s “fault and negligence.”
Turner, testifying on behalf of the families, had been summoned as an expert witness, an acknowledgment of his many years as captain of large passenger ships and of the respect afforded him by other mariners, but it became quickly evident to those present that being questioned by lawyers was not something he enjoyed. He offered only abrupt, clipped answers—seldom more than a single sentence or phrase—but nonetheless proved to be a damning witness.
The lawyers managed to pry from him his account of being at sea when he first learned of the Titanic disaster. He’d been captain of the Mauretania at the time. The Titanic had departed on April 11, 1912, and the Mauretania on April 13, a fact Turner remembered because the date posed a problem for superstitious passengers, even though in seafaring lore the number 13 presents no particular hazard. It is sailing on a Friday that causes sailors dread. Upon receiving reports by wireless of ice along his course, Turner decided to veer well south. His wireless man brought him first word of the Titanic’s collision with an iceberg.
Asked now whether he thought it had been prudent for the Titanic to travel at 20 knots or more with ice likely to be in the vicinity, Turner offered one of his most energetic replies: “Certainly not; 20 knots through ice! My conscience!”
The best way to proceed, Turner explained, was very slowly, or simply to stop. He allowed that wireless had become an effective tool for alerting captains to the presence of ice but dismissed sea studies that suggested that captains might derive warning by carefully monitoring the temperature of air and water as they sailed. This was useless, Turner explained: “No more effect than a blister on a wooden leg.”
Turner also expressed ambivalence about the value of lookouts. The Cunard manual required two in the crow’s nest at all times. “I call them Board of Trade ornaments,” Turner said; “all they think about is home and counting their money.”
Asked whether he gave lookouts binoculars, Turner replied: “Certainly not; might as well give them soda water bottles.”
Still, he said, when traveling through waters where ice might appear, he always doubled the lookout, adding two men at the bow.
Turner warned that no matter what precautions were taken, what studies were made, ice would always be a hazard. Startled by this, one of the attorneys asked Turner, “Have you learned nothing by that accident?”
“Not the slightest,” Turner said. “It will happen again.”
At various points during the deposition, the lawyers focused on Turner’s own ship, with emphasis on the Lusitania’s watertight decks and doors, and in particular its longitudinal bunkers.
“Which is very unusual with merchant vessels, but common enough with naval vessels, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Turner said, “a protection.”
Further questioning taught the lawyers that the captain had little interest in the structural design of ships, including his own.
“You are not a mechanical man,” one asked, but “a navigator.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t pay much attention to the construction of ships?”
“No, as long as they float; if they sink, I get out.”
Asked if there was anything “peculiarly extraordinary” about the watertight doors on the Lusitania and her sister ship, the Mauretania, Turner answered: “Don’t know.”
A few moments later, the lawyer asked, “Before the ‘Titanic,’ it was supposed these great ships were non-sinkable?”
“Who told you that?” Turner snapped. “Nobody I ever went to sea with proved it.”
The deposition concluded with a question as to whether a ship with five flooded compartments could continue to float.
Turner replied, “My dear sir, I don’t know anything at all about it; it all depends on the size of the compartments, the amount of buoyancy; if she has buoyancy, she will float; if she has not, she will go down.”
Turner returned to his ship.
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