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The Ship That Stood Still: The Californian and Her Mysterious Role in the Titanic Disaster
A narrative of the actions of the crew aboard the Californian, the ship that failed to come to the assistance of the sinking Titanic
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
384 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1993
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April 24, 2022
“[Second Officer Herbert] Stone was now alone on the bridge [of the Californian], walking up and down. [Wireless Operator Cyril] Evans was fast asleep, and probably [Third Officer Charles] Groves and Chief Officer Stewart as well. [Apprentice James] Gibson was below on the quartermaster’s deck busy with the log; and [Captain Stanley] Lord was in his steam-heated chart room, with all his clothes on, including his boots and his cap, which shaded his eyes from the electric light. He was lying uncomfortably on the settee, as he was nearly six feet and the settee was not.
Captain Lord always insisted on the importance of these details, the implication being that he, although fast asleep, was also simultaneously fully alert, and ready throughout, at a moment’s notice, for any emergency. In view of what happened when the gravest emergency did arise, Captain Lord might just as well have been not only comfortably pajama-ed and snugly tucked into his bunk, but peacefully asleep far away at home in distant…England.
In the story of the Californian, all these men – Lord, Groves, Stewart, Stone, Gibson, Evans – are familiar names, and one other as well, Ernest Gill, assistant donkeyman, who was also below. But in the still and sleeping ship, with only the faint bumping of the light field ice against her sides and the regular shipboard sounds, there were other names too, not hitherto known, names of men who were watching silently, watching when Herbert Stone’s moment came, the most shining and the most terrible of his whole life; so soon now and so unexpectedly.
‘First of all,’ Stone said [in his testimony], ‘I was walking up and down on the bridge, and I saw one white flash in the sky immediately above this other steamer. I did not know what it was; I thought it might be a shooting star.’
He realized before long it was a white rocket. It was then about a quarter to one…”
- Leslie Reade, The Ship that Stood Still: The Californian and her Mysterious Role in the Titanic Disaster
Even if you know next to nothing about the sinking of the Titanic, you’ve probably heard about the Californian. Though left on the cutting room floor of James Cameron’s blockbuster film, the Californian provides a startling counterfactual to the disaster. If the nearby steamer – captained by Stanley Lord – had been able to come to Titanic’s rescue, the events of April 14-15, 1912, might barely be remembered.
But the Californian did not come to Titanic’s rescue. Instead, her captain and crew had the front-row seat for the greatest spectacle in maritime history.
This is the story that Leslie Reade unfolds in his obsessive and passionate The Ship that Stood Still.
***
The saga of the Californian endures, not simply because of the “what-ifs,” but because of the way it defies our understanding of how people act. The men on the Californian, from the unfortunate officer-of-the-watch Herbert Stone, to the sleepy Captain Lord, all resolutely pushed back against the natural inclinations of human curiosity. They saw something immensely strange, but went about their night without asking follow-up questions, the framework of their decisions apparently lacking any overlay of logic or common sense.
I say this because neither Captain Lord nor his officers are malevolent figures. They were not evil men, intent on ill deeds. Though much has been made of a peremptory wireless message from the Titanic to the Californian before the Titanic struck ice, there is absolutely no evidence of bad faith.
Instead, The Ship that Stood Still is about a Samaritan who failed to be good. It is an epic of inaction, and all the ramifications that followed. Captain Lord, you see, did nothing, or so close to nothing that it makes no difference.
Because Captain Lord’s indifference was so profound, it has provoked a rather vast inquiry. In this character interrogation, there has arisen a group – called the “Lordites” – who believe that Captain Lord – a man they never met, and who probably wouldn’t like them – was used as a scapegoat.
Leslie Reade vehemently disagrees.
To put it in terms a Cervantes fan can understand: Reade is Don Quixote, and the Lordites are windmills. This book is his jousting lance.
***
Before we go any further, it should be noted that The Ship That Stood Still is written for the obsessed amateur of Titanic lore. It’s not designed to be a general history of the shipwreck. Indeed, there is very little written about the Titanic herself, and her experience is filtered through the eyes of the men of the Californian.
More specifically, this is an argumentative book. Reade has a point to prove and an axe to grind.
That axe is Captain Lord.
Reade believes that Lord and the Californian watched Titanic die. He believes that Lord saw the Titanic before she struck the ice; that Lord’s officers saw Titanic’s eight distress rockets; that Lord was told by an officer about the rockets; and that Lord did nothing other than attempt to contact the “mystery” ship with a Morse lamp. Meanwhile, as Lord napped and his wireless officer slept, the Titanic fired off all her rockets and slipped beneath the Atlantic, depositing 1500 men, women, and children into the frigid sea.
The Lordites counter that Californian was much farther away from the Titanic than the eight to ten miles determined by the British Inquiry. Accordingly, they argue that the Californian was too distant to see Titanic’s rockets and to render any aid.
Substantively, many of the Lordites’ theories contradict eyewitness testimony, and are sometimes plainly stupid. The belief – for instance – that an unknown mystery ship lay between the Titanic and the Californian, firing off its own rockets, is staggeringly ridiculously, not to mention unsupported. Other contentions, however, especially concerning the actual and relative positions of the two ships, bear exploration, because Robert Ballard did not find the Titanic at the coordinates provided by her fourth officer, Joseph Boxhall.
Though they prefigure our present world of Birthers, 9/11 Truthers, and Sandy Hook Truthers, in the grand scheme of things, the Lordites are a harmless bunch. Reade, though, clearly wanted to squash them like bugs. His seriousness simultaneously struck me as deeply funny, deeply sad, and deeply human. After all, this is a subset of a subject that itself does not qualify as a world-historical event. Yet Reade gave his soul to it, showing once more that the meaning of life is the meaning we give to life.
In any event, Reade proceeds through events in a ruthlessly methodical manner, setting up the arguments of the pro-Lord faction and demolishing them with precision, erudition, and many, many diagrams. Among the topics he tackles are the distance between the two ships; the positioning of the two ships (the red or green lights that mark the port and starboard sides of a ship play a big role in the mystery); why the rockets couldn’t be heard; and the existence or absence of a third ship. As in a legal brief – which this sometimes resembles – there is overlap and repetition. At times, it all gets a bit technical, especially when talking about longitude and latitude. For the most part, though, I kept up with Reade’s propositions, helped along by his visual aids.
***
Some background is important, because it figures into this book’s execution.
The late Leslie Reade was an Oxford grad who “read for the Bar” and later developed a non-professional interest in the Titanic/Californian saga. He flung himself into his research wholeheartedly, interviewing people who hadn’t been interviewed, talking to the families of the people who were no longer alive, and uncovering documents that had never been published. This took decades. Then, just as he started assembling his manuscript, putting the final touches on his magnum opus, Robert D. Ballard discovered the wreck and – for the first time – gave the world an accurate location. A location, I might add, quite different from the one Reade had been using.
It was back to the drawing board.
Unfortunately, time waits for no one, and a lifetime is not long enough to thoroughly explore the Titanic. Reade was now an old man, unable to finish his defining project. His friend, Edward de Groot, went back through the manuscript, integrated the new material from Ballard’s expedition, and published the book in 1993.
***
The Ballard conundrum hangs over The Ship that Stood Still like a cloud, calling Reade’s conclusions into question.
That is to say, Ballard’s coordinates for the wreck’s location must be taken as accurate and reliable, since they are buttressed by physical evidence and modern locational tools. By the same measure, Officer Boxhall’s contemporary coordinates – plotted by hand, aided by sextant, scribbled down with a pencil held by a sweaty hand, by a man who knew he might be dead in two hours – can no longer be accepted. This was always a possibility, and Boxhall received so much criticism for his reckoning that, upon his death, he demanded that his ashes be spread at the spot he figured in 1912.
The upshot is that – as the Lordites have long suspected – the Titanic and the Californian might have been farther apart than first surmised.
Reade – who passed in 1989, four years after Ballard’s coup – literally has no time for this argument, and his hurried response is that Titanic did not sink straight down to her 13,000 foot grave. Rather, she planed away for over two miles, like a glider coming in for a landing. Moreover, Reade notes the likelihood that the Californian’s dead-reckoned position was as wrong as Titanic’s. Still, Boxhall’s 1912 position is off by 13.5 miles from Ballard’s 1985 position. This, I believe, requires further explanation than Reade (and de Groot, his editor) provide. However, due to Reade’s failing health and eventual death, he was unable to bring his full intellectual abilities to bear against this last looming question.
***
This seems like a deal breaker, but despite a less-than-seamless integration, the overall result still stands. Forget latitude, longitude, atmospheric conditions, and mystery ships. The most basic facts of the night have remained unchanged for 110 years: Titanic’s officers saw a ship nearby; Titanic fired off eight white rockets; the men aboard the Californian saw eight right rockets.
Case closed.
***
As with any group challenging conventional wisdom, the Lordites have made strong use of non sequiturs. The most obvious of these is the proposition that Captain Lord is blameless because the Californian – stopped in pack ice – could never have navigated her way through the bergs and floes in time. This reasoning fails because the true culpability – moral, if not legal – stems from Captain Lord’s refusal to try. If he had roused himself just long enough to wake up Cyril Evans, his telegraphist, then Evans would have popped an eardrum from Titanic’s powerful wireless device, which was tapping out CQDs and SOSs until the ship lost power. With this simple confirmation, Captain Lord could then have made his attempt. At worst, he arrives too late to save everyone, but still picks up everyone in the boats, and maybe a few in the water. At best, he is a maritime hero whose statue would have stood in Belfast and Southampton and New York, and who would have had trouble walking for the medals on his chest, and the garlands about his shoulders.
That is the night’s nagging secret: the utter lack of inquisitiveness on the part of Captain Stanley Lord. It takes a man of inexplicable uncurious-ness to hear of white rockets fired at sea and make no attempt to ascertain their provenance. That’s what Lord did, and damned if he cared. For most of us, the guilt of this failure would be consuming. Strangely enough – or perhaps, not strange at all – Lord appeared to live out his days without losing much sleep over the event, showing that the man knew how to snooze, if nothing else.
Captain Lord always insisted on the importance of these details, the implication being that he, although fast asleep, was also simultaneously fully alert, and ready throughout, at a moment’s notice, for any emergency. In view of what happened when the gravest emergency did arise, Captain Lord might just as well have been not only comfortably pajama-ed and snugly tucked into his bunk, but peacefully asleep far away at home in distant…England.
In the story of the Californian, all these men – Lord, Groves, Stewart, Stone, Gibson, Evans – are familiar names, and one other as well, Ernest Gill, assistant donkeyman, who was also below. But in the still and sleeping ship, with only the faint bumping of the light field ice against her sides and the regular shipboard sounds, there were other names too, not hitherto known, names of men who were watching silently, watching when Herbert Stone’s moment came, the most shining and the most terrible of his whole life; so soon now and so unexpectedly.
‘First of all,’ Stone said [in his testimony], ‘I was walking up and down on the bridge, and I saw one white flash in the sky immediately above this other steamer. I did not know what it was; I thought it might be a shooting star.’
He realized before long it was a white rocket. It was then about a quarter to one…”
- Leslie Reade, The Ship that Stood Still: The Californian and her Mysterious Role in the Titanic Disaster
Even if you know next to nothing about the sinking of the Titanic, you’ve probably heard about the Californian. Though left on the cutting room floor of James Cameron’s blockbuster film, the Californian provides a startling counterfactual to the disaster. If the nearby steamer – captained by Stanley Lord – had been able to come to Titanic’s rescue, the events of April 14-15, 1912, might barely be remembered.
But the Californian did not come to Titanic’s rescue. Instead, her captain and crew had the front-row seat for the greatest spectacle in maritime history.
This is the story that Leslie Reade unfolds in his obsessive and passionate The Ship that Stood Still.
***
The saga of the Californian endures, not simply because of the “what-ifs,” but because of the way it defies our understanding of how people act. The men on the Californian, from the unfortunate officer-of-the-watch Herbert Stone, to the sleepy Captain Lord, all resolutely pushed back against the natural inclinations of human curiosity. They saw something immensely strange, but went about their night without asking follow-up questions, the framework of their decisions apparently lacking any overlay of logic or common sense.
I say this because neither Captain Lord nor his officers are malevolent figures. They were not evil men, intent on ill deeds. Though much has been made of a peremptory wireless message from the Titanic to the Californian before the Titanic struck ice, there is absolutely no evidence of bad faith.
Instead, The Ship that Stood Still is about a Samaritan who failed to be good. It is an epic of inaction, and all the ramifications that followed. Captain Lord, you see, did nothing, or so close to nothing that it makes no difference.
Because Captain Lord’s indifference was so profound, it has provoked a rather vast inquiry. In this character interrogation, there has arisen a group – called the “Lordites” – who believe that Captain Lord – a man they never met, and who probably wouldn’t like them – was used as a scapegoat.
Leslie Reade vehemently disagrees.
To put it in terms a Cervantes fan can understand: Reade is Don Quixote, and the Lordites are windmills. This book is his jousting lance.
***
Before we go any further, it should be noted that The Ship That Stood Still is written for the obsessed amateur of Titanic lore. It’s not designed to be a general history of the shipwreck. Indeed, there is very little written about the Titanic herself, and her experience is filtered through the eyes of the men of the Californian.
More specifically, this is an argumentative book. Reade has a point to prove and an axe to grind.
That axe is Captain Lord.
Reade believes that Lord and the Californian watched Titanic die. He believes that Lord saw the Titanic before she struck the ice; that Lord’s officers saw Titanic’s eight distress rockets; that Lord was told by an officer about the rockets; and that Lord did nothing other than attempt to contact the “mystery” ship with a Morse lamp. Meanwhile, as Lord napped and his wireless officer slept, the Titanic fired off all her rockets and slipped beneath the Atlantic, depositing 1500 men, women, and children into the frigid sea.
The Lordites counter that Californian was much farther away from the Titanic than the eight to ten miles determined by the British Inquiry. Accordingly, they argue that the Californian was too distant to see Titanic’s rockets and to render any aid.
Substantively, many of the Lordites’ theories contradict eyewitness testimony, and are sometimes plainly stupid. The belief – for instance – that an unknown mystery ship lay between the Titanic and the Californian, firing off its own rockets, is staggeringly ridiculously, not to mention unsupported. Other contentions, however, especially concerning the actual and relative positions of the two ships, bear exploration, because Robert Ballard did not find the Titanic at the coordinates provided by her fourth officer, Joseph Boxhall.
Though they prefigure our present world of Birthers, 9/11 Truthers, and Sandy Hook Truthers, in the grand scheme of things, the Lordites are a harmless bunch. Reade, though, clearly wanted to squash them like bugs. His seriousness simultaneously struck me as deeply funny, deeply sad, and deeply human. After all, this is a subset of a subject that itself does not qualify as a world-historical event. Yet Reade gave his soul to it, showing once more that the meaning of life is the meaning we give to life.
In any event, Reade proceeds through events in a ruthlessly methodical manner, setting up the arguments of the pro-Lord faction and demolishing them with precision, erudition, and many, many diagrams. Among the topics he tackles are the distance between the two ships; the positioning of the two ships (the red or green lights that mark the port and starboard sides of a ship play a big role in the mystery); why the rockets couldn’t be heard; and the existence or absence of a third ship. As in a legal brief – which this sometimes resembles – there is overlap and repetition. At times, it all gets a bit technical, especially when talking about longitude and latitude. For the most part, though, I kept up with Reade’s propositions, helped along by his visual aids.
***
Some background is important, because it figures into this book’s execution.
The late Leslie Reade was an Oxford grad who “read for the Bar” and later developed a non-professional interest in the Titanic/Californian saga. He flung himself into his research wholeheartedly, interviewing people who hadn’t been interviewed, talking to the families of the people who were no longer alive, and uncovering documents that had never been published. This took decades. Then, just as he started assembling his manuscript, putting the final touches on his magnum opus, Robert D. Ballard discovered the wreck and – for the first time – gave the world an accurate location. A location, I might add, quite different from the one Reade had been using.
It was back to the drawing board.
Unfortunately, time waits for no one, and a lifetime is not long enough to thoroughly explore the Titanic. Reade was now an old man, unable to finish his defining project. His friend, Edward de Groot, went back through the manuscript, integrated the new material from Ballard’s expedition, and published the book in 1993.
***
The Ballard conundrum hangs over The Ship that Stood Still like a cloud, calling Reade’s conclusions into question.
That is to say, Ballard’s coordinates for the wreck’s location must be taken as accurate and reliable, since they are buttressed by physical evidence and modern locational tools. By the same measure, Officer Boxhall’s contemporary coordinates – plotted by hand, aided by sextant, scribbled down with a pencil held by a sweaty hand, by a man who knew he might be dead in two hours – can no longer be accepted. This was always a possibility, and Boxhall received so much criticism for his reckoning that, upon his death, he demanded that his ashes be spread at the spot he figured in 1912.
The upshot is that – as the Lordites have long suspected – the Titanic and the Californian might have been farther apart than first surmised.
Reade – who passed in 1989, four years after Ballard’s coup – literally has no time for this argument, and his hurried response is that Titanic did not sink straight down to her 13,000 foot grave. Rather, she planed away for over two miles, like a glider coming in for a landing. Moreover, Reade notes the likelihood that the Californian’s dead-reckoned position was as wrong as Titanic’s. Still, Boxhall’s 1912 position is off by 13.5 miles from Ballard’s 1985 position. This, I believe, requires further explanation than Reade (and de Groot, his editor) provide. However, due to Reade’s failing health and eventual death, he was unable to bring his full intellectual abilities to bear against this last looming question.
***
This seems like a deal breaker, but despite a less-than-seamless integration, the overall result still stands. Forget latitude, longitude, atmospheric conditions, and mystery ships. The most basic facts of the night have remained unchanged for 110 years: Titanic’s officers saw a ship nearby; Titanic fired off eight white rockets; the men aboard the Californian saw eight right rockets.
Case closed.
***
As with any group challenging conventional wisdom, the Lordites have made strong use of non sequiturs. The most obvious of these is the proposition that Captain Lord is blameless because the Californian – stopped in pack ice – could never have navigated her way through the bergs and floes in time. This reasoning fails because the true culpability – moral, if not legal – stems from Captain Lord’s refusal to try. If he had roused himself just long enough to wake up Cyril Evans, his telegraphist, then Evans would have popped an eardrum from Titanic’s powerful wireless device, which was tapping out CQDs and SOSs until the ship lost power. With this simple confirmation, Captain Lord could then have made his attempt. At worst, he arrives too late to save everyone, but still picks up everyone in the boats, and maybe a few in the water. At best, he is a maritime hero whose statue would have stood in Belfast and Southampton and New York, and who would have had trouble walking for the medals on his chest, and the garlands about his shoulders.
That is the night’s nagging secret: the utter lack of inquisitiveness on the part of Captain Stanley Lord. It takes a man of inexplicable uncurious-ness to hear of white rockets fired at sea and make no attempt to ascertain their provenance. That’s what Lord did, and damned if he cared. For most of us, the guilt of this failure would be consuming. Strangely enough – or perhaps, not strange at all – Lord appeared to live out his days without losing much sleep over the event, showing that the man knew how to snooze, if nothing else.
June 22, 2025
I really wanted to read this book and hopefully understand better the situation of the Californian and it's relation the the Titanic disaster. Like many people who were interested in the Titanic disaster, the Californian was a name that came up a lot, though I didn't know much about the situation as they would have testified it.
This book went into a lot more detail by including testimony from Captain Lord and his officers. At least, they tried to. The only take away that I could get from this book was that Captain Lord lied half of the time that he opened his mouth, half of his crew protected him and that the US Senate Hearings and the British Inquiry were token attempts to make it look like they were doing something. Look like because it was obvious that the US portion of the investigation was a group of people who didn't know diddly-squat making judgements and Mersey's inquiry was more about protecting Captain Lord as an officer of the British Merchant sailors.
A lot of time was also spent explaining the different theories and stories that have come up through the years trying to exonerate Lord of his decision to ignore the Titanic's rockets and not reawaken his Marconi operator who had gone to bed earlier. They brought up stories about mystery steamers, sealing ships that in order to be close enough to see the disaster would have had to go over 125 knots, almost 150 miles per hour. Even today's high speed ferries only go about 50 knots.
After the original author's passing, the book was taken up by someone else. Which is part of why I thought that there were so many inconsistencies in the writing. But at the end of the book, it was pointed out that some officials who had offered facts had revoked them, likely in and effort to continue the previous politically motivated judgements of 1912. So the author had to go back and change a lot of the facts that he had previously written.
The 1990-1992 Reappraisal was also mentioned. Which ended up being nothing more than another political stunt in an effort to refresh the white paint that was repeated brought up on both sided of the ocean every time the question was raised about Lord's complacency on that night. Even he admitted that his crew saw the flares and that he thought that they could have been a signal of distress. He was also caught in many lies after the fact, though he never seemed to care.
People who support Captain Lord say that he was "unjustly treated" after the tragedy. Which I don't understand why they think that may be the case. He was never charged, he never lost his Master's certificate and the only "punishment" that he ever faced was in the court of public opinion and his removal as the captain of the Californian. He even had a very successful career commanding freighters afterwards.
Pretty much, the only take away that I have from this book is that the authors were hoping to make a quick dollar, had a lot of time to flip through a thesaurus and didn't have any qualms about taking testimony and changing it to what they thought it "should" mean. Like case were an officer of the Californian said that he saw several "lights and that they were strange lights" which the author's claimed he couldn't have meant. So they changed it to "they were strange nights."
This book is another prime of example of if you can't dazzle them with brilliancy, bury them with bull...
This book went into a lot more detail by including testimony from Captain Lord and his officers. At least, they tried to. The only take away that I could get from this book was that Captain Lord lied half of the time that he opened his mouth, half of his crew protected him and that the US Senate Hearings and the British Inquiry were token attempts to make it look like they were doing something. Look like because it was obvious that the US portion of the investigation was a group of people who didn't know diddly-squat making judgements and Mersey's inquiry was more about protecting Captain Lord as an officer of the British Merchant sailors.
A lot of time was also spent explaining the different theories and stories that have come up through the years trying to exonerate Lord of his decision to ignore the Titanic's rockets and not reawaken his Marconi operator who had gone to bed earlier. They brought up stories about mystery steamers, sealing ships that in order to be close enough to see the disaster would have had to go over 125 knots, almost 150 miles per hour. Even today's high speed ferries only go about 50 knots.
After the original author's passing, the book was taken up by someone else. Which is part of why I thought that there were so many inconsistencies in the writing. But at the end of the book, it was pointed out that some officials who had offered facts had revoked them, likely in and effort to continue the previous politically motivated judgements of 1912. So the author had to go back and change a lot of the facts that he had previously written.
The 1990-1992 Reappraisal was also mentioned. Which ended up being nothing more than another political stunt in an effort to refresh the white paint that was repeated brought up on both sided of the ocean every time the question was raised about Lord's complacency on that night. Even he admitted that his crew saw the flares and that he thought that they could have been a signal of distress. He was also caught in many lies after the fact, though he never seemed to care.
People who support Captain Lord say that he was "unjustly treated" after the tragedy. Which I don't understand why they think that may be the case. He was never charged, he never lost his Master's certificate and the only "punishment" that he ever faced was in the court of public opinion and his removal as the captain of the Californian. He even had a very successful career commanding freighters afterwards.
Pretty much, the only take away that I have from this book is that the authors were hoping to make a quick dollar, had a lot of time to flip through a thesaurus and didn't have any qualms about taking testimony and changing it to what they thought it "should" mean. Like case were an officer of the Californian said that he saw several "lights and that they were strange lights" which the author's claimed he couldn't have meant. So they changed it to "they were strange nights."
This book is another prime of example of if you can't dazzle them with brilliancy, bury them with bull...
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