Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 28, 1990 TAG: 9007280129
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: LONDON LENGTH: Medium
In 1912, as history records it, Lord and his ship stood idly by while the Titanic went down less than 10 miles away with 1,503 men, women and children. Two commissions investigated the incident, and both ruled that Lord was negligent.
But until the day he died, in 1962, Lord insisted that he was innocent of any wrongdoing. He said his ship, the Californian, was at least 30 miles away when the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank. Few listened to him.
Among those who did was Leslie Harrison, who at the time was secretary of Britain's Mercantile Marine Association. Not long before Lord died, at the age of 82, Lord asked Harrison to do what he had been unable to do: clear his name.
Now, at age 78 and after almost three decades of trying, Harrison may be on the brink of doing that.
On the basis of Harrison's lobbying and new evidence that has come to light, the British government has reopened the investigation into the sinking of the Titanic.
In an interview, Harrison said Lord had been under the weight of the Titanic burden for four decades, but the 1958 film "A Night to Remember," which portrayed Lord as a villain, convinced Harrison that he had to share the burden.
Harrison, himself a nautical navigator, spent a month examining Lord's documents and charts, and "I determined that Lord was dead right," he said.
But when Harrison set out to champion Lord's cause, he met some resistance from his colleagues. As he puts it, there was fear that history would lose the perfect scapegoat for a disaster attributable in large measure to the inadequate number of lifeboats on the Titanic.
Harrison decided to plead Lord's case in book form. A small publishing house brought out "A Titanic Myth - the Californian Incident" in 1986. Only 1,700 copies were printed, and Harrison reckons that he realized less than $500 from it, along with more criticism from his colleagues.
The keystone of Harrison's premise - and Lord's defense - is that the official investigations into the Titanic disaster placed both the Titanic and the Californian at the wrong place at the time the Titanic hit the iceberg. But Lord's evidence, which consisted of his charts, logs and other materials, was probably not enough to prove his case.
Then, five years ago, an American oceanographer, Robert D. Ballard, located the Titanic on the ocean floor at a place where no one, except perhaps Lord and Harrison, had expected it to be. It was just three miles from the position where Lord's charts indicated that he found the Titanic's wreckage and nearly 20 miles from the Californian's position when the distress calls went out.
It will now be up to a British maritime accident investigator to analyze Lord's charts, Ballard's findings and prevailing ocean currents the night of the accident to try to determine, once and for all, whether Capt. Lord and the Californian might have been able to reach the sinking Titanic in time.
by CNB