I recently saw a documentary that claimed Capt. Smith was hired to sink Titanic for the insurance and that the “tradition” of the captain always going down with his ship is a fiction created (through repetition in print, film, etc.) to provide cover for Smith’s despicable decision.
He should have remained alive not only to lead his crew in the evacuation of the passengers but to give testimony to a board of inquiry.
Capt. Smith’s decision to go down with Titanic was strange as well as cowardly but if he did scuttle the greatest ship afloat with 1500 lives lost, it does make sense.
I’m winging it from memory here, but I believe if Captain Smith was guilty of anything, it was “normalcy bias.” I think he was really close to retirement and according to crew testimony at the trial, he seemed incapable of grasping the nature of the emergency, which is disturbingly quite common during accidents and disasters. I think he actually slept through the first hour because the crew was afraid to wake him.
That’s a good point. Q seems to connect the sinking of the Titanic in April of 1912 to the formation of the Federal Reserve in 1913.