Complete Works

much, when unassisted by imagination and when they have gained mastery over common sense, are the most deceptive exercises of intellect.  Two and two are four, and two are six.  That is immutable; you may trust your soul to that; but you must be certain first of your quantities.  I know how the strength of materials can be calculated away, and also the evidence of one’s senses.  For it is by some sort of calculation involving weights and levels that the technicians responsible for the Titanic persuaded themselves that a ship not divided by water-tight compartments could be “unsinkable.”  Because, you know, she was not divided.  You and I, and our little boys, when we want to divide, say, a box, take care to procure a piece of wood which will reach from the bottom to the lid.  We know that if it does not reach all the way up, the box will not be divided into two compartments.  It will be only partly divided.  The Titanic was only partly divided.  She was just sufficiently divided to drown some poor devils like rats in a trap.  It is probable that they would have perished in any case, but it is a particularly horrible fate to die boxed up like this.  Yes, she was sufficiently divided for that, but not sufficiently divided to prevent the water flowing over.
    Therefore to a plain man who knows something of mathematics but is not bemused by calculations, she was, from the point of view of “unsinkability,” not divided at all.  What would you say of people who would boast of a fireproof building, an hotel, for instance, saying, “Oh, we have it divided by fireproof bulkheads which would localise any outbreak,” and if you were to discover on closer inspection that these bulkheads closed no more than two-thirds of the openings they were meant to close, leaving above an open space through which draught, smoke, and fire could rush from one end of the building to the other?  And, furthermore, that those partitions, being too high to climb over, the people confined in each menaced compartment had to stay there and become asphyxiated or roasted, because no exits to the outside, say to the roof, had been provided!  What would you think of the intelligence or candour of these advertising people?  What would you think of them?  And yet, apart from the obvious difference in the action of fire and water, the cases are essentially the same.
    It would strike you and me and our little boys (who are not engineers yet) that to approach — I won’t say attain — somewhere near absolute safety, the divisions to keep out water should extend from the bottom right up to the uppermost deck of the hull .  I repeat, the hull , because there are above the hull the decks of the superstructures of which we need not take account.  And further, as a provision of the commonest humanity, that each of these compartments should have a perfectly independent and free access to that uppermost deck: that is, into the open.  Nothing less will do.  Division by bulkheads that really divide, and free access to the deck from every water-tight compartment.  Then the responsible man in the moment of danger and in the exercise of his judgment could close all the doors of these water-tight bulkheads by whatever clever contrivance has been invented for the purpose, without a qualm at the awful thought that he may be shutting up some of his fellow creatures in a death-trap; that he may be sacrificing the lives of men who, down there, are sticking to the posts of duty as the engine-room staffs of the Merchant Service have never failed to do.  I know very well that the engineers of a ship in a moment of emergency are not quaking for their lives, but, as far as I have known them, attend calmly to their duty.  We all must die; but, hang it all, a man ought to be given a chance, if not for his life, then at least to die decently.  It’s bad enough to have to stick down there when something disastrous is going on and any moment may be your last; but to be drowned shut up under deck is too bad.  Some men of the Titanic died like that, it is to be feared.  Compartmented, so to speak.  Just think what it means!  Nothing can approach the horror of that fate except being buried alive in a cave, or in a mine, or in your family vault.
    So, once more: continuous bulkheads — a clear way of escape to the deck out of each water-tight compartment.  Nothing less.  And if specialists, the precious specialists of the sort that builds