existed there through the mental haze arising from knowledge of the
greatest maritime tragedy the world has known: he must get rid of any
foreknowledge of disaster to appreciate why people acted as they did.
Secondly, he had better get rid of any picture in thought painted
either by his own imagination or by some artist, whether pictorial or
verbal, "from information supplied." Some are most inaccurate (these,
mostly word-pictures), and where they err, they err on the highly
dramatic side. They need not have done so: the whole conditions were
dramatic enough in all their bare simplicity, without the addition of
any high colouring.

Having made these mental erasures, he will find himself as one of the
crowd faced with the following conditions: a perfectly still
atmosphere; a brilliantly beautiful starlight night, but no moon, and
so with little light that was of any use; a ship that had come quietly
to rest without any indication of disaster--no iceberg visible, no
hole in the ship's side through which water was pouring in, nothing
broken or out of place, no sound of alarm, no panic, no movement of
any one except at a walking pace; the absence of any knowledge of the
nature of the accident, of the extent of damage, of the danger of the
ship sinking in a few hours, of the numbers of boats, rafts, and other
lifesaving appliances available, their capacity, what other ships were
near or coming to help--in fact, an almost complete absence of any
positive knowledge on any point. I think this was the result of
deliberate judgment on the part of the officers, and perhaps, it was
the best thing that could be done. In particular, he must remember
that the ship was a sixth of a mile long, with passengers on three
decks open to the sea, and port and starboard sides to each deck: he
will then get some idea of the difficulty presented to the officers of
keeping control over such a large area, and the impossibility of any