AN UNSINKABLE TITANIC
when they were loaded down with sixty-five people, the total weight must have been about six tons. Now a craft of six tons' displacement requires considerable handling, and the two or three sailors allotted to each boat, jammed in, as they were, among crowded passengers, would have been powerless in heavy weather to keep the boat from broaching broadside to the sea and capsizing.
The demand, then, for unsinkable ships is justified by the fact that the lifeboat is at best but a poor makeshift—that to put several thousand people adrift in mid-ocean is to expose them to the risk of ultimate death by starvation or drowning.
However, in view of the fact that ninety-five passenger ships out of every hundred are built with the single skin, low bulkheads, and non-watertight decks, which characterised the Titanic, it is certain that the cry: "A lifeboat seat for every passenger" is fully justified. The problem of housing the large number that would be required presents no insuperable difficulties, and there are several alternative plans on which the boats might be disposed. On page 45 will be found a proposed arrangement, re-
[ 46 ]
