Everyone grows up learning the same story about the RMS Titanic, that when the ship set out on its maiden voyage in 1912, the owners and authorities, confident that the ship was unsinkable, did not require it to carry a full complement of lifeboats. So when the Titanic sank in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, more than half of the people on board died for lack of lifeboat space. But the more you learn about the history of lifeboats and how they worked, the more you realize that the standard story about the Titanic’s lifeboats isn’t entirely correct.
Helen Doe is a maritime historian and author of the book One Crew, a history of the first ever nation-wide lifeboat service, Britain’s Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Doe says that for most of human history, the onboard lifeboat you are likely picturing in your head right now did not exist. Even as late as the 18th century, on a typical wooden sailing ship, what few boats were on board were mostly for taking cargo and crew to and from shore. There were no boats designed for the crew to get on just in case the ship sank. So if your ship did sink, there wasn’t much you could do except signal for help, by firing a cannon or lighting a fire, and hope that someone came to your rescue.
Then, in 1785, a British carriage-builder named Lionel Lukin filed a patent for an “unimmergable boat”, the first known craft designed with the specific purpose of saving lives at sea.
Lukin’s key innovation was to line the boat’s hull with sealed air pockets and cork to help keep it buoyant, even in the most difficult conditions. Less than a decade later, the Englishmen William Woudhave and Henry Greathead improved on Lukin’s design. Their boat’s hull rose steeply upward at both ends, so that only the middle of the boat would ever take on water, while the bow and stern stayed above the waterline, making it even more difficult to sink.
The boat was also intended to be “self-righting”, so it wouldn’t capsize. And somewhere along the way, these unimmergable, self-righting, life-saving vessels were finally dubbed “lifeboats.”
The earliest lifeboats were meant to be launched by people on shore, not unlike coast guard rescue boats today. Lifeboats slowly made their way onto ships with the advent of the transatlantic passenger steamer in the mid-19th century.
But sailors soon discovered that, although lifeboats launched from shore performed well, lifeboats on ships were rarely able to save anyone. Mike Brady is a maritime history researcher and the creator of the youtube channel Oceanliner Designs. Brady says lifeboats on ships were only useful when the water was calm and you were sinking slowly and close to land. The rest of the time, lifeboats were a gamble.
Shipboard lifeboats were more ungainly and cheaply built than their shore-based counterparts. They were designed to carry as many passengers as possible, not a rescue crew, and it was difficult to get passengers onto a boat from a moving deck, and then lower that boat into a raging storm.
And even if a lifeboat got safely away and was piloted by a trained crew member, that would do very little good if the ship sank far out at sea, without hope of rescue. As a result, many lifeboats simply disappeared, or were found decades later washed up with their complement dead inside.
But at the turn of the 20th century, the shipping industry hit upon a better strategy – summed up by the mantra “the ship is its own best lifeboat”. The idea was to make ships so sturdy, with so many safety features and redundancies, that there would rarely be any need to get in an actual lifeboat. Instead, in most emergencies, the safest boat would be the ship itself.
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