Conspiracy theorists believe it was not the RMS Titanic that really sank, but was her sister ship RMS Olympic that sank on the fateful day.
For the video link, click here or read below for the entire conspiracy.
On 20 September 1911, the Olympic was involved in a collision with the Royal Navy’s light cruiser HMS Hawkein the Brambles Channel near Southampton. Hawkehad been inexorably drawn toward the Olympic by the giant liner’s wake (in fact, this incident led to the discovery of a new hydrodynamic principle affecting ships moving in parallel in restricted waters). So powerful was the suction that the cruiser’s ram bow was driven into the liner’s starboard side, aft of the engine room, damaging the starboard propellor shaft. (Gardiner falsely claims that the collision damaged theOlympic’s center turbine mountings and her keel.) A subsequent Court of Inquiry (at which the new hydrodynamic principle was presented for the first time) found that the Olympic was at fault, and the owners of the ship, the White Star Line and its parent company, International Mercantile Marine, were liable for damages. As Gardiner spins his yarn, this ruling had dire financial consequences for both White Star and IMM, as White Star’s insurers (Lloyds of London) refused to honor the insurance claim–conveniently ignoring the fact that Lloyd’s did not insure theOlympic, as the White Star Line was self-insured. What was true was repairs to the Olympic would take nearly two months, forcing White Star to not only absorb the cost of the repairs but also the lost revenue that resulted from the company’s largest, newest, and most glamorous liner being out of service. An unexpected consequence was that the repairs to theOlympic would set back the completion of the Titanicat the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast by a similar span of time, delaying the new ship’s introduction and maiden voyage.
To make matters worse, at least, so Gardiner tells us, the damage to the Olympic proved to be even more serious than was first believed, for after the ship was repaired and returned to service, she supposedly began experiencing severe engine problems which caused her to be returned to Harland and Wolff yet again, this time in February 1912. The ostensible reason for this return, as told to the public in general, was that theOlympic had lost a propellor blade and that she had to be drydocked to allow its replacement. This is where Gardiner becomes the most ambitious–and at the same time, the most absurd. He theorizes that, in order to get at least one of the two liners to sea and earning money, the crippled Olympic was converted into the almost-completed Titanic, the Titanic then assuming her older sister’s identity. Betraying an almost total ignorance of ships and shipbuilding in general, Gardiner asserts that all that was necessary to accomplish this identity switch was exchanging those parts of the ships which bore the vessels’ names: name plates, bells, navigation equipment, lifeboats, and any interior signing bearing the name Olympic or Titanic. This, of course, completely ignores the physical differences that already existed between the two ships, for example, the completely reworked accommodations on B and C Decks, which dramatically altered the number and arrangement of the windows and portholes on both decks; the extended enclosure aft on C Deck, the different arrangement of ventilators, fans, piping and machinery on the Boat Deck; the difficulty in changing the shell-plating at the bow and stern which bore the ships’ names (the names weren’t just painted on the plates, they were cut into the plates in letters four feet high and one-half inch deep). But hey! It’s a conspiracy theory–why let something as mundane as facts or the truth get in the way of a good fantasy, right? One last minute alteration was made to theOlympic–supposedly now the “Titanic”-which was done to forever make her distinct from her sister–and at the same time assure that everyone would know that the ship which was to be sunk was indeed the “Titanic.”The forward two-fifths of her Promenade Deck (B Deck) were enclosed by steel screening and glass windows.
(Just in passing, Gardiner also forgets to explain how this switch was to be concealed from the shipyard workers who were working on the two ships–some 15,000 of them–for that matter. As my friend James Carlisle, Belfast-born and raised, puts it, “How on earth can anyone expect 15,000 Irishmen to keep a secret?”)
The length of the “Titanic’s” sea trials is further evidence of the switch, as Gardiner sees it. TheOlympic‘s trials in 1910 required two full days, while the “Titanic’s” trials reportedly took less than a day to complete. By Gardiner’s accounting, why bother conducting sea trials on a ship that had already passed them almost two years earlier? He also claims that the “Titanic” never traveled faster than one-half her designed top speed, as her damaged hull was too weak to endure the stresses of a prolonged high-speed run. Any and all documentary records indicating otherwise were, he says, falsified in order to maintain and perpetuate the massive insurance fraud which was about to take place. (Gardiner conveniently forgets to explain how in just four and one-half days the “Titanic”reached the position where she sank if she was never able to travel at more than 12 knots. Details, right?)
For that is the heart of Gardiner’s thesis: the switching the two liners was done to perpetrate an insurance fraud on a near-unimaginable scale. The “Titanic”–actually the crippled and irreparable Olympic–would be lost at sea, and an insurance claim for her total value, some $15,000,000 in 1912, would be filed and of necessity honored.
