University of Virginia Library

THE CAPTAIN'S LOVE OF THE SEA

Once the interviewer stopped asking personal questions, Captain Smith would talk of the sea, of his love for it, how its appeal to him as a boy had never died.

"The love of the ocean that took me to sea as a boy has never died." he once said. "When I see a vessel plunging up and down in the trough of the sea, fighting her way through and over great waves, and keeping her keel and going on and on—the wonder of the thing fills me, how she can keep afloat and get safely to port. I have never outgrown the wild grandeur of the sea."

When he was in command of the Adriatic, which was built before the Olympic, Captain Smith said he did not believe a disaster with loss of life could happen to the Adriatic.

"I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to the Adriatic," he said. "Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that. There will be bigger boats. The depth of harbors seems to be the great drawback at present. I cannot say, of course, just what the limit will be, but the larger boat will surely come. But speed will not develop with size, so far as merchantmen are concerned.

"The traveling public prefers the large comfortable boat of average speed, and anyway that is the boat that pays. High speed eats up money mile by mile, and extreme high speed is suicidal. There will be high speed boats for use as transports and a wise government will assist steamship companies in paying for them, as the English Government is now doing in the cases of the Lusitania and Mauretania, twenty-five knot boats; but no steamship company will put them out merely as a commercial venture."

Captain Smith believed the Titanic to be unsinkable.