The Samson's Strange Sights

First Officer Henrik Naess, Samson

"I was on watch, but sat down below...

drinking a rum toddy with the skipper..."

In 1962, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Titanic disaster, a BBC radio program introduced a new suspect for the mystery ship seen by the Titanic. A transcript of a diary of First Officer Henrik Naess, of the sealer Samson, told the story of his adventures on board that ship. From it, we can re-assemble the relevant passages. He writes of having an ear ailment that left him temporarily out of work, before he received two good offers of work...

   "...after Christmas, 1912, we sailed from Tongsberg on February 8, with 45 men aboard, under Captain Ring, a sailor to his fingertips... [in April] we kept on a south-westerly course until noon the next day. According to our calculations and the noon observations, we should then be level with Cape Hatteras and we found quite rightly that we were... we continued to the south-west the whole afternoon until darkness set in...

    "...We were on six hour watches... I was on watch in the evening, but sat down below drinking a rum toddy with the skipper... just before twelve o'clock I strolled out on deck to wait for my relief. I noticed two stars on the horizon far down to the south. "Those stars are hanging very low," I said to the bridge hand. "Nip up to the crow's nest and see what you can make of it." I thought it possible that it could be American seal-catchers lying on the edge of the ice barrier. The bridge hand climbed up and pointed his telescope towards the stars.

    "That is no star!" he shouted from above, "they are lanterns and I can see lots of lights." A moment passed and then some rockets rose against the sky. Thereafter all the lights were extinguished and it was dark. We saw no more.

    "It was feared that we might be taken for violating territorial waters, and the lights out there probably meant that there were Americans in the neighborhood. When the lights went out this probably meant that we had been observed, the lights being, maybe, signals to other ships. We therefore changed course and hurried northwards. When dawn came, there was no sign of ships anywhere."

The diary tells how the Samson was damaged in the ice, and limped back to Iceland, and there, Naess and Captain Ring sat down to dinner with the Consul.

    "Have you heard the latest ghastly news?" The Consul tells them about the Titanic.

    "When did this happen?" I asked. There was something inside me which made me think.... We now understood the meaning of the lights and rockets we had seen. We had been ten nautical miles away when the Titanic went down. There we were, with our big excellent ship and eight boats in calm, excellent weather. What might we have done, if we had known?"

There are obvious difficulties with this account:

• By the time this diary entry begins ("after Christmas, 1912"), the Titanic had already been at the bottom of the ocean for nearly eight months.
• The Titanic sank in mid-ocean, several hundred miles from land, no-where near any country's "territorial waters."
• The Samson reportedly witnessed all this south of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, United States, and by going "further to south-west all afternoon" was heading further and further in the wrong direction. The Titanic sank off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, a few hundred miles from the eastern shores of Canada.
• If the First Mate was below decks, sharing a rum toddy with his Captain, when it was his turn to be out on watch, was he sober enough to be trustworthy?

In 1963 author Leslie Reade conducted a search of shipping records in Iceland, and found that the Samson was actually in the port of Isafjordhur on April 6, and again on April 20, when she paid her dock taxes. His 1992 posthumous book, The Ship That Stood Still, contains a notarized photostat of government tax documents, including Captain Ring's signature on the dates in question. In short, the Samson would have had to cover 1,500 miles between April 6 and April 14 to arrive at the scene of the Titanic's sinking in time to witness it - absolutely impossible for a six-knot ship, and she could not possibly have been within ten miles of Titanic on April 14, and been back in Isafjordhur on April 20.

The Samson - a six knot ship.

Known to have been in Iceland on April 6 and again on April 20,

it is impossible for her to sail to Titanic's position and back in two weeks.

In spite of the implausibilities in the diary itself, and even after Reade's discovery was made known, pro-Lord authors as late as 1997 continue to tell the story that the Samson might have been on the scene, implying that the Californian somehow was not. Among these authors are:

Leslie Harrison, 1988, A Titanic Myth,
Charles Haas and Jack Eaton, 1986, Titanic: Triumph and Tragedy,
Robin Gardiner and Dan van der Vat, 1995, The Titanic Conspiracy.

A word about Reade's book, The Ship That Stood Still, mentioned earlier in connection with the Samson. An exhaustive study of the Californian incident, it was originally intended to be published in 1975. According to its Postscript, at the last moment before publication, Leslie Harrison withdrew his permission for Reade to use information which Harrison had supplied eleven years earlier. Later, Harrison was quoted in a Liverpool newspaper describing this as "a book we managed to kill before it came out."  In any case, the book was finally re-edited and published posthumously in 1993. Interested students may be able to find it in used bookstores or libraries. Its identifying information is: ISBN 0-393-03537-9, W. W. Norton and Company.   Walter Lord, author of A Night to Remember and The Night Lives On, once referred to Leslie Reade as a Titanic guru.