James Cameron's Titanic spreads the blame for the disaster around a bit. He's not afraid to make J. Bruce Ismay, president of the White Star Line, look like a selfish coward, for example. But one person gets off with relatively little blame in the film: Captain Edward Smith. As portrayed by Bernard Hill, Smith is shown to be a competent, compassionate man who realizes the trouble the ship is in too late. His decision to literally go down with the ship is given a big, dramatic moment as he waits on the bridge for the water to burst in and drown him.
In reality, Captain Smith should get a lot more blame. As the BBC makes clear, he was the captain. Every decision that doomed the passengers stops with him. He ignored warnings about the ice field, after all, and maintained a speed that made evading icebergs difficult if not impossible.
Worse, he never issued an order to abandon ship. The lack of such an order convinced many passengers that things weren't as bad as they seemed, and definitely slowed down the evacuation. And Smith had to have been aware that lifeboats were departing only half-full, and yet he appears to have done nothing about it. Many people speculate that Smith was in shock from the enormity of what was happening, which would explain his lack of organized action.
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