"TITANIC: R.I.P.; Can Dead Men Tell Tales?" My first published book,
but it was my 1985 novel "TITANIC Calling," that began my TITANIC research. 
The plot came to me while I was a flight attendant for Captain Eddie's Finest,
Eastern Airlines, the airline that David Letterman had once called this country's 
'premier pioneer airline.' 
   On those long dark night coach trips, after the beverages had been served
and the flight settled down to routine cabin inspections, while passengers slept, 
I'd sit on my jumpseat, look out at the stars and think...what if?
     What if the crew of a passenger ship that sank, died and reincarnated, 
where would they be apt to end up?  Hmmm.  Of course.  Same profession, but
in the sky, instead of on the sea, because airplanes had taken over
transoceanic travel.  The sea and the sky are twin mistresses...easy enough,
and I already had a great interest in ships and their history...maybe I had 
reincarnated from a life at sea? (Eventually a 'past life reader' would tell 
me that I had been a British sailor in at least two past lives.) So the plot thickened, 
and then we had a delay and, as usual I went to the airport 
bookstore to kill time, but this time I stumbled across 'Maiden Voyage'
by Geoffrey Marcus.  A coincidence maybe, or more? 
  Anyway, I was hooked on TITANIC's alleged mysteries, 
and I thought, 'I can make the ship in my novel TITANIC, 
there has been so much written about her, it will be easy 
to get background material.'
    But then I discovered the many different versions of what had happened 
on that fatal night in 1912, and none of them really made a lot of sense. 
And it dawned on me, only one man knew what really happened, TITANIC's watch
officer when she struck ice, William McMaster Murdoch, and he had died that night. 
So I set out to discover what kind of man, what kind of mariner he had been.
     I was fortunate...I had virtually free travel almost anywhere in the
world.  So I went to England, and to Scotland, to Dalbeattie, the family
home of the seafaring Murdochs, I met Scott Murdoch, who introduced me to
old Jimmy Murdoch, who had actually known Will.  I learned from Jimmy
that Will's widow, Ada Banks Murdoch, had returned to her native Christchurch,
New Zealand after WW I.  I wrote a letter to the editor of the Christchurch
Press, asking for contact with Ada Murdoch's relatives.  I had an immediate
reply from her nephew, L. R. Webley, who had known her when he was a boy, 
and said that she had remained bitter for the remainder of her life because 
of the way White Star had treated Will, literally blaming him for the loss of
TITANIC...to satisfy terms of the Harter Act, as I later learned, which Ada
may or may not have known about. And I had an unexpected bonus, 
a letter from Jim McGiffin, son of White Star Captain James McGiffin, 
who had been a shipmate,
and close friend of Will's.  Captain McGiffin had also been White Star's
Marine Superintendent at Queenstown, TITANIC's last port of call before
she started on her fatal voyage. And from the late Harry Murdoch in Canada, 
the family historian who had a great interest in maritime history, I learned,
among many other things, that Will Murdoch was known by his colleagues as 
'the best and smartest sailor afloat.'  
     I learned enough about Will to realize that he had tremendous integrity,
superior intelligence and reflexes, and that he actually was responsible 
for preventing serious damage to TITANIC that night.
     Later I traveled to Germany, after learning of the proximity of the
German liner FRANKFURT to TITANIC. At the US Senate Inquiry TITANIC's 
surviving junior wireless operator Harold Bride had testified that 
FRANKFURT had been first to answer TITANIC's first CQD call, but had been
rebuffed by TITANIC's senior Marconi operator, Jack Phillips.
     With an introduction to Germany's leading maritime historian/author, 
Arnold Kludas, I went to meet him at the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum in Bremerhaven. 
Herr Kludas told me of Wilhelm M�ller, a former German Handelsmarine deck officer
who had written an article about FRANKFURT and TITANIC, published in the
January/February, 1962, "Belgian Shiplover,' the quarterly journal of the 
Belgian Nautical Research Society.  The title of M�ller's article was 
'Once Again the TITANIC' and it is printed in its entirety in my book 
"TITANIC: Sinking the Myths." Wilhelm was then living in a retirement home 
in Canada, and later I went there to interview him. I had already heard 
of the "Chronik der Waried Reederei," a limited edition book privately 
published in Germany just prior to WWII,  which told of 
the DAPG tanker NIAGARA's proximity to TITANIC that night, but Kludas 
showed me the chapter from the Chronik which told of that incident.  
And Kludas also showed me Engineering magazine's summary of the 
British Board of Trade TITANIC Inquiry transcript, with testimony 
from Harland & Wolff's naval architect Edward Wilding, in which 
Wilding answered questions about the bunker fire, which had smoldered 
in TITANIC's forward bunkers until about 24 hours prior 
to her impact with ice.  Wilding had admitted that the heat 
from the fire would have made the crucial bulkhead 'more brittle.'
     This testimony fit with a statement given to reporters by a rescued
TITANIC crewman, in which he said that the fire had been extinguished by
removing all of the coal from bunkers adjacent to that bulkhead, and thus
when the water came in the bulkhead had no shoring support from the coal.
This was the prescribed method for extinguishing such bunker fires, 
usually started by spontaneous combustion caused by the breaking up 
of the coal during bunkering. These fires were common in coal-burning 
vessels, and not considered dangerous in steel-hulled ships.  
The odds against this particular watertight bulkhead becoming 
crucial to TITANIC's survival after her minimal damage from 
the collision with a growler, or bergy bit (not the mountain 
of ice that legend insists) must have been at least a million to one. 
However, after the fact, when Ismay and most importantly Thomas Andrews,
TITANIC's designer, had assessed the heat damage to that bulkhead, 
and gambled that it would hold until Cunard's CARPATHIA arrived, 
the fire damage had to be covered up, particularly because TITANIC 
had sent no distress signal, as she was not considered to be in 
immediate danger at that time, and International Rules of the Road 
instructions for sending distress signals were, and are, 
firmly spelled out.
    This had happened at a time in maritime history when oil-firing 
of steamships was already being phased in by Germany and the 
United States, in their respective warships, and Germany's 
first Diesel-oil powered merchant vessel had already made her 
maiden voyage. Britain, however, had no oil, but did have plenty 
of coal. British mine owners, and miners' unions of course were 
fighting against the conversion to oil for the Royal Navy and 
Britain's mercantile marine which was being recommended by 
First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill and highly 
respected retired RN Admiral 'Jackie' Fisher. Additionally, 
Britain as yet had no marine engineers trained in oil-firing, 
and there would have been a tremendous loss of jobs with 
the conversion to oil fuel as all of the coal-firing stokers, 
firemen, trimmers, etc., would not be needed in oil-fueled ships.  
(In fact, when TITANIC's elder sister OLYMPIC was converted 
from coal to oil-firing in 1918 her engine room crew roster 
fell from 360 to 60 men.) To have the general traveling public 
realize that if TITANIC had not been coal-fueled she would not 
have sunk, at a time when the future of shipping was oil fuel,
could have been fatal to Britannia as 'ruler of the waves'...
especially when her potential enemy on the high seas, Germany,
had begun building its own ships at long last, and had actually 
wrested the Blue Riband from Britain with the first four-stacker, 
KAISER WILHELM DER GROSSE, built at the Vulkan Stettin yard in 1897. 
With the greater efficiency and economy of oil fuel, as well as 
the fact that at sea an oil-fired warship would show little smoke 
to betray her position, and have fewer personnel risking 
their lives in battle, Britain's loss of sea supremacy was
assured if its ships were not converted, yet Britain would be 
entirely dependent upon the Middle East for oil, 
an even greater detriment in wartime. With Britain and Germany 
known to be on the brink of war anyway, with German-flagged 
tankers carrying oil from the United States to Germany on 
a regular basis, no, it would definitely not do to have 
passengers flocking to the safer oil-fueled German and 
American liners. 
    So I began a new quest...I found old seamanship, navigation
and naval architect manuals from TITANIC's era. I studied metallurgy 
as well.  And I learned about coal fires, and floodable length, 
and the Southern Track, and ice, and distress signals, and maritime law,
and many other interesting items which had been completely ignored 
in previous TITANIC research. I already understood dead reckoning 
navigation from my own flying experience in light aircraft.  
And I found many volumes of memoirs of mariners and marine engineers 
of TITANIC's era, including those of Arthur Rostron, James Bisset, 
Bertram Hayes, and that wonderfully prolific writer and Merchant Navy 
engineer William McFee, plus too many others to mention here.  
I also read many, many newspaper articles and accounts of the 
tragedy written in 1912, and interviewed two TITANIC survivors.
    From all of this material, plus consulting with professional 
deck and engineering officers who had steam and North Atlantic 
experience, and finally acquiring the complete B.O.T. inquiry 
transcript to go with the US Senate Inquiry transcript, which I had
easily acquired early in my research, I put the pieces together.
     The answers to TITANIC's 'riddle' lie in my books R.I.P., 
and Myths. The combination/update of certain chapters from these 
books explain it in detail, the first being CALIFORNIAN and TITANIC; 
Facts vs. Myths, available from Michael Tennaro's titanicbooksite.com. 
CALIFORNIAN's Master, Captain Stanley Lord, had been a scapegoat 
for the remainder of his life, and unfortunately to some 'historians'
he still remains so posthumously.  Myths thoroughly explains at 
last why Captain Lord, had to be a scapegoat, although there were
many vessels within sight of TITANIC, but CALIFORNIAN was not 
one of them.  If TITANIC had sent distress signals as prescribed 
by the International Rules of the Road in 1912, there would have 
been plenty of aid for her. Lord Mersey's 'conclusion' that
CALIFORNIAN was only five miles from TITANIC but did nothing, 
made no sense, but was given and accepted in 1912 to protect 
Britain's economic interests and prestige at sea. It is my opinion 
that Captain Lord understood this, and patriotically refrained from 
contesting it.  The fact that he never lost his license, and went 
on to serve his country and mercantile marine with an outstanding 
record, supports this.
   The original version of my novel "TITANIC Calling" will soon
be available from www.katcomedia.com and www.titanicbooksite.com  
"TITANIC Calling" is a 'beach' read, a more portable, more easily 
read version of the disaster, in historical novel genre, with facts 
from my extensive research for 'Myths' and 'R.I.P.' Myths, however, 
in its technical entirety, is available again from 
www.katcomedia.com and www.titanicbooksite.com.