After a frustrating search for a new master to assume command of their latest and largest vessel, ABC News has learned that White Star Lines President G. Walker Bush has chosen Captain Sir John Felching for the role. Felching will report directly to the president, but as the new captain of the Titanic, he has been assured a free hand in dealing with what a White Star spokesman referred to as “certain persistent, moisture-related challenges.”
“A lot of people want to pack it in,” Felching told reporters shortly after his appointment was announced. “It’s true that the Titanic’s maiden voyage hasn’t gone as smoothly as we might have liked, but that’s no reason to just cut bait and abandon ship. If we pull our survivors out now, the icebergs will follow us home.”
Filling the position had become a priority for White Star executives after a handful of former shipmasters told the president they did not want the job. Among them was retired Captain Sir Holmbert Queef, who proved an embarrassment to management after he wrote a skeptical letter to the Times. In his missive, Sir Hombert questioned the veracity of a press release which claimed that the ship’s original master, Captain Edward John Smith, had died of “natural causes associated with old age, aggravated slightly by respiratory distress caused by damp conditions typical of the North Atlantic.”
“What I found in discussions with current and former members of White Star management,” Queef wrote, “is that there is no agreed upon strategic view of the Titanic’s problem. Some feel that she began the voyage without the necessary resources (like lifeboats). Others believe she was stabbed in the back by the Carpathia, while still others attribute the current difficulties to a ship’s company demoralized by a constant stream of criticism and second-guessing by Fleet Street penny dreadfuls. Personally, I think it’s the ruddy great gash in her hull.”
Felching will set sail on Monday aboard the White Star clipper Exculpate to join his new command, insisting that while ”there are obstacles ahead, and an unacceptable amount of water damage in the First Class salons, we fully intend to guide this noble ship to her original destination.”
When a reporter asked Captain Felching how he planned to cross a thousand miles of ocean in a ship with a hundred meter-long hole below the waterline, the Captain was gently pushed aside by White Star board member Professor G. Harlan Reynolds, who trained a gimlet eye upon the assembled scribes and boldly declared, “Float.”
