The Californian Incident

“Very likely you’ll all be taken aboard the Titanic again at daylight,” Lightoller insisted. “Or, at worst, you’ll all be taken on board that other ship.”

When Titanic sank, she took with her the hopes, dreams and passions of over 1,500 souls. Yet, frustratingly near on the horizon was a ship -- seen by passengers and crew -- that never responded to Titanic's wireless distress calls or its distress rockets; a ship so close, even as passengers succumbed to waters cold enough to feel "like a thousand knives being driven into the body," among the survivors and the lost, many clung desperately to the hope that it would approach - a mystery ship that as the night was consumed by what one survivor called "that spine-tingling chorus" of 1,500 drowning souls "... across the water -- a mixture of cries, screams and shouts ... the most nightmarish sound imaginable"; that even as Titanic slowly reared up, then broke apart, and sank nearby ... stood still and did nothing.

The evidence seemed to point clearly to Captain Stanley Lord’s command, the Californian - but Captain Lord tried to put his command as far as forty miles away - nowhere near enough to have been of any help, and without Titanic’s precise location when she sank, the debate over the mystery ship’s location and identity could never be resolved … until now.

Through pains-taking research and intimate detail, “The Californian Incident” takes us back aboard Titanic on that tragic night, gives us a front-row seat at the hearings, and even takes us aboard the ship that turned a blind eye and sailed away. Now, using science as a candle in the dark, “The Californian Incident” finally sheds light on one of Titanic’s darkest moments and, once and for all, solves one of her deepest mysteries.

Bio

As the prolific author of three Titanic books, Charles Pellegrino is also the only person who has sailed with expeditions through all three eras of Titanic’s exploration. “Her Name, Titanic,” said Walter Lord (“A Night to Remember”), was "Like walking through a Stanley Kubrick film . . .. it is impossible to pull off this sort of thing without knowing the facts, and Charlie Pellegrino knows his Titanic inside and out." Publishers Weekly calls “Ghosts of the Titanic” “a tour de force,” and Stephen King said, “Charles Pellgrino has raised the Titanic – at least in my imagination.” And of “Farewell, Titanic,” James Cameron, the director of Titanic, wrote, "Pellegrino has completed his twenty-five-year journey of Titanic exploration with this deeply detailed book that looks the horror and chaos of that disaster square in the eye, with human insights not previously brought to light. Pellegrino really is the king of connect-the-dots."

Charles Pellegrino wears many hats. He has been known to work simultaneously in crustaceology, paleontology, preliminary design of advanced rocket systems, and marine archaeology. He has been described by Stephen Jay Gould as a space scientist who occasionally looks down and by Sir Arthur C. Clarke as "the polymathic astro-geologist-nuclear physicist who happens to be the world's first astro-paleontologist." In the late 1970s Dr. Pellegrino and Dr. Jesse A. Stoff produced the original models that predicted the discovery of hydrothermal biospheres in certain moons of Jupiter and Saturn. He was a framer of the U.S.-Russian Space Cooperation Initiative (which included, among its designs, an International Space Station and joint Mars missions). At Brookhaven National Laboratory he and Dr. James Powell coordinated brainstorming sessions that reach now into the next 50 years in space. Projects currently under design range from vastly decreasing the cost of launching payloads into orbit to the robotic mining of near-Earth asteroids and relativistic flight (Valkyrie rockets). Scaled-down versions of the Valkyries can bring Mars and even Saturn's moon Titan within only a few weeks' travel time.