There was no criminal trial of the dead captain. The investigations were a Senate hearing and a Board of Trade wreck inquiry.
Both sat while bodies were still being recovered and while White Star’s officers were available as witnesses.
Agencies
- US Senate subcommittee — First public inquiry, 19 April–25 May 1912, chaired by Senator William Alden Smith.
- British Wreck Commissioner — Formal investigation under the Merchant Shipping Acts, Lord Mersey, 2 May–30 July 1912.
- Board of Trade — Set the 26 questions, supplied assessors and faced conflict-of-interest criticism for judging its own boatage rules.
- White Star / Marconi / Cunard — Company and wireless records, plus Carpathia’s rescue log, were compelled or volunteered as exhibits.
What followed
- Hold the witnesses
Smith boarded Carpathia’s arrival story and issued subpoenas so Ismay and officers could not leave the United States at once.
- Map the ice field
Both courts collected ice messages and other ships’ positions to show that the hazard was known on 14 April.
- Time the flooding
Andrews’s reported inspection, pump orders and the two-hour-forty-minute sink time were reconstructed from officers.
- Count the boats
Loading order, underfilled davits and the legal boatage table became the political core of both reports.
- Examine Californian
Captain Stanley Lord’s stopped ship and unread rockets were treated as a near-miss rescue, not as the cause of the wreck.
- Recommend statute
Continuous wireless, boats for all, rocket discipline and ice patrol moved from recommendation to 1912–14 law.
Turning points
- Carpathia at New York — The 18 April landing created a press crush and gave Smith a living witness list before memories hardened in Liverpool.
- Mersey’s speed finding — The 30 July report refused a design-defect escape hatch and pinned the casualty on navigation in ice.
- 1985 wreck images — The broken hull ended folk claims of a single intact dive and opened a second, archaeological file.
The investigations were fast, public and incomplete on steerage lives — and still sufficient to change Atlantic law.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.