If you ever find yourself abandoning a sinking
ship in the middle of the ocean, your chances
of surviving as a man are, well, they're nearly
double that of a woman. pretty wild to think
about. Right. I mean, wait a minute. Does an
ancient, unbreakable maritime law dictate that
the crew absolutely has to save the women and
children first? That's definitely what the movie's
telling. Exactly. But welcome to this deep dive
where we are going to look into that. Today,
we have a really fascinating mission for you.
We're taking a massive Wikipedia article that
chronicles the history, the real world applications,
and honestly, the grim statistical realities.
of this universally recognized command. Yeah,
and we're really putting this myth to the test
today. Because that famous doctrine you've heard
shouted in literally every blockbuster disaster
movie, it is not a law at all. I mean, its historical
application is fiercely inconsistent. And the
actual data regarding who makes it into a lifeboat
and who gets left behind, well, it's going to
completely shatter your assumptions about human
nature in a crisis. It really is. It's the ultimate
collision between our idealized morality and
our, you know, primal survival instincts. If
you take a look at the backdrop behind me today,
you'll see we've brought up these faded maritime
star charts and naval blueprints just to kind
of set the mood for you. I love the aesthetic,
by the way. Very nautical. Thanks, yeah. In this
deep dive, we're going completely below deck.
We're stripping away the Victorian romanticism
that always surrounds shipwrecks to examine the
cold, hard, and honestly, often terrifying mechanisms
of human behavior in those absolute ultimate
moments of panic. Okay, let's unpack this. Because
to understand the famous disasters we all think
we know so well, we have to trace this idea back
to its actual origin point, right? Back in the
19th century. Yeah, we have to go back to May
of 1840. Right. American vessel called the Poland.
And a detail that stands out immediately in the
historical record, and I found this super interesting,
is that this wasn't even a military ship with
like rigid discipline. It was a packet ship.
Which is a huge distinction. It is. For anyone
unfamiliar with 19th century maritime terms,
a packet ship was essentially the ocean going
equivalent of a mail truck. Like a mail truck
that also carried paying passengers, just running
scheduled routes between North America and Europe.
Exactly. So the Poland was en route from New
York to Le Havre, France, when it was suddenly
struck by lightning. And a fire breaks out deep
in the cargo hold. Which is basically a worst
case scenario. Oh, absolutely. But this isn't
an immediate catastrophic sinking where the ship
just plunges beneath the waves in minutes. It's
more of an agonizingly slow burning realization
of extreme danger. Right. They have time to think
about it. Yeah. The captain assesses the fire,
realizes the ship is likely doomed, and he prepares
the passengers for the grim possibility of taking
to the small lifeboats. But according to the
historical accounts, the captain didn't even
issue the famous order. Wait, really? The captain
didn't say it? Nope. A French passenger simply
offered a suggestion. He told the group, let
us take care of the women and children first.
Wow. So it was a completely civilian suggestion?
Entirely civilian. Driven by the social etiquette
of the era, rather than any sort of naval handbook.
And it worked, because like you said, it was
a precautionary orderly situation. The passengers
agreed, and they safely evacuated the women,
the children, and a few male passengers into
the ship's longboat. while the rest of the men
in the crew just stayed aboard the burning deck
to fight the blaze, you know, just buying time.
That slow, methodical nature of the Poland Fire
is basically what allowed this chivalric ideal
to play out without the pressure of total absolute
panic. Yeah, but what happens next is what truly
cements the phrase in history. One of the male
passengers who evacuated into that longboat was
a man named J .H. Buckingham. Ooh, the journalist.
Right, he wasn't just any passenger, he was a
journalist from Boston. So he survives, and he
writes this incredibly vivid, dramatic account
of the noble chivalry displayed aboard the Poland.
Which is exactly what people wanted to read.
Totally. It gets published in the Boston Courier.
Then he gets picked up across the Atlantic by
the Times in London. It even gets reprinted in
a book published that very same year. It's essentially
19th century viral media. That's exactly what
it is. Buckingham's article transformed this
localized moment of politeness into a global
media sensation. It captured the public imagination
so intensely that it started bleeding right into
fiction. Like 20 years later in 1860, the novelist
William Douglas O 'Connor wrote a book called
Herrington, a story of true love. Yeah that's
a wild book. It really is. He writes this fictional
Captain Herrington who goes down with his ship
standing on the deck holding a heavy wooden hand
spike. And he's violently threatening to smash
the skull of any man who dares touch a lifeboat
before the women and children are safe. Which
perfectly demonstrates how popular culture was
actively fusing women and children first with
that other great maritime myth, you know, that
the captain goes down with the ship. Right, combining
all the dramatic tropes. Exactly. The public
just devoured this romanticized fiction. And
that fictional romance suddenly appeared as a
terrifying historical reality in 1852 during
the sinking of the Royal Navy troop ship, HMS
Birkenhead. The famous Birkenhead drill, which
really became the gold standard for Stoicism.
It really did. So the Birkenhead strikes uncharted
rocks off the coast of South Africa and begins
to rapidly sink. The captain, Robert Salmond,
gives the order and the soldiers aboard demonstrate
a terrifying level of discipline. Like genuinely
hard to comprehend. Yeah. 60 men are ordered
to man the chain pumps. For those unfamiliar
with mid -century naval engineering, these were
massive physically exhausting manual cranks used
to literally pump rising ocean water out of the
hull. Backbreaking work. Oh, incredibly. And
another 60 men are assigned to the tackles of
the lifeboats, operating the heavy ropes and
pulley systems required to lower the boats down
the side of the hull. And then the rest of the
soldiers are ordered to assemble on the poop
deck. Which, I know, despite the funny name,
is just the raised deck at the very rear of the
ship. They're ordered to march the back and simply
stand there in formation. Just wait. Yeah, just
standing there. The sheer weight of hundreds
of men standing at the rear was an attempt to
act as a counterweight, to try and raise the
sinking forward part of the ship out of the water.
They literally stood at attention while the women
and children were lowered away safely in the
ship's cutter, which is just a small road boat
used for transfers. They stood in perfect military
formation as the ship sank beneath their feet.
I mean, the imagery is so powerful, so unbelievably
disciplined, that it became a defining legend
of the British Empire. It's cinematic. Yeah.
Rudyard Kipling even immortalized it in his 1893
poem, Soldier and Sailor 2. But, you know, hearing
this timeline, the mechanism behind the myth
becomes painfully obvious. To me, these early
Victorian stories operate exactly like our modern
superhero movies. That's a great way to put it.
Right. Like, we want to believe that when a city
is falling apart, someone with an unshakable
moral compass will hold up the collapsing building
so the innocent can escape. It is a highly sanitized
narrative that society desperately needs to believe
about human nature. But looking at the industrial
context of the era, I really have to push back
on the nobility of it all. This intense focus
on chivalry feels like an elaborate cultural
band -aid. Was the insistence on this moral code
really just a way to cover up the fact that maritime
safety regulations of the 19th century were mathematically
guaranteeing mass casualties? If we connect this
to the bigger picture, Your assessment of the
industrial reality is completely accurate. During
the 19th and early 20th centuries, shipping companies
simply refused to outfit their vessels with enough
lifeboats to save everyone on board. Which is
just so mind -boggling today. It is. To understand
the sheer scale of this institutionalized negligence,
we can look at a debate from 1870. The UK Board
of Trade was questioned in the House of Commons
regarding the sinking of a paddle steamer called
the Normandy. George Shalefeff Speaking on behalf
of the board, actively argued against passing
laws that would require passenger steamers to
carry enough lifeboats for everyone. Wait, he
argued against saving lives? Like, what was the
mechanical or economic justification for that?
Well, he claimed that adding more lifeboats would,
quote, encumber the decks and rather add to the
danger than detract from it. Wow. And sadly,
there is a twisted economic logic to his argument
based on shipbuilding of the era. Putting dozens
of heavy wooden lifeboats on the top deck of
a narrow steamer makes the vessel dangerously
top -heavy and prone to capsizing. Okay, I see
the physics of it, but still. Yeah, but furthermore,
first -class passengers paid a premium for open,
unobstructed promenade decks to take their afternoon
walks. Cluttering those high -paying spaces with
lifeboats was just bad for business. So it was
about the view. Pretty much. Add to that the
fact that maritime legislation was based entirely
on the cubic tonnage of the vessel, which is
a holdover from when ships primarily moved cargo,
not tourists, and the laws completely ignored
the actual human passenger count. So the industry
was essentially operating like an airline that
legally overbooks a flight by hundreds of seats,
realizes the plane is going to crash, and then
relies on a poem to explain why half the passengers
have to stay behind and die. The Victorian commentator
celebrated women and children first as the ancient
chivalry of the sea handed down through the bloodline.
But underneath the poetry, it was just a manufactured
code of conduct designed to manage a death toll
created by corporate cost cutting. a coping mechanism
for systemic failure. And that brings us to the
predictable consequences of that failure. When
we strip away the orderly military discipline
of the Birkenhead, we're left with the horrifying
reality of what happens when the panic of limited
survival resources actually sets in. Right, which
perfectly frames the disaster of the French liner
La Bourgogne in 1898. If the Birkenhead is the
romantic ideal, La Bourgogne is the dark, brutal
mirror. Yeah, it's horrific. When that ship began
to sink, the veneer of chivalry completely evaporated
under the pressure of survival. Out of 200 women
on board, 199 died. And out of all the children
on the ship, not a single one survived. The statistics
reflect an environment of absolute chaos and
brutal self -preservation. The crewmen, the very
individuals employed to maintain order and safely
evacuate the passengers, they realized the severe
shortage of lifeboats and just took them for
themselves. Just left the passengers behind.
Yeah, they possess the technical knowledge to
operate the complex pulleys and tackles, and
they use that advantage exclusively for their
own survival. And it gets worse. As they were
launching the boats, the crewmen actively use
oars and knives to beat and stab passengers who
were desperately trying to climb aboard. Put
yourself on that slanted freezing deck for a
second. Think about that. You are standing there
with your family as the water rises. You are
relying on this grand unwritten moral toad you've
read about in the newspapers to protect you.
And instead, the uniformed crew is actively using
weapons against you to secure their own seats
in the only available boats. It's terrifying.
It exposes the terrifying fragility of our social
contracts. When the water reaches your boots
and there are 10 people for every one seat, the
illusion of chivalry just shatters it really
does and this stark realization about human panic
combined with the fatal ambiguity of unwritten
rules leads us directly into the most famous
application of the doctrine in human history
right the sinking of the rms titanic in 1912
The Titanic is the ultimate symbol of this entire
concept. I mean, we all know the broad strokes
of the tragedy, but looking at the mechanical
breakdown of the evacuation that night reveals
a terrifying study in deadly semantics. Yeah,
words really matter here. When the Titanic struck
the iceberg and Captain Edward J. Smith realized
the ship was mathematically doomed, he gave a
verbal order to his officers. He told them, put
the women and children in and lower away. Here's
where it gets really interesting because that
single vaguely worded sentence from the captain
caused a massive misinterpretation on the boat
deck, resulting in wildly different survival
rates depending on which side of the ship you
happen to be standing on. You have two different
officers managing the lifeboats. First officer
William McMaster Murdoch takes the captain's
order to mean women and children first. His operational
logic is simple, right? You load all the women
and children standing in the vicinity, and if
there are still empty seats in that lifeboat,
you allow men on board to maximize the capacity
of the boat before dropping it into the ocean.
Makes perfect sense. Yeah. But on the other side
of the ship... Second Officer Charles Lightoller
interprets the exact same sentence to mean women
and children only. Only? Yes. And Lightoller's
adherence to his interpretation was incredibly
rigid. He lowered lifeboats into the freezing
Atlantic Ocean with empty seats rather than allowing
any men to step aboard to fill them. Unbelievable.
If a boat holding 60 people only had 40 women
and children nearby, Lightoller sent it down
with 20 empty seats. He actively prevented men
from boarding, basically standing as a real -life
version of that fictional Captain Harrington.
Because he was so fiercely committed to preserving
this unofficial, idealized code, he was willing
to let viable, life -saving seats go to the bottom
of the ocean. The mathematical outcome of that
cognitive dissonance is just staggering. What
did the final statistics look like? Well, the
numbers show a massive gender disparity dictated
by this unwritten rule. 74 % of the women on
board the Titanic were saved, 52 % of the children
were saved, but only 20 % of the men survived.
Wow. And the tragedy compounded for the men who
did make it, because the narrative of the Birkenhead
was so culturally dominant. This toxic idea that
a real man bravely accepts drowning society mercilessly
punished male survivors. J. Bruce Esme, the White
Star Line official, is the prime example of that.
He helped load boats for hours and then stepped
into a lifeboat at the very last minute when
there were no other passengers nearby. He filled
an otherwise empty seat, but he was prominently
branded as a coward by the press. Ruined his
life. He lived the rest of his life in total
social exile. The cultural pressure of this unwritten
rule was so intense that survival itself became
a badge of shame for men. The Titanic sinking
served as an absolute flashpoint for societal
expectations. It forced a global conversation
about gender roles, rights and the true cost
of chivalry. And to understand how polarizing
this doctrine had become, we can look at the
immediate cultural friction it caused. In 1913,
the year after the Titanic sank, an author named
Ernest Bax published a book called The Fraud
of Feminism. And we should pause here to make
something incredibly clear to you, the listener.
We are absolutely not taking a side on this politically
charged sentiment. Oh, right. Definitely not.
We are not endorsing these viewpoints at all.
We are simply reporting it to show how polarizing
this unofficial doctrine had become in the cultural
zeitgeist. immediately after the Titanic sank.
Exactly. We just want to convey the ideas contained
in the original source material. So Backus used
the Titanic disaster as a core argument describing
this concept of chivalry as, quote, the deprivation,
the robbery from men of the most elementary personal
rights in order to endow women with privileges
at the expense of men. He heavily criticized
the outcome of the sinking. It was the very intense
reaction. Seeing quotes like that proves that
immediately after the Titanic, this supposedly
universal code was already fracturing the cultural
zeitgeist. It wasn't universally beloved, it
was sparking intense, bitter debate about the
value of a human life based on gender. This raises
an important question. How does rigid adherence
to an emotionally driven rule fundamentally undermine
the ultimate goal of an evacuation? Right. I
mean, if the objective is to save as many human
beings as possible, Leithoeller's strict interpretation
of women and children only mathematically failed.
He prioritized the preservation of a Victorian
ideal over the preservation of human life, literally
sending empty wooden seats to the ocean floor.
Which brings us to the ultimate reckoning of
this deep dive. You have heard the romantic legend
of the Birkenhead and the horrifying breakdown
of order on La Bregone and the fatal miscommunications
of the Titanic. But individual stories, no matter
how famous, they don't give us the whole picture.
No, they don't. What happens when we zoom out,
strip away the anecdotes and look at the aggregated
math of maritime disasters across history? Well,
the math completely destroys the myth. In 2012,
economists at Uppsala University in Sweden released
a groundbreaking comprehensive study. They didn't
just look at one or two famous British ships.
They analyzed the survival rates of over 15 ,000
people across 18 different maritime disasters.
That is a massive data set. It is. This spanned
over a century and included ships from various
nationalities, which really removed any specific
cultural bias from the data. Their conclusion
was definitive. The women and children first
rule is largely a total miss. And the actual
survival rates completely invert the Hollywood
narrative. Entirely. In their massive sample
size, the survival rate was 34 .5 % for men compared
to just 17 .8 % for women. Wait, really? So men
had a nearly 2 to 1 survival advantage in shipwrecks?
Yes. It's a devastating statistic that completely
unravels the Buckingham article from 1840. Furthermore,
the Upsala researchers concluded that true members
are significantly more likely to survive than
passengers. You know, the crew who know the layout,
who know how to release the lifeboats, who have
physical access to the upper decks, they use
that knowledge to save themselves. It's dark,
but it makes sense. It is a grim reflection of
human nature prioritizing self -preservation
above all else. So if this chivalric code is
a mathematical fiction backed by almost zero
historical data, What is the actual protocol
today? Like if you step onto a massive cruise
ship tomorrow, what rule is legally in place
to manage an evacuation? You might be surprised
to learn that there is absolutely zero legal
basis for women and children first in international
maritime law. None at all. None. It does not
exist in any modern statute. In modern evacuations,
the protocol is based on practicality, not poetry.
In a 2012 BBC interview, maritime expert Robert
Ashdown clarified the modern standard. Today,
crew members are trained to help the most vulnerable
people escape first. Okay, that makes a lot more
sense. Right. That typically means prioritizing
the injured, the elderly, or the very young completely
regardless of gender. It is entirely based on
physical mobility and acute need. A healthy,
able -bodied woman is expected to manage her
own evacuation, while the crew focuses their
resources on a disabled passenger or an elderly
man who physically cannot navigate the stairs.
It is a logical, needs -based approach. Exactly.
But even with all this data from Uppsala University,
even with modern international maritime law clearly
pivoting to a logic -based system, the cultural
lingering of this 19th century phrase is astonishing.
The myth is incredibly sticky. I mean, despite
the 2012 study proving it false, The Boy Scouts
of America Sea Scouting Program kept women and
children first as the motto of the sea and embedded
it in their sea promise all the way until 2020.
2020. It took an organization dedicated to maritime
education over a century to update a slogan based
on a fiction. And it isn't just in institutional
handbooks either. In February of 2020, a pub
in the town of Birkenhead Gallagher's traditional
pub painted a massive romanticized mural on the
side of their building celebrating the sinking
of HMS Birkenhead, proudly bearing that exact
slogan. We just cannot let the romance go. So
what does this all mean? It means that Women
and Children First was, at its core, a Victorian
moral ideal. It was a temporary, localized tradition
that was born out of the deadly impracticality
of a shipping industry that refused to sacrifice
deck space to pay for enough lifeboats. Yeah,
a cover -up. Exactly. It was a beautiful, comforting
story we told ourselves to mask an ugly, mathematical,
industrial truth. It was never a reflection of
actual human behavior in a crisis, as the data
clearly shows us. And it's certainly not modern
law. The stoicism of the Birkenhead was a celebrated
exception to the rule of human panic. Thank you
so much for joining us on this Deep Dive. We've
navigated from the lightning -struck deck of
the Poland to the empty lifeboats of the Titanic
and finally landed on the cold, hard data of
modern economics. To close us out today, we want
to leave you with a final, provocative thought
to chew on. Yeah, think about this. If women
and children first was ultimately a myth, a comforting
illusion that society actively chose to believe
through newspaper columns, Victorian novels,
and blockbuster films, what other unwritten rules
of human decency do we assume will protect us
in a modern crisis simply because we've seen
them play out on screen? Next time you board
a ship, a commercial airliner, or even a crowded
commuter train, take a look around and ask yourself.
In the absolute worst case scenario, when the
panic sets in, are you relying on the cold mechanics
of the law to keep you safe, or are you secretly
relying on a 19th century poem? A fascinating
question to carry with you into the world. Until
next time, stay curious, keep questioning the
myths, and we'll see you on the next Deep Dive.