Swift Looks

The dining table at the Spanish embassy in Belgrave Square is 13.5 metres long and seats fifty people. It’s said to be the largest table (without leaves) in London. No. 24 Belgrave Square, once Downshire House, was acquired by the Spanish government in 1928. The table came with the house. The previous owner was William Pirrie, the 1st Viscount Pirrie, chairman of the shipbuilders Harland & Wolff and a one-time mayor of Belfast. It was in the dining-room of Downshire House in 1907 that Pirrie and Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line, conceived their idea for three vast new ocean liners, the Olympic, the Britannic and the Titanic, to rival Cunard’s ships. Only the Olympic had a career as a liner. The Britannic became a hospital ship in the First World War and sank after hitting a mine in the Aegean. The huge table now at the Spanish embassy was built for the Titanic, but it proved to be too large for the ship. It was taken to Pirrie’s residence on Belgrave Square, one relic of the Titanic not thousands of feet below the Atlantic.

The Bayesian, which sank off Sicily on 19 August with the loss of seven lives, was built by Perini Navi, which is now owned by Giovanni Costantino’s Italian Sea Group. Costantino began in the sofa business and then moved onto the types of yacht that often have many onboard sofas. He is not a man to shy away from his own successes. ‘Coming from different sectors, I often clashed with pre-defined and pre-existing rules,’ he has said. ‘Nonetheless, I persevered, and everything I envisioned has propelled the group I lead to global prominence.’ Perini Navi went bankrupt in 2020 and was acquired at auction by Italian Sea Group in 2021.

The Bayesian was built in 2008 for a Dutchman who couldn’t in the end take charge of it after an accident on another yacht that left him paralysed. Another Dutchman acquired the boat and named it Salute, before selling it in 2014 to a company owned by Angela Bacares, the wife of the tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, who changed its name and had the yacht refitted in Mallorca in 2020. Lynch and their daughter Hannah were among those killed when the Bayesian sank.

Immediately after it went down, Costantino said the yacht was ‘unsinkable’ – only the crew were to blame. Bayes’s theorem, which Lynch studied at Cambridge, is a mathematical rule for adjusting probabilities in the light of new evidence, though you don’t need to understand Bayesian statistics to see that a sunken vessel can’t be described as unsinkable.

The OED defines a yacht as:

a light fast-sailing ship, in early use esp. for the conveyance of royal or other important persons; later, a vessel, usually light and comparatively small, propelled by motive power other than oars, and used for pleasure excursions, cruising etc., and now esp. one built and rigged for racing.

The Bayesian was not built to race. It was 56 metres long and displaced more than 540 tonnes: it fit the OED definition, just about, thanks to those adverbs ‘usually’ and ‘comparatively’. It had six cabins that could accommodate twelve guests, and had quarters for a ten-person crew. One of Perini Navi’s innovations was to build ships that required smaller crews, with more space for guests – and sofas. The Bayesian had one vast, 72-metre mast – the tallest in the world when it was built – but, like the table for the Titanic, there was something madly unrealistic and unnecessary about its size: the ship was in no way dependent on its sails.

It had twin MTU-designed diesel engines, each capable of producing almost 1000hp. MTU is a German company now owned by Rolls Royce Holdings. In the 1930s, MTU built cars and the engines for the Hindenburg zeppelin, which went up in flames fourteen months after its first transatlantic flight. With its engines running, and on a calm sea, the Bayesian could travel at 15 knots – that’s about 410 miles a day. The boat had tanks for 57,000 litres of fuel – twice the capacity of an Airbus A320 – which allowed it to sail (or rather not) for 3600 miles. Other tanks held 14,000 litres of fresh water.

But the sleek design of the boat was to emphasise its sailing prowess: the towering mast and huge sails, monitored by electronic winches, gave an impression of lightness and speed. In Homer, the Greeks are forever swift, with their swift horses and their swift ships, their speed an aspect of their heroism. So, too, from its looks, was the Bayesian, only those swift looks were deceiving.

Giovanni Costantino isn’t the only person to believe human error brought about the sinking of the Bayesian, although no one else seems quite so certain as he does. ‘It is very difficult to say precisely what happened here,’ a naval architect told the BBC. But Costantino has said:

Seven people have died onboard a vessel with our brand, which is why I want to speak up, also out of respect and closeness to the families who have lost relatives and friends. I imagine the crew is going through the worst moment of their lives. However, something in the way they handled the situation did not work. There was a chain of human errors. I can tell you with certainty that the ship took on water in these thirteen minutes. It took on water not only flooding the garage but also the engine room.

Referring to the Robert Baden Powell, an older yacht that was nearby but didn’t sink, Costantino carried on:

A ship from those years cannot have the technology of the Bayesian. Yet that ship did not suffer damage. Its crew had prepared it well to face the storm. They even managed to provide assistance to the Bayesian. The local fishermen did not go out that night. These people took the weather conditions seriously. How did the crew of the Bayesian not take the meteorological bulletin seriously? I struggle to explain it. How did they, when they realised they were losing the ship, not think of rescuing the passengers who were in the cabins? At the moment, only God knows.

The weather forecast for the night the Bayesian sank predicted bad weather but not a storm of such ferocity. The captain of the Robert Baden Powell has said that the crew of the Bayesian told him the hatches were closed. Angela Bacares cut her feet so badly on board before she was thrown into the water that once she reached the shore she had to be placed in a wheelchair. Maybe Costantino has an explanation for the shattered glass, too.