6, where he refused to return to rescue people from the water due to fear of the boat being sucked into the ocean with the huge suction created by the Titanic, or swamped by other floating passengers.

According to several accounts of those on the boat, including Margaret Brown, who argued with him throughout the early morning, Lifeboat 6 did not return to save other passengers from the waters.

In 1906, he married Florence Mortimore in Devon, England; when he registered for duty aboard the Titanic, his listed address was in Southampton, where he lived with his wife and two children.

He would also testify to have been given direct orders by second mate Charles Lightoller and Captain Edward Smith to row to where a light could be seen (a steamer they thought) on the port bow, drop off the passengers and return.

6 passengers publicly accused Hichens of being drunk: Major Arthur Godfrey Peuchen and Mrs Lucian Philip Smith.

He had been initially concerned about the suction from the Titanic and later by the fact that being a mile away from the wreck, with no compass and in complete darkness, they had no way of returning to the stricken vessel.

[citation needed] Hichens served with the Army Service Corps during the First World War; by 1919, he was third officer on a small ship named Magpie.

[2] On 23 September 1940, at age 58, Hichens died of heart failure aboard the ship English Trader, while the vessel was moored off the coast of Aberdeen in the north-east of Scotland.

He strongly protests when Molly Brown starts encouraging the other women to row towards the light, and she threatens to throw Hichens overboard.

Hichens' negative attitude was further depicted in Diane Hoh's 1998 romance novel Titanic: The Long Night, which recounts his conduct as well as that of Molly Brown, from the viewpoint of Elizabeth Farr, a fictional lifeboat passenger.

In press interviews leading up to the publication of her latest novel, Good as Gold (into which she has worked the story of the catastrophe), Patten reports that a "straightforward" steering error by Hichens, brought about by his misunderstanding of a tiller order, caused the Titanic to hit an iceberg in 1912.