Call Me Ismay

by Sean McDevitt

  Smith shook his head slightly, sensing an opportunity for Ismay to speak for himself, albeit somewhat theatrically. “It will not take long, and I think I would like to have you read them, inasmuch as they came from you.”

  Ismay's outstretched arm sagged slightly, as he sensed in desperation that the inquiry's attention was going to remain solely on him for the time being. “Yes, sir, I will do so,” he muttered. He placed the messages down on the table before him, as he pulled a pair of reading glasses from the front pocket of his coat with slightly unsteady hands. “This is a message I sent on April 15th.” Ismay coughed once before continuing in the choppy language of the Marconigram.

  “'Deeply regret advise you Titanic sank at 2:20 A.M. this morning after collision iceberg, resulting serious loss life. Full particulars later. YAMSI.' This is a message sent by Mr. Franklin to me on April 17, 1912- 'So thankful you are saved, but grieving with you over terrible calamity. Shall sail Saturday to return with you. Florence.' That was from my wife, and was forwarded to me by Mr. Franklin, who added, 'Accept my deepest sympathy horrible catastrophe. Will meet you aboard Carpathia after docking.'”

  “Who signed that?” asked Smith.

  “It was signed 'Franklin.' This is a message I sent. I have not the date of it, but it was received by Mr. Franklin on April 17, 1912- 'Most desirable Titanic crew aboard Carpathia should be returned home earliest moment possible. Please send outfit of clothes, including shoes, for me. Have nothing of my own. Please reply. YAMSI.' This is a message-”

  “I beg your pardon, Mr. Ismay,” Smith interrupted. “Have I understood you more than once to say 'YAMSI', right at the end of your communication?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What is the significance of that? What is its meaning?”

  “That is my personal signature for private messages,” he replied, placing the notes down. “It is my surname spelled backwards.”

  Smith stole a knowing glance at his colleagues before resuming. “You mean to say, sir, that you wished to obscure your name in a request for personal items?”

  “I should- I should say, not only for this particular message, but for any correspondence of a personal nature,” Ismay, annoyed, fidgeted in his chair.

  “Was this an deliberate attempt on your part to obfuscate your involvement, to somehow dodge your accountability in the wake of the disaster, then?”

  “Certainly not, sir!” Ismay responded, punctuating his words with a tap of the walking stick he had been clinging to, his voice rising and the Conference Rooms' spectators beginning to stir once more. Ismay was slowly becoming a steaming cauldron of rage that threatened to overflow at any moment. As beads of sweat formed on his forehead, he focused on the Senator from Michigan, making his words more cutting as he undersold them in the form of a stern lecture. He removed his reading glasses. “Mr. Senator, sir. We the English would call this the proceedings of a star chamber. I should think the Americans would refer to it as a kangaroo court. While I have deemed it necessary to cooperate in any way that I can, I simply must protest the insinuations being made by this inquiry.”

  “Insinuations can only be validated by your responses to them, Mr. Ismay,” Smith replied coolly.

  “I- I should like to respond-” Ismay sputtered, “that my signature as described on these messages can be found on any number of communications sent or received by me in the past and is not unique to this particular exchange. Yamsi, Ismay- it's completely irrelevant. Call me simply Ismay, if you must.”

  “Point taken, Mr. Ismay,” Senator Smith replied with a slight dose of sarcasm. “Please continue.”

  Still fuming, Ismay placed his reading glasses back on, and resumed. “This is a message which Mr. Franklin dispatched to me on the 18th of April, 1912, and which I received when the Carpathia docked in New York: 'Concise Marconigram account of actual accident greatly needed for enlightenment public and ourselves. This most important. Franklin.'”

  “What time was that?”

  “It was sent by Mr. Franklin on the 18th of April-” Ismay carefully examined the message- “at 4:45 P.M.”

  “That was the day you reached New York?”

  “I received it, I presume, about 9 o'clock that night, when we were alongside the dock.” Ismay removed his glasses, folding them and placing them back into his coat. “Now, that is a copy of every message I sent and every message I received and I had absolutely no communication with any other ship or any shore station, or with anyone.”

  Smith leaned back in his chair, silently motioning to two of his fellow Senators, Theodore Burton of Ohio and Duncan Fletcher of Florida. As they huddled in a private conference, a few lady spectators in feathered hats took the opportunity to open sack lunches they had brought along to the inquiry. Ismay sighed sadly, and reached out to the edge of his own table where he had stacked a few blank sheets of paper lifted from the press table. Despite the incessant burning and itching of his hands, which had suffered from a mild case of frostbite during the Titanic's sinking- and a recent strange aversion to anything with a blank, white surface, such as the papers that now lay before him- he felt compelled to somehow soothe his nerves. A man not given to emotionally revealing conversations, Ismay wasn't about to make any small talk with irritating White Star Line officials like Franklin or Sanderson or bored-looking bodyguards. Instead he took pen to paper, and began drawing, almost constantly for the duration of his questioning, a sketch of the White Star Line's flag. It was an emblem that had been a touchstone in his life, and for some reason, more now than ever, he needed the company's logo in his sight at all times. Focusing upon the details of the five-pointed star, filling the gaps where coloring would be with repetitive small strokes of black ink, he found stability, gentle remembrance, and yet... a feeling that some of his own questions about that fateful night were not being answered in his mind.

  A single tap of Smith's gavel jarred him as the questioning suddenly resumed. “Mr. Ismay, as you had indicated earlier, when you were on the bridge with Captain Smith, after the accident- did he say anything to you about her condition at that time?”

  “No, sir-” Ismay gave a small, frustrated sigh- “As I told you on Friday, when I went up to ask him what had happened, he told me we had struck an iceberg, and I asked him whether he thought the matter was serious, and he said he thought it was.”

  “That was the first intimation you had?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you hear any order given to call the passengers?”

  “I did not, sir.”

  “Or any other alarm?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I think in my prior examination in New York, you said you entered a lifeboat from the A Deck?”

  “From the Boat Deck, sir.”

  “And that, at the time, there were no other persons around- no women, particularly?”

  A deserted deck flashed through his mind's eye. “Absolutely none that I saw, sir.”

  “Was that the last lifeboat or the last collapsible boat to leave?”

  “It was the last collapsible boat that left- the starboard side- of the ship.”

  “Was it filled to its capacity?”

  “No, it was not.”

  “It was not filled to its capacity?” Smith's disbelieving tone only added to the tenseness that threatened to overtake the Conference Room.

  “No, sir.” Ismay's face reddened slightly.

  “Do you know how many people were in it?”

  “I believe that I already testified on this matter in New York, sir,” was Ismay's brittle response.

  “Indeed, you did, Mr. Ismay,” Smith stated plainly. “And unless I am mistaken, I believe that in your prior examination, you stated that the lifeboat was practically full. Therefore, we will revisit the matter.” There was a substantial rumble of voices in the room. “Mr. Ismay, do you know how many people were in your lifeboat?”

  His frustration mounting, Ismay leaned forward but restrained himself from raising his voice. “What
more can I tell you, sir? I think there were about forty women in it, and some children. There was a child in arms. I think they were all third class passengers, so far as I could see...”

  “At the time you entered it, did you say anything to Captain Smith about entering it?”

  “No, sir, I did not.” Ismay's brief moment of emotional strength evaporated upon the senator's mention of E.J., and he sank back in his chair. “I never saw the captain again.”

  “Who, if anyone, told you to enter that lifeboat?”

  “No one, sir.”

  “Why did you enter it?”

  Ismay froze, the tableau that had burned into the landscape under his eyelids refusing to dim: a deserted deck, a few cries in the distance, but otherwise an overwhelming sense of complete solitude on the deck of a ship that unquestionably had begun to founder. “Because there was room in the boat,” he replied, as if entering a plea. “She was being lowered away. I felt the ship was going down, and I got into the boat.”

  More than a few spectators vocally disapproved of his statement, and Senator Smith seemed to deliberately let several seconds pass by before resuming. “Did you yourself see any icebergs at daybreak the following morning?”

  “I should think I saw four or five icebergs when day broke on Monday morning.”

  “How near the scene of the Titanic disaster?”

  “I could not tell where she went down,” Ismay replied, cringing slightly. “We were some distance away from it.”

  “Not desiring to be impertinent at all, Mr. Ismay,” Smith intoned, appearing to ingratiatingly lay a trap for his witness, “but in order that I may not be charged with omitting to do my duty, I would like to know where you went after you boarded the Carpathia and how you happened to go there?”

  “Mr. Chairman.” Ismay cast his eyes down upon the table before him, allowing himself to collect his thoughts for a moment before responding. “I understand that my behaviour on board the Titanic, and subsequently on board the Carpathia, has been very severely criticized by the press through several scurrilous printed remarks. I want to court the fullest inquiry, and I place myself unreservedly in the hands of yourself and any of your colleagues, to ask me any questions in regard to my conduct, so please do not hesitate to do so and I will answer them to the best of my ability. So far as the Carpathia is concerned, sir, when I got on board the ship I stood up with my back against the bulkhead, and somebody came up and said something to me...” Ismay winced for an instant, struggling with his memory, then continued. “Then another man took me and put me into a room. I did not know whom occupied the room. This man proved to be the doctor of the Carpathia. I was in that room until I left the ship. I was never outside the door of that room. During the whole of the time I was in this room, I never had anything of a solid nature to eat, nothing at all- I lived only on soup. I did not want very much of anything. The room was constantly being entered by people asking for the doctor. The doctor did not have a suite of rooms on the ship. He simply had this one small room.”

  Smith let Ismay's words hang in the air for a few moments, then moved the conversation forward. “In view of your statement, Mr. Ismay, I desire to say that I have seen none of these comments to which you refer,” he replied, more than a bit sarcastic. “In fact, I have not read the newspapers since I started for New York- I have deliberately avoided it so that I have seen none of these reports, and you do not understand that I have not made any criticism upon your conduct aboard the Carpathia?”

  “No, sir. But I am here to answer any questions in regard thereto.”

  “Mr. Ismay,” Senator Fletcher piped in, taking the unexpected action of rising out of his chair as he spoke. “I believe that at least one White Star official has stated that Captain Smith gave you a telegram reporting ice.”

  There was an awkward silence. Ismay's mind raced while his stomach lurched. What telegram reporting ice? he thought frantically. “Ah... I- I... y-yes, sir,” Ismay stammered, impulsively gambling on the possibility that he in fact knew what Fletcher was talking about. “I... I certainly think that I know what you speak of,” he rambled. He was a bit startled by the senator's tactic, and it was a subject that he did not realize had been mentioned by any other witnesses. In this instance it had been Harold A. Sanderson, who from a few feet away was giving Ismay a firm grim nod of acknowledgement. Ismay was once again seized with the fear that he was not going to be able to remember some of his own actions.

  “On Sunday afternoon?” Fletcher asked.

  “S-Sunday afternoon, I think it was.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Senator Fletcher, representing Florida, but a native of Georgia, frowned for a moment as he looked down at his notes. He eventually continued, measured and deliberate. “What... became of that telegram?”

  “I- I handed it back to Captain Smith, I should think... about 10 minutes past seven on Sunday evening,” Ismay replied, the transaction coming back to him as if through a thick fog. “I- I was sitting in the smoking room- yes, it was the smoking room, and I had just dined with Dr. O'Loughlin, the ship's surgeon- or I was about to dine with him, I should say.” Ismay nodded nervously, seeming to be reassuring himself of his memory. “When- when Captain Smith happened to come in the room, yes, yes, for some reason-” Ismay, unfortunately, laughed ingratiatingly, “what it was I do not know, and on his way back, he happened to see me sitting there and came up and said, 'By the way, sir, have you got that telegram which I gave you this afternoon?' I... I said, 'Yes.' I put my hand in my pocket and said, 'Here it is.' He said, 'I want it to put up in the officers' chart room.' That- that is the only conversation I had with Captain Smith in regard to the telegram. When he- when he first handed it to me earlier that afternoon, he made no remark at all.”

  “Can you tell what time he handed it to you and what its contents were?” Fletcher asked, a somewhat stern inflection in his voice.

  “It is- it is very difficult to place the time. I- I do not know whether it was in the afternoon or immediately before lunch, I am not certain.” He pulled his chapped hands together, clasping them so tightly that his fingers slowly turned purple. Flashes of white edges danced in his memory as he struggled with his words. “I- I did not pay any particular attention to the Marconi message... I...” Ismay lowered his head, gingerly, his neck and shoulders locked tightly in tenseness. He paused for several uncomfortable seconds. His memories of that Sunday afternoon seemed so uneventful. Was it the simply contrast between order and warmth and solitude the ship had offered that day to the jumbled horror of the nighttime that was so disconcerting? Or was there some action on his part that he could not account for?

  Ismay slowly resumed, trying to be helpful. “It was sent from the captain of the Baltic, and it gave the position of some ice...” A sudden flash of remembrance caused him to rush his next sentence. “It-it-it also gave the position of some s-s-steamer which was short of coal and wanted to be towed into New York, and I- I think it ended up by wishing success to the Titanic.” Ismay smiled wanly, his ability to speak and his choice of words failing him.

  Senator Fletcher did not smile back, but nevertheless seemed to be enjoying this game of hunter/hunted. “Did you see any other Marconigrams that afternoon?”

  “N-no, sir.”

  “Did you see the ship after you left her in the collapsible boat?”

  “I saw her once...” Ismay replied, his voice trailing off.

  “What was her position then?”

  Ismay's voice continued to lower. “She was very much down by the head, her starboard light was just about level with the water.”

  “Did she break in two, so far as you could see?”

  “I never looked around again.” Ismay felt dizzy, but managed to remain calm despite a persistent self-doubt. He at least thought he had never looked back.

  Senator Fletcher seemed to strike a stately pose for effect, then called out his next question. “Were there any women and children in
the vicinity of the collapsible boat when you got in?”

  “None, sir.” Ismay responded, a pained look on his face that was quickly replaced by a forced dignity. He had already answered this extremely difficult question before, and although the thought of having to respond to it yet again was deeply offensive, he chose wisely not to become impertinent.

  Senator Fletcher continued. “How far did you have to lower the collapsible boat from the boat deck to the water?”

  “It was very difficult to judge, because we had considerable difficulty in getting our boat down at all.”

  “You did not have enough men?”