Titanic's Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler

by Brad Matsen

  At twelve forty-five A.M., one hour and five minutes after impact, Murdoch sent lifeboat No. 7 into the sea with twenty-nine first-class passengers—eleven women and girls, eighteen men and boys, and the Pomeranian dog belonging to one of the girls—plus three seamen to man the oars. The boat was built to carry sixty-five people, but Murdoch had not been able to convince passengers to leave the warmth and comfort of the ship.

  Neither Murdoch nor Lightoller, who was loading his first boat on the port side, was worried about launching nearly empty lifeboats. There would be plenty of time to bring them back to the ship to pick up more passengers, and they could load the boats much more easily through boarding hatches on the lower decks. The lifeboats would be most useful for ferrying people to the rescue ships when they arrived in a few hours.

  In the half hour after the first lifeboat was away, Murdoch and Lowe, on the starboard side, and Lightoller and Wilde, on the port side, launched five more boats, all of them carrying only first-class passengers and crew. One third-class passenger, an Italian immigrant with a broken arm named Philip Zenni, managed to get aboard the sixth boat as it went down the side of the ship.

  As though cued by some primitive instinct, the mood on the ship changed. A wave of second-and third-class passengers erupted onto the upper decks. Even to a person who had never been aboard a ship, the steadily increasing angle of the deck and the water rushing through companionways in the first four compartments signaled danger.

  The passengers and crew who had been in the flooding men’s compartments on the lower decks in the bow were in full flight. In the women’s and families’ compartments in the stern, the danger was not so obvious at first. On the way up from her quarters, Violet Jessop passed crewmen chatting and smoking on the stairs as if nothing was happening. On deck, she reported to Lightoller and tried to give up her seat in boat No. 16. He ordered her aboard. As Jessop squeezed in with Elizabeth Leather at her side, someone handed her a swaddled infant. For the first time, she believed Titanic would sink.

  Far below the boat deck, most third-class passengers were staying in their staterooms because they did not speak the language of the sea. They did not understand that something terrible had happened to their ship. If they’d woken when Titanic hit the iceberg, most of them went right back to sleep. Changes in the sound of the engines meant nothing to them.

  By the time the first of them—including Olaus Abelseth, Adolph Humblen, Karen Abelseth, and Anna Saltkjelsvik—reached the open air at the stern of B Deck, the calm pace of loading the first lifeboats had deteriorated into a riot. Abelseth pulled Karen and Anna up the boat deck stairway where two seamen were screening out men and allowing only women near the boats. Just as Karen and Anna went through the barrier, one of the seamen yelled, “Everybody!” Abelseth and Humblen went up, too. Abelseth lost track of Anna, but he saw an officer grab Karen and throw her into a lifeboat. Another officer shouted, Are there any sailors here? Are there any sailors here? Abelseth had fished with his father in Norway from the time he was ten years old until he’d left for America. He knew how to handle a small boat as well as any man on Titanic. But his cousins were nowhere to be seen. He couldn’t bear the thought of surviving if they did not. He said nothing to the officer, and fought his way back into the crowd to look for them.

  By one-thirty, almost two hours after impact, a steady stream of firemen and trimmers were pouring from the engineers’ stairwell onto the boat deck near the three remaining lifeboats on the starboard side. Murdoch ordered leading fireman Fred Barrett to take command of No. 13, already crammed with sixty-four people.

  Anna Turja was on deck in the mob surging around the last four lifeboats. She wandered for a few minutes, looking for Maria and her children, until an officer grabbed her arm and shoved her into a nearly full lifeboat on the port side. Turja was terrified by the creaking of the ropes and pulleys of the launching gear as the boat crept seventy feet down the sheer bluff of Titanic’s black hull. It almost landed on top of boat No. 13, but at the last second veered off and splashed heavily into the sea. Everyone in Turja’s boat got soaking wet.

  Red distress rockets exploded over the ship, their light blotting out the stars for the few minutes it took for them to burn out. All sixteen wooden lifeboats had been launched. At the front of the boat deck, Wilde began preparing the first of the four collapsible lifeboats. They had wooden bottoms with canvas sides and could carry only forty people each.

  Bruce Ismay, still in his pajamas and overcoat, ran up to lend a hand with the launching of the collapsible boats. In minutes, they fastened the first one to a davit. Wilde crammed fifty people into it, then turned to Ismay.

  There are no more women and children nearby, Wilde said. Get in the boat.

  Ismay obeyed, and left Titanic.

  Wilde and Lightoller wrestled with the last two collapsible boats, trying to move them under the davits. A crowd surged around them. Titanic shuddered in an entirely new, much more frightening way. The ship seemed to inhale, then exhale, as though it were taking deep breaths. The noise was deafening, a combination of a high-pitched whine and a deep, groaning note that no one had ever heard before.

  In her lifeboat, some two hundred yards from the roaring ship, Violet Jessop held the infant who had materialized in her arms. She didn’t know whether it was a boy or girl. Jessop held the baby against her belly, underneath her eiderdown coat, clucking to calm it, and heard the dreadful sounds of the ship’s death throes above her. “Surely, this is all a dream,” she muttered to no one.

  Olaus Abelseth’s cousins were lost in the chaos. At the stern of the wildly trembling ship, he cinched on his white kapok life jacket, took a deep breath, and jumped in the direction of a lifeboat below.

  Lightoller frantically tried to free the last collapsible lifeboat, which was wedged into its chocks on the roof of the deckhouse with its tie-down ropes snarled. Harold Bride was helping Lightoller. He had stayed at his telegraph key until Smith came to the Marconi room, relieved him of his post, and disappeared into the flooding wheelhouse.

  A hump of the sea washed over the deck below the top of the officers’ quarters, jarring the last lifeboat free. It tumbled off the ship. Lightoller and Bride fell into the sea alongside it. The lifeboat swamped, then turned over. Underneath it, they flailed in the darkness, swallowing seawater and fighting off the arms of other terrified men. They clawed their way clear and climbed to the top of the overturned lifeboat, where they joined other men clinging to its keel.

  Bruce Ismay did not see the end. He was pulling hard on an oar in his lifeboat with his back toward Titanic. He turned around once as they rowed away from the side, saw the chaos at the rail, saw Thomas Andrews throwing deck chairs into the sea, saw people jumping, and looked away. Behind him, he heard the strains of “Songe d’Automne.” An odd thought popped into his head: No. 114 in the White Star music book.

  Ismay rowed some more. The sinister shrieks of tearing steel overwhelmed all other sounds. He heard cables snapping like rifle shots, and risked another look. The forward funnel broke free of the deck, toppled absurdly into the sea, and swamped a lifeboat. For long minutes, Ismay could not force himself to turn around again. The next time he did, Titanic was gone. He hadn’t felt even a ripple as the ship went down.

  The sounds in the endless darkness changed again. Ismay heard the voices of people in the water. He made out a few words: Come back. Help. God. Please. And he heard many words in languages that he did not understand. Ismay fell on his oar. His valet, Richard Fry, and his secretary, William Harrison, had stayed. They were out there. Smith. Andrews. The sailor in charge of the lifeboat hollered at him to row. Ismay rowed. A half hour later the words, screams, and whimpers stopped as though a switch had been thrown.

  Carpathia was an hour and ten minutes away.

  Twelve

  YAMSI

  Ismay knew it was cold because he was shivering. He knew he could hear because the sailor standing in the back of the lifeboat was shouting orders:
Row. Ship your oars. The oarlocks clattered. Someone was crying. He heard voices from the other boats, invisible in the darkness. Ismay knew he could see. There was an ocean of stars above him. Every few minutes, a rocket sizzled into the sky and exploded, the bright green light blotting out the heavens. Then the stars returned. None of it made any sense.

  Time passed. Ismay had no idea how much. The stars faded again, this time replaced by the faint pink tones of dawn. Then there was a new light. Lower. A shooting star? He heard a thud that sounded like a cannon. More shooting stars. Brighter. They were white flares, Ismay realized. Then a ship materialized against the brightening sliver of the horizon.

  Ismay felt sensation returning to his arms and legs. The sailor barked: Row. When the lifeboat hove to in the lee of the ship, Ismay helped to fend off from the side. The sailor and another man grabbed lines that dropped from above. There was no violence in the sea; it was a calm morning. Ismay sat until someone grabbed his lapel and pulled him to the Jacob’s ladder. The dark side of the ship was a forty-foot bluff. In his bed shoes, Ismay lost his footing on every other rung and clung to the ropes. At the top of the ladder, an officer with wide-eyed terror on his face took Ismay by the arm and helped him to the deck.

  “I’m Ismay.” He hadn’t spoken since he’d gotten into the lifeboat. The words came out in a hoarse whisper. The officer at the rail turned away from him to help the next survivor from the ladder.

  Ismay walked four paces to the bulkhead of the deckhouse and settled his back against the cold steel. A man in uniform materialized in front of him.

  “I’m Ismay,” he said, forcing himself to speak louder.

  “Will you not go into the saloon and get some soup or something to drink?”

  “No. If you will leave me alone I will be very much happier here,” Ismay said. “If you will get me in some room where I can be quiet, I wish you would.”

  The man put his arm around Ismay’s shoulders and coaxed him through a doorway, up some stairs, and into a stateroom, leaving him there in the darkness.

  At midnight in the newsroom of the New York Times, managing editor Carr Van Anda heard the clatter of the dispatch box in its metal chute. When a bulletin arrived at the telegraph room on the eighteenth floor, the operator threw it into a wooden box and lowered it on a rope to the newsroom. Van Anda had just put the first morning edition to bed, with the news that Teddy Roosevelt had beaten William Howard Taft in the Pennsylvania primary election.

  The bulletin was from the Associated Press in Cape Race, Newfoundland.

  Sunday night, April 14 (AP). At 10:25 o’clock tonight the White Star Line steamship Titanic called “CQD” to the Marconi station here, and reported having struck an iceberg. The steamer said that immediate assistance was required.

  Van Anda called the White Star office and got through to the night-duty officer, who knew nothing. Next, he called the Times correspondent in Halifax. The reporter told him that a Canadian ship had picked up the distress call and forwarded it to another ship, Virginian, en route from Halifax to Liverpool. Virginian’s captain had changed course and was racing to 41° 46' north, 50° 14' west. The reporter in Halifax also told Van Anda that Olympic and Baltic had confirmed that they’d heard the distress call. The last transmission from Titanic was sloppy, which was surprising since it had been sent by an experienced telegrapher. It said the ship was sinking by the bow, and ended abruptly at 12:27, New York time. After that, there had been a flurry of messages between a half dozen ships and Cape Race, but nothing more from Titanic.

  Van Anda decided he didn’t have enough facts to replace Taft and Roosevelt with the Titanic story in the morning-mail edition. He had a few hours to dig into his story for the next edition that afternoon. For the time being, Van Anda posted the news that the world’s biggest ocean liner had sent a distress call on the bulletin board in front of the office in Times Square.

  NEW LINER TITANIC HITS AN ICEBERG;

  SINKING BY THE BOW AT MIDNIGHT;

  WOMEN PUT OFF IN LIFEBOATS;

  LAST WIRELESS AT 12:27 BLURRED.

  The morning editions of several newspapers carried stories on the calls for help from the North Atlantic but reported that they were unconfirmed. Editors at every paper in town loosed a barrage of assignments to their reporters, with orders to get to the bottom of the puzzling story. At White Star headquarters, Phillip Franklin, general manager of the line’s American operations and vice president of International Mercantile Marine, started taking phone calls from the press at seven A.M.

  The hearsay that Titanic had foundered was preposterous, Franklin told them. The ship’s telegraph signal fading abruptly was due to a malfunction in the wireless station or atmospheric interference. White Star and IMM were perfectly satisfied that there was no cause for alarm regarding the safety of the passengers.

  At noon, the Associated Press in Montreal relayed a bulletin from Cape Race for which Franklin had been praying all morning: ALL TITANIC PASSENGERS SAFE. THE VIRGINIAN TOWING THE LINER INTO HALIFAX.

  Franklin went to work fulfilling White Star’s obligations to 1,324 passengers who were expecting to land in New York but were going to find themselves in Halifax, six hundred miles north. The word about the collision and rescue spread among friends and relatives of the passengers, many of whom rushed to the White Star offices to find out what would happen to their loved ones.

  At one P.M., Franklin chartered a special express train to pick up the stranded passengers in Halifax. Any friends and relatives who wanted to go north to meet them were welcome to ride along. Franklin commandeered the steamer Lady Laurier to sail from Halifax immediately, intercept Virginian and Titanic, and escort them to port. He dictated a telegram and ordered it sent to every known relative of the first-class passengers: ALL TITANIC’S PASSENGERS SAFE. LINER BEING TOWED TO HALIFAX.

  Titanic updates flew among Marconi stations at sea on both sides of the Atlantic. Newspapers posted hourly bulletins on the walls outside their offices. THE NEW TITANIC STRIKES ICEBERG AND CALLS FOR AID, said one. VESSELS RUSH TO HER SIDE. In London, the Daily Sketch ran a story, datelined Montreal, with the headline CALLS FOR HELP. MANY GREAT LINERS RACE TO THE RESCUE Early that afternoon, the banner on the front page of the New York Sun proclaimed, ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION. The rescue was hailed as another triumph for the Marconi International Marine Communication Company.

  On the afternoon of April 15, telegrapher David Sarnoff went to work in downtown Manhattan with the New York Sun tucked under his arm. Sarnoff was a Russian immigrant, born in Uzlian, near Minsk, who had been in America for twelve years. He loved his job with the Marconi company and believed he was part of a revolution as powerful as the invention of movable type. His first assignment had been at the Marconi station on Nantucket Island. Sarnoff had been off duty on the morning Florida ran into Republic, but he’d hurried to work when he’d heard what had happened and had spent the next forty-eight hours helping transmit bulletins on the rescue.

  Sarnoff’s job in New York didn’t involve saving lives, but he was sure New York was a step up from Nantucket. John Wanamaker, the department store tycoon, had installed telegraph stations in his stores to transmit information about sales, inventory, and other company business. At the same time, he offered telegraph service to his customers, giving many of them their first glimpse of the wonderful power of wireless communications. When Wanamaker’s was open for business, the Marconi offices were always surrounded by a crowd leaning in to watch the operators tapping their keys and jotting notes on incoming messages.

  Telegraphic voyeurism helped Sarnoff pass many long hours at work. He was good at picking the Wanamaker call letters out of the river of electrical chatter flowing into his headphones, but to break the monotony, he listened just as intently for messages from ships at sea. Most of the ships’ telegrams he overheard were mundane: HAVING A GREAT TIME. OCEAN AIR WORKING WONDERS FOR ME. PLEASE MEET AT THE 34TH STREET PIER ON WEDNESDAY MORNING. Every once in a while, he heard one tha
t admitted him to the interiors of commerce, which were utterly foreign and fascinating to him: TRANSFER 400,000 FROM NEW YORK ACCOUNT IMMEDIATELY, OR WE’RE FINISHED. Some cables were windows into tragedy: YOUR DAUGHTER ELLEN DIED THIS MORNING, IN TRANSIT FROM MARSEILLE. REQUEST INSTRUCTIONS FOR BURIAL AT SEA.

  On April 15, Sarnoff took care of a bit of incoming and outgoing traffic on the company frequency, then switched to the no-man’s-land of offshore radio waves. Maybe he could pick up something about Titanic. The night before, he had heard faint transmissions between the liner in distress and Olympic, which he’d passed on to the press. From the papers that day, it looked like it had turned into an even bigger rescue story than Republic’s.

  As the sun dropped lower in the sky, there would be less interference. His receiver often picked up signals from ships as far as a thousand miles away. As usual, the air was rattling with amateur chatter, jamming commercial signals. The Marconi company was no longer the only participant in the electronic revolution. Anybody with a little bit of skill and money could build a radio transmitter.

  At four thirty-five P.M. Sarnoff heard the unmistakable fist of a professional offshore telegrapher. MCE DE MKC: MCE, this is MKC. From earlier eavesdropping on maritime traffic, Sarnoff knew that MCE was Cape Race, Newfoundland, and MKC was RMS Olympic. He tuned his receiver to sharpen the signal. The message was from Olympic’s captain, Herbert J. Haddock, for relay by landline to the White Star office in New York.

  CARPATHIA REACHED TITANIC POSITION AT DAYBREAK. FOUND BOATS AND WRECKAGE ONLY. TITANIC FOUNDERED ABOUT 2.20 AM IN 41.16 N. 50.14 W. ALL HER BOATS ACCOUNTED FOR. ABOUT 675 SOULS SAVED. LEYLAND LINE SS CALIFORNIAN REMAINING AND SEARCHING POSITION OF DISASTER. CARPATHIA RETURNING TO NEW YORK WITH SURVIVORS. PLEASE INFORM CUNARD. HADDOCK