Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic

by Daniel Allen Butler

  Lightoller then remarked that it was a pity that the breeze had so completely died, since the chop a breeze usually kicked up would make it easier to spot any ice ahead as it washed up against the base of a berg or growler. Smith was sure that the visibility was good enough that even a “blue” berg, that is, one that had recently overturned, would be spotted before it could present a danger. Just before 9:30, Captain Smith told Lightoller he was going to his cabin. “If it becomes at all doubtful, let me know at once.”3

  The sudden drop in temperature had driven all but the most hardy passengers inside. Since this was the next to the last night out, it was the custom for the First Class passengers to dress in their most resplendent attire for dinner. (The last night out was reserved for packing.) The ladies looked ravishing in their evening gowns; the gentlemen were dashing in their white tie and tails. Even Mrs. Henry Harris put in an appearance, in the best theatrical tradition, though she would have been excused if she hadn’t: earlier that day she had tripped and fallen down one of the staircases, breaking a small bone in her arm. Once Assistant Surgeon Simpson had set the arm in plaster, Mrs. Harris gamely insisted on dressing for dinner, earning a compliment from Captain Smith for her pluck.4

  In Third Class another of the seemingly endless dances was getting under way. In the middle of the merriment, a large rat suddenly appeared out of nowhere, eliciting screams of terror, some real, some feigned, from the young women. A handful of the men dashed after the offending rodent, and the dance was under way again.5

  After dinner about a hundred Second Class passengers had gathered in their Dining Saloon for the traditional hymn singing, led by the Rev. Earnest Carter, an Anglican priest, while a young Scottish engineer named Douglas Norman played the piano. All of the hymns sung were chosen by request, and Reverend Carter held the little gathering’s attention by preceding each selection with a brief bit of information about the hymn’s author and sometimes a history of how the particular hymn came to be written. When Marion Wright prepared to sing “Lead Kindly Light,” he explained that the song had been written in the aftermath of a shipwreck on the North Atlantic.

  Kate Buss, who had come to hear her new friend Marion Wright sing, noticed that many of the people gathered in the dining saloon were powerfully moved by Miss Wright’s singing, some of the men even having tears in their eyes. At one point, Reverend Carter’s wife Lilian was seen covering her face with her hands, lost either in deep prayer or deep emotion. Not surprisingly, then, more than a few of the hymns chosen dealt with the dangers of traveling by sea, and Lawrence Beesley, a young school teacher from London who was traveling to see his brother in America, remembered how movingly everyone joined in to sing “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.”

  Eternal Father, strong to save,

  Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,

  Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep

  It’s own appointed limits keep.

  O hear us when we cry to Thee

  For those in peril on the sea.6

  At 10:00 P.M. First Officer Murdoch walked onto the bridge to relieve Lightoller. The first thing he said was, “It’s pretty cold.”

  “Yes it is. It’s freezing,” was Lightoller’s reply. He then went on to tell Murdoch that the ship might be up to the ice any time now, adding that the water temperature was down to thirty-one degrees and still dropping; that the carpenter had been warned not to let the fresh water supply freeze up; that the crow’s nest had been specially warned to watch out for ice, specifically small bergs and growlers; and that the captain had left word to be called if “it became at all doubtful.” With that, Lightoller, looking forward to a warm bunk, bade Murdoch good night and went off to his cabin. While Murdoch was relieving Lightoller, Quartermaster Hitchens relieved Quartermaster Oliver at the helm. “N 71 W,” Oliver murmured, giving Hitchens the Titanic’s current course.

  “N 71 W,” Hitchens repeated, taking the wheel and peering into the softly lit binnacle to make sure the ship was steady on her course. Satisfied that she was, Hitchens gazed out through the wheelhouse windows into the night.7

  In the crow’s nest, Lookouts Jewell and Symons were relieved by Lookouts Fleet and Lee. “Keep a sharp eye out for ice, especially small bergs and growlers!” Symons said, repeating the last orders given to him. Fleet and Lee quickly settled in and began peering intently into the night. Fleet noticed what looked like haze on the horizon, and it seemed that the ship would be in it soon.

  “Well, if we can see through that,” Fleet remarked, “we’ll be lucky.”8

  In the wireless office, just behind the officers’ quarters on the boat deck, Phillips finally was making some headway on the backlog of personal messages from the passengers. The day had been so exhausting that Bride had volunteered to relieve Phillips at midnight, a full two hours early. It was typical of Bride, who seemed to possess a bottomless reservoir of good humor and thoughtfulness. Meanwhile Phillips still had more than an hour to go, so he hunched over his key and rapped out his messages to the relay station at Cape Race, Newfoundland.

  Suddenly, at 11:00 P.M., the Californian burst in, announcing “Say, old man, we are surrounded by ice and stopped.” The Californian’s operator hadn’t bothered to get Phillips’s OK to break in on his transmission, and the ship was so close that the message nearly deafened him. Furious, Phillips signaled back, “Shut up! Shut up! I am busy, I am working Cape Race!” The Californian’s operator lapsed into hurt silence and Phillips apologized to Cape Race, whose operator, William Gray, was a good friend. The last thing Jack Phillips needed after a day like this was some idiot interrupting his work. Wearily, he resumed sending his messages.9

  In the crow’s nest, Lookouts Fleet and Lee continued to peer determinedly into the night, their concentration total. The mist that Fleet had commented on earlier had disappeared, and now all conversation between the two men ceased as they scanned the waters ahead of the ship. Mindful of Second Officer Lightoller’s warning to be alert for ice, neither man wanted the slightest distraction, for though visibility was good, conditions for spotting ice were poor. Despite the crystal clear air, the absence of any moonlight meant that the typically ghost-white icebergs and growlers would be visible only at a much reduced distance, while the calm sea, later described as “as smooth as a piece of polished plate glass,” meant that there would be no white wash of water at the base of an iceberg that would ordinarily be kicked up by chop or swell. Fleet in particular sorely missed the binoculars.

  It was a little more than twenty minutes before midnight when Fleet thought he saw something straight ahead. The object appeared quite small at first, but grew rapidly in size, and Fleet hesitated for only a few seconds to make sure of the object’s identity before reaching up for the pull of the large bronze bell above his head. He gave three sharp tugs, three rings being the signal for “object ahead,” then quickly grabbed the telephone in the box on the mast behind him. The bridge answered almost immediately—it was Sixth Officer Moody

  “Iceberg right ahead,” Fleet said without preamble.

  “Thank you,” Moody replied. Turning to First Officer Murdoch, he repeated Fleet’s words. 10

  “Hard a-starboard!” Murdoch snapped to quartermaster Hitchens, who stood at the ship’s telemotor wheel. Murdoch then stepped over to the bronze engine room telegraph and rang for full speed astern on both engines. Hitchens meanwhile spun the wheel to the right, then all three men waited tensely for the bow to swing clear of the oncoming berm. 11

  Up in the crow’s nest it looked as if the ship would never turn in time. Bracing themselves for the shock of a head-on collision, Fleet and Lee breathed a sigh of relief as at the last second the prow swung left, apparently missing the ice. Even so, it looked awfully close, and as the berg brushed past, large chunks of ice thudded onto the foredeck and into the well deck. As the ship glided past, the two men could see why the iceberg had been so hard to spot at first—it was a “blue” berg, recently overturned and still dark with sea water
. Over the noise of the falling ice it seemed to the two lookouts that they could hear a faint, metallic ripping sound.

  On the bridge Murdoch pulled the switch that closed the watertight doors to the boiler rooms and engine room, then stepped out onto the starboard bridge wing and watched the berg pass by the liner’s hull. It was so close he felt he could almost reach out and touch it. 12

  Throughout the Titanic, her crew, sensitive as crew members always are to the rhythms and sounds of their vessel, reacted to the collision in a surprising variety of ways and with an equally surprising variety of explanations. Down forward on D Deck, in the crew’s quarters, Fireman John Thompson and his mates had woken up only moments before and were preparing to go on watch at midnight. A sudden crash sent those men still in their bunks sprawling onto the deck. Thompson heard a “harsh, grinding sound,” then ran out onto the forward well deck, only to find it littered with ice.

  Asleep in his bunk in the forward crew’s quarters, Seaman Fred Clench was awakened “by the crunching and jarring, as if [the ship] was hitting up against something.” Quickly pulling on his trousers and shoes, he too went out onto the forward well deck. As he stood beside the hatch to the No. 1 cargo hold, Clench could hear the sound of inrushing seawater far below.

  Four decks below and some ways aft of where First Officer Murdoch was standing, in the First Class Dining Saloon, four off-duty stewards were sitting around one of the tables. The last passengers had long since left and now this small group had the huge dining room all to themselves. A faint but unmistakable shudder that seemed to run the length of the ship interrupted them in the middle of their conversation. That was all, just a shudder, but it was enough to rattle the table settings.

  Steward James Johnson thought he recognized it: he had been on the Olympic when she had dropped a propeller blade earlier that year, and it felt exactly the same to him. Another steward was apparently of the same mind, and, anticipating a trip back to Harland and Wolff, promptly announced, “Another Belfast trip!”

  Just astern of the First Class Dining Saloon was the First Class galley, where Chief Night Baker Walter Belford had just finished baking rolls for the next morning’s breakfast. Suddenly for no apparent reason, a pan filled with freshly baked rolls sitting atop an oven tumbled to the deck, startling Belford. Then he too noticed that the ship seemed to shudder, although in his annoyance over the ruined rolls, the thought of another trip to enjoy Belfast hospitality was the last thing on his mind.

  One deck lower, on C Deck, four off-duty seamen were relaxing in the forward crews’ mess. Seamen Brice, Buley, Osman, and Evans were, as one of them put it, “sitting around smokin’ and yarnin”’ when they heard three bells ring up in the crow’s nest, followed about a half minute later by a slight jar. To Seaman Edward Buley, “it seemed as though something was rubbing alongside her,” while Brice thought it felt like “a heavy vibration.” Frank Osman went out onto the forward well deck and was confronted by the sight of mounds of ice piled on its starboard side.13

  Down in the engine room, the only indication Chief Engineer Bell had that anything unusual had happened was the unexpected ringing of the engine telegraph as someone on the bridge suddenly ordered “Full Speed Astern” on both engines. Bell quickly gave the order to stop the center turbine and then threw the reciprocating engines into reverse. A moment later an alarm bell sounded as the watertight doors began to close automatically. For several minutes a bewildered group of engineers, greasers, and artificers looked at each other and wondered just what had happened.

  Quartermaster George Rowe had been standing watch on the after, or auxiliary, bridge. This was often a hardship post, for the bridge was really just an open catwalk running across the poop deck at the stern, leaving Rowe completely exposed to the elements. Tonight, though, wasn’t all that bad: the absence of any wind kept the cold from becoming unbearable, and Rowe was able to keep reasonably warm by pacing to and fro across the bridge. As he paced he noticed a curious sight—thousands of tiny ice splinters that gave off bright colors as they caught and refracted the glow of the deck lights, a phenomena that sailors call “Whiskers ’round the Light.” It stuck in Rowe’s mind because it usually occurred only near ice fields.

  His reverie was broken suddenly by a slight change in the motion of the ship, as the steady beat of the engines changed. Peering forward he stared at what appeared to be a full-rigged ship, with sails set, passing perilously close by the Titanic’s starboard side. After a second or two, Rowe realized that he was actually looking at an iceberg, one that towered over the auxiliary bridge, itself nearly sixty feet above the water. As Rowe watched, the berg passed by swiftly and vanished. 14

  Steward Alfred Crawford was strolling the corridors of B Deck forward when he heard a muffled “crunch” coming from the starboard side of the ship; he ran out to the railing just in time to see “a large black object” passing alongside. Turning to go back inside, he saw Mr. and Mrs. Dickinson Bishop coming out onto the deck. The Bishops had left their cabin, B-47, to see what had happened. Both were shivering furiously in the intense cold, and they walked up and down the deck a couple times before bumping into Steward Crawford. “You go back downstairs,” Crawford told them, “there’s nothing to be afraid of. We have only struck a little piece of ice and passed it.”

  The Bishops’ experience was typical of most of the passengers’: many of them felt something, variously described later as a bump, a quiver, or a grinding jar, but few had any idea what it was. Major Peuchen thought a heavy wave had struck the ship. Marguerite Frolicher, a young Swiss girl traveling with her father on one of his business trips, was half asleep and thought of the Zurich ferries’ notoriously bumpy landings. Mrs. E. D. Appleton felt little, but heard something disturbing indeed—a ripping sound, as if someone was tearing a long piece of cloth.15

  In the First Class Smoking Room, located almost at the center of the Titanic’s upper deck, the shudder brought all activity to an abrupt halt. A handful of guests from George Widener’s party in honor of Captain Smith had left the à fa carte Restaurant behind and moved into the Smoking Room shortly after the ladies had retired. Now Clarence Moore, Major Butt, George Widener’s son Harry, and William Carter were all that were left. In one corner of the room, a handful of young men, Hugh Woolner and Bjorn Steffanson among them, were involved in a rather boisterous game of bridge, while at another table Lucien P Smith was discovering that his French wasn’t up to the complexities of bidding with three Frenchmen.

  Suddenly they all felt a shudder, and conversations hung suspended for a moment. Every man was instantly on his feet, hurrying out the aft doors and rushing to the after railing of the Promenade Deck. Hugh Woolner heard someone calling out “We’ve struck an iceberg—there it is!” Peering intently into the night, Woolner thought he could make out a huge black shape a hundred or so yards astern of the ship, but it was quickly swallowed up by the darkness. The group filed back into the Smoking Room passing comments back and forth about the incident, and just as the last man in was closing the door behind him, someone noticed a new phenomenon—the engines had stopped. 16

  Just a few moments earlier, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Douglas had been strolling past the Grand Staircase. Mr. Douglas had just remarked to his wife that the ship seemed to be going faster than it ever had before, as for once the vibration of the engines was quite noticeable on the staircase. They had arrived at their stateroom, C-68; just as the Titanic hit the berg, but to them the shock of the collision didn’t seem very great.

  Mrs. J. Stuart White didn’t think much of it at the time either: the ship quivered as if it “went over a thousand marbles. There was nothing terrifying about it at all.” Mr. C. E. Stengel, in C-116, was moaning in his sleep. His wife shook him awake, and just as his head cleared, he heard a “slight clash.” Stengel paid it little attention until he noticed a moment later that the engines had stopped. Turning to his wife he said, “There is something serious, there is something wrong. We had better go up on deck.
” 17

  To Bruce Ismay the shudder meant something serious, though perhaps not dangerous. He had awakened with a start in his deluxe cabin on B Deck, having had enough experience with ships to know that the Titanic had hit something. But what?

  James McGough, a buyer for Gimbel’s from Philadelphia, could have answered Ismay’s question. Something of a fresh-air fiend, McGough had left the porthole of his cabin open as he was getting ready for bed. When the iceberg brushed by, several sizable chunks of ice fell into his cabin through the open port.

  Of all the passengers’ reactions, perhaps that of Mrs. Walter Stephenson was the most ominous. As she lay in her bed, just dozing off, she felt a jolt run through the ship. Instantly it brought to mind the memory of another April, just six years earlier, when she had been lying in bed and felt the same kind of jolt, as the city of San Francisco began falling to pieces around her. 18

  Back up on the bridge, Captain Smith appeared just seconds after the impact. Imperturbable as ever, but with a serious air, he asked, “Mr. Murdoch, what was that?”

  “An iceberg, Captain. I ordered hard-a-starboard and rang for full speed astern. I was going to hard-a-port around it, but it was just too close.”

  “Close the watertight doors.”

  “Already closed, sir.”

  “All stop.”

  “Aye, sir.” Murdoch turned to the engine room telegraph and rang down for the engines to stop.

  Just then Fourth Officer Boxhall came up to the bridge, and together with Smith and Murdoch, stepped out onto the starboard bridge wing, where for several seconds they peered vainly into the night trying to spot the iceberg. Stepping back inside, Smith sent Boxhall on a quick inspection of the ship. After just a few minutes Boxhall returned, saying he could find no damage below decks. His report didn’t satisfy Captain Smith, who told Boxhall, “Go and find the carpenter and get him to sound the ship.” As Boxhall ran down the bridge ladder, the carpenter, Jim Hutchinson, pushed past him on his way up to the bridge, blurting out, “She’s making water fast!”