The grim question arose as to which of them should surrender her place and her chance of safety. Beside Miss Evans sat Mrs. J. J. Brown, of Denver, the mother of several children. Miss Evans was the first to volunteer to yield to another.
GIRL STEPS BACK TO DOOM
“Your need is greater than mine,” said she to Mrs. Brown. “You have children who need you, and I have none.”
So saying she arose from the boat and stepped back upon the deck. The girl found no later refuge and was one of those who went down with the ship. She was twenty-five years old and was beloved by all who knew her.
Mrs. Brown thereafter showed the spirit which had made her also volunteer to leave the boat. There were only three men in the boat and but one of them rowed. Mrs. Brown, who was raised on the water, immediately picked up one of the heavy sweeps and began to pull.
In the boat which carried Mrs. Cornell and Mrs. Appleton there were places for seventeen more than were carried. This too was undermanned and the two women at once took their places at the oars.
The Countess of Rothes was pulling at the oars of her boat, likewise undermanned because the crew preferred to stay behind.
Miss Bentham, of Rochester, showed splendid courage. She happened to be in a life-boat which was very much crowded—so much so that one sailor had to sit with his feet dangling in the icy cold water, and as time went on the sufferings of the man from the cold were apparent. Miss Bentham arose from her place and had the man turn around while she took her place with her feet in the water.
Scarcely any of the life-boats were properly manned. Two, filled with women and children, capsized immediately, while the collapsible boats were only temporarily useful. They soon filled with water. In one boat eighteen or twenty persons sat in water above their knees for six hours.
THE ETERNAL COLLISION
Eight men in this boat were overcome, died and were thrown overboard. Two women were in this boat, and one succumbed after a few hours and one was saved.
The accident was reported as entirely the result of carelessness and lack of necessary equipment. There were boats for only one third of the passengers; there were no search lights; the life-boats were not supplied with food or safety appliances; there were no lanterns on the life-boats; there was no way to raise sails, as there was no one who understood managing a sailboat.
Mrs. Hogeboom explained that the new equipment of masts and sails in the boats was carefully wrapped and bound with twine. The men undertook to unfasten them, but found it necessary to cut the ropes. They had no knives, and in their frenzy they went about asking the ill-clad women if they had knives. The sails were never hoisted.
THE MONEY BOAT
Thomas Whiteley, a first saloon steward, in telling of various experiences of the disaster that had come to his knowledge, said that on one of the first boats lowered the only passengers aboard were a man whom he was told was an American millionaire, his wife, child and two valets. The others in the boat were firemen and coal trimmers, he said, seven in number, whom the man had promised to pay well if they would man the life-boat. They made only thirteen in all.
“I do not know the man’s name,” said Whiteley. “I heard it, but have forgotten it. But I saw an order for five pounds which this man gave to each of the crew of his boat after they got aboard the Carpathia. It was on a piece of ordinary paper addressed to the Coutts Bank of England.
“We called the boat the ‘money boat.’ It was lowered from the starboard side and was one of the first off. Our orders were to load the life-boats beginning forward on the port side, working aft and then back on the starboard. This man paid the firemen to lower a starboard boat before the officers had given the order.”
Whiteley’s own experience was a hard one. When the uncoiling rope, which entangled his feet, threw him in the sea, it furrowed the flesh of his leg, but he did not feel the pain until he was safe aboard the Carpathia.
“I floated on my life-preserver for several hours,” he said, “then I came across a big oak dresser with two men clinging to it. I hung on to this till daybreak and the two men dropped off. When the sun came up I saw the collapsible raft in the distance, just black with men. They were all standing up, and I swam to it—almost a mile, it seemed to me—and they would not let me aboard. Mr. Lightoller, the second officer, was one of them.
“‘It’s thirty-one lives against yours,’ he said, ‘you can’t come aboard. There’s not room.’”
“I pleaded with him in vain, and then I confess, I prayed that somebody might die, so I could take his place. It was only human. And then some one did die, and they let me aboard.
“By and by, we saw seven life-boats lashed together, and we were taken into them.”
MEN SHOT DOWN
The officers had to assert their authority by force, and three foreigners from the steerage who tried to force their way in among the women and children were shot down without mercy.
Robert Daniel, a Philadelphia passenger, told of terrible scenes at this period of the disaster. He said men fought and bit and struck one another like madmen, and exhibited wounds upon his face to prove the assertion. Mr. Daniel said that he was picked up naked from the ice-cold water and almost perished from exposure before he was rescued. He and others told how the Titanic’s bow was completely torn away by the impact with the berg.
K. Whiteman, of Palmyra, N.J., the Titanic’s barber, was lowering boats on deck after the collision, and declared the officers on the bridge, one of them First Officer Murdock, promptly worked the electrical apparatus for closing the water-tight compartments. He believed the machinery was in some way so damaged by the crash that the front compartments failed to close tightly, although the rear ones were secure.
Whiteman’s manner of escape was unique. He was blown off the deck by the second of the two explosions of the boilers, and was in the water more than two hours before he was picked up by a raft.
“The explosions,” Whiteman said, “were caused by the rushing in of the icy water on the boilers. A bundle of deck chairs, roped together, was blown off the deck with me, and I struck my back, injuring my spine, but it served as a temporary raft.
“The crew and passengers had faith in the bulkhead system to save the ship and we were lowering a collapsible boat, all confident the ship would get through, when she took a terrific dip forward and the water swept over the deck and into the engine rooms.
“The bow went clean down, and I caught the pile of chairs as I was washed up against the rim. Then came the explosions which blew me fifteen feet.
“After the water had filled the forward compartment, the ones at the stern could not save her, although they did delay the ship’s going down. If it wasn’t for the compartments hardly anyone could have got away.”
A SAD MESSAGE
One of the Titanic’s stewards, Johnson by name, carried this message to the sorrowing widow of Benjamin Guggenheim:
“When Mr. Guggenheim realized that there was grave danger,” said the room steward, “he advised his secretary, who also died, to dress fully and he himself did the same. Mr. Guggenheim who was cool and collected as he was pulling on his outer garments, said to the steward:—
PREPARED TO DIE BRAVELY
“‘I think there is grave doubt that the men will get off safely. I am willing to remain and play the man’s game, if there are not enough boats for more than the women and children. I won’t die here like a beast. I’ll meet my end as a man.’
“There was a pause and then Mr. Guggenheim continued: “‘Tell my wife, Johnson, if it should happen that my secretary and I both go down and you are saved, tell her I played the game out straight and to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward.
“Tell her that my last thoughts will be of her and our girls, but that my duty now is to these unfortunate women and children on this ship. Tell her I will meet whatever fate is in store for me, knowing she will approve of what I do.’”
In telling the
story the room steward said the last he saw of Mr. Guggenheim was when he stood fully dressed upon the upper deck talking calmly with Colonel Astor and Major Butt.
Before the last of the boats got away, according to some of the passengers’ narratives, there were more than fifty shots fired upon the decks by officers or others in the effort to maintain the discipline that until then had been well preserved.
THE SINKING VESSEL
Richard Norris Williams, Jr., one of the survivors of the Titanic, saw his father killed by being crushed by one of the tremendous funnels of the sinking vessel.
“We stood on deck watching the life-boats of the Titanic being filled and lowered into the water,” said Mr. Williams. “The water was nearly up to our waists and the ship was about at her last. Suddenly one of the great funnels fell. I sprang aside, endeavoring to pull father with me. A moment later the funnel was swept overboard and the body of father went with it.
“I sprang overboard and swam through the ice to a life-raft, and was pulled aboard. There were five men and one woman on the raft. Occasionally we were swept off into the sea, but always managed to crawl back.
“A sailor lighted a cigarette and flung the match carelessly among the women. Several screamed, fearing they would be set on fire. The sailor replied: ‘We are going to hell anyway and we might as well be cremated now as then.’”
A huge cake of ice was the means of aiding Emile Portaleppi, of Italy, in his hairbreadth escape from death when the Titanic went down. Portaleppi, a second class passenger, was awakened by the explosion of one of the bulkheads of the ship. He hurried to the deck, strapped a life-preserver around him and leaped into the sea. With the aid of the preserver and by holding to a cake of ice he managed to keep afloat until one of the life-boats picked him up. There were thirty-five other people in the boat, he said, when he was hauled aboard.
THE COWARD
Somewhere in the shadow of the appalling Titanic disaster slinks—still living by the inexplicable grace of God—a cur in human shape, to-day the most despicable human being in all the world.
In that grim midnight hour, already great in history, he found himself hemmed in by the band of heroes whose watch word and countersign rang out across the deep—”Women and children first!”
What did he do? He scuttled to the stateroom deck, put on a woman’s skirt, a woman’s hat and a woman’s veil, and picking his crafty way back among the brave and chivalric men who guarded the rail of the doomed ship, he filched a seat in one of the life-boats and saved his skin.
His name is on that list of branded rescued men who were neither picked up from the sea when the ship went down nor were in the boats under orders to help get them safe away. His identity is not yet known, though it will be in good time. So foul an act as that will out like murder.
The eyes of strong men who have read this crowded record of golden deeds, who have read and re-read that deathless roll of honor of the dead, are still wet with tears of pity and of pride. This man still lives. Surely he was born and saved to set for men a new standard by which to measure infamy and shame.
It is well that there was sufficient heroism on board the Titanic to neutralize the horrors of the cowardice. When the first order was given for the men to stand back, there were a dozen or more who pushed forward and said that men would be needed to row the life-boats and that they would volunteer for the work.
The officers tried to pick out the ones that volunteered merely for service and to eliminate those who volunteered merely to save their own lives. This elimination process, however, was not wholly successful.
THE DOOMED MEN
As the ship began to settle to starboard, heeling at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, those who had believed it was all right to stick by the ship began to have doubts, and a few jumped into the sea. They were followed immediately by others, and in a few minutes there were scores swimming around. Nearly all of them wore life-preservers. One man, who had a Pomeranian dog, leaped overboard with it and striking a piece of wreckage was badly stunned. He recovered after a few minutes and swam toward one of the lifeboats and was taken aboard.
Said one survivor, speaking of the men who remained on the ship: “There they stood—Major Butt, Colonel Astor waving a farewell to his wife; Mr. Thayer, Mr. Case, Mr. Clarence Moore, Mr. Widener, all multimillionaires, and hundreds of other men, bravely smiling at us all. Never have I seen such chivalry and fortitude. Such courage in the face of fate horrible to contemplate filled us even then with wonder and admiration.”
Why were men saved? ask others who seek to make the occasional male survivor a hissing scorn; and yet the testimony makes it clear that for a long time during that ordeal the more frightful position seemed to many to be in the frail boats in the vast relentless sea, and that some men had to be tumbled into the boats under orders from the officers. Others express the deepest indignation that 210 sailors were rescued; the testimony shows that most of these sailors were in the welter of ice and water into which they had been thrown from the ship’s deck when she sank; they were human beings and so were picked up and saved.
“WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST”
The one alleviating circumstance in the otherwise immitigable tragedy is the fact that so many of the men stood aside really with out the necessity for the order, “Women and children first,” and insisted that the weaker sex should first have places in the boats.
There were men whose word of command swayed boards of directors, governed institutions, disposed of millions. They were accustomed merely to pronounce a wish to have it gratified. Thousands “posted at their bidding”; the complexion of the market altered hue when they nodded; they bought what they wanted, and for one of the humblest fishing smacks or a dory they could have given the price that was paid to build and launch the ship that has become the most imposing mausoleum that ever housed the bones of men since the Pyramids rose from the desert sands.
But these men stood aside—one can see them!—and gave place not merely to the delicate and the refined, but to the scared Czech woman from the steerage, with her baby at her breast; the Croatian with a toddler by her side, coming through the very gate of Death and out of the mouth of Hell to the imagined Eden of America.
To many of those who went, it was harder to go than to stay there on the vessel gaping with its mortal wounds and ready to go down. It meant that tossing on the waters they must wait in suspense, hour after hour even after the lights of the ship were engulfed in appalling darkness, hoping against hope for the miracle of a rescue dearer to them than their own lives.
It was the tradition of Anglo-Saxon heroism that was fulfilled in the frozen seas during the black hours of Sunday night. The heroism was that of the women who went, as well as the men who remained!
CHAPTER VII
LEFT TO THEIR FATE
COOLNESS AND HEROISM OF THOSE LEFT TO PERISH—SUICIDE OF MURDOCK—CAPTAIN SMITH’S END—THE SHIP’S BAND PLAYS A NOBLE HYMN AS THE VESSEL GOES DOWN
THE general feeling aboard the ship after the boats had left her sides was that she would not survive her wound, but the passengers who remained aboard displayed the utmost heroism.
William T. Stead, the famous English journalist, was so little alarmed that he calmly discussed with one of the passengers the probable height of the iceberg after the Titanic had shot into it.
Confidence in the ability of the Titanic to remain afloat doubtlessly led many of the passengers to death. The theory that the great ship was unsinkable remained with hundreds who had entrusted themselves to the gigantic hulk, long after the officers knew that the vessel would not survive.
The captain and officers behaved with superb gallantry, and there was perfect order and discipline among those who were aboard, even after all hope had been abandoned for the salvation of the ship.
Many women went down, steerage women who were unable to get to the upper decks where the boats were launched, maids who were overlooked in the confusion, cabin passengers who refused to des
ert their husbands or who reached the decks after the last of the life-boats was gone and the ship was settling for her final plunge to the bottom of the Atlantic.
Narratives of survivors do not bear out the supposition that the final hours upon the vessel’s decks were passed in darkness. They say the electric lighting plant held out until the last, and that even as they watched the ship sink from their places in the floating life-boats, her lights were gleaming in long rows as she plunged under by the head. Just before she sank, some of the refugees say, the ship broke in two abaft the engine room after the bulkhead explosions had occurred.
COLONEL ASTOR’S DEATH
To Colonel Astor’s death Philip Mock bears this testimony: “Many men were hanging on to rafts in the sea. William T. Stead and Colonel Astor were among them. Their feet and hands froze and they had to let go. Both were drowned.”
The last man among the survivors to speak to Colonel Astor was K. Whiteman, the ship’s barber.
“I shaved Colonel Astor Sunday afternoon,” said Whiteman. “He was a pleasant, affable man, and that awful night when I found myself standing beside him on the passenger deck, helping to put the women into the boats, I spoke to him.
“‘Where is your life-belt?’ I asked him.
“‘I didn’t think there would be any need of it,’ he said.
“‘Get one while there is time,’ I told him. The last boat is gone, and we are done for.’
“‘No,’ he said, ‘I think there are some life-boats to be launched, and we may get on one of them.’
“‘There are no life-rafts,’ I told him, ‘and the ship is going to sink. I am going to jump overboard and take a chance on swimming out and being picked up by one of the boats. Better come along.’
“‘No, thank you,’ he said calmly, ‘I think I’ll have to stick.’
“I asked him if he would mind shaking hands with me. He said, ‘With pleasure,’ gave me a hearty grip, and then I climbed up on the rail and jumped overboard. I was in the water nearly four hours before one of the boats picked me up.”
The Sinking of the Titanic Page 5
