The Midnight Watch

by David Dyer

  I wrote down the words verbatim, as quickly as the captain spoke them, using my own shorthand – not a proper stenographical system like Pitman’s or Gregg’s, but a mixture of words, scrawls and symbols I’d developed over the years. The captain, slightly hunched forward in this low-ceilinged room, spoke clearly and evenly, as if he had memorised his words.

  ‘Scarcely had the boat been brought to a standstill when we received a relayed message from the steamer Virginian. The SOS was signalled to C. Evans, the Marconi operator on board our steamer. We knew the danger attending any attempt to steer the vessel through the icefloes, but also knew that no effort should be lost to render what assistance we could. We were about twenty miles away.’

  Even though the captain’s language was strangely formal – ‘C. Evans’, ‘attending any attempt’, ‘render assistance’ – there was nonetheless some good material here. It would be easy to write Thomas’s nice little story – a tragic tale of thwarted heroism. But I had promised a story about bodies, and I was getting nothing exclusive from this captain: my fellow reporters’ pencils were just as busy as mine.

  Captain Lord described how his ship had pushed through the icefield but arrived just as the Carpathia was hoisting the last lifeboat aboard. ‘We offered to help, but the captain informed us that he required no assistance.’

  I saw Sam Jameson from the Monitor write ‘tragically, no help needed’. I was losing interest. But then Lord said something that made me look up from my notebook. ‘We stood by and watched the proceedings.’

  The proceedings? His words struck me as so very passive and detached. I saw Jameson put square brackets around them; the other reporters wrote nothing. They wanted this captain to say he had searched the scene frantically, or lowered lifeboats at once, or hung his head in despair. There was no place in their stories for standing by and watching. But I wrote the words down and I underlined them. They seemed to me the most important thing the captain had said so far – there was oddity in their blandness. They put me in mind of pawns in a game of chess, subtly positioned to protect a valuable piece.

  ‘How far away were you?’ I asked.

  ‘When?’ he responded, his eyes lifting high above our heads as if he were looking at something far away.

  ‘When you were … standing by and watching.’

  ‘Oh, then. No distance at all. A mile, perhaps.’

  The emphasis on ‘then’ was almost imperceptible, but I had heard it. ‘And at other times?’ I asked. ‘When you got the SOS call, for example? How far then?’

  Now there was a distinct hesitation. ‘Thirty miles – perhaps more.’

  ‘Thirty? I thought you said twenty before?’

  ‘Thirty.’

  I pushed a little harder. ‘Do you have the exact latitude and longitude?’

  Now his eyes fell. He fixed his gaze on me as if I were an insect that finally needed swatting. A Boston insect – more persistent, and less well mannered, no doubt, than those of England. The officers either side of him seemed hardly to breathe. ‘That information,’ he said, ‘the latitude and longitude, is something of a state secret.’

  Latitude and longitude a state secret? Perhaps I had misheard. It made no sense. I pressed him further. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It will be in my report to the company. You will have to get it from the office.’

  I heard Thomas’s sugary voice behind me: ‘You may give it now, if you wish,’ he said.

  ‘I do not have the exact figures for our overnight position – the exact latitude and longitude I cannot give. I shall put them in my report, in the usual way.’

  A pencil fell to the floor. It belonged to a thin, bespectacled young man with oily hair – perhaps twenty years old – who loafed against the far wall and whom I hadn’t noticed before. The clatter, and the young man’s stifled cry, diverted attention from the captain. The reporter from the Transcript – the fastest and most astute of us – at once threw questions at the boy. ‘Are you the Marconi man? Tell us about the SOS call.’ There were instant and overlapping outbursts from others: ‘Did you hear from the Titanic directly? Can you show us the SOS message?’ The boy fidgeted and shuffled forward as if to speak. I tried to read his face: did I see resentment there?

  But it was the captain who spoke. ‘We received the distress message shortly after dawn. At about 5.30, I would say – yes, about then.’

  ‘Can’t the boy answer? There’s nothing wrong with his vocal organs, is there?’ It was an impertinence that surprised even me. The question came from old Frank of the Globe, who I knew drank a gin martini every morning after breakfast, except on Sundays when he drank two: one for himself and one for the Lord. ‘Well?’ Frank demanded again. ‘Is there anything wrong with the boy? Can’t he speak for himself?’

  ‘I will answer your questions,’ Lord said, ‘on behalf of the ship. That is only proper, as her captain. I said that at the very beginning.’

  ‘Then you need to tell us more. I don’t have enough.’ Frank held his notebook forward to show its sparse scribblings. ‘If you’re the only one who can speak, then you must speak more!’

  I did admire old Frank. Cobwebs of fine veins laced his cheeks and his left hand quivered with a strange palsy, but he was awed by no one, not even this tall, burnished captain of the British Merchant Marine. In Frank’s conception of things, the primary responsibility and duty of people – anyone, everyone – was to give him a good story.

  ‘Tell us about the ice – tell us more about that,’ said the reporter from the Herald, trying to be helpful.

  The captain’s words began slowly to flow again – in that exotic accent with its commanding calm. ‘Our ship,’ he said, and my hand noted down his words as surely as one of Edison’s wax rolls, ‘bucked her way through continuous icefloes.’ He seemed to find his stride. ‘I forced my steamer to the limit of safety and all ordinary precautions were abandoned.’ He looked to Jack Thomas, who rolled one hand slowly over the other, like a steamer’s paddlewheel, as if to say, Keep going – give them more.

  ‘There were icefloes stretching in all directions,’ the captain obligingly went on, ‘and it was often necessary to slow down the engine to permit the ship to break her way through them without ripping off plates.’ The man had thawed a little; he made eye contact with us individually, as if remembering long-ago lessons in public speaking, and began to develop a sense of the dramatic. ‘I never in all my marine career saw so much ice!’ His words became active and for the first time he spoke of emotion. ‘At times, nervous and anxious as we were, we hardly seemed to be moving. We had to dodge the big bergs, skirt the massed field ice and plough through the line of least resistance. For three full hours we turned, twisted, doubled on our course – in short, manoeuvred one way or another – through the winding channels of ice.’

  Winding channels of ice! When he tried, it seemed, this captain could be creative. I looked behind me and saw Thomas smiling warmly. The captain was at last doing a good job.

  * * *

  Only a few hours earlier, the Carpathia had berthed in New York, watched by forty thousand onlookers. The survivors came ashore in driving rain, and their individual stories – like the tiny flames of candles being lit in a dark cathedral – had begun to illuminate a very great tragedy. Visions flashed upon the consciousness of a nation: first-class men standing on sloping decks in dinner jackets, steerage passengers rushing wildly for the boats, Italians being shot dead by the Titanic’s officers, the mighty Captain Smith, his great white beard spreading around him in the black waters, swimming to a lifeboat with a baby in his arms. There were visions of shame, too: when a passenger was asked how Mr Ismay, chairman of the line, had escaped the doomed ship, the passenger simply shrugged and said, ‘Well, he got into a lifeboat.’

  ‘I wish I’d been down there,’ said old Frank from the Globe while we waited to be escorted to the Californian’s gangway. ‘I’d have shot him. That’s what we used to do with yellows back then, you know. Shoot ’e
m, straight up, no questions.’ When Frank spoke this way we never did know who the ‘we’ were, or when ‘back then’ was, and no one ever dared ask.

  The talk went on. Frank massaged his swollen gums with a dirty finger. Other reporters muttered about being ‘down there’ – in New York, getting the real stories.

  I slipped away. I had no desire to be in New York, and I was not yet ready to leave this ship, which, in her own passive way, intrigued me. I crossed the alleyway to the seaward side of the main deck, where there were no pressmen, and no crewmen either. I climbed the external stairs – narrow, rusty, steep – to the very topmost deck. I knew a little about ships, and there was something very specific and particular I wanted to find on this one.

  The bridge, open to the weather, was deserted. There had been drizzle earlier, but now the late morning air sparkled clear and warm. The Bunker Hill Monument seemed strangely tall and close and great clusters of gulls whooped and cried amid the cranes of the nearby docks. The inner harbour, fed by the vibrant waters of the Charles and Mystic rivers, glowed blue and white. Years earlier, when my father had taken me exploring around the islands in an old Maine lobster boat, the harbour was alive with sail; the brown canvas of barques and barges snapped and cracked in the spring winds. But this morning, as I looked out, the harbour was thrashed and pummelled by the power of steam. Everywhere I saw the tall, straight funnels of the steam engines that drove the submerged propellers of tugs, barges and steamers, each taking the most direct route, none caring about the direction of the wind.

  It was progress of a sort, I supposed, but I couldn’t help feeling nostalgia for those older, lazier days when soft breezes calmed human lives. This modern frenzy of steam-making seemed to bring with it a fevered insanity: I had read in dispatches of a man in Brooklyn who killed his own baby then leapt out a window; of a psychic healer in Dallas – described as ‘a holy man of the Punjab’ – sent to jail for rubbing his oily palms on women’s tumours; of a farmer in Pennsylvania who shot his wife and then forced his nine-year-old grandson to shoot him dead with the same shotgun. And, of course, most insane of all: the Titanic, with steam engines the size of office buildings, undone so easily by silent ice. ‘And still the horror grows,’ declared The Boston Daily Globe.

  As I stood alone on the sunny bridge of the Californian and reflected on all this madness, I could not help but wonder what disorder and chaos might be found beneath the neat decks of this ordinary, sleepy steamer. I brought to my mind the captain’s face and tried again to read what I had seen. There were some peculiarities beneath that hard-fired exterior.

  Why had he said his ship’s position was a state secret?

  Why had he silenced the wireless man? Why had none of his officers said a single word?

  Why had he first said his ship was twenty miles from the Titanic but then later said thirty? Why was he trying to push the Titanic further away?

  Why, if the captain had received the wireless distress call scarcely after his ship had been brought to a standstill, as he claimed, did he then use the term ‘overnight position’? Why was he trying to shrink his overnight hours to nothing? What had happened during those hours?

  And I thought, too, about the man standing behind the captain – the man with the pretty face and deep eyes who remained so perfectly still that I wondered what he was trying to conceal with such fixed concentration.

  There was a story on this ship. I could smell it.

  I looked about. The engine telegraph, compass and ship’s wheel, each mounted on steel stands, had been covered in green canvas. A small locker amidships was labelled ‘glasses’. It was locked. On the forward bulkhead, beneath a canvas windbreak, was a stoppered speaking tube, and adjacent to this was a card behind glass showing the ship’s dimensions, turning circle, stopping distance, and other details. There was also a ‘compass deviation’ card. It was all very interesting, but it was not what I was looking for.

  I walked slowly back and forth. At each end of the bridge an extended awning provided some protection for a small foldout table. I pulled both tables down and stowed them again. Perhaps this was where the officers carried out their navigational calculations. Behind the starboard table, secured to the rear steel wall, I saw a small cupboard. There was a latch, but it was not locked. Inside was a water bottle, a tin tankard full of pencils, and there, resting on a lower shelf, I saw what I wanted: a small notebook, with pages sewn into a soft cover. On the cover were printed the words ‘Californian Scrap Log’.

  This, I was sure, would give me some clues as to what had happened. But I was disappointed. About half the log’s pages had been torn out, and the remainder were blank, apart from a ruled margin and the word ‘date’ printed in pencil at the top of each. There was no writing, no clues.

  I idly flicked the stubs of the missing pages with my thumb. The pages had been torn out about half an inch from the spine. Then I noticed something odd: one of the stubs had a perfectly straight edge. All the others had been ripped, but this one seemed to have been cut carefully with a knife. I counted back: if one page were used per day, then the cut page represented the 15th of April – the date of the disaster. So whatever had happened on this ship that night, it had warranted removal with surgical precision.

  * * *

  ‘File your story by three o’clock or don’t bother filing at all.’

  I received the note at one o’clock from a breathless message boy. I recognised the rushed yet masterful lettering of Krupp.

  I told the boy to come back at half past two – I would have something for him then. But as the wall clock in the Marginal Street saloon neared two o’clock, I still had not put one word on the page. I’d drunk three bourbons to liberate my muse, but nothing came. The more I thought of that enigmatic captain – his inscrutable face, the liquid charm of his voice, the almost hypnotic power he seemed to have over those around him – the fewer words I had. There was something about him that resisted my efforts; it was as if a curtain were drawn around him, behind which I could not see. In the era before Hearst and Pulitzer I would have tried to get at the man by learning something of his past – about his mother and father, his apprenticeship, how he had come to be the Leyland Line’s youngest commander. But these days there was no time for such things.

  ‘Hello, old boy!’

  I looked up. Jack Thomas had pushed his way into the tavern, red-faced, dabbing at spittle on his lips. ‘How did you know I was here?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh John, I know how to sniff you out.’ He heaved himself into a chair and dropped a newspaper onto the table.

  ‘I don’t really have time. I’ve got to file —’

  ‘But that’s why I’m here, old boy. I’ve come to help you out. Read that.’

  He pushed the newspaper towards me. It was the morning edition of The Boston Daily Globe. STORY OF HEROISM ran the front-page headline in letters an inch high. MAJOR BUTT STOPPED STAMPEDE BY SHOOTING DOWN CRAVENS was the sub-headline. ‘The tale of the sinking of the steamship Titanic,’ the story began, ‘is a story of heroism. There were brave men on board that ship…’

  ‘See?’ said Thomas. ‘A story of heroism. I thought, That’s the sort of thing you could write. It would certainly help us.’

  ‘You want me to write about Captain Lord shooting people?’

  Thomas gave a great laugh; a substance came out of his nose. ‘If only he had! That would have been splendid! But no, not shooting – sacrificing. Sacrificing the safety of his own ship to help others in the freezing ice. An IMM captain following the very finest traditions of the British Merchant Marine. That sort of thing.’

  I slid the newspaper back across the table but Thomas, breathing through closed teeth with a wet, sucking sound, pushed it straight back to me. ‘Read on,’ he said, pointing at a paragraph with a stubby finger. ‘Read it out aloud.’

  ‘“Major Archibald W. Butt,”’ I mumbled, bourbon blurring my diction a little, ‘“the personal aide of President Taft, stood near the starboard gang
way for more than two hours assisting women and children into the lifeboats.”’ I looked up at Thomas. ‘That the part you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, yes. Keep going, old boy.’ Thomas leaned back to listen.

  ‘“With drawn revolver, Major Butt warned off excited men who tried to leap to the places held for the women and children, and when they would not obey his orders to stand back, he shot them.”’

  ‘He shot them!’ Thomas gave a little clap.

  I read on. It was all rather gripping. ‘“It was not time for argument, and the President’s aide wounded six men before he stopped the stampede to the boats. Every man of them was lost. Major Butt declined to step into a boat himself, and his last hours were devoted to the saving of life. Just before the Titanic broke apart and made the dive into the sea, Major Butt leaped overboard and was drowned.”’ I looked up. ‘His last hours were devoted to saving people by shooting them?’

  ‘Not people. Cravens!’ Thomas was beaming.

  ‘Who were these cravens?’

  ‘You know who they were.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Italians.’

  ‘I thought you liked Italians.’

  ‘They’re not brave.’

  ‘They’re not American, is what you mean.’

  ‘Oh John, don’t be so contrary.’

  ‘I’m not being contrary.’

  Perhaps it was the bourbon, but I felt very sorry for the six men who’d been shot dead by the brave major. I thought it an outrageous crime – to shoot unarmed men in the last desperate moments of their lives. ‘Thank God for Major Butt,’ I said, raising my glass in tribute.

  ‘Yes indeed!’ replied Thomas, raising his in reply.

  ‘But,’ I continued after I’d drained my glass, ‘surely the biggest craven of all was the head of your own company. And he’s no Italian.’

  ‘Exactly, old boy. Exactly. That’s why I’m here – asking you to make something of Captain Lord. For every villain there is a hero.’