Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From
Page 20
The Promenade (or “A”) Deck, from which lifeboat 4 left with its cargo of American millionairesses and Cornish housewives, and from which Hugh Woolner jumped for his life.
(The Irish Picture Library/Father FM Browne SJ Collection)
Second-class passengers sauntering on the boat deck—550 feet long.
(Irish Examiner)
Lifeboat 14 towing collapsible lifeboat D (the last lifeboat to be lowered) toward their rescuers on the Carpathia. “The rescued came solemnly, dumbly, out of a shivering shadow,” said the Carpathia’s captain.
(Southampton City Council, Arts & Heritage)
Crowds outside White Star’s Southampton office, checking lists of survivors and awaiting fresh bulletins. “Women sobbed aloud, while tears glistened in the eyes of rough and hardy sea-faring men.”
(Southampton City Council, Arts & Heritage)
Bathroom steward Sam Rule, safe back in Plymouth, but mourning the “little lads” who were lift boys and bellboys. He would have bundled them in with the women if he could have.
(Southampton City Council, Arts & Heritage)
Able Seaman Horswill escaped in lifeboat 1. It has been suggested that he and his wife are examining his check from Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon.
(Southampton City Council, Arts & Heritage)
Surviving crew members reach Southampton Docks.
(Southampton City Council, Arts & Heritage)
White Star men attend a memorial service in Southampton.
(Southampton City Council, Arts & Heritage)
A corpse retrieved from the Atlantic by the cable ship Minia is prepared for its coffin.
(Nova Scotia Archives)
Part III
LIFE AND DEATH
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: “What does this vaingloriousness down here?”. . .
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate
For her—so gaily great—
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said “Now!” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
—THOMAS HARDY, “THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN, (LINES ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC)”
10
Collision
The weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me . . . Then came sudden alarms; hurrying to and fro; trepidation of innumerable fugitives . . . darkness and lights, tempest and human faces; and at last, with a sense that all was lost, female forms; and the features that were all the world to me, and but a moment allowed—and clasped hands; with heartbreaking partings, and everlasting farewells!
—THOMAS DE QUINCEY, CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER
The fifth night of the maiden voyage was moonless: a flat sea, an unclouded sky, with stars gleaming in the frosty air. “Grand weather,” said John Poingdestre, a member of the deck crew, but “terribly cold.”1 After five thirty on Sunday evening, the sharp fall in temperature drove all but the hardiest passengers indoors. It was so chill that smart women in flimsy dresses retreated to their cabins early. Eloise Smith, for example, who had dined with her husband in the Café Parisien, left him at ten thirty and went to bed. Elizabeth Shutes, the American governess of the Graham family, wrote afterward: “Such a biting cold air poured into my state room that I could not sleep, and the air had so strange an odour, as if it came from a clammy cave. I had noticed the same odour in the ice cave on the Eiger glacier.” She lay in her berth shivering until she switched on her electric stove, which threw a cheerful red glow.2 The Waldorf-Astoria resident Ella White remembered telling Marie Young, the musician with whom she was sharing her cabin, “We must be very near icebergs to have such cold weather.” Her stateroom, too, was chilly. “Everybody knew we were in the vicinity of icebergs,” she said after she reached New York. The ship’s navigation, she added with a mixture of anger and despondency, “was a careless, reckless thing. It seems almost useless to speak of it.”3
Captain Smith was sufficiently concerned about ice to leave the Wideners’ dinner early at nine o’clock and return to the bridge. Murdoch, who replaced Lightoller as officer on watch an hour later, had no authority from Smith to reduce speed, although it was clear that the ship had entered an ice zone. The lookouts were told “to keep a sharp look-out for all ice,”4 but no extra lookouts were posted. Fleet and Lee, the lookouts in the crow’s nest, knew the risks, and were straining to see. At eleven forty Fleet glimpsed a dark object in the ship’s path, rang the crow’s nest bell three times (the warning for “object dead ahead”), and telephoned the bridge: “Iceberg right ahead.”
Murdoch ordered Quartermaster Hichens to turn hard-a-starboard; then he ordered the engine room to reverse engines. He was trying to swing the ship’s bow to port so that it would miss the iceberg and then to swing the stern back to starboard so that it too would miss. But the ship was traveling at twenty-two and a half knots, covering thirty-eight feet per second, and the iceberg was about five hundred yards away. For more than twenty seconds the bow continued to plough straight ahead. Murdoch should have left the engines full ahead—not reverse—to make a sharp turn. Moreover, all officers on Atlantic liners knew that ramming an iceberg was preferable to sideswiping it: a ship with its bows buckled by a collision could remain afloat and reach port under its own steam. If Murdoch had steered the ship headfirst into the iceberg, the prow would have held and the vulnerable side of the ship been protected. Yet Murdoch’s impulse was to slow the ship and turn it away, just as a man has an instinct to flinch and turn his head aside before being punched. It was a fatal impulse.
To Fleet it seemed that a collision had been averted. The liner had swung to starboard at the last moment and seemed to clear. Four saloon stewards were sitting in the first-class dining room discussing their passengers when they heard a grinding sound. James Johnson thought the ship had lost a propeller blade: “another Belfast trip,” said someone, thinking of the repairs, but a man who went down to the engines returned looking worried: “It is a bit hot.”5 Third Officer Herbert Pitman was woken by a sound resembling “the ship coming to anchor—the chain running out over a windlass.”6 He lay in his bunk for a few minutes wondering why the ship was anchoring, and lit his pipe meditatively. Lookout George Symons had gone to his bunk after being relieved by Fleet and Lee. “What awakened me was a grinding sound on her bottom. I thought at first she had lost her anchor and chain, and it was running along her bottom.”7 Another off-duty lookout, William Lucas, had been in the mess room playing nap (a simple card game in which whoever bids the highest number of tricks chooses trumps), but stopped just before the collision “because I was broke.” As he left the mess room he felt “a hard shock,” which “very nearly sent me off my feet.” There was a grating sound, he added, “like a ship ru
nning up on gravel, a crushing noise.”8 Down below in a stokehold, fireman George Beauchamp heard a sound like “the roar of thunder.”9 Coal slid in one bunker and briefly trapped trimmer George Cavell.10
Murdoch was unsure if the ship had been damaged but, using an automatic switch, shut the doors between the sixteen watertight compartments. Firemen and stokers near boiler room 6, where there had been a loud bang when the starboard side of the ship broke, scrambled through the watertight doors as they shut, or scurried up escape ladders to a higher deck. Smith appeared on the bridge, ordered the engines to stop, and sent his fourth officer, Boxhall, to inspect the damage. Many passengers noticed when the ship stopped: Renée Harris said that her dresses on their hangers in the wardrobe stopped swaying. Emily Ryerson felt the stilling of the engines and questioned her bedroom steward, Walter Bishop. “There’s talk of an iceberg, ma’am,” he replied, “and they have stopped, not to run over it.”11
Boxhall soon reported that the mail room on F deck was awash: everyone knew that this meant the ship was badly holed. Ismay arrived in carpet slippers with pajamas peeping from underneath his trousers and was told his liner had hit an iceberg. The ship’s designer, Thomas Andrews, accompanied Smith on a tour of inspection. They were aghast to find that six forward watertight compartments had been breached as the iceberg bumped past. Three cargo holds and two boiler rooms as well as the forepeak had been ripped into below the waterline. Andrews and Smith recognized that with six holed compartments, the bow would be sunk by the weight of seawater pouring in and that the ocean would pour over the top of each successive bulkhead in turn. The closure of the watertight doors was futile. Andrews estimated that the ship would survive for at best two hours before sinking.
Smith visited the Marconi cabin before leaving on his inspection. The ship had struck an iceberg, he told Phillips and Bride. They should prepare to transmit messages summoning help, but not send them until he had checked the damage. Ten minutes later he returned and told Phillips to transmit CQD, the international call for help. At twelve fifteen on April 15, half an hour after the accident, the first distress call was sent. CQ was Marconi code for “all stations,” and D indicated an emergency call: CQD was known in slang as “Come Quick, Danger.” SOS had been introduced in 1908 as an international distress call because it was easier to transmit in Morse code than CQD. It was supposed to denote “Save Our Souls.” At twelve thirty a steamer loaded with steerage passengers making for Canada, the Mount Temple, received the CQD and went to the coordinates given by the Titanic, but these were inaccurate and the ship played no part in the rescue. The wireless man on the nearest ship, the freighter Californian, had switched off his Marconi apparatus forty-five minutes before Phillips sent his first message. The Californian captain, Stanley Lord, has been heavily condemned for ignoring the distress rockets that his crewmen later saw fired on Smith’s orders. At twelve forty-five Phillips finally heard from the small liner Carpathia, fifty-eight miles away: at full speed it would take four hours to reach the Titanic’s calculated position.
At Smith’s order, issued after he had returned from his inspection with Andrews, the boatswain piped “all hands up and get the lifeboats ready.”12 It is often said that this order was issued at twelve twenty-five and that Smith’s vacillation was culpable; but it is reasonable to surmise that the order was made after he told the Marconi men to begin sending distress calls around twelve fifteen. Smith was, however, so anxious to avert panic, and shaken by his knowledge that there were insufficient lifeboats, that he did not instill enough urgency into their loading. Initially, passengers doubted the gravity of their danger, so that many refused to enter the lifeboats, which left half-empty. Four hundred more people might have survived if the lifeboats had been filled efficiently.
Passengers before the collision had disported in delusive security. Lady Duff Gordon, with a cabin on A deck costing £58 18s, pictured the first-class decks: “A great liner stealing through the vast loneliness of the Atlantic, the sky jewelled with myriads of stars overhead, and a thin little wind blowing cold and even colder straight from the frozen ice fields, tapping its warning of approaching danger on the cosily shuttered portholes of the cabins, causing the look-out man to strain his eyes anxiously into the gloom. Inside this floating palace warmth, lights and music, the flutter of cards, the hum of voices, the gay lilt of a German waltz—the unheeding sounds of a small world bent on pleasure. Then disaster, swift and overwhelming, turning all into darkness and chaos, the laughing voices changed into shuddering wails of despair—a story of horror unparalleled in the annals of the sea.”13
Eloise Smith had left her husband, Lucien, playing bridge in the Café Parisien with three Frenchmen: the sculptor Paul Chevré, the aviator Pierre Marechal, and Fernand Omont, a cotton broker. They were not nervous gamblers playing for small stakes, like the lookout man Lucas with his game of nap in the mess room, but trenchant men who redoubled bids, trumped aces, and, as they soon proved, appraised their chances well. A mass of ice crunched up against the portholes. The Frenchmen hastened on deck. “Do not be afraid,” an officer said. “We are merely cutting a whale in two.”14 In the first-class smoking room, Henry Blank, William Greenfield, and Alfred Nourney, the bogus Baron von Drachstedt, made up another card game. Archie Butt sat with Harry Widener, Clarence Moore, and William Carter nearby. Spencer Silverthorne, buyer for a department store in Saint Louis, was reading a novel about Wyoming cattle ranchers lynching rustlers. The lupine moneymen Hugh Woolner and Håkan Björnström-Steffansson were using the smoking room as their lair, too. “We felt a rip that gave a sort of twist to the whole room,” Woolner reported. “Everybody stood up and a number of men walked out rapidly through the swinging doors on the port side, and ran along . . . guessing what it might be, and one man called out, ‘an iceberg has passed astern.’”15
Lower down in the ship, on Sunday night, the chief second-class steward, John Hardy, had closed the public rooms and extinguished most lights at 11 P.M. In a second-class berth on D deck costing £13, Lawrence Beesley felt a change in the movement of the ship. “As I read in the quietness of the night, broken only by the muffled sound that came to me through the ventilators of stewards talking and moving along the corridors, when nearly all the passengers were in their cabins, some asleep in bed, others undressing, and others only just down from the smoking-room and still discussing many things, there came what seemed to me nothing more than an extra heave of the engines and a more than usually obvious dancing motion of the mattress on which I sat. Nothing more than that.”16
Most third-class passengers were already in their berths, for their saloons were closed after ten. Victor Sunderland was a teenage Londoner who had paid £8 1s for a berth on G deck. He was traveling to join an uncle in Cleveland, Ohio; later he became a plumber. He and his cabinmates were smoking in their bunks near the bow. He still wore his trousers, though his jacket hung on a rack. After hearing the jar of the collision, which he likened to the sound of coal falling on an iron plate, he and some others made for the main deck to investigate. A steward sent them back, saying that nothing was amiss. Sunderland smoked more cigarettes in his bunk until water began seeping under the cabin door.17
Passengers drew different analogies to describe the sound and feel of the collision. In second class, the missionary’s wife Sylvia Caldwell imagined a large dog shaking a young kitten in its mouth. The impact sounded to Emma Bucknell in first class like a “terrific peal of thunder mixed in with many violent explosions.”18 Ella White was sitting on her bed, stretching to turn off her bedside light at the moment of the collision: “It was just as though we went over about a thousand marbles. There was nothing terrifying about it at all.”19 George Harder, a young Brooklyn manufacturer honeymooning with his wife, felt the ship shake, then a “rumbling, scraping noise.” Harder went to investigate on deck, where he met Dick Bishop and Jack Astor. People said reassuringly, “Oh, it will be only a few hours before we are on our way again.”20 In his first-class sta
teroom, Norman Chambers heard a sound like “jangling chains whipping along the side of the ship,” and was sent by his wife to investigate. At the top of a stairway leading to the mail-sorting room, he found two clerks “wet to their knees, who had just come up from below, bringing their registered mailbags.”21
The Titanic had been steaming at twenty-two and a half knots: “the instant the engines were stopped the steam started roaring off at all eight exhausts, kicking up a row that would have dwarfed the row of a thousand railway engines thundering through a culvert,” Second Officer Lightoller recalled.22 The crew responded immediately to the call for “All hands on deck,” but it was impossible to give verbal orders: hand gestures set the crew swinging lifeboats out, hauling tight the falls, and coiling them on deck and ready for lowering. As passengers emerged on deck, the cacophony increased their alarm. When later the deafening din of venting steam stopped, the silence seemed sinister.
Officers and crew deceived the passengers in order to avoid panic—and perhaps to protect themselves from full realization of their predicament. Passengers kept asking if the situation was serious. “I tried to cheer them up,” wrote Lightoller, “by telling them ‘No,’ but that it was a matter of precaution to get the boats in the water, ready for any emergency. That in any case they were perfectly safe, as there was a ship not more than a few miles away, and I pointed out the lights on the port bow which they could see as well as I could.”23 The ship was probably the Californian, at whose dozy, heedless master Lightoller flung recriminatory barbs for forty years. “Wrap up warmly, for you may have a little trip for an hour or so in one of our lifeboats,” Lady Duff Gordon’s steward told her comfortingly. “If it had not been for this ill-advised reticence hundreds more lives would have been saved,” she felt. “The appalling danger we were in was concealed from us all until it was too late and in the ensuing panic many of the boats were lowered half-filled because there was no time to fill them.”24 Yet it was the stewards’ duty to assuage worries and deter panic. Many of them did not recognize the danger, or realize that the ship must sink, until long after the first lifeboats were primed.