All large New York hotels had a steamship agent sitting at a desk arranging transatlantic passages. These men were besieged by anxious questioners, while elsewhere in the lobbies small groups loitered to debate the tragedy. George Boldt, manager of the Waldorf-Astoria, who had over thirty reservations from Titanic passengers, sat at his desk in suspense between the arrival of bulletins. At the Ritz-Carlton, Lord Rothes waited patiently for tidings of his wife. William Graham of the American Tin Can Company waited at the Plaza for news of his wife and daughter. The Gotham Hotel received telegraphic inquiries from Björnström-Steffanson’s father. Waiting in the hotels were hundreds of shipping agents who had crossed America to attend the gaudy rejoicings that were planned on board to mark the maiden voyage.35
On Wednesday a weeping girl asked if the name of her brother, Vivian Payne, Charles Hays’s secretary, was among the list of survivors. She had come from Montreal, where her widowed mother was “insane with grief and her life despaired of,” and broke down when Payne’s name was not on any list. Anderson Polk, of Dayton, Ohio, brother of Lucile Carter, swayed and nearly fell when given his good news. A plainly dressed woman with her daughter came timidly forward. A millionaire stood aside for her and retrieved her bag when she dropped it. She asked after her brother, Walter Bishop, a bedroom steward, and received a reply that made her turn away with a sob. There were hysterics who wanted to aggrandize themselves by making bogus claims for attention. Joseph Marrington of Philadelphia maintained a ceaseless vigil for two days seeking news of William Lambert of Greensboro, Pennsylvania. “He was my closest friend on earth,” said Marrington, “and as dear to me as a brother. He saved my life several years ago in the jungles of Ecuador while we were searching for rubber.” There was no such man on the ship: Marrington seems to have been indulging in a cheap fantasy. A young man who said he was called Long created an uproar by rushing through the throng screaming that his sister was lost. “When handed a list of survivors he scanned it hurriedly, and found the name of Long. He began laughing hysterically until it occurred to him to ask if the name was that of a steerage passenger. When he was informed that the Long was a first-cabin passenger he fairly shrieked his woes in English and Italian, and became so frenzied that it was necessary to lead him into the street.”36 He, too, was an attention-seeking impostor.
It was not until Wednesday that Arabic newspapers in New York reported that the Titanic had carried scores of passengers from the Turkish province of Syria. The English listings of Arabic names were so misspelled that they raised a thick haze of apprehension in communities from Canada to Texas. It took time for reliable lists of passengers and survivors to be compiled by Lebanese community newspapers. In the interval, heartbreaking fears were aroused: a delegation of a dozen men from Wilkes-Barre was in New York ten days after the accident trying to establish who from Hardin had been on the liner, who was lost, and who still lived. Syrian immigrants in the United States were divided by politics and religion, but this disaster briefly united them. The Syrian-American Club of New York and the Lebanese League of Progress raised $307 for Mayor Gaynor’s relief fund; a Syrian hotelier provided rooms for survivors; and Bishop Rafa’el Hawaweeny of Brooklyn conducted a dignified memorial service in the Orthodox Cathedral.37
On Thursday, the largest crowds of all thronged White Star’s offices. Broadway was choked by cars and taxicabs discharging woeful passengers—mainly women. Weary, haggard clerks shook their heads and despondently pointed at rosters of survivors. “There were many pathetic scenes as the harrowed inquirer turned away from the counters and stumbled, sobbing, to a chair . . . Men and women from distant cities kept coming in even greater number, many of them hysterical and scarcely able to articulate their inquiries, some so feeble they had to be supported to the counters and then almost carried out to waiting vehicles.” Several Washington women came in a limousine to ask for Archie Butt, and swooned or wept, clinging to one another, when they heard there was no hope. Telegrams poured into the offices from almost every city in America, and the telephones were taxed to the limit. Family and friends of third-class passengers—Italians, Slavs, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Transylvanians, Russians, Poles, Germans, and French—“came in a swarm to fight their way into the jammed offices and wail for information.” Without interpreters, “they chattered and wept and wailed in vain.”38
Never in the history of ships had so many lives been lost except in battle; and the Titanic death roll was greater than the British death roll of any battle in the South African War. The whole of England was sorrowing: London had not been so somber since the “Black Week” of December 1899 when news arrived of three separate military defeats of the British Army by Boer irregulars with the loss of about twenty-eight hundred lives. Then sorrowing, fearful crowds had surrounded Cumberland House, the old War Office building in Pall Mall, seeking news of the dead and wounded. White Star’s head office, Oceanic House, was a short distance away in Cockspur Street, which joins Pall Mall to Trafalgar Square (the building is now the Texas Embassy steakhouse). Again, sad, fearful men and women thronged Pall Mall. The crowd outside Oceanic House, although orderly, became so big that the police had to marshal them. Early reports stated that George Vanderbilt and Lord Ashburton were on board, although denials came speedily. It became clear that “the majority of the well-known people on board belonged to New York rather than to London.”39
On Tuesday, Sir Courtenay Bennett, British consul-general in New York, telegraphed a coded message to London: “Consular uncollated hipponax moramenti lives romanized eperlano fewtrils,” which was deciphered as “No hope that any more lives will be saved except by means of fishing-smacks.”40 In Cockspur Street, on Tuesday, there was a pathetic crowd outside the building waiting for lists to be pinned on the bulletin board. Men wearing silk hats and frock coats came and went in motorcars. Shabby women from back-to-back terraced housing walked up with defeated steps, and left with drawn faces. A smartly attired lady who found that her husband was not listed among the survivors and regained her taxicab, leaned forward with her despairing face buried in her hands. When a new list was affixed to the board, there was a frantic rush to scan the names, and dejection on people’s faces as they turned away.41
Lord Winterton traveled up to London on Tuesday from Sandwich, where he had been staying with Nancy Astor, with whom he was in love. “The news of the Titanic disaster, in which about 1,500 persons (including Jack Astor, Stead & others) have lost their lives is just to hand, and is too terrible to think of. Everyone talking about it in the trains.”42 Arnold Bennett heard a newspaper vendor complaining in Brighton: “They mucked up this Titanic disaster for us. They put on the bills, ‘Titanic sunk’. That was no use to us. They ought to have put ‘Hundreds drowned’. Then we should have made a bit.”43
In Cockspur Street, on Wednesday, the early buses brought City workers, who broke their journey in the hope of allaying their fears for loved ones. Some, who had kept vigil at the office for thirty-six hours, fell asleep where they sat. Others paced the streets, too agitated to sit still, returning to check the bulletin boards. A young wife, awaiting news of her husband, dissolved into wild tears. Another young woman, after scanning the list of third-class survivors, burst into loud crying and was consoled by a clerk. As in New York, there were impostors claiming a part in the tragedy under false pretenses and playing their part as melodrama. A demented youth, who asserted that he had four sisters and a brother among the passengers, bit his lip until it seemed that blood must flow.44
“There has been an astonishing disaster at sea, the Titanic, the largest vessel ever built, wrecked in mid-Atlantic by collision with an iceberg,” the radical-minded, aristocratic libertine Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote. “It was her first voyage, and she was carrying over a thousand passengers to New York, many of them millionaires. Most of the women and children seem to have been put in boats and picked up by a passing steamer, but the rest have perished, over 1,000 souls.” Blunt gloried in the retributive justice visited on
lazy, rootless epicureans and their insatiable, dolled-up harpies. “One thing is consoling in these great disasters, the proof given that Nature is not quite yet the slave of Man, but is able to rise even now in her wrath and destroy him. Also if any large number of human beings could be better spared than another, it would be just these American millionaires with their wealth and insolence.”45 Other members of the English upper classes, for whom fortitude was the greatest virtue, were unmoved by the deaths of soft-living parvenus. Lady Dorothy Nevill, the aged High Tory daughter of the Earl of Orford, had once defined the art of conversation as not only saying the right thing at the right time but leaving unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. She failed her own criterion when, at a women’s luncheon, she told the novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes that “the wreck was a judgement from God on those idle rich people who want all earthly luxuries even on the water.” The artificiality of the floating Ritz was detestable. Lady Dorothy, who was a famous horticulturalist, snapped with disgust, “I am told they even had a garden!”46 Scawen Blunt and Lady Dorothy Nevill believed in discipline, resilience, and the fulfillment of hereditary responsibilities, and doubted if American millionaires knew much about these qualities.
Everywhere it was said that the craze for speed and the vanity of breaking records were endangering shipping and life, although, of course, White Star liners were not built for speed like Cunarders or German ships. “These big steamers,” the Economist judged, “to save a mere five hours on the voyage, take a dangerous course through the ice, and a liner travelling at 20 knots through an ice region is infinitely more likely to cripple herself than an old tramp doing her 8 knots, and careless of time.”47 Porter McCumber, Republican senator from North Dakota, was one of the few American politicians to deplore the blackguarding of Ismay and condemn the lust for speed. “The American people are as much to blame for this catastrophe as anyone,” he courageously told the Senate on April 19. “We seek and encourage people to push those vessels to the very test of endurance and speed. When the Lusitania was launched and made her record trip the whole country . . . clapped our hands and cheered.” Neither the equipment nor the route of the Lusitania excelled those of Titanic—only the latter’s luck was worse. There was too much of the competitive sportsmen’s bravado about American attitudes to speed, said the senator. Rash young aviators were incited to soar above the clouds and ascend thousands of feet. Elated by applause for his derring-do, a pilot attempts to go yet higher, “and the following day we bury a mass of flesh and we call for another victim to satiate our thirst for the spectacular. We demand the highest limit of speed and are always ready to take the chance.”48
English newspapers treated the calamity as vindication of the heroism of the world’s greatest seafaring nation. The self-control of Anglo-Saxon manhood was contrasted with the sneaking cowardice of “Italians” or “Chinese.” The gutter press declared that “women and children first” was not just the law of the sea, but the instinct and instilled discipline of racially superior people. This opinion was upheld in unlikely quarters. “Had the Titanic been a vessel manned by Chinese sailors, I can assure you there would not have been a woman or child saved,” declared Henry Moy Foi, of the Chinese Merchants Association of America, speaking in Cleveland, Ohio. “Whenever a Chinese vessel goes down, it is the duty of the sailors to see that the men are taken off first. The children come next, and then the women [because] the Chinese government feels that the men are the most valuable for the nation. In China it would really have been a crime to take care of the women first . . . the average woman would be destitute without her husband. Children are given second choice because childless families always can be found to take care of them.”49
It seems singularly English to find a pretext for racial triumphalism in a national disaster, yet this was a common solace. “In all our minds, there has been a thrill at the heroism and self-sacrifice,” declared a cabinet minister, Lord Beauchamp. “They were ordinary common or garden members of the Anglo-Saxon race. It makes one proud to think that there were so many men ready to face death quietly and in a self-sacrificing spirit, making way for the women and children to be rescued. Not only does it make us proud of our race, but it makes us sure that there is a great destiny reserved in the world still for the Anglo-Saxon race.”50 Beauchamp’s cabinet colleague Winston Churchill, then first lord of the admiralty, followed the Titanic story with fascination. “The story is a good one,” he wrote to his wife on Thursday. “The strict observance of the great traditions of the sea towards women & children reflects nothing but honour upon our civilization. Even I hope it may mollify some of the young unmarried lady teachers”—he meant suffragettes—“who are so bitter in their sex antagonism, & think men so base & vile.” He felt “proud of our race and its traditions as proved by this event. Boat loads of women & children tossing on the sea—safe & sound—& the rest—Silence.”51
There was a frantic outcry, not silence, on land. All newspapers, all readers, were eager for the Carpathia to reach New York with its shocked and sorrowing survivors. “CARPATHIA IS PLUNGING TOWARDS PORT WITH REMNANTS OF TITANIC’S THOUSANDS: HUGE RESCUER WITH ITS PITIFULLY FEW SURVIVORS IS EXPECTED TO DOCK IN NEW YORK,” blared the Cleveland Plain Dealer of April 17. Two days later, hours before the Carpathia docked, the same paper was proliferating the abundant rumors. “The brief wireless despatches indicate that pneumonia was prevalent among the rescued, and showed that many had gone insane. Some of the most notable men and women on board were reported among those who had lost their minds.”52
The Carpathia reached the quayside at nine thirty during the dark night of Thursday, April 18. As the ship approached, the wind began to blow hard and rain fell in torrents, with thunder and lightning breaking over the sky. The ship was harried by tugs, ferries, and yachts carrying reporters shouting questions through megaphones. Photographers took flashlight pictures, which (coupled with the lightning flashes) made a dazzling explosion of luminosity. About twenty-five hundred people—mostly animated by morbid curiosity—stood in the drizzling rain. They were packed so tight in the side streets, through which the survivors would have to leave, that the way was impassable. William Gaynor, mayor of New York City, who in 1910 had been shot in the neck while walking on the deck of the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosser at Hoboken, and who was to die in 1913 while sitting in a deck chair on the Baltic as it approached Ireland, had ordered an elaborate police operation around Cunard’s pier. Mounted policemen rode back and forth so that their rearing horses would send the crowds into retreat. Lieutenant Charles Becker—a corrupt officer who months later murdered the gambler Herman Rosenthal—led a police squad targeting pickpockets. The Cunard pier was under a police cordon, with two hundred officers restraining journalists, sensation seekers, and souvenir hunters. Twenty-five horse ambulances were standing by—a few attended by a surgeon in a white uniform—their clanging bells exciting the crowd; Salvation Army workers, nurses, and stretcher bearers were gathered in small numbers, and undertakers’ wagons bore coffins. Black-veiled women were helped from cabs and limousines by the police and taken to a reserved area on the pier. The flags on the Singer Building and other skyscrapers were flying at half-mast and lit by arc lights trained on them. A small group—including Vincent Astor and Renée Harris’s brother, Samuel Wallach, a clothing manufacturer—stood by the head of the gangplank in the rain. Pierpont Morgan Junior stood at the dock.
The ship’s docking seemed interminable. When the gangway was put down, hundreds of people waiting on the pier took off their hats. At 9:35 P.M. disembarkation began. First-class passengers came first, then second, and finally third—immigration officers spared them the customary rough processing through Ellis Island. Dr. and Mrs. Frauenthal ensured that they disembarked first, and were hustled into a motorcar. The three Lamson sisters, Caroline Brown, Charlotte Appleton, and Malvina Cornell, hatless for the first time in their adult lives and grieving for their lost companion, Edith Evans, were met by the magistrate Robert Cornell,
Malvina’s husband. The pregnant widow Astor, looking faint, was propped up and hurried away by her stepson, Vincent. The widowed Emily Goldsmith was wearing two wedding rings on her hand—one entrusted to her by Tom Theobald as they parted on the boat deck, with a hasty injunction to give it to his widow. Two brothers had come from Montreal to collect their eleven-month-old nephew, Trevor Allison, whose parents and toddler sister had all been lost. “Bobo” Dodge, aged four, swathed in white wool, excited and merry at the blaze of flares as photographers took pictures, was the only spark of joy in the scene.
Whether they were wide or thin, long or squat, grieving people seemed to shrink in size. Passengers looked dulled and confused as they left the claustrophobic horror of the past days for the limitless bewilderment of the present. Their usually controlled public faces had slipped askew. Survivors looked pinched and stricken: some still scared, with a fright that would never leave them; others dazed, staring, angry; and some distraught. Few had yet clambered back inside the armor of training and manners. Most were bedraggled, although a few, such as the banker Robert Daniel, managed to look spruce. Many felt culpable for surviving, or ashamed at being caught in an event that was already so notorious. As the missionary’s wife Nellie Becker, looking overwrought, alighted with her three children, she told her twelve-year-old daughter, Ruth, “Don’t you dare tell anybody we were on the Titanic.”53
Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From Page 27
