Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  The senator, who held his first interrogations on April 19 at the Waldorf-Astoria, issued subpoenas to the four surviving officers and to twenty-seven crewmen—all of whom were itching to return home to England. They were so affronted when Senator Smith moved the hearings to Washington, D.C., at being herded into a second-rate boardinghouse that they refused to cooperate with an inquiry intended, they believed, to discredit British seamanship. Only the intervention of Lord Eustace Percy, an attaché at the British embassy, deterred the seamen from defying the senatorial summons. The embassy attested to Lightoller’s “tact, capability and good sense in handling a trying situation.”68

  Smith was an incoherent, unsystematic questioner, who hated the Demon Drink and hoped to elicit that Captain Smith or other officers had been drunk. He also cross-examined Henry Stengel, in Ismay’s presence, to elicit if Smith, Ismay, and the ship’s officers had participated in the pool betting on the ship’s speed and arrival time. His implication was that Smith or Ismay had ordered the ship to race into the ice zone to win a bet. The senator’s firm, mellifluous voice uttered clichés that managed to seem both incontrovertible and inflammatory. He hunted clues to Ismay’s accomplices with all the salivating doggedness and random sideways lunges of a young basset hound tracking hares.

  White Star’s sailors resented the grating stupidity of Senator Smith asking Fifth Officer Lowe what an iceberg was composed of: “Ice, I suppose, sir,” was Lowe’s rejoinder. Third Officer Pitman was quizzed about exploding icebergs and the reliability of seals as guides to icebergs’ whereabouts. Smith asked Lightoller whether crew or passengers might have sought refuge in the ship’s watertight compartments. He demanded of Captain Stanley Lord whether the Californian had dropped anchor when it stopped overnight in midocean. Smith also inquired if the great funnel crashing into an ocean full of desperate people in life jackets had injured anyone. He persisted, too, in chivvying a reluctant, distressed Pitman into describing the cries of the people freezing to death in the ocean: an unforgivable act of cheap-thrills emotional voyeurism.

  Absurd allegations were made and left unchallenged. Imanita Shelley swore, for example, that Hélène Baxter, the Canadian millionairesse had told her on the Carpathia that she had sent her son, Quigg Baxter, for advice from Captain Smith after the ship stopped, “that her son had found the Captain in a card game, and he had laughingly assured him that there was no danger and to advise his mother to go back to bed.”69 Yet even the bumptious senator was stunned into respectful silence by the bald, unadorned recital of horrific experiences by the South Dakota homesteader Olaus Abelseth, a brave, clear-headed witness, an unexceptional man who did exceptional things, and brought discomforting authenticity to the proceedings.

  In an eager young democracy, politicians want votes and use cheap stunts and flashy catchphrases to grab headlines and excite voters. In a settled older democracy, the people with power use hallowed formulas and staid circumlocution to subdue discussion and lull the electorate. Smith’s inquiry was raucous scapegoating: he wanted to attract headlines, inflame emotion, apportion blame, protect American interests, and wound the English. Lord Mersey, who led the London inquiry, was a judge with nautical expertise. It was unnecessary to explain to him why a sailor was not an officer, although an officer was a sailor, or that watertight compartments were not refuges in which passengers could ensconce themselves, before the ship sank to the bottom of the Atlantic, to be rescued later. He was assisted at the inquiry by the attorney general and Marconi speculator Sir Rufus Isaacs, who had left school at the age of thirteen and long ago had been a headstrong ship’s boy. Isaacs led the questioning of witnesses with limpid, courteous clarity. Mersey buried himself in blueprints, models, and deadening technical details as he sought to mitigate criticisms of his compatriots. Whereas Smith chopped and stamped his way through the shallows of American bluster, Mersey paddled cautiously beside the fathomless depths of English equivocation. Mersey, with his crisp inflections, personified the unspoken rules of England with its systematic inhibiting influences. His censure was so light that it sounded like applause.

  Both inquiries agreed that the Titanic was going too fast for the conditions, the lookout was inadequate, the loading of lifeboats haphazard, and that Lord’s Californian had seen the distress rockets and should have gone to help. No third-class passengers testified to Mersey (the Duff Gordons were the only passengers to appear before him), and only three to Smith. Both inquiries concluded that there was no discrimination against third-class passengers, although two of them testified to Smith that the crew had tried to restrain them.

  The Titanic sank because of poor navigation. Captain Smith neglected the ice warnings and failed to reduce speed; but he was not trying to break records, for his liner could never match the speed of a fast Cunarder. Still less did he endanger his ship at Ismay’s behest. Maintaining speed in the vicinity of ice was accepted practice: the captains of all great liners went at full tilt into storms and bad weather and did not think that they were violating either good sense or good seamanship. They did so partly in order to adhere to scheduled mail deliveries, and partly out of masculine vanity. The fact that this was common practice does not reduce the captain’s culpability. It was his responsibility that the ship under his command sped into the ice.

  Murdoch, officer of the watch, aggravated the crisis by reversing engines and swerving the helm: if the ship had struck by the bow it probably would have stayed afloat. Smith failed to impress on his men that the ship was certainly sinking when they began launching lifeboats beneath full capacity. Mersey concluded that he could not blame Smith, whose grievous mistakes were not negligent given prevailing practices in the Atlantic. He also judged that Ismay had no obligations to die with the ship: had he not clambered into lifeboat C, he would have achieved nothing except wasting his life.

  In the sequel to the disaster, regulations were revised so that ships were obliged to carry enough lifeboats for all passengers and crew. It became mandatory to train seamen to handle them. New rules were imposed covering bulkheads and lifesaving equipment. All vessels carrying more than fifty passengers had to be equipped with long-range, permanently manned Marconi sets. The International Ice Patrol was established to monitor icebergs. Shipping lanes were moved south of ice-encumbered seas.

  When the disaster was confirmed in New York, White Star had chartered a cable-laying vessel called the Mackay-Bennett to search the area to recover bodies. It sailed on Wednesday, April 17, carrying a volunteer crew and undertakers as well as tons of ice and hundreds of coffins. When the Mackay-Bennett reached the accident scene, the bodies in their white life jackets scattered across the ocean surface looked, from a distance, like a flock of white seagulls resting on the water. The saturated remains were hauled from heavy seas, and their appearance, clothes, and possessions inventoried. Overall, the Mackay-Bennett recovered 306 bodies. First-class passengers’ corpses were put in coffins; second- and third-class, sewn in canvas bags; and crew members, packed in ice and laid on the foredeck under tarpaulin. One hundred and sixteen bodies—the most bloated or disfigured—were weighted and slipped overboard into the rolling seas to sink two miles deep.

  The Mackay-Bennett reached Halifax on the bright spring morning of April 30. Every flag was at half-mast; church bells tolled mournfully; shops had photographs of the dead ship, festooned in black bunting, displayed in their windows. There was a guard of honor as the corpses were brought ashore. Twenty hearses traveled back and forth between the harbor and a curling rink that had been converted into a temporary morgue. Military patrols were on guard to prevent ghoulish photography.

  White Star chartered other search vessels. The Minia retrieved seventeen bodies, including that of the railway president Charles Hays: its crew slept at night with filled coffins stacked around them. Another chartered Newfoundland steamer, the Algerine, retrieved the last of the 328 bodies found in the ocean, including that of a saloon steward, James McGrady. A tiny boy was buried at the expense of the
Mackay-Bennett captain and crew. The child was believed to be Gösta Pålsson, whose Swedish mother and three siblings were lost, too. Ninety years after his death, DNA testing suggested that he was thirteen-month-old Eino Panula, whose Finnish mother and four siblings all died. In 2007 further DNA tests indicated that he was nineteen-month-old Sidney Goodwin, whose parents and five siblings perished.

  On May 8 a funeral service for Charles Hays was held in a Montreal church. From the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, along thousands of miles of Grand Trunk Railway branch lines, in every Grand Trunk siding and depot, the engines ceased for five full minutes to pant and snort along their tracks. All movement ceased at each Grand Trunk crossing and station as thousands of railway staff stood with bowed heads in silent tribute. Then work resumed, the wheels turned, and within seconds the Grand Trunk Railway rattled forward without its president.

  One English funeral, too, made an outstanding mark. After the Carpathia had docked, every newspaper reader could visualize the bandsmen continuing to play in order to avert panic, sticking to their posts when all was plainly lost. Their courage was saluted as sublime: a Manchester merchant declared that their valor had surpassed that of “the Noble Six Hundred” in the Charge of the Light Brigade, for the cavalrymen obeyed a military command whereas Hartley’s band obeyed a voluntary impulse.70 The corpse of the bandleader, Wallace Hartley, was found in the ocean, in evening dress, with his music case strapped to it, and shipped to Liverpool on White Star’s Arabic. His face, seen through a glass panel in the coffin, seemed discolored by a blow and embalming. A horse-drawn hearse took ten hours to carry Hartley’s coffin through the night the fifty-nine miles (through congested Lancashire factory districts) to his hometown of Colne. On May 18 the body of “Colne’s hero, Britain’s hero, the world’s hero,” was buried in his hometown. All business stopped for the day. The Colne and Nelson Times estimated that forty thousand people attended the funeral, coming by train and tram from across northern England to stand on the route to the Bethel Independent Methodist Chapel. Seven bands played the “Dead March” from Saul with muffled drums. Twelve young men—eight of them his cousins—bore his coffin shoulder-high through Colne. Inside the cemetery, the police, bandsmen, scouts, ambulance corps, and public mourners made an avenue for the twelve men who bore the coffin shoulder high to its grave. Thousands of people stood around the entrance, and the countryside was dotted with onlookers. Police and bandsmen formed a cordon around the grave, which was lined with evergreen, narcissi, marguerites, lilies-of-the-valley, and rhododendrons. As the coffin was lowered into the grave, a dozen scout buglers sounded the “Last Post.” The notes went rolling through the valley and came echoing back. A lark sang overhead.71

  Claims for loss of property included $177,353 (£36,567) for fourteen trunks, four bags, and a jewel case from Charlotte Cardeza; $100,000 from Björnström-Steffansson for Blondel’s oil painting La Circassienne Au Bain; $5,000 for Billy Carter’s Renault motor car; $3,000 from Emilio Portaluppi for a signed picture of Garibaldi presented to his grandfather; $750 for Robert Daniel’s champion French bulldog Gamin de Pycombe; $500 from Margaret Brown for Egyptian antiquities intended for the Denver Museum; $50 for Eugene Daly’s bagpipes; $5 for Annie Stengel’s copy of Science and Health; and 8 shillings 6d for Edwina Troutt’s marmalade machine. The District Court of New York received claims for damages totaling $16,804,112—the highest was $1 million from Renée Harris, widow of the Broadway producer. No claims were received from any Astor, Guggenheim, Straus, or Widener; and only a claim for Thayer luggage.

  On May 13, the White Star liner Oceanic found collapsible A, which had drifted two hundred miles southeast of the sinking ship at a rate of nearly eight miles a day. It contained three bodies: that of Thomson Beattie, a Winnipeg land developer, lying on a bench in full evening dress; a steward; and a fireman. All three had frozen to death on the night of sinking. For a month their corpses, bleached by sun and salt, had been pitched by the Atlantic swell under the open sky. The Oceanic’s crewmen sewed the corpses in canvas, cast them overboard, and capsized collapsible A.

  On June 20, Hamburg-Amerika’s Imperator left on its maiden voyage to New York. It was nine hundred feet long and fifty-two thousand tons: the Titanic would have been superseded as the world’s largest vessel very soon. The Titanic was not, however, surpassed as the world’s worst peacetime disaster at sea until 1987, when a ferry in the Philippines sank with the loss of 4,375 passengers.

  Mary Nakid, who was eighteen months old at the time of the voyage, traveling with her twenty-year-old father and nineteen-year-old mother from Lebanon to Waterbury, Connecticut, became the first survivor of the disaster to die—of meningitis on July 30, 1912. The second death, of Eugenie Baclini, aged three, also Lebanese, also from meningitis, was on August 30. The first adult to die, in December 1912, was Archibald Gracie, who never revived his powers after hours knee-deep in icy water on a half-submerged raft. Months after the accident he was moved to tears reading and rereading survivors’ accounts. As he lay dying in a New York hotel he was heard repeating, “We must get them into the boats, we must get them all into the boats.”72

  In January 1913, Pierpont Morgan sailed for Egypt on board White Star’s Adriatic with his favorite Pekinese dog. He had been agitated and anxious for months. Now, traveling down the Nile, he became deluded. He could not sleep and would not eat. Stock Exchanges slumped at the news of his indisposition. In March he shifted from Cairo to the royal suite of the Grand Hotel in Rome. Throughout his life he had suffered bouts of depression, in which he felt worthless; but in Rome, as his daughter, secretaries, and physicians tried to ward off dealers clamoring to see the great collector, his fears overwhelmed him. He was sedated, grew incoherent, and finally so agitated that he was given morphine. Delirious, then comatose, he died on March 31. Physicians certified the cause of his death as “psychic dyspepsia,” a condition unknown to medical science. Italian soldiers marched in a guard of honor as his body was carried to the station in Rome; in Paris the coffin was bedecked in orchids, carnations, roses, and palms; at Le Havre the French army saluted his cortège; and on the day of his funeral, the New York Stock Exchange closed in his honor until noon. Thirty thousand people lined the streets of New York that day, Monday, April 14, 1913—exactly a year after his great ship had struck the iceberg.

  The disaster fractured marriages. In Lucile Carter’s divorce suit of 1914, she claimed: “When the Titanic struck, my husband came to our state room and said, ‘Get up and dress yourself and the children.’ I never saw him again until I arrived at the Carpathia at 8 o’clock the next morning, when I saw him leaning over the rail. All he said was that he had had a jolly good breakfast, and that he never thought I would make it.” Billy Carter claimed to have put her in a lifeboat before stepping into collapsible C with Ismay; but Lord Mersey concluded that collapsible C left fifteen minutes before Lucile Carter and her children in lifeboat 4.

  Surviving ship’s officers were treated like Vietnam veterans—shunned if not ruined. Neither Lightoller nor Pitman, Boxhall, and Lowe received a White Star command. Lightoller was singular in his willingness to discuss the sinking. Other survivors were punished by mass opinion. Albert Dick was ostracized, left his Canadian hotel business, and sold real estate instead. Arthur Peuchen was traduced for surviving, and suffered both social and business reverses: a rich man in 1912, he died a pauper in 1929. Masabumi Hosono was denounced in Japan for having survived when others had died. His ministry sacked him; Japanese newspapers reviled his cowardice; he was shunned, and although he survived until 1939, he was a broken man. The English were more forgiving of survivors: the magistrate Algernon Barkworth was always considered by his Yorkshire neighbors as an upstanding English gentleman. The story that Ismay was forced to live as a recluse is fanciful; tales of Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon’s isolation are overdone.

  A year after the sinking, Lightoller jumped into a cold bath at the end of a strenuous game of tennis on a summer day. The cold water induc
ed a sudden, overwhelming shock, the memory of his hours in the freezing Atlantic overpowered him, and he fell into a scared trance until pulled from the bath by friends. Neshan Krikorian, the young Armenian who saved himself by leaping into lifeboat 10 as it was lowered, lived for sixty-five years in Ontario, but never boarded a ship again and was dismayed by the mere sight of lakes. After his experiences, Lawrence Beesley had a deep aversion to the sea: he only once took his family on a seaside holiday, during which he insisted upon turning his beach chair to face inland. When the film A Night to Remember was being shot, Beesley was hired as a special adviser, and asked to sit by a tape recorder in a caravan at Pinewood Studios and imitate the despairing cries of freezing people that he remembered hearing from his lifeboat. He performed this macabre task: the death cries in A Night to Remember at least have an enduring resonance.

  The anniversary of April 15 was sad and stressful for survivors: Frank Goldsmith lived another sixty-nine years, but was always subdued on April 15. On the second anniversary of the sinking, and thus two years after her son George’s death, Eliza Hocking was killed by a streetcar in Akron, though whether she threw herself under it, lurched under it drunk, or was distracted by misery is unclear. Marion Thayer died on the thirty-second anniversary of the Titanic collision, in 1944. Selma Asplund, who lost her husband and three sons in the disaster, died on the fifty-second anniversary of the sinking, in 1964. Meier Moor, who had been a boy of seven on the Titanic, collecting cigarette cards from the adult passengers, died on the sixty-third anniversary of the sinking, in 1975.