Collision Course

by Moscow, Alvin;

  Seeking another route, he climbed two decks up and asked for help among the people on the Promenade Deck. He could not get the attention of any crewmen. The few stewards he met brushed by him, intent upon some other task. Passengers sympathized, urged him to find a lifejacket for himself and treated him like a boy half his age who was lost. He tried to explain that he was not lost, it was his mother and father who were lost, but everyone seemed too busy and distraught to make much sense to him. Peter did return to his cabin for his lifejacket. The Foyer Deck was covered with oil and water as he found his way to his cabin. He hoped to find his parents looking for him at his cabin, but the room was empty. Tying a lifejacket around him, he set out once again for Cabin 180 where he still hoped to find his mother and father.

  Meanwhile, Peterson climbed to the bridge of the Doria. He wanted to see the captain about recruiting enough men for a concerted effort at clearing the wreckage away from his wife and Mrs. Cianfarra.

  The chiropractor explained his plight to Captain Calamai and the captain, in a calm, modulated voice, promised that he would send a rescue team to Cabin 56. The captain even addressed Peterson by name, remembering him from a previous social visit and inspection of the ship’s bridge.

  Captain Calamai, it seemed, performed his duties as shipmaster almost by rote, one part of him stunned by the catastrophe and the other part carrying on against an avalanche of demands. There was only so much he could do in the face of those demands with the number of men on the bridge, and no sooner did a problem arise than he gave an order designed to solve it. Above all, he struggled to maintain the calm deliberateness that had marked his career, determined to set the mood for his fellow officers and crew. Many appeals for aid reached the bridge. Two women were trapped in Cabin 230 on A-Deck. Several people were drowning in oil on B-Deck in the ten cabins which abutted the garage in the compartment between frames 153 and 173, which had been smashed open in the collision. As the calls for help reached the bridge, Captain Calamai generally ordered the man closest to him to organize a rescue squad and see what could be done.

  Shortly after Peterson had left the bridge, Chief Engineer Chiappori reached the captain after a long, arduous climb from the Engine Room. He had more bad news. At 12:15 the ship’s main electrical plant in the Generator Room had been abandoned. The pumps were still suctioning water but could not keep pace with the tons of sea flowing freely through the tunnel of the deep-tank compartment into the Generator Room. One by one the first four dynamos had been switched off as the water level approached the electrical parts. The sea water was waist high in the room when it had reached the fourth generator, and then the engineers had given up. The final two diesel motor generators had been closed down and the essential electrical load had been transferred to the emergency 250-kilowatt generator aft on A-Deck and to the two turbine-operated dynamos of 1,000 kilowatts each in the Main Engine Room. With the steady loss of electrical power, the ship’s ventilation system had been sacrificed, the telephones were dead, the radio transmitter and receivers had to be switched to emergency battery power. The ship’s remaining electrical power was circuited to the operation of pumps and to maintaining the ship’s lights.

  With the pumps available, the chief engineer explained, he was doing everything possible to correct the list of the ship, but the situation was hopeless. He was even taking the drastic measure of emptying the three large double-bottom tanks beneath the starboard sides of the Generator and Boiler Rooms. From the starboard outboard tank beneath the Generator Room, he was transferring oil to the wing tanks on the opposite side of the ship. Tanks 15 and 17 beneath the Boiler Room were being emptied into the sea. Captain Calamai listened to the bad news stolidly like a man bearing the whiplash. He neither offered advice nor issued orders to the chief engineer although it is well known, as the captain himself later admitted in court proceedings, that the emptying of lowside tanks tends to decrease the stability of a ship and increases the risk of capsizing. Decreasing the weight on the lower side of a listing ship was tantamount to lifting the ship’s center of gravity, like shortening the pendulum on a grandfather clock.

  There was no way of calculating exactly how long the ship would last. It had been impossible to take soundings because of the list. Yet, it seemed that the ship would not capsize as soon as Captain Calamai had at first feared. She seemed to have found a new equilibrium after her quick list to 25 degrees. Now, at 12:30 A.M., the list had increased only to 28 degrees. Rope guidelines had been strung by Third Officer Giannini across the wheelhouse so that the captain and men could walk from one wing of the bridge to the other. The radar set, tuned to the eight-mile range, showed two rescue ships closing in on the Doria. The ships, the Cape Ann and the Thomas, radioed a request that the Doria fire rockets to indicate her position. Giannini and another officer climbed to the roof of the wheelhouse where they fired two red rockets of distress into the night. Chiappori, before leaving the bridge, pledged to Captain Calamai that his men would fight on in the Engine Room to the very last moment.

  The rescue squad, sent to Cabin 230 where women were reported trapped, was intercepted at nearby Cabin 236 by Mrs. Wells, who implored them to free her daughter trapped between her bed and the wall. The men went to work and in fifteen minutes lifted the bed away from the wall, freeing the small, wailing girl. The men helped the mother and her small children along the flooded A-Deck to a stairway and up to the Promenade Deck muster station. Cabin 230 was forgotten. No one would ever know whether the three women behind its jammed door were dead or alive.

  Dr. Tortori Donati, accompanied by Nurse Coretti, returned to the hospital for a supply of morphine and hypodermic syringes and then plodded to Cabin 56-58. There was no reason for them to stop in again in the men’s ward where Robert Hudson, the American sailor, still was sleeping blissfully. In Cabin 58, the doctor found Peterson, Waite and a night watchman. Steward Rovelli at the time was off searching for a jack. Dr. Tortori Donati, profoundly shocked at the sight of the wreckage which filled the entire left side of Cabin 58, handed over the syringe and a phial of morphine to Peterson when the chiropractor explained that he was a doctor. The ship’s physician could not see how the women, whose voices he could plainly hear, could be reached. He sent his nurse back to the hospital for an amputation saw and a cast saw. The night watchman he told to try to find an ax. He himself crawled into the smashed and narrowed hallway of Cabin 56, where he came upon the body of Cianfarra. He confirmed that the man was dead, and then crawled into the dark cabin. He tried to lift off some wreckage, but found it too heavy. The night watchman, returning with an ax, tried to chop through the wall connecting the two cabins, but the veneered plywood attached to the ceiling merely vibrated with the blows, dislodging debris over the two women. Peterson meanwhile climbed beneath the wall partition and injected all of the morphine into the arms of his wife and Mrs. Cianfarra. Both women were in considerable pain.

  Rovelli returned, unable to find a jack anywhere, and joined Peterson amid the wreckage. Together, the fifty-seven-year-old chiropractor of Upper Montclair, a wealthy suburban community in New Jersey, and the forty-eight-year-old waiter from Genoa, worked as equals in the single endeavor to move wreckage away from Mrs. Cianfarra, who had to be freed before there could be any hope for Mrs. Peterson. The two men had never met before, nor did they stop for introductions during their struggle. They succeeded finally in freeing Mrs. Cianfarra’s right leg. Her other leg remained entrapped in twisted bedsprings. The men decided they needed tools: scissors or a knife to cut away a cumbersome mattress, pliers or wire cutters to snip the bedsprings, and a jack to lift a wall section and heavy beams.

  Both women again pleaded with the men to leave them to die in the wreckage. They implored Peterson and Rovelli to save themselves before the ship sank. But on that subject both men were of the same mind: they would not leave the ship until both women were freed. As Peterson tried to bolster the spirits of his wife, Rovelli took it upon himself to encourage Mrs. Cianfarra. As the night wo
re on he made her his own special responsibility. Over and over again he reassured her, “Don’t worry, lady, I will get you out of here.” Personal identity seemed to mean nothing to the forty-eight-year-old steward who was risking his life for a woman he had never seen before. When Mrs. Cianfarra asked him his name, he said, “My name, what does it matter? Don’t worry, I won’t leave you.”

  Dr. Tortori Donati in the meantime had left in response to an appeal that men were needed to rescue several people drowning in oil on B-Deck. This time he took with him Dr. Giannini and the two males nurses. A single narrow stairway with three flights of steps was the only access from A-Deck to the latitudinal corridor of B-Deck adjacent to the garage which had been torn open by the collision. Descending the stairway to the dark corridor of the ship below the level of the sea was frightening. The screams of several women could be heard at the top of the stairway.

  Two engineering officers and two seamen at the lowest stairway platform above the corridor deck explained the situation to the doctor’s party. Four persons already had been pulled out, but high on the port side of the corridor three women were too terrorized to try to reach the stairway in the middle of the corridor. The sea water mixed with fuel oil was waist high at the center stairway and was slowly flooding the corridor. The starboard side was under water. The doctor by playing the beam of a flashlight down the narrow corridor could see three forms crouching at the end of the corridor. All his coaxing was futile. The women seemed not to hear him because of their own continuous wailing.

  Repeatedly the men tried throwing a rope to the hysterical women, but each time one reached for the line she would slip and go under the oily water. The black slimy water sloshed back and forth in the corridor as the listing ship rolled in the sea. After the two engineers had left to return to their other duties, Dr. Tortori Donati as senior officer decided the only way to save the women, all Italian emigrants, was for the men to go in after them. The prospect was harrowing, but it was equally harrowing just to be on the stairway watching the black water rise, suspecting that the ship might sink at any moment. One crewman, with a rope tied about his waist, plunged into the water and struggled to the women. He coaxed but he could not convince them to pull themselves along the rope to the stairway and safety. Another crewman had to venture into the corridor to force the women one by one along the rope. One of the women clutched a satchel in one hand, leaving only one other hand by which to hold on to the rope. “Throw the bag away,” the crewman screamed at her. “You will lose your life for that bag.” But she held on to it as if it were life itself.

  The three women reached the stairway in a state of shock, hysteria and emotional collapse, but otherwise the doctor found them uninjured. The third woman to reach the stairway refused to climb to the deck above. “I have no clothes on,” she wailed. The exasperated doctor argued with her at length, convincing her finally that smeared from head to foot with thick black oil, she was as decently covered as were the other two women in their drenched nightgowns. He left the three with the crewmen and two male nurses to be brought to the Promenade Deck, and headed with Dr. Giannini aft on A-Deck to the hospital to pick up more supplies.

  Later, while the doctors were on Upper Deck during their climb from the hospital to the Promenade Deck, they learned that one of the two women in Cabin 56 had been extricated. The first surgeon sent Giannini on to tend to the patients on the Promenade Deck while he himself went to Cabin 56. He found Mrs. Cianfarra wrapped in a blanket, lying quietly on the floor in the hallway of Cabin 58. Her face was cut and her hair matted with blood. She had been freed finally, some two hours after the collision, by Peterson cutting through the twisted bedsprings with pliers found in the radio shack and by Rovelli hacking away a mattress with a vicious-looking carving knife taken from a kitchen galley.

  Mrs. Cianfarra was lifted in the blanket to be carried topside. She cried out as she was jostled. It was the first scream or sign of tears since her ordeal began. “I think my leg and arm are broken,” she said in a quiet voice by way of explanation to the doctor.

  The doctor bent toward her and said, “You are a very brave woman. We will take care of you now.” Mrs. Cianfarra, numbed by shock and morphine, was carried in the blanket to the high side of the Promenade Deck.

  Most of the passengers had sought the high side of the ship, trying to get as far away as possible from the prospect of the ship rolling over on them. Some headed directly for the muster stations in the interior of the Promenade Deck while others first went to their cabins for lifejackets and valuables. But once having arrived on the high side of the ship, there the people stayed, mostly in isolated groups. The angle of the decks made it nearly impossible to move around. For those with families, there seemed no place to go, no place safer than the high side of the ship.

  The only thing to do, it seemed, was to stay put and wait for some responsible word of what had happened and what would happen next. That word never came. For many, the sheer waiting and the uncertainty of the first two hours after the collision was the worst agony of the night. The loudspeakers strategically placed about the Promenade Deck, the lounges and the Boat Deck were visible but silent. Passengers waited, knowing nothing. They speculated upon conflicting stories, rumors and theories, but it was easier to believe that the Engine Room boilers had exploded than that the Andrea Doria had collided with another ship in the middle of the ocean.

  Those who congregated on the port side of the ship had no way of knowing that the lifeboats on the other side had been lowered away. Excitement spread sporadically each time a group of crewmen climbed aboard a portside lifeboat and attempted to launch the boat. Occasionally passengers climbed aboard a deserted lifeboat as it hung in its davit, waited for something, anything, to happen, and then climbed out again in disgust or despair.

  There was no way for the passengers to accurately estimate the danger. They speculated but did not know whether the ship would sink or sail on to New York. Few people knew or believed there had been a collision. Certainly no one knew the Andrea Doria had collided with another passenger liner, the Stockholm.

  While the passengers waited in ignorance, news of the collision and the Andrea Doria’s appeal for lifeboats to evacuate its passengers was flashed around the world by the press wire services, radio and television. Amateur radio operators up and down the east coast of the United States picked up the distress messages which crackled across the air waves, and notified various news outlets.

  Ironically, the collision had interrupted a rather wistful conversation in the bar next to the Cabin-Class Ballroom on the possibility of an engine breakdown which would stretch the pleasurable voyage another day or so. George Krendell, a New York insurance broker, and Sylvan Hendler, an importer-exporter, agreed they would not mind the day. But Christine Grassier and Marguerite Lilley, although thoroughly pleased with the ocean trip, said they were anxious to see the United States. Christine Grassier, a black-haired petite woman of French-Indo-Chinese extraction, made her home in Menton, France, near the Italian border, where she had met Marguerite Lilley, whose parents lived in the little town. Mrs. Lilley was married to an English businessman and lived in London.

  Krendell, facing a porthole, saw the lights of the Stockholm as it slid by after the collision. In stunned silence the four looked at one another, and then Krendell leaped to his feet. “Stay there, I’ll be right back,” he shouted. He ran to the nearby corridor and flung open two doors leading to the Promenade Deck. When he opened the first door leading to a small cubicle, the ship lurched on her starboard list and Krendell was thrown through the second door toward a ten-to-fifteen-foot hole in the glass side of the Promenade, ripped by the Stockholm sliding by. Baggage stacked on the deck began tumbling through the hole. He looked about to find his own luggage and noticed with some surprise that his three cases of liqueurs and a carton of perfumes purchased in Paris also had been brought up on deck from the hold. The deck was loaded obviously not only with cabin luggage but also baggage stored in t
he ship’s hold.

  While Krendell was out on deck, his friend Hendler excused himself from the ladies and made straightaway for the vault in the Purser’s Office, where he had deposited for safekeeping $16,000 in cash, and several exotic jewelry items bought in Italy.

  Krendell, who fancied he knew something of ships since he sailed his own boat at East Hampton, New York, advised the girls to stay put while he fetched their lifejackets. But the two women insisted on accompanying him. The three set out on a tortuous route to their cabins one deck below and toward the stern. The nearest stairway, when they reached it, was jammed with people and the corridors on Upper Deck, although less crowded, were more difficult to navigate. A stream of water, most probably from a ruptured water pipe, flowed along the downward side of the starboard corridor about twelve inches deep. Krendell and his two women companions had to grasp and struggle around each person going in the opposite direction since everyone was trying to walk beyond the reaches of the water, holding on to the starboard wall with one outstretched arm. As the ship rolled, there were intermittent cries, “We’re sinking, we’re sinking.” But more often men and women in nightclothes demanded of those fully dressed, “What happened?” “What shall we do?” “Are we sinking?”

  Krendell’s Cabin 114 was opposite that of the girls’ in a narrow passageway off the main corridor. The proximity had led to their meeting soon after they had all boarded the ship in Cannes. Krendell, a slender, fair-complexioned man more than six feet tall, quickly gathered up the two lifejackets in his cabin, his passport and papers, and then went to the other cabin. “Hurry, hurry,” he shouted impatiently. It occurred to him that women did not relinquish their prerogative to keep men waiting even on a sinking ship. The two girls finally emerged from their small cabin, Marguerite clutching a small overnight bag which Krendell carried for her.