How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  We got some of the women and children out of the crush and sent them to where the boats were and saw them get in until I counted on one boat thirty-two persons. Then there was a shout that no more could go into that boat, although I have since heard that the lifeboat could easily hold from forty-five to fifty persons. By this time we all felt sure we would be drowned if we stayed on the [ship] — that is, all of the steerage people thought so. And that was enough to drive them wild and a fight began among them to get to where the boat was being made ready. The forward deck was jammed with the people, all of them pushing and clawing and fighting, and so I walked forward and stepped over the end of the boat that was being got ready [Collapsible C] and sat down.

  But in Ismay’s account of the sinking of the Titanic nothing much happened. There was no crowd around his boat and no panic, despite the fact that most of the lifeboats had now departed, that the boat deck was awash and the ship beginning to list. ‘Did you see any struggle among the men to get in?’ he was asked at the US Senate inquiry. None, he replied.

  One after another eighteen lifeboats dropped into the sea, most of them half-filled.

  Lifeboat number 1 contained only Lord and Lady Duff Gordon plus their staff and seven crew members. There had not been time to launch Collapsibles A and B, which floated free when the Titanic went down and were used as rafts. Because there had been no proper safety drill, most of the crew were unconfident about handling the davits and nervous about filling the boats to capacity in case they buckled. Nor did they know which boat they were assigned to: lists had been posted up, but no one had bothered looking at them. No alarm had been raised, there was no attempt at imposing discipline and no one knew what was happening or what they were meant to be doing. Some boats were manned by stewards who had never held an oar before, and some were rowed by women. Only three of the lifeboats contained lamps, and none contained compasses. Should the lifeboats encounter the 30-mile-wide ice floe that was advancing towards them, sixteen feet above the water level, there was nothing that could be done. Beneath the Titanic’s thin gleam of efficiency lay an acreage of slapdash.

  The Titanic had lifeboat capacity for 1,100 of the 2,340 passengers and crew on board, but only 705 people were saved, of whom 325 were men. In meetings held in October 1909 and January 1910, Ismay — who made the final decisions about the ship’s design, decoration and equipment — had turned down the suggestion of placing three boats, rather than one, on each davit. With her sixteen wooden lifeboats and four Engelhardt collapsible boats, the Titanic was already carrying 10 per cent more than the British Board of Trade official requirements and anyway, why clutter the recreation deck unnecessarily when the ship was itself a lifeboat? ‘If a steamship had enough lifeboats for all,’ a White Star Line official patiently explained, ‘there would be no room left on deck for the passengers. The necessary number of lifeboats would be carried at the cost of many present comforts to our patrons.’ Instead of lifeboats the patrons had luxury: a palm court, a gymnasium and a Louis XVI restaurant. As it was, because the majority of passengers were not told the Titanic was sinking and few believed anyway that the ship was sinkable, most thought it safer to stay in the floating palace with its clocks and chairs and electric lights, than commit themselves to an unknown future on the watery wilderness below. ‘Most of the men thought they would be safer back on the boat,’ Abraham Hyman said, ‘and some of them smiled at us as we went down.’

  Collapsible C was lowered with difficulty. The Titanic was now listing heavily towards starboard, causing the lifeboat to catch on the rivets; Jack Thayer, watching from the deck, ‘thought it would never reach the water right side up, but it did’. From inside the boat, Abraham Hyman recalled that ‘when we were nearly to the water we passed a big hole in the side of the [ship]. This was about three quarters of the way back toward the stern and the pumps were throwing a great stream of water out through it. It threatened to swamp our boat, and we got scared. There were about ten men in the boat and we each took an oar and pushed the boat away from the side of the ship. That’s all that saved us.’

  George Rowe, who took charge of Collapsible C, was a thirty-two-year-old former Merchant Marine from Hampshire. Apart from Rowe, Ismay, William Carter, Albert Pearcey, Margaret Devaney, Emily Badman, May Howard, Amy Stanley, Emily Goldsmith, Shawneene George, the Nakids, and Abraham Hyman, whose experiences of the loading we have already heard, the boat contained three firemen and thirty-one further adults and children (all third-class), including twenty-three of the Titanic’s seventy-nine Lebanese passengers (of whom thirty-one were saved altogether). ‘The boat would have accommodated certainly six more passengers,’ Ismay said in his public statement to the press, ‘if there had been any on the boat deck to go.’

  The Titanic was only superficially a liner for the rich: she was actually an emigrant ship. Ismay’s lifeboat consisted of the following people, several of whom were returning from visits to their family while others were hoping to start new lives:

  Mrs Mariana Assaf, aged forty-five, living in Canada

  Mrs Mary Abrahim, aged eighteen, living in Pennsylvania

  Mrs Latifa Baclini and her three daughters: Marie, aged five, Eugenie, aged three, and Helene, nine months

  Mrs Catherine Joseph, aged twenty-four, returning to her husband in Detroit with her four-year-old son, Michael (who was placed in another lifeboat), and her two-year-old daughter, Anna

  Mrs Darwis Touma, aged twenty-three, returning to her husband in Michigan with her children, Maria and Georges

  Mrs Omine Moubarek, emigrating to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with her two sons, Gerios, aged seven and Halim, aged four

  Banoura Ayorb Daher, aged fifteen, emigrating to Canada

  Adele Najib Kiamie, aged fifteen, travelling from Lebanon to be married

  Fatima Mousselmani, aged twenty-two, travelling from Lebanon to be married

  Jamilia Nicola-Yarred, aged fourteen, and her eleven-year-old brother, Elias, travelling to meet their father

  Hilda Hellström, aged twenty-two , travelling from Sweden

  Velin Öhman, aged twenty-two, travelling from Sweden

  Sarah Roth, aged twenty-six, a tailor from Southampton

  Anna Salkjelsvik, aged twenty-one, travelling from Norway

  John Goldsmith, aged ten

  Lee Bing, Chang Chip, Ling Hee, Ali Lam: Chinese employees of the Donaldson Line. Thought by Ismay to be stowaways, they had boarded the ship, along with four other men, on one third-class ticket.

  At forty-nine, Ismay was the oldest person there and the oldest man by ten years. Six foot four with a waxed moustache and the handsome face of a matinee idol, he sat amongst Lebanese, Chinese and Swedish passengers in his pyjamas, coat and slippers and spoke to no one. It is unlikely that anyone, apart from William Carter, had any idea who he was.

  The Titanic went down two hours and forty minutes after she hit the iceberg — the same length of time, it has been noted, as a performance in the theatre. For one passenger at least, the events of the night seemed ‘like a play, like a drama that was being enacted for entertainment’, and for Ismay the drama would continue before a variety of audiences and on a number of different stages.

  In her bowels the ship carried 3,500 mailbags containing 200,000 letters and packages. One of them was the manuscript of a story by Joseph Conrad called ‘Karain: A Memory’, which he was sending to New York. ‘Karain’ is the tale of a man who impulsively betrays a code of honour and lives on under the strain of intolerable guilt.

  Ismay said he was pushing an oar with his back to the ship when the Titanic made her final plunge. I did not wish to see her go down, he told the US inquiry, adding, I am glad I did not. He was one of few survivors not to have looked. ‘I will never forget the terrible beauty of the Titanic at that moment,’ wrote Charlotte Collyer, in anticipation of Yeats’s phrase in ‘Easter 1916’. ‘She was tilted forward, head down, with her first funnel partly under water. To me she looked like an enormous glow worm: for she wa
s alight from the rising water line, clear to her stern — electric lights blazing in every cabin, lights on all the decks and lights at her mast heads.’7 The glow worm carried Charlotte Collyer’s young husband and all the money and possessions they had in the world. ‘Fascinated’, wrote Jack Thayer, who had jumped into the sea and was swimming away. ‘I seemed tied to the spot. Already I was tired out with the cold and struggling, although the life preserver held me head and shoulders above water.’ ‘Fascinated’, wrote Elizabeth Shutes, a governess travelling first-class with her charge, ‘I watched that black outline until the end.’8 ‘Fascinated’, repeated Violet Jessop, one of the ship’s stewardesses, who was in a lifeboat; ‘my eyes never left the ship, as if by looking I could keep her afloat… I sat paralysed with cold and misery as I watched Titanic give a lurch forward. One of the huge funnels toppled off like a cardboard model, falling into the sea with a fearful roar. A few cries came to us across the water, then silence, as the ship seemed to right herself like a hurt animal with a broken back.’9 The Titanic went down ‘like a stricken animal’, agreed Lawrence Beesley, a second-class passenger travelling to a Christian Science gathering. ‘We had no eyes for anything but the ship we had just left. As the oarsmen pulled slowly away we all turned and took a long look at the mighty vessel towering high above our midget boat, and I know it must have been the most extraordinary sight I shall ever be called upon to witness.’ With her lights ablaze, the Titanic resembled, until her final plunge, a living, breathing thing.

  When the Titanic had melted away, those on the moonless water gazed with disbelief at the great ship’s disappearance. She was, they now realised, a boat and not a palace; it is as though they had expected to see her crumble to the ground. In the midst of horror (‘the horror, the helpless horror’, said Elizabeth Shutes, echoing the famous last words of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) they found themselves caught in contemplation. Second Officer Lightoller, who was swept overboard and blown across the sea by a rush of steam towards an upside-down lifeboat onto which he clung and which was itself thrown from the site of the ship by a falling funnel, described watching the ‘terrible awe-inspiring sight’ of ‘this unparalleled tragedy that was being enacted before our very eyes… the huge ship slowly but surely reared herself on end and brought rudder and propellers clear of the water, till at last, she assumed an absolute perpendicular position. In this amazing attitude she remained for the space of half a minute. Then with impressive majesty and ever-increasing momentum, she silently took her last tragic dive to seek a final resting place in the unfathomable depths of the cold grey Atlantic…’ ‘I realise’, Lawrence Beesley said, ‘how totally inadequate language is to convey to some other person who was not there any real impression of what we saw…’10 But those who watched, from the unlettered to the urban sophisticates, each described the same experience of romantic awe and dread fascination. The sinking of the Titanic seemed to Edith Russell, a thirty-four-year-old first-class passenger who worked as a fashion buyer and a reporter for Womens Wear Daily, like the collapse of a ‘skyscraper’. But in her death throes, the Titanic also became Excalibur, the sword of the mortally wounded King Arthur which was thrown back into the lake and caught by a mysterious hand. Her glittering scabbard sparkled and flashed one last time before the surface of the water closed over her, erasing all trace.

  The Titanic left behind a level sea, undisturbed apart from a reddish stain and a tangle of flotsam consisting mainly of deck-chairs, the cork of lifejackets and the bodies of the dead and dying. Hanging over the water, ‘like a pall’, was what Colonel Archibald Gracie — an American first-class passenger saved by climbing onto the upturned Collapsible B — described as ‘a thin, light-grey smoky vapour’ which ‘produced a supernatural effect, and the pictures I had seen by Dante and the description I had read in my Virgil of the infernal regions, of Charon, and the River Lethe, were then uppermost in my thoughts’.11

  While many of those in the lifeboats had not realised until the very end that the Titanic would sink, only Ismay and the surviving officers were prepared for what came next. There rose from the wreckage what Colonel Gracie called ‘the most horrible sounds ever heard. The agonising cries of death from over a thousand throats, the wails and groans of the suffering, the shrieks of the terror-stricken and the awful gaspings for breath of those in the last throes of drowning, none of us will ever forget to our dying day.’ In his account of the birth and death of the Titanic, the Irish journalist Filson Young had described the noise of the Belfast shipyard at Harland & Wolff when the ‘monster’ was under construction as ‘a low sonorous murmuring like the sound of bees in a giant hive’. In his memoirs, Second Officer Lightoller described the Titanic while she was being prepared as ‘a nest of bees’ which became on sailing day ‘a hive about to swarm’.12 With the ship’s disappearance the sound returned. ‘The Titanic was like a swarming bee-hive,’ recalled Charlotte Collyer, ‘but the bees were men… Cries more terrible than I had ever heard rang in my ears.’

  ‘We could see groups of almost fifteen hundred people still aboard,’ recalled Jack Thayer, ‘clinging in clusters or bunches, like swarming bees.’ The image recalls the journey made by Aeneas to the underworld in Dante’s Inferno, where he passes a valley in which he hears what he thinks are bees in a summer meadow. The humming, Aeneas is told, comes not from bees but from the souls of the dead drinking from the River Lethe, in order to forget their previous lives before returning to live for a second time on land. The cries also recall the passage in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, where the feasting passengers aboard a ship are terrified to hear the voices of people talking in the air. ‘Let us fly,’ they say, ‘Larboard! Starboard! Topsails! Scudding-sails! We’re all dead men. Let us fly, in the name of all devils, fly!’ Pantagruel’s ship was reaching ‘the approaches of a frozen sea over which there was a huge and cruel combat at the onset of last winter’; the words they heard were the cries of men and women which had frozen in the air.13

  Most of the survivors had not known until now that there were people still aboard the Titanic, that the ship was not equipped to save everyone. Edith Russell recalled that moments before the Titanic went down ‘there was a loud cry, as if emanating from one throat. The men in our boat asked the women to cheer, saying “those cheers that you hear in the big boat mean they have all gotten into lifeboats and are saved”. And do you know, that we actually cheered, believing that the big shout was one of thanksgiving.’14 In a letter sent forty-five years later to Walter Lord, Lawrence Beesley described how they ‘had no knowledge of the number of boats available, how many had got away in the boats, and, in fact, no reason to doubt that every one on board had, in some way, a chance of safety. There was’, he said, ‘no forewarning of the tragedy, no anticipation of peril for our fellow passengers as we saw the Titanic glide slowly down to her doom. The ship had gone but the passengers were, in all probability, safe, waiting only as we did, for the dawn to bring the rescuing ships. Therefore the terrible nature of the cries, which reached us almost immediately after the Titanic sunk, came upon us entirely unprepared for their terrible message. They came as a thunderbolt, unexpected, inconceivable, incredible. No one in any of the boats standing off a few hundred yards away can have escaped the paralysing shock of knowing that so short a distance away a tragedy, unbelievable in its magnitude, was being enacted, which we, helpless, could in no way avert or diminish.’15

  The lifeboats might have returned to rescue some of the many hundreds of people in the water, most of whom, floating in their lifejackets, would die of hypothermia, but both passengers and crew refused, fearing that suction from the sinking ship would pull them down, if they were not overwhelmed by soaking bodies trying to clamber to safety. To return would be suicide, they reasoned. In Lifeboat 1, referred to afterwards as the Money Boat, Lady Duff Gordon, also known as the fashion designer Lucille, watched the ship disappear and then commiserated with her maid: ‘You have lost your beautiful nightdress.’ Lord
Duff Gordon was reported to have offered the seven crew members who were rowing them away £5 each for a new uniform if they did not turn back. Jack Thayer, struggling in the water, watched while the lifeboats ‘four or five hundred yards away, listen[ed] to the cries and still they did not come back. If they had turned back several hundred more would have been saved. No one can explain it. It was not satisfactorily explained in any investigation. It was just one of the many “Acts of God” running through the whole disaster.’

  The only boat to attempt further rescue was Lifeboat 14, in the charge of Fifth Officer Lowe. Instead of taking his cargo into the swarm of struggling bodies, Lowe kept close to the wreckage and held himself ‘ready to save any poor man who might become detached from the big confused mass’. He rescued four people, including a Japanese passenger who had strapped himself to a door and seemed as lifeless as a marble statue. ‘What’s the use,’ Lowe had initially said. ‘He’s dead, likely, and if he isn’t there’s others better worth saving than a Jap.’ But once the rescued man recovered he jumped up, stretched, stamped his feet and took over an oar. ‘By Jove,’ exclaimed Lowe. ‘I’m ashamed of what I said about the little blighter. I’d save the likes o’ him six times over if I got the chance.’

  Returning to save any of the gasping bodies was not discussed in Collapsible C. Instead, they looked for other boats. As Ismay’s was one of the three boats equipped with a lamp he could at least see, if he wished, the passengers who had paid for their tickets on the Titanic now floating in the water. But he did not look; nor did he turn his head. Ismay kept his eyes blank and fixed at some point in the distance.