How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  For Senator Smith, his opening scene could not have been more unexpected, or more pleasing. Here we have the worst shipwreck the peacetime world has ever known, an event discussed in every home from Little Rock to Liverpool, and Ismay, who is lucky enough to be alive, has nothing whatever to say about it. He speaks about what is natural — I came in the natural course of events; you naturally do not start a new ship running at full speed; the natural order is women and children first — and yet his behaviour is entirely unnatural. The instinct of other men was to protect the helpless but Ismay’s was to save himself. Even the direction of his rowing is perverse; it is the wrong way round. In his speech and actions Ismay has been turned inside out. His answers all seem to be endings: That, sir, is all I can tell you; that is all I know; I have no idea; I did not look to see; I really could not say. He speaks only in negatives — never, no, none, not, nothing. He does not know the names of the officers who have died; he does not know how many women and children were left on the ship; he does not know whether the wireless operators are alive or dead — I really have not asked; he does not know how many lifeboats have been picked up; he did not look as his ship went down — I did not wish to see her go down… I am glad I did not… My back was turned to her. Commenting on his replies to questions in the witness stand, several of the next day’s papers ran a list on their front page headed: ‘What Bruce Ismay did not see as he left the Titanic with the women and children.’

  ‘I saw no passengers in sight when I entered the lifeboat’

  ‘I did not see what happened to the lifeboats’

  ‘I did not look to see after leaving the Titanic whether she broke in two’

  ‘After I left the bridge I did not see the Captain’

  ‘I saw nothing of any explosion’

  ‘I saw no trouble, no confusion’

  ‘I did not recognise any of the passengers on the Titanic as she sank’

  ‘I saw no women and children waiting when I entered the lifeboat’

  The more simple Ismay’s answers, the more complicated the matter seemed to be. It was as though another, octopus-like, story was wrapping its warty tentacles around his own blameless narrative and squeezing out the air. Ismay’s non-answers resemble nothing so much as the trial of the Knave of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where the King confuses what is important with what is unimportant: ‘ unimportant, your Majesty means, of course,’ says the White Rabbit. ‘“unimportant, of course, I meant,” the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, “important–unimportant–unimportant–important” as if he were trying which word sounded best.’

  Ismay had nothing to conceal and everything to conceal, he was both a passenger and not a passenger; he consulted with the Captain about speed and he did not consult with the Captain about speed; the speed was increasing on Sunday and it was not increasing; he was helping to load the boats and he was not helping to load the boats; he saw the Captain but he did not see the Captain; he knew on Sunday that they were near icebergs and he did not know on Sunday that they were near icebergs; he was moving on the deck but he was motionless; there were no passengers left on board when he jumped and there were hundreds of passengers left on board. Important, unimportant, unimportant, important.

  Senator Smith had stage-managed proceedings so that Captain Rostron’s testimony followed that of Ismay. While Ismay had told the inquiry what he did not see, did not do, and did not know in relation to his ship, passengers and crew, Rostron described all he did to save the Titanic’s people; and while Ismay tried to conceal his emotional state from the Senators, Rostron openly wept. In the crisis, Ismay had panicked while Rostron thought clearly; on the stand, Ismay struggled with his meanings while Rostron thrilled the room with a plain account of how he ran his ship under a full head of steam to reach the scene of the wreck. ‘Would you have done so in the night time?’ asked Smith.

  ‘It was in the night time,’ Rostron politely replied. ‘Although I was running a risk with my own ship and my own passengers, I also had to consider what I was going for.’

  ‘To save the lives of others?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rostron nodded. ‘I had to consider the lives of others.’

  ‘You were prompted,’ said Smith, ‘by your interest in humanity. And you took the chance.’

  ‘It was hardly a chance,’ said Rostron. ‘Of course it was a chance, but at the same time I knew quite what I was doing.’

  ‘I think I might say, for my associates,’ Smith looked around him, ‘that your conduct deserves the highest praise.’

  It had been ‘absolutely providential’, said Rostron, that the modest Carpathia picked up the mighty Titanic’s CQD (the maritime distress call). Senator Smith agreed that it had indeed been ‘a very remarkable coincidence’, ‘so providential as to excite wonder’. Had the message come five minutes later, ‘the ill-paid operator’ who ‘snatched this secret from the air, would have forgotten his perplexities in slumber’.

  Ismay listened as Rostron (mistakenly) explained that a boat the size of Collapsible C could contain up to seventy-five people — considerably more than the forty-five he had stated earlier — and confirmed that ‘if the Titanic had hit the iceberg bow-on — she should have been in the New York harbour instead of at the bottom of the sea’.

  Smith then fired his killer question: ‘Who is the master of a ship at sea?’

  ‘By law,’ replied Rostron, ‘the Captain of the vessel has absolute control, but suppose we get orders from the owners of the vessel to do a certain thing and we do not carry it out: the only thing then is that we are liable to dismissal.’ Smith took it in: to the crew, the Captain was next to God, to the owner, the Captain was an employee.

  Rostron was released, and he returned to begin again his ship’s delayed Mediterranean cruise. He was later given honorary American status when he became the first Englishman to have a plaque of his head placed in New York’s Hall of Fame.

  Before the morning session ended, Congressman J. A. Hughes of West Virginia made an intervention. Hughes, whose newly married daughter, Mrs Lucian P. Smith, had been on the Titanic and lost her husband, was a recipient of the mysterious Marconigram from the ‘White Star Line’ stating that the steamer was being towed to Halifax with all her passengers on board. It was Mrs Lucian P. Smith who then told the press, in a story which had spread across America, that on being picked up by the Carpathia, Ismay had insisted he be given a good meal and private quarters. The Congressman now read aloud a message he had received from a certain newspaper: ‘You are quoted in press reports declaring, following Mrs Smith’s story, that Ismay should be lynched. Please wire us, day press rate collect, 500 words, your view of Titanic disaster.’

  Hughes wished it known that he denied using that exact wording, and had turned down the suggestion that he provide the paper with any further views. ‘Lynched’ was a loaded term. White supremacists were busy lynching African Americans at this time, and the most recent public lynching had taken place on the night the Titanic sank. It was a term which expressed visceral hatred, and which comprised the wish to see a slow execution before a bloodthirsty mob of spectators. Senator Smith thanked Congressman Hughes, and Ismay left for lunch.

  The Titanic is, amongst other things, a story of doubles and so it is appropriate that the Captain of the ship should have the same name as the man who then steered the American inquiry, and that what began as a contrast between two men — the first a villain, the second a hero — should continue as a clash between two cultures, one seen as arrogant and backward-looking, the other as naive and progressive. Ismay, who in England was not considered well bred, symbolised for Americans the moral corruption of the Old World. Senator William Alden Smith, who was regarded in America as an altruist and a seeker after truth, represented to the English the crude self-interest of the New World.

  Smith’s background made him the epitome of self-reliance. When he was twelve, his family, who were poor and devout, moved f
rom the sleepy backwater of Dowagiac, Michigan, to the industrial city of Grand Rapids. Soon afterwards his father died of lung disease and William Alden dropped out of school to sell newspapers, deliver telegrams, and run a successful popcorn stall in order to support his mother and siblings. At twenty-one he started studying law (paying his way by cleaning the offices) and at twenty-four he set up his own law firm where he gained a reputation for winning his cases ‘by wearing his adversaries out’. He became a Congressman and then, aged forty-seven, a maverick member of the Senate. A Republican supporter of small businesses and a champion of ‘the little man’, Smith fought against the likes of J. Pierpont Morgan. Nothing would give him greater satisfaction than to watch the House of Morgan sink: if the inquiry were able to prove that Ismay was negligent, or had been cognisant of negligence, on board the Titanic then the IMM could be sued. As a reporter for the Grand Rapids Evening Press explained: ‘The Senator’s viewpoint is that… the question is not one of responsibility merely, but of liability for damages in civil suits. Should it be developed that reasonable diligence was not exercised in sailing the Titanic, the families of survivors have a good chance to collect the damages.’ Smith believed that Ismay was hiding something, and his object was to keep him in the United States until the inquiry was over, even if he was no longer required as a witness. Once Ismay returned to England he would be out of the reach of US law. As long as he remained in Washington, Smith could crack him like an egg.

  The English press saw Smith as no more than a snapping terrier whose self-importance and evident ignorance could be mercilessly lampooned. ‘The Michigan senator’, wrote the London Standard, ‘is less qualified as an investigator than the average individual to be picked up in the average American streetcar.’ Smith was sent up as a figure in music-hall burlesque; for Joseph Conrad, who wrote about the wreck for an English literary journal, he was Mr Bumble, the cocked-hatted power-hungry beadle in Oliver Twist, and Conrad referred to the inquiry as ‘Bumble-like proceedings’. Smith’s only British defendant was Alfred Stead, whose father, the journalist W. T. Stead, had gone down with the ship. ‘The newspapers,’ Alfred Stead wrote, ‘tell us that Senator Smith… is a “backwoodsman”, ignorant of all nautical affairs. I do not care if he is a Red Indian. His ignorance, if it exists, is excusable ignorance, whereas the ignorance of officers and seamen in their duties is criminal negligence.’

  A cartoon of Senator Smith, published in the Graphic, 1912

  But it was not the difference between Ismay and Smith, Ismay and Rostron, or England and America which lent the inquiry its peculiar quality; it was the sameness of Ismay and Second Officer Lightoller. Generally regarded as one of the heroes of the night, Lightoller had loaded the lifeboats on the port side and then, as the ship was descending, had taken ‘a dive’ and found himself drawn, by a sudden rush of water, to the wire mesh of a giant air shaft on which he became glued by the pressure of the sea. Unable to detach himself, Lightoller assumed that this is how he would die when a blast of hot air came up the shaft and blew him back to the surface of the water. He was then pulled under again, and just as he was ‘rather losing interest in things’, as he later put it, he eventually surfaced by the side of an overturned collapsible boat. Holding onto a piece of rope, he floated alongside it until one of the ship’s giant funnels fell, missing him by inches and causing the raft, and Lightoller, to be flung fifty yards clear of the sinking Titanic. Men were now starting to scramble onto the lifeboat and Lightoller joined them, eventually taking control. ‘If ever human endurance was taxed to the limit,’ he said in his memoirs, ‘surely it was during those long hours of exposure in a temperature below freezing, standing motionless in our wet clothes.’ He ordered every man on the upturned boat to face the same way and to ‘lean to the left or stand upright or lean to the right, as the case might be. In this way we managed to maintain our foothold on the slippery planks by now well under water.’ Here the party remained for several hours until they were taken on board two of the half-empty lifeboats.

  Senator Smith was unmoved by accounts of Lightoller’s survival; as far as he was concerned Rostron was the saint of the story and Lightoller simply a stooge of Ismay, more concerned with keeping his job with the White Star Line than preventing future tragedies at sea. Had they not been whispering together in the cabin of the Carpathia, cooking up their plot to abscond on the next available White Star liner without so much as setting foot on American soil?

  Lightoller was called to the stand after lunch. Described by the papers as ‘strong and powerfully built’ with a ‘virile sea-worn face’, he told the inquiry in a clear, deep voice how he had retired to bed and was dropping off to sleep when he heard ‘a slight shock and a grinding sound. That was all there was to it. There was no listing, no plunging, diving, or anything else.’ He then left his room in his pyjamas and went to the bridge where he found the Captain and First Officer Murdoch motionless, looking ahead. The ship was still moving and so he assumed all was well. Lightoller then returned to his room. ‘What for?’ asked Smith.

  ‘There was no call for me to be on deck,’ replied Lightoller.

  ‘No call, or no cause?’ corrected Smith.

  ‘As far as I could see,’ said Lightoller, ‘neither call nor cause… I did not think it was a serious accident.’ As he walked back, Lightoller saw no one except the Third Officer, ‘who left his berth shortly after I did’. The two men briefly conferred about the incident and concluded that ‘nothing much’ had happened.

  ‘Did you go back to your room under the impression that the boat had not been injured?’ asked Smith.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Lightoller.

  ‘Didn’t you’, wondered Smith, ‘tell Mr Ismay that?’

  Lightoller answered that he had not yet seen Ismay; that he would only see Ismay once, about twenty minutes later, and that he ‘really could not say’ whether he had or had not then told him there was no cause for concern. Lightoller went back to bed for ‘ten minutes’. When he was roused by Fourth Officer Boxhall he put some clothes on top of his pyjamas and went out on deck. Ismay, when Lightoller saw him, was standing stock-still and alone. According to Lightoller the entire evening had been conducted in silence; he appears in his account like a man in a dream, sleepwalking to the bridge and then back to bed where he wakes with a start, realising that everyone is going to die.

  Nor did Lightoller recall seeing any passengers on the deck when the ship was going down. ‘I ask you again,’ Smith persisted: ‘There must have been a great number of passengers and crew still on the boat, the part of the boat that was not submerged, probably on the high point, so far as possible. Were they huddled together?’

  ‘They did not seem to be,’ said Lightoller. ‘I could not say, sir; I did not notice; there were a great many of them, I know, but as to what condition they were in, huddled or not, I do not know.’ However, in his memoirs, written twenty-three years later, Lightoller remembered the crowds and what condition they were in. They were washed back in a ‘dreadful huddled mass… It came home to me very clearly how fatal it would be to get amongst those hundreds and hundreds of people who would shortly be struggling for their lives in that deadly cold water.’

  Lightoller explained how the Captain gave him no order to load the lifeboats on the port side, how he had placed twenty-five people into the first boat because he was unconfident about filling it with more, how he had personally tested all the lifeboats when the ship was in Southampton (in his memoirs, he admitted to testing only ‘some of them’), and how it was only as she began to list that he realised there was a genuine emergency. There had been no confusion amongst the passengers, who ‘could not have stood quieter had they been in church’, and no restraint on the movement of those in steerage. No other man had tried to join them on the upturned lifeboat because everyone else was ‘some distance away’.

  As for the question of whether he had seen any ice warnings, Lightoller did not know they were in ‘the vicinity of icebergs’, he ‘could
not say’ whether he saw the ‘individual message’ sent by the Amerika on Sunday evening or heard of it even though it was received during his shift. (This particular Marconigram, which never reached the bridge of the Titanic from the communications room, had been intercepted and sent to Washington where it ended up on Senator’s Smith’s desk.) Would it not, asked Smith, ‘have been the duty of the person receiving this message to communicate it to you, for you were in charge of the ship?’ Lightoller replied only ‘under the commander’s orders, sir’ and that while he did not know about that particular message he ‘knew that a communication had come from some ship; I can not say that it was the Amerika… speaking of the icebergs and naming their longitude… the message contained information that there was ice from 49 to 51’.

  ‘How do you know it came?’ asked Smith.

  ‘Because I saw it,’ replied Lightoller. At one o’clock on Sunday, the Captain had shown it to him.

  Lightoller’s cocky responses during the five hours he was questioned were designed to ridicule Smith’s pretence at authority. He thought the inquiry, as he put it in his memoirs, a ‘complete farce wherein all the traditions and customs of the sea were continuously and persistently flouted’. It was an outrage that professional seamen should answer, before their clothes had even dried, to what he called ‘an armchair judge’ who had never himself ‘been called upon to make a life-and-death decision in a sudden emergency’.5

  What mattered to Lightoller was the forthcoming British inquiry; this American affair was an amateur theatrical which had to be endured. Asked at what time he left the ship, Lightoller replied that he didn’t leave it, that the ship had left him. He kept a straight face when, in an account of how the ship’s forward funnel had fallen on top of a group of struggling swimmers, Smith inquired whether any of them were injured (one of the passengers probably killed by the funnel was John Jacob Astor, whose body, when it was found by the recovery ship, Mackay-Bennett, floating in the Atlantic, was so crushed and charred that it could be identified only by the $2,440 in notes in his pocket and the diamond ring on his finger).