Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  As Boat 4 pulled away from the stern, her passengers were shocked by the sight of the liner’s three massive bronze propellers slowly rising from the sea.

  (photo credit 1.9)

  As the liner’s deck slanted higher toward the stern, First Officer Murdoch struggled to load Collapsible C. (photo credit 1.20)

  Get out of this, clear out of this!” William Murdoch shouted in his stern Scottish voice as a crowd of men began swarming into Collapsible C. The first officer then raised his revolver and fired two shots into the air. Crouching on the floor of the boat, a panicked Daniel Buckley began to cry and a woman nearby threw her shawl over him and told him to lie low. Hugh Woolner saw Murdoch’s gun flash as he sprinted toward the scene with Björnström-Steffansson at his heels. For the last hour, the robust Englishman and his young Swedish friend had been aggressively rounding up women and children and bustling them into lifeboats. At Collapsible C the vigorous duo began grabbing men by the ankles and hauling them out of the boat. Daniel Buckley, however, managed to escape their notice in the dark, as did four Chinese sailors who crouched under the bow.

  When most of the men had been cleared out, Woolner then turned to the “Italian and other foreign women” waiting nearby (who were, in fact, mainly Lebanese) and started to hoist them into the boat, noticing how many of them went limp in his arms as he lifted them over the rail. When all the women on deck had been loaded, Woolner suggested to Steffansson that they go down to A deck in search of others. But on arriving on the promenade deck, they found it to be deserted with its ceiling lights glowing an eerie red as the power waned. No women were to be seen near Collapsible C either, according to William Carter and Bruce Ismay. Carter claimed that he and Ismay walked around calling “Are there any more women here?” for several minutes but heard no answer. With no more female passengers to be found, the Philadelphia millionaire and the White Star managing director stepped over the rail and into Collapsible C as it was being lowered down the side.

  Yet there were, in fact, nearly two hundred women and children still on board the Titanic. More than half of them were waiting in the third-class public rooms and corridors or on the decks near the stern. At 1:30 a.m. the gates on the stairs up from third class had been opened for women but many had chosen to remain with their men. Father Thomas Byles circulated among the third-class passengers, hearing confessions and reciting the rosary with them. At 2:00 a.m. the gates were opened for third-class men as well as women, and many more steerage passengers soon crowded the boat deck. As he began loading Collapsible D on the port side, Lightoller was forced to pull his revolver to clear a crowd of what he called “dagoes” out of the boat. He then formed a cordon of crewmen to prevent a rush on the boat.

  As small knots of steerage women were escorted across the deck toward the last boat, there were still a few women from first class on board as well. Archibald Gracie was shocked to see Caroline Brown and Edith Evans standing by the starboard railing. He had escorted Evans and the three Lamson sisters to the staircase landing below the boat deck over an hour ago and had then gone in search of his other “unprotected” ward, Helen Candee, but discovered that she had already gone up on deck. Caroline Brown began to explain to Gracie how they had become separated from the others, but he and Jim Smith simply hustled them both toward the ring of men surrounding Collapsible D. Once they were let through, Edith Evans said to Caroline Brown, “You go first. You are married and have children.” Brown was then lifted into the lifeboat, but when Evans went to follow, she was unable to clamber over the railing in her tapered skirt. “Never mind,” she called out to Brown, “I will go on a later boat,” and turned and hurried away down the deck. Evans had earlier told Archibald Gracie that she had been told by a fortune-teller to beware of water and that she now knew she would be drowned. Gracie had dismissed this as superstition but Edith Evans would become one of only four women from first class to perish.

  René Harris had not yet boarded a lifeboat either, despite Harry’s best efforts to persuade her to do so. At around 2:00 a.m. Captain Smith and Dr. O’Loughlin spotted the couple near the bridge.

  “My God, woman!” the captain called out. “Why aren’t you in a lifeboat?”

  “I won’t leave my husband,” René protested.

  “Isn’t she a brick?” said O’Loughlin with a smile.

  “She’s a little fool!” the captain replied fiercely. “She’s handicapping her husband’s chance to save himself.”

  “Can he be saved, if I go?” she asked.

  “Yes, there are plenty of rafts in the stern,” the captain replied disingenuously, “and the men can make for them if you women give them a chance.”

  Before she could protest further, René felt herself being picked up and carried through the circle of crewmen.

  “Catch my wife. Be careful, she has a broken arm,” she heard Harry say as she was lifted over into Collapsible D. When the boat began to be lowered, her husband leaned over the rail and threw a blanket down to her.

  “Harry!” she shouted.

  “Good-bye, sweetheart!” he called back as the boat jerked its way down to the water—now only about fifteen feet below. René looked up and spotted Archie Butt standing beside her husband. “He was motionless,” she later wrote, “without a trace of fear in his eyes.” Earlier, she had noticed Archie escorting women and children toward the boats as courteously as if he were at a White House reception. René saw Frank Millet standing on the deck as well, and recalled him “wearing that same smile that he did all the way from Southampton.” Frederick Hoyt, the Connecticut broker who had played cards with Millet only hours before, also noted the artist’s genial expression as he helped Hoyt’s wife into Collapsible D.

  “Have you any message, Frank?” Jane Hoyt asked him.

  “Give my love to Lily and to all my friends,” Millet replied calmly.

  As they stood on the portside promenade deck with the lights above them fading, Hugh Woolner and Björnström-Steffansson looked out and saw Collapsible D being lowered directly in front of them.

  “Let’s make a jump for it!” said Woolner. “There is plenty of room in her bows!”

  The two men then climbed onto the rail at the open end of the forward promenade. Steffansson jumped down first and landed safely in the boat that was by then in the water. Woolner soon followed but hit the side of the boat with his chest and fell backward. Gripping the gunwale with his fingers, Woolner hoisted one foot out of the water and Steffansson grabbed his leg and pulled him into the boat. Woolner had barely caught his breath before a splash was heard nearby and another man swam over to the collapsible and was hauled in. Jane Hoyt threw her fur wrap over the shivering new arrival and then shrieked, “My God, it’s my husband!”

  “Jane!” Fred Hoyt exclaimed as he reached out to his wife. “Let me take an oar,” he soon added, “it will help to warm me.” Hugh Woolner later wrote that he and the three other men at the oars began to “pull like the deuce to get clear of the ship.” The former Cambridge oarsman claimed he had never rowed harder. René Harris remembered that “Look out for the suction!” kept ringing in her ears as Collapsible D pulled away. It was then that she spotted two little boys sitting on the floor of the boat and passed over her blanket to be wrapped around them. The curly-headed toddlers had been put into Collapsible D by their father, who, in a strong French accent, had said that he was a “Mr. Hoffman.”

  May Futrelle later claimed that she was also in Boat D with René Harris. She, too, had been reluctant to leave the ship without her husband, but Jacques had finally insisted, “For God’s sake go!” When May looked back up to the boat deck, she caught sight of Jacques cupping his hands as he lit a cigarette for himself and one for Colonel Astor, the match illuminating both of their faces. “I know those hands never trembled,” she wrote. “This was an act of bravado. Both men must have realized that they must die.”

  But did they realize it? Most of the men left on board the sinking liner, it seems, still held hopes
of escape. Jacques Futrelle himself had told his wife that he was sure he could swim to a lifeboat and be picked up. Montreal millionaire Harry Molson was seen removing his shoes as he prepared to swim for the lights of the ship he could see off the port bow. Algernon Barkworth, the justice of the peace from Yorkshire, later claimed, “I learned swimming at Eton and made up my mind if it came to the worst I would try my luck in the water.” Baker Charles Joughin gathered up about fifty steamer chairs from the A-deck promenade and, with boozy purposefulness, threw them overboard one at a time for use by swimmers.

  Though stories of heroic fatalism on the sinking liner are part of the Titanic mystique, many of them may not be entirely authentic. Ben Guggenheim is best-remembered for stating, “We have dressed in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen,” as he and his valet stood on the sloping deck in their evening clothes. Guggenheim then gave a message to Steward Henry Etches: “If anything should happen to me, tell my wife in New York that I’ve done my best in doing my duty.” Yet according to Etches, this encounter took place forty-five minutes after the collision, which places it at 12:25, a time when most passengers did not believe the ship was in any real danger, and no lifeboats had yet departed. Etches himself left the ship at 12:45 in Boat 5, so whether Guggenheim displayed similar sangfroid when the ship was actually going down is unknown.

  In the film of A Night to Remember, Thomas Andrews is depicted in his final moments standing alone in the smoking room, staring blankly at the painting over the fireplace, his lifebelt cast aside. This is based on an account by Steward John Stewart, who on seeing the ship’s designer asked, “Aren’t you going to have a try for it, Mr. Andrews?” but the stricken man simply “stood liked one stunned.” There are other reports, however, of Andrews being seen on the bridge and the boat deck after all the lifeboats had departed, so it’s possible that toward the end, he thought of his wife and child and made an effort to save himself. W. T. Stead, too, is often depicted as sitting impassively in the smoking room, reading a book while the ship goes down. When Fireman George Kemish spotted Stead, “he looked as if he intended stopping where he was whatever happened.” Kemish’s recollection, however, was written over forty years later and it seems unlikely that at the time the stoker would have known Stead by sight. Second-class passenger Imanita Shelley recalled that while she was boarding Lifeboat 10, which left at approximately one-fifty, she saw Stead standing alone and without a lifebelt by the aft railing on the boat deck, “in silence and what seemed to me a prayerful attitude, or one of profound meditation.”

  Norris Williams (photo credit 1.43)

  Norris Williams remembered how calm it seemed after the last boats had gone. The musicians continued playing quietly, though most of the passengers had retreated upward toward the stern. Williams thought it seemed a little peculiar to be walking around when all means of escape appeared cut off. He and his father had gone into the staircase foyer and looked down the stairwell at the greenish water climbing up the lower stairs. Out on the boat deck they saw lights from the lifeboats and Norris noted how far away many of them seemed. The calm surface of the ocean sparkled with phosphorus and reminded him of light seen through a prism. Henry Harper in Boat 3 noted that “at every stroke of the oars great glares of greenish-yellow phosphorescent light would swirl aft from the blades and drip like globules of fire from the oars.… I have never seen it so fine.”

  Others thought they had never seen so many stars in the sky. Seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer watched a davit arm grow higher against the starry sky as he stood by the starboard rail with Milton Long, the friend he had met in the Palm Room after dinner. Thayer had lost sight of his parents in the crowd going down to A deck to board Boat 4 and thought that his father had left in the lifeboat with his mother. Jack had several times been on the verge of sliding down a rope hanging from a davit but Long had told him to wait. In the silences, Jack thought of his parents and his sister and brother, of the good times in his life, and the future pleasures he might not live to enjoy.

  Jack’s father, meanwhile, was standing on the other side of the boat deck, having moved aft on the slanting deck with George Widener, Arthur Ryerson, and some other of his smoking room companions, Archie Butt, Frank Millet, and Clarence Moore likely among them. Archibald Gracie and James Clinch Smith were nearby as well. When Gracie realized that all the lifeboats had left, the sensation, as he put it, “was not an agreeable one.” It left him feeling breathless and he found his voice sticking in his throat. But he knew from his West Point training that if he was to survive, he could not give in to fear. “While I said to myself, ‘Goodbye to all at home,’ ” he later wrote, “I hoped and prayed for escape.”

  Archie Butt and Frank Millet were no doubt experiencing similar emotions. Archie must surely have realized that the premonitions of doom that had dogged him for weeks might soon become a reality. This may have been behind the impassive gaze that Marian Thayer and René Harris had both noted. Frank Millet had written to a friend only a few months ago that he would rather sink on a warship than in a dory. And he had often said that if he could choose his manner of death, he would live his life to the fullest and end it by dying in battle. Yet an Atlantic liner sinking underneath him seemed an improbable way to die, so it is likely that Millet, like Gracie, still thought that rescue was possible.

  The news that there were two more collapsible boats stowed on the roof of the officers’ quarters suddenly suffused Archibald Gracie with renewed hope. He and Jim Smith hustled down to the forward starboard deck and began to lend a hand in preparing an empty davit for the collapsible boat that was lashed to the roof above. “Has any passenger a knife?” one of the men on the roof shouted down, and Gracie tossed up his penknife, thinking it an inadequate tool for such a critical task. As Gracie and Smith were leaning oars against the wall to help slide Collapsible A down from the roof, the lifeboat suddenly came crashing down, splintering the oars and sending men scurrying out of the way. Crewmen then began dragging the collapsible over to the davits to attach it to the ropes for lowering.

  At the same time, Charles Lightoller was on the portside roof with about a dozen crewmen, struggling to cut the lashings and free the other Engelhardt boat, Collapsible B. Marconi operator Harold Bride had just climbed up on the roof to join them. The captain had come to the Marconi Room about ten minutes before to release Bride and Phillips from their duties. “You look out for yourselves,” Smith had said. “That’s the way it is at this kind of a time. Every man for himself.” But Jack Phillips continued to work the wireless key even as the lights dimmed and his signal sputtered. Bride was awed by his dedication. The junior operator stepped into the sleeping quarters to retrieve his money, and when he returned, he saw a stoker trying to steal Phillips’s lifebelt. In a rage, Bride grabbed the man and a scuffle ensued, which ended with Phillips slugging the stoker and knocking him down. “Let’s clear out,” Phillips said breathlessly, and the two men fled the wireless cabin, leaving the stoker lying on the floor. As they heard water gurgling up toward the bridge, Phillips headed aft while Bride climbed up on the roof of the officers’ quarters.

  Norris Williams and his father, meanwhile, were on the bridge with Captain Smith when the ship gave a sudden lurch. Norris glanced down toward the bow but could only see the foremast sticking up from the water like a tree on a floodplain. Suddenly he was engulfed in a torrent of icy seawater that washed over the ship in a wave. As he tried to swim out from the flooded bridge toward the starboard railing, Norris lost sight of his father. As the wave swept aft along the deck, it drenched those who were struggling to cut Collapsible A free from the davit ropes. On the port side, Collapsible B crashed downward and landed upside down on the boat deck.

  Archibald Gracie and Jim Smith retreated up the deck from the wave but ran straight into a mass of people streaming out of the first-class entrance from the staircase. The crowd, which included some women, fled aft from the advancing water but was stopped by a railing that marked the end of the
first-class promenade. Realizing they were in a tight spot, Gracie and Smith looked up to the roof over the officers’ mess. Smith made a leap for the roof but fell back. Gracie tried, too, but failed, hampered by his heavy coat and lifebelt.

  Just then the liner’s foredeck shuddered upward and Norris Williams suddenly found himself standing high and dry on the boat deck as the water retreated. He glanced around and saw his father about twelve to fifteen feet away from him. As the word “suction” flashed into his brain, Norris yelled out “Quick! Jump!” to his father and then leapt over the rail. Others nearby did the same. At about this time, Marconi operator Harold Bride claimed that he looked down from the roof and saw Captain Smith dive into the sea from the bridge.

  A moment later the ship’s bow lurched downward again, sending an even larger wave rolling aft. Harold Bride was now on the deck beside overturned Collapsible B and when the water surged toward him, he grabbed an oarlock and held on as the boat was swept from the deck. On the starboard side, a number of people had clambered into Collapsible A and two men were struggling to cut it free just as the second wave washed over it. The boat was slammed against the davit and then pushed toward the forward funnel before it drifted off half-submerged with a few occupants still inside it.

  Archibald Gracie threw himself into the second wave as if riding the surf at the seashore. It lifted him up to the top of the officers’ mess where he grabbed the railing, pulled himself onto the roof, and scuttled over on his stomach to the base of the second funnel. When he raised his head to look for Jim Smith, he couldn’t see him or any of the others who had been on the deck only seconds before. Gracie felt a pang of guilt at being separated from his friend since they had agreed to stick together till the end. He thought that Smith might have been thrown against the wall and knocked out or washed overboard in a tangle of ropes and other debris.