Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  Lifeboat 14 approaches the Carpathia with Collapsible D in tow. (photo credit 1.44)

  René’s friend May Futrelle was surprised to see some male passengers among the women in the Carpathia’s first-class dining saloon, and this caused her to make a rapid search of all the public rooms in the hope that her “Jack” might be in one of them. She then went out on deck to see the remaining lifeboats arrive, and as each boat came alongside, she kept hoping that every big man she spied might be her husband. On discovering that Jacques Futrelle was not on board, she would return to the dining saloon to await the next boat.

  William Carter had spotted his wife and daughter as Boat 4 came alongside but could not see his son. When he shouted down for him, eleven-year-old Billy Carter lifted up the brim of his mother’s large hat and called up to his anxious father. It had been a long, cold, and arduous night for the most socially prominent of the Titanic’s ladies in Boat 4. But the news that awaited them on the rescue ship was far worse. Madeleine Astor, Marian Thayer, and Emily Ryerson would soon learn that they were widows, and Eleanor Widener would discover she had lost both her husband and her son. Of the nine guests who had attended the Widener dinner party the evening before, only four were left alive. A very fragile Madeleine Astor was soon escorted to the dining saloon and attended to by Dr. McGee. Marian Thayer waited on deck as the last boats came in, anxiously looking for her husband and son.

  Boat 8 was the next to arrive, at around 7:30 a.m., followed by Boat 6, which had to make several attempts to come alongside on account of the rising waves. After Helen Candee was swung up the side, she was assisted to the hospital where her broken ankle was treated. Margaret Brown was given a cup of hot coffee as she stepped onto the deck, and she was soon impressed by how many of the Carpathia’s passengers came forward to offer clothing, toiletries, and the use of a stateroom. On entering the dining saloon, she spied “our brave and heroic quartermaster” gesticulating to a small group as he described how difficult it had been to discipline the occupants of his boat. On seeing Mrs. Brown, however, Hichens, in her words, “did not tarry long but made a hasty retreat.”

  After 8:00 a.m., only Boat 12 remained on the open sea, precariously overloaded with about seventy-five passengers, including those rescued from Collapsible B. Lightoller ordered a few people to move toward the stern which helped raise the bow, but still the gunwales remained only inches above the water. Archibald Gracie was squeezed in at the bow between Algernon Barkworth and the body of the dead man that Lightoller had put on board. A woman passed him a steamer rug which he threw over his head and he and Barkworth and a crewman huddled under it for warmth. As the sea became rougher, one wave and then another splashed over the bow. Just as the boat looked as if it might founder, Lightoller managed to coax it onto one long swell that took it right into calmer waters in the lee of the Carpathia. Archibald Gracie had no trouble clambering up the rope ladder and said that he felt like kissing the deck in gratitude. Harold Bride, too, managed to climb up to the deck but promptly collapsed and was carried to the hospital to be treated for frostbitten feet. Jack Thayer spied his mother waiting on the deck and embraced her. She was overjoyed to see him but shocked that he had no news of his father.

  Charles Lightoller, punctilious to the end, saw that all his passengers were boarded before climbing up himself, becoming the last Titanic survivor to board the Carpathia. On deck a knot of women stood around Captain Rostron asking if he was sure that there were no more boats.

  “Could not another ship have picked them up?” one distraught woman demanded.

  “Was it not possible that he might have climbed onto an iceberg?” queried another.

  Lightoller thought to himself that there was no kindness in holding out hope where he knew there was none.

  May Futrelle heard an officer on deck say, “This is the last of the Titanic’s boats.” But even then she did not give up. Only when the Carpathia blew its whistle and began to move away did she fully realize that her husband was gone.

  Captain Rostron of the Carpathia was nicknamed “The Electric Spark” on account of his energetic decisiveness. (photo credit 1.45)

  Please don’t!” René Harris called out as the Carpathia’s musicians gathered by the piano in the dining saloon. To May Futrelle, sitting beside her, it looked as if they were about to play a hymn. The musicians dispersed, but something that May found even more harrowing followed. An Episcopalian clergyman came into the dining saloon and read the service for the burial of the dead from the Book of Common Prayer. This was at the request of Captain Rostron, a prayerful man himself, who thought it would give comfort to the bereaved. But for May, “the shock and finality of it were awful.” The minister, Reverend Father Roger Anderson of Baltimore, finished with a prayer of thanksgiving for the living, many of whom were by then quietly weeping. Margaret Brown looked around the room at the survivors, “speechless, half-clad, their eyes protruding, hair streaming down, those who only twelve hours before, were immaculately groomed and richly gowned.”

  During the service, the Carpathia circled over the area where the Titanic had gone down. Arthur Peuchen went out on deck and stood by the bow railing looking for any sign of his friends. He saw some deck chairs and lifebelts and streams of granular, reddish-brown cork, but no bodies. Peuchen assumed they had drifted off with the wind that had come up that morning. He also saw a striped barber’s pole bobbing in the waves which puzzled him since the barbershop had been on C deck. He concluded that it must have been blown out of the ship by the explosions he had heard during the sinking.

  From the bridge, Captain Rostron also noted floating masses of insulating cork but was surprised by how little wreckage there was. He did see one body, a man floating on his side in a life preserver, his head half-submerged. But with the sea rising, Rostron was eager to be on his way to New York and signaled to the Californian, which had arrived an hour before, to continue the search. The Leyland steamer had heard the news by wireless early that morning and had slowly made its way through the ice to the scene. The Californian searched the area for an hour or more but saw only stray bits of wreckage and some of the Titanic’s lifeboats that Rostron had set adrift after taking thirteen of them on board.

  That morning Captain Rostron had considered several places he might land his more than seven hundred unexpected passengers. He’d first considered the Azores so that he could continue to the Mediterranean as scheduled; then Halifax, which was the nearest port. But on seeing the survivors come aboard, many of them in a distressed state and some in need of medical attention, it soon became clear that he should take them directly to New York. Rostron decided to visit Bruce Ismay to discuss the decision with him but the shattered White Star chairman quickly gave his agreement to whatever the captain thought was best. It was Rostron who had earlier prompted a dazed Ismay to send a wireless message notifying the White Star Line’s New York office about the accident. To Philip Franklin, the U.S. vice president of White Star’s parent company, the International Mercantile Marine, Ismay had written:

  Deeply regret advise you Titanic sank this morning after collision iceberg, resulting serious loss life. Full particulars later. Bruce Ismay.

  “Captain, do you think that is all that I can tell him?” Ismay asked as he gave the note to Rostron.

  “Yes,” said Rostron in reply.

  By then Philip Franklin already knew that the Titanic was in trouble. He had been awakened just before 2 a.m. by a telephone call from a newspaper reporter informing him that the Titanic had struck an iceberg and had radioed for assistance. Franklin rang off and telephoned the White Star dock and was told that reporters had been calling there as well. On telephoning the Associated Press, Franklin was informed that a report on the Titanic’s distress calls had already gone out—in time for the morning papers. At 3 a.m. he cabled Captain Haddock of the Olympic, urging him to make every effort to contact the Titanic and advise him of her position. By 8 a.m. crowds had already started to gather outside the White Star of
fices on lower Broadway.

  As the Carpathia turned its bow toward New York, the captain found that the ice field continued for many miles, stretching toward the horizon. While he proceeded slowly around its perimeter, the giant bergs caught the morning sun, a sight that stirred Rostron to wax poetic when he wrote of it later: “Minarets like cathedral towers turned to gold in the distances … and some seemed to shape themselves like argosies under full sail.” Helen Candee, too, admired the stunning white vista as she reclined with her ankle bandaged, pondering what she called “nature’s implacable strength.” Archibald Gracie, meanwhile, lay wrapped in blankets on a sofa in the lounge, feeling rather awkward without his clothes. Daisy and Frederic Spedden had looked after Gracie when he first arrived—“half-frozen and completely unnerved,” in Daisy’s description—and had taken his clothes to be dried in a bake oven. But after a few hot brandies the colonel had rallied, and whenever Daisy drew near, he would ask plaintively for his trousers, saying he couldn’t possibly move without them. Gracie had suffered a blow to the head and there were cuts and bruises on his legs that would be sore to the touch for several days. Eventually his dry but salt-stained clothes were returned to him and he went off to nap in a borrowed cabin.

  The Speddens spent the rest of the day tending to those in need and Daisy recalled heartrending scenes as women frantically sought their missing children. Margaret Brown tried to help a woman who kept screaming out for her child and she eventually asked the doctor to give the distraught woman a sedative since she was pulling out strands of her hair in panic. Soon the only children left unclaimed were the two French toddlers who had been put aboard Collapsible D by a “Mr. Hoffman.” Margaret Hays, the young New Yorker who had carried her little dog into Boat 7, was fluent in French and had taken charge of the two boys. The curly-haired waifs, aged three and two, were soon seen playing on deck with Margaret’s Pomeranian, one of three dogs to have survived.

  After napping for almost an hour behind a stove in the galley, Norris Williams had awakened and gone out on deck just as the Carpathia was departing. But with his legs still feeling very numb and painful, he made his way to the ship’s hospital. A surgeon who was helping Dr. McGee examined Norris and expressed grave concern about the state of his legs. He thought that amputation might be necessary and cheerfully ventured that this could even be done on board before the ship reached New York. But there was a chance, he thought, that the young tennis player might be able to save his legs if he were to exercise them continually. Norris seized on this option and resolved to walk the decks day and night. First, however, he found a change of clothes and steeped himself in a hot bath.

  Jack Thayer had been lent a pair of pajamas and a bunk and as he climbed into bed he was still aglow from the hot brandy given to him on arrival—his first-ever alcoholic drink. His mother was resting in Captain Rostron’s cabin, which she shared with Eleanor Widener and Madeleine Astor. René Harris was given the use of a stateroom along with two other women, one of them Ninette Aubart, whom she soon befriended. The distraught young Frenchwoman was grieving the loss of Ben Guggenheim and feeling afraid about landing in a strange country where she did not speak the language.

  Captain Rostron paid another visit to Ismay’s room that morning. He had received a wireless message from the Olympic proposing that the Titanic’s passengers be transferred to her. Rostron thought that putting the survivors into boats for a second sea transfer was a very bad idea. Even the sight of a ship that so closely resembled the Titanic might stir up panic among the survivors. Ismay agreed emphatically—the Olympic should stay out of sight.

  On board the sister liner, however, Frank Millet’s friend Daniel Burnham had been told that they were steaming to the rescue of the Titanic’s passengers, and he was preparing to give up his suite to Frank and Archie Butt. He could use the time on board with Frank to prepare him for the next meeting of the Lincoln Memorial Commission. In a letter waiting for Frank in New York, Burnham had written, “The rats swim back and begin to gnaw at the same old spot the moment the dog’s back is turned,” the “rats” being several congressmen who were still pushing for John Russell Pope’s design over that of Henry Bacon. The letter had concluded, “I leave the thing confidently in your hand.”

  When a list of the Titanic’s survivors was posted on the Olympic’s notice board the next morning, however, Burnham saw that Millet’s name was not on it. In his diary entry for April 16, the ailing architect recorded the news of the Titanic’s loss and noted that “Frank D. Millet, whom I loved, was aboard of her … and probably [has] gone down.” Burnham himself would die two weeks later, but the classical white temple he had championed for the Lincoln Memorial would prevail—a tribute to the architect’s persistence and that of the friend he loved.

  The Olympic’s Marconi operators were relaying all the messages from the Carpathia to stations onshore, due to the Cunard liner’s limited wireless range. Marconi forms had been distributed to the survivors that morning but many of their messages would not be sent for another day or two—if at all. Captain Rostron had instructed that the first priority was to transmit a list of the survivors. The Carpathia’s chief purser and his assistant were busy compiling the names of passengers while Lightoller worked on the list of the surviving crew and engine room staff and a senior steward gathered the names of the cooks and stewards. The grim tally would come to 712 people rescued from a ship that had held 2,209. Over two-thirds of those on board the Titanic had perished.

  But this news had not yet reached New York. The morning edition of the New York Herald announced: THE NEW TITANIC STRIKES ICEBERG AND CALLS FOR AID, VESSELS RUSH TO HER SIDE. The New York Times went further and said that the liner was actually sinking. This sent anxious relatives down to White Star’s offices at No. 9 Broadway—among them Ben Guggenheim’s wife, Florette; John Jacob Astor’s son, Vincent; and J. P. Morgan’s son, John Pierpont Jr. (“Have just heard fearful rumor about Titanic with iceberg,” the financier had wired his son from the spa in Aix. “Hope for God sake not true.”) Philip Franklin knew little more than was in the newspapers but he and his staff provided reassurances that the Titanic would not sink and her passengers were safe. Ismay’s “Deeply regret advise you” cable had not been received by him and, unaccountably, would not arrive till Wednesday morning. At 9:30 a.m. Franklin announced to the press that the Titanic was still afloat. At mid-morning there was a rumor out of Montreal that the damaged liner was slowly being towed to Halifax, and by noon White Star had arranged to send a train there to pick up passengers. That afternoon many newspapers ran stories headed ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION. Philip Franklin meanwhile continued to send wireless messages to Captain Haddock of the Olympic, asking him to contact the Titanic and advise him regarding the landing of the passengers.

  Philip Franklin reassured those making inquiries at the White Star offices in New York that the Titanic’s passengers were safe. (photo credit 1.46)

  By early afternoon the Carpathia had passed the last of the ice and could begin to pick up speed, but at 4:00 p.m its engines were stopped. Father Anderson then appeared on deck in his clerical garb, followed by Carpathia crewmen carrying four corpses sewn into canvas bags. These were the bodies of two male passengers, one fireman, and one seaman, that had been brought aboard from the lifeboats. Each of the canvas bags in turn was laid on a wide plank and covered with a flag. As the words “Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the deep” were read aloud, the bodies were tipped into the sea one at a time. A large crowd stood nearby with heads bared. The canvas bags had been weighted so that the bodies would fall feet first but one of them struck the water flat. A Carpathia passenger wrote that he would never forget the sound of that splash.

  One of those buried at sea was first-class passenger William F. Hoyt, the heavy man who had been pulled into Boat 14 and died shortly thereafter. When May Futrelle learned that a large man had been lifted into one of the lifeboats, she question
ed the crew of Boat 14 but soon realized that the man they described could not have been her husband. She also heard that Archibald Gracie had been pulled under with the ship and worked up her courage to ask him if he had suffered as he was being dragged down. Gracie reassured her that if he had never come up, he would have had no more suffering, giving May some comfort that perhaps Jacques had not endured an agonizing death.

  That afternoon Charles Lightoller had a serious talk with the three other surviving officers, Pitman, Boxhall, and Lowe, about what lay ahead. It was agreed that their best hope for escaping what Lightoller called “the inquisition” that awaited in New York was to immediately board the Cedric, scheduled to sail for Liverpool on Thursday. Their case was taken to Bruce Ismay who sent a message to Philip Franklin suggesting that the Cedric be held for the Titanic’s crew and himself. Ismay also asked that clothes and shoes be put on board for him. The cable was signed “Yamsi,” his coded signature for personal messages.

  Ismay took only soup for dinner that evening in his room—a room, he later insisted, that was merely a storeroom where Dr. McGee kept his medicines, not a private cabin. For many of the other rescued passengers, a search began after dinner for places to sleep. Women with children were given first priority for staterooms and Daisy Spedden noted in her diary that a nice man gave up his cabin to her and her son Douglas, her maid, and Miss Burns, while an elderly gentleman took in her husband, Frederic. Edith Rosenbaum made a bed for herself on one of the tables in the dining saloon while other women slept in the lounges, using sofa cushions as pillows. The men found refuge wherever they could, mainly in the smoking rooms, where they curled up on the floor, the tables, or on the upholstered benches. Norris Williams found that the smoking room benches were not long enough for him to sleep on for any length of time, but this suited him since he was getting up every two hours to exercise his legs anyway.