A Night to Remember (11 page)

Down, down dipped the
Titanic
’s bow, and her stern swung slowly up. She seemed to be moving forward too. It was this motion which generated the wave that hit Daly, Brown, and dozens of others as it rolled aft.

Lightoller watched the wave from the roof of the officers’ quarters. He saw the crowds retreating up the deck ahead of it. He saw the nimbler ones keep clear, the slower ones overtaken and engulfed. He knew that this kind of retreat just prolonged the agony. He turned and, facing the bow, dived in. As he reached the surface, he saw just ahead of him the crow’s nest, now level with the water. Blind instinct seized him, and for a moment he swam toward it as a place of safety.

Then he snapped to and tried to swim clear of the ship. But the sea was pouring down the ventilators just in front of the forward funnel, and he was sucked back and held against the wire grating of an air shaft. He prayed it would hold. And he wondered how long he could last, pinned this way to the grating.

He never learned the answer. A blast of hot air from somewhere deep below came rushing up the ventilator and blew him to the surface. Gasping and sputtering, he finally paddled clear.

Harold Bride kept his head too. As the wave swept by, he grabbed an oarlock of Collapsible B, which was still lying upside down on the Boat Deck near the first funnel. The boat, Bride and a dozen others were washed off together. The collapsible was still upside down, and Bride found himself struggling underneath it.

Colonel Gracie was not as sea-wise. He stayed in the crowd and jumped with the wave—it was almost like Newport. Rising on the crest, he caught the bottom rung of the iron railing on the roof of the officers’ quarters. He hauled himself up and lay on his stomach right at the base of the second funnel.

Before he could rise, the roof too had dipped under. Gracie found himself spinning round and round in a whirlpool of water. He tried to cling to the railing, then realized this was pulling him down deeper. With a mighty kick he pushed himself free and swam clear of the ship, far below the surface.

Chef John Collins couldn’t do much of anything about the wave. He had a baby in his arms. For five minutes he and a deck steward had been trying to help a steerage woman with two children. First they heard there was a boat on the port side. They ran there and heard it was on the starboard side. When they got there, somebody said their best chance was to head for the stern. Bewildered, they were standing undecided—Collins holding one of the babies—when they were all swept overboard by the wave. He never saw the others again, and the child was washed out of his arms.

Jack Thayer and Milton Long saw the wave coming too. They were standing by the starboard rail opposite the second funnel, trying to keep clear of the crowds swarming toward the stern. Instead of making for a higher point, they felt the time had come to jump and swim for it. They shook hands and wished each other luck. Long put his legs over the rail, while Thayer straddled it and began unbuttoning his overcoat. Long, hanging over the side and holding the rail with his hands, looked up at Thayer and asked, “You’re coming, boy?”

“Go ahead, I’ll be right with you,” Thayer reassured him.

Long slid down, facing the ship. Ten seconds later Thayer swung his other leg over the rail and sat facing out. He was about ten feet above the water. Then with a push he jumped as far out as he could.

Of these two techniques for abandoning ship, Thayer’s was the one that worked.

The wave never reached Olaus Abelseth. Standing by the fourth funnel, he was too far back. Instead of plunging under, this part of the ship was swinging higher and higher.

As she swung up, Abelseth heard a popping and cracking … a series of muffled thuds … the crash of glassware … the clatter of deck chairs sliding down.

The slant of the deck grew so steep that people could no longer stand. So they fell, and Abelseth watched them slide down into the water right on the deck. Abelseth and his relatives hung on by clinging to a rope in one of the davits.

“We better jump or the suction will take us down,” his brother-in-law urged.

“No,” said Abelseth. “We won’t jump yet. We ain’t got much show anyhow, so we might as well stay as long as we can.”

“We must jump off!” the cry came again, but Abelseth held firm: “No, not yet.”

Minutes later, when the water was only five feet away, the three men finally jumped, holding one another’s hands. They came sputtering to the surface, Abelseth hopelessly snarled in some rope from somewhere. He had to free his hands to untangle the line, and his cousin and brother-in-law were washed away. Somehow he got loose, but he said to himself, “I’m a goner.”

In the maelstrom of ropes, deck chairs, planking, and wildly swirling water, nobody knew what happened to most of the people. From the boats they could be seen clinging like little swarms of bees to deck houses, winches and ventilators as the stern rose higher. Close in, it was hard to see what was happening, even though—incredibly—the lights still burned, casting a sort of murky glow.

In the stories told later, Archie Butt had a dozen different endings—all gallant, none verified. According to one newspaper, Miss Marie Young, music teacher to Teddy Roosevelt’s children, remembered him calling, “Good-bye, Miss Young, remember me to the folks back home.” Yet the papers also reported Miss Young as saying she saw the iceberg an hour before the crash.

In an interview attributed to Mrs. Henry B. Harris, Archie Butt was described as a pillar of strength, using his fists here—a big brother approach there—to handle the weaklings. Yet Lightoller, Gracie and the others working on the boats never saw him at all. When Mrs. Walter Douglas recalled him near Boat 2 around 1:45, he was standing quietly off to one side.

It was the same with John Jacob Astor. Barber August H. Weikman described last moments with the great millionaire. It was a conversation full of the kind of small talk that normally takes place only in the barber’s chair. And even more trite: “I asked him if he minded shaking hands with me. He said ‘With pleasure’ …” Yet, Barber Weikman also said he left the ship at 1:50, a good half hour earlier.

Butt and Astor’s endings were parlayed in a single story attributed to Washington Dodge, the San Francisco Assessor: “They went down standing on the bridge, side by side. I could not mistake them,” the papers had him saying. Yet Dr. Dodge was in Boat 13, a good half-mile away.

Nor did anyone really know what happened to Captain Smith. People later said he shot himself, but there’s not a shred of evidence. Just before the end Steward Edward Brown saw him walk onto the bridge, still holding his megaphone. A minute later Trimmer Hemming wandered on the bridge and found it empty. After the
Titanic
sank, Fireman Harry Senior saw him in the water holding a child. Pieced together, this picture, far more than suicide, fits the kind of fighter who once said: “In a way, a certain amount of wonder never leaves me, especially as I observe from the bridge a vessel plunging up and down in the trough of the sea, fighting her way through and over great waves. A man never outgrows that.”

Seen and unseen, the great and the unknown tumbled together in a writhing heap as the bow plunged deeper and the stern rose higher. The strains of “Autumn” were buried in a jumble of falling musicians and instruments. The lights went out, flashed on again, went out for good. A single kerosene lantern flickered high in the after mast.

The muffled thuds and tinkle of breaking glass grew louder. A steady roar thundered across the water as everything movable broke loose.

There has never been a mixture like it—29 boilers … the jeweled copy of the
Rubáiyát …
800 cases of shelled walnuts … 15,000 bottles of ale and stout … huge anchor chains (each link weighed 175 pounds) … 30 cases of golf clubs and tennis rackets for Spalding … Eleanor Widener’s trousseau … tons of coal … Major Peuchen’s tin box … 30,000 fresh eggs … dozens of potted palms … 5 grand pianos … a little mantel clock in B-38 … the massive silver duck press.

And still it grew—tumbling trellises, ivy pots and wicker chairs in the Café Parisien … shuffleboard sticks … the 50-phone switchboard … two reciprocating engines and the revolutionary low-pressure turbine … 8 dozen tennis balls for R. F. Downey & Co., a cask of china for Tiffany’s, a case of gloves for Marshall Field … the remarkable ice-making machine on G Deck … Billy Carter’s new English automobile … the Ryersons’ 16 trunks, beautifully packed by Victorine.

As the tilt grew steeper, the forward funnel toppled over. It struck the water on the starboard side with a shower of sparks and a crash heard above the general uproar. Greaser Walter Hurst, struggling in the swirling sea, was half blinded by soot. He got off lucky—other swimmers were crushed under tons of steel. But the falling funnel was a blessing to Lightoller, Bride and others now clinging to overturned Collapsible B. It just missed the boat, washing it 30 yards clear of the plunging, twisting hull.

The
Titanic
was now absolutely perpendicular. From the third funnel aft, she stuck straight up in the air, her three dripping propellers glistening even in the darkness. To Lady Duff Gordon she seemed a black finger pointing at the sky. To Harold Bride she looked like a duck that goes down for a dive.

Out in the boats, they could hardly believe their eyes. For over two hours they had watched, hoping against hope, as the
Titanic
sank lower and lower. When the water reached her red and green running lights, they knew the end was near … but nobody dreamed it would be like this—the unearthly din, the black hull hanging at 90 degrees, the Christmas card backdrop of brilliant stars.

Some didn’t watch. In Collapsible C, President Bruce Ismay bent low over his oar—he couldn’t bear to see her go down. In Boat 1, C. E. Henry Stengel turned his back: “I cannot look any longer.” In No. 4, Elizabeth Eustis buried her face.

Two minutes passed, the noise finally stopped, and the
Titanic
settled back slightly at the stern. Then slowly she began sliding under, moving at a steep slant. As she glided down, she seemed to pick up speed. When the sea closed over the flagstaff on her stern, she was moving fast enough to cause a slight gulp.

“She’s gone; that’s the last of her,” someone sighed to Lookout Lee in Boat 13. “It’s gone,” Mrs. Ada Clark vaguely heard somebody say in No. 4. But she was so cold she didn’t pay much attention. Most of the other women were the same—they just sat dazed, dumbfounded, without showing any emotion. In No. 5, Third Officer Pitman looked at his watch and announced, “It is two twenty.”

Ten miles away on the
Californian,
Second Officer Stone and Apprentice Gibson watched the strange ship slowly disappear. She had fascinated them almost the whole watch—the way she kept firing rockets, the odd way she floated in the water. Gibson remarked that he certainly didn’t think the rockets were being sent up for fun. Stone agreed: “A ship is not going to fire rockets at sea for nothing.”

By two o’clock the stranger’s lights seemed very low on the horizon, and the two men felt she must be steaming away. “Call the Captain,” Stone ordered, “and tell him that the ship is disappearing in the southwest and that she has fired altogether eight rockets.”

Gibson marched into the chart room and gave the message. Captain Lord looked up sleepily from his couch: “Were they all white rockets?”

Gibson said yes, and Lord asked the time. Gibson replied it was 2:05 by the wheelhouse clock. Lord rolled over, and Gibson went back to the bridge.

At 2:20 Stone decided that the other ship was definitely gone, and at 2:40 he felt he ought to tell the Captain himself. He called the news down the speaking tube and resumed studying the empty night.

A
S THE SEA CLOSED
over the
Titanic,
Lady Cosmo Duff Gordon in Boat 1 remarked to her secretary Miss Francatelli, “There is your beautiful nightdress gone.”

A lot more than Miss Francatelli’s nightgown vanished that April night. Even more than the largest liner in the world, her cargo, and the lives of 1,502 people.

Never again would men fling a ship into an ice field, heedless of warnings, putting their whole trust in a few thousand tons of steel and rivets. From then on Atlantic liners took ice messages seriously, steered clear, or slowed down. Nobody believed in the “unsinkable ship.”

Nor would icebergs any longer prowl the seas untended. After the
Titanic
sank, the American and British governments established the International Ice Patrol, and today Coast Guard cutters shepherd errant icebergs that drift toward the steamer lanes. The winter lane itself was shifted further south, as an extra precaution.

And there were no more liners with only part-time wireless. Henceforth every passenger ship had a 24-hour radio watch. Never again could the world fall apart while a Cyril Evans lay sleeping off-duty only ten miles away.

It was also the last time a liner put to sea without enough lifeboats. The 46,328-ton
Titanic
sailed under hopelessly outdated safety regulations. An absurd formula determined lifeboat requirements: all British vessels over 10,000 tons must carry 16 lifeboats with a capacity of 5,500 cubic feet, plus enough rafts and floats for 75 percent of the capacity of the lifeboats.

For the
Titanic
this worked out at 9,625 cubic feet. This meant she had to carry boats for only 962 people. Actually, there were boats for 1,178—the White Star Line complained that nobody appreciated their thoughtfulness. Even so, this took care of only 52 percent of the 2,207 people on board, and only 30 percent of her total capacity. From then on the rules and formulas were simple indeed—lifeboats for everybody.

And it was the end of class distinction in filling the boats. The White Star Line always denied anything of the kind—and the investigators backed them up—yet there’s overwhelming evidence that the steerage took a beating: Daniel Buckley kept from going into First Class … Olaus Abelseth released from the poop deck as the last boat pulled away … Steward Hart convoying two little groups of women topside, while hundreds were kept below … steerage passengers crawling along the crane from the well deck aft … others climbing vertical ladders to escape the well deck forward.