A Night to Remember (13 page)

There was no time for such thoughts at 2:20
A.M.,
Monday, April 15, 1912. Over the
Titanic
’s grave hung a thin, smoky vapor, soiling the clear night. The glassy sea was littered with crates, deck chairs, planking, pilasters, and corklike rubbish that kept bobbing to the surface from somewhere now far below.

Hundreds of swimmers thrashed the water, clinging to the wreckage and each other. Steward Edward Brown, gasping for breath, dimly noticed a man tearing at his clothes. Third Class passenger Olaus Abelseth felt a man’s arm clamp around his neck. Somehow he wriggled loose, sputtering, “Let go!” But the man grabbed him again, and it took a vigorous kick to free himself for good.

If it wasn’t the people, it was the sea itself that broke a man’s resistance. The temperature of the water was 28 degrees—well below freezing. To Second Officer Lightoller it felt like “a thousand knives” driven into his body. In water like this, life belts did no good.

Yet a few managed to keep both their wits and their stamina. For these, two hopes of safety loomed in the littered water—Collapsibles A and B. Both had floated off the sinking Boat Deck, A swamped and B upside down. Then the falling funnel washed both boats further clear of the crowd. Now the strongest and luckiest swimmers converged upon them.

After about 20 minutes Olaus Abelseth splashed alongside A. Perhaps a dozen others already lay half-dead in the wallowing boat. They neither helped nor hindered him as he scrambled over the gunwale. They just mumbled, “Don’t capsize the boat.”

One by one others arrived, until some two dozen people slumped in the hulk. They were a weird assortment—tennis star R. Norris Williams, Jr., lying beside his waterlogged fur coat … a couple of Swedes … Fireman John Thompson with badly burned hands … a First Class passenger in BVDs … Steward Edward Brown … Third Class passenger Mrs. Rosa Abbott.

Gradually Boat A drifted further away; the swimmers arrived at less frequent intervals. Finally they stopped coming altogether, and the half-swamped boat drifted silent and alone in the empty night.

Meanwhile other swimmers were making for overturned Collapsible B. This boat was much closer to the scene. Many more people swarmed around its curved white keel, and they were much louder, much more active.

“Save one life! Save one life!” Walter Hurst heard the cry again and again as he joined the men trying to board the collapsible.

Wireless Operator Harold Bride was of course there from the start, but under the boat. Lightoller also arrived before the
Titanic
sank. He was treading water alongside when the forward funnel fell. The wave almost washed him away and at the same time pushed young Jack Thayer right up against the boat. By now Hurst and three or four others were crouching on the keel. Lightoller and Thayer scrambled aboard too. Bride was still under the boat, lying on his back, bumping his head against the seats, gulping for air in the stuffy darkness.

Then came A. H. Barkworth, a Yorkshire Justice of the Peace. He wore a great fur coat over his life belt, and this daring arrangement surprisingly helped buoy him up. Fur coat and all, he too clambered onto the upturned collapsible, like some bedraggled, shaggy animal.

Colonel Gracie arrived later. Dragged down with the
Titanic,
he tried first a plank, then a large wooden crate, before he spied the overturned collapsible. When he finally drew alongside, more than a dozen men were lying and kneeling on the bottom.

No one offered a helping hand. With each new man, the collapsible sagged lower into the sea; already the water slopped over the keel from time to time. But Gracie hadn’t come this far for nothing. He grabbed the arm of a man already lying on the boat, and hauled himself onto the keel. Next, Assistant Cook John Collins swam up and managed to get on too. Then Bride dived out from underneath and scrambled onto the stern.

By the time Steward Thomas Whiteley arrived, Collapsible B wallowed under the weight of 30 men. As he tried to climb aboard, someone swatted him with an oar, but he made it anyhow. Fireman Harry Senior was beaten off by an oar, but he swam around to the other side and finally persuaded them to let him on too.

All the time men straddling the stern and the bow flayed the water with loose boards, paddling to get away from the scene and steer clear of the swimmers.

“Hold on to what you have, old boy. One more would sink us all,” the men in the boat shouted to those in the water.

“That’s all right, boys; keep cool,” one of the swimmers replied when they asked him to stay clear. Then he swam off, calling back, “Good luck, God bless you.”

Another swimmer kept cheering them on: “Good boy! Good lads!” He had the voice of authority and never asked to climb aboard. Even though they were dangerously overcrowded, Walter Hurst couldn’t resist holding out an oar. But the man was too far gone. As the oar touched him, he spun about like a cork and was silent. To this day Hurst thinks it was Captain Smith.

As they moved off into the lonely night, away from the wreckage and the swimmers, one of the seamen lying on the keel hesitantly asked, “Don’t the rest of you think we ought to pray?”

Everybody agreed. A quick poll showed Catholics, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists all jumbled together; so they compromised on the Lord’s Prayer, calling it out in chorus with the man who suggested it as their leader.

It was not the only sound that drifted over the water. All the time while Collapsibles A and B were filling up and painfully struggling away from the scene, hundreds of swimmers were crying for help. Individual voices were lost in a steady, overwhelming clamor. To Fireman George Kemish, tugging at his oar in Boat 9, it sounded like a hundred thousand fans at a British football cup final. To Jack Thayer, lying on the keel of Boat B, it seemed like the high-pitched hum of locusts on a midsummer night in the woods back home in Pennsylvania.

T
HE CRIES IN THE
night meant one thing to lively, impulsive Fifth Officer Lowe—row back and help.

He was in a good position to do something. After leaving the
Titanic
in No. 14, he had rounded up Boats 10, 12, 4 and D, and all five were tied together like a string of beads about 150 yards away.

“Consider yourselves under my command,” he ordered, and now he organized his flotilla for rescue work. It was suicide for all the boats to go—they were too undermanned to face the bedlam—but one boat with a handpicked crew might do some good. So Lowe divided his 55 passengers among the other four boats and picked volunteers from each to give No. 14 some expert oarsmen.

It was nerve-racking work, playing musical chairs with rowboats at 2:30
A.M.
in the middle of the Atlantic—almost more than Lowe could stand. “Jump, God damn you, jump!” he shouted impatiently at Miss Daisy Minahan. On the other hand, an old lady in a shawl seemed much too agile. Lowe ripped it off and looked into the frightened face of a young man—eyes white with terror. This time nothing was said, but he pitched the man into Boat No. 10 as hard as he could.

It took time to make the transfer. Then more time while Lowe waited for the swimmers to thin out enough to make the expedition safe. Then still more time to get there. It was after three o’clock—nearly an hour since the sinking—when Boat 14 edged into the wreckage and the people.

There was little left—Steward John Stewart … First Class passenger W. F. Hoyt … a Japanese steerage passenger, who had lashed himself to a door. For nearly an hour Boat 14 played a hopeless blindman’s bluff, chasing after shouts and calls in the darkness, never quite able to reach who was shouting.

They got only four, and Mr. Hoyt died in an hour. Lowe had miscalculated how long it took to row to the scene … how long to locate a voice in the dark … most of all, how long a man could live in water 28 degrees. There was, he learned, no need to wait until the crowd “thinned out.” But at least Lowe went back.

Third Officer Pitman in No. 5 also heard the cries. He turned the boat around and shouted, “Now, men, we will pull toward the wreck!”

“Appeal to the officer not to go back,” a lady begged Steward Etches as he tugged at his oar. “Why should we all lose our lives in a useless attempt to save others from the ship?”

Other women protested too. Pitman was torn by the dilemma. Finally he reversed his orders and told his men to lay on their oars. For the next hour No. 5—40 people in a boat that held 65—heaved gently in the calm Atlantic swell, while its passengers listened to the swimmers 300 yards away.

In No. 2, Steward Johnson recalled Fourth Officer Boxhall asking the ladies, “Shall we go back?” They said no; so Boat 2—about 60 percent full—also drifted while her people listened.

The ladies in Boat 6 were different. Mrs. Lucien Smith, stung that she had fallen for the white lie her husband used to get her in the boat; Mrs. Churchill Candee, moved by the gallantry of her self-appointed protectors; Mrs. J. J. Brown, naturally brave and lusty for adventure—all begged Quartermaster Hitchens to return to the scene. Hitchens refused. He painted a vivid picture of swimmers grappling at the boat, of No. 6 swamping and capsizing. The women still pleaded, while the cries grew fainter. Boat No. 6—capacity 65; occupants 28—went no closer to the scene.

In No. 1, Fireman Charles Hendrickson sang out, “It’s up to us to go back and pick up anyone in the water.”

Nobody answered. Lookout George Symons, in charge of the boat, made no move. Then, when the suggestion came again, Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon announced he didn’t think they should try; it would be dangerous; the boat would be swamped. With that, the subject was dropped. No. 1—12 people in a boat made for 40—rowed on aimlessly in the dark.

In boat after boat the story was the same: a timid suggestion, a stronger refusal, nothing done. Of 1,600 people who went down on the
Titanic,
only 13 were picked up by the 18 boats that hovered nearby. Boat D hauled in Mr. Hoyt because he planned it that way. Boat 4 rescued eight—not because it rowed back but because it was within reach. Only No. 14 returned to the scene. Why the others didn’t is part of the mystery of why trained men in the identical situation should react so differently.

As the cries died away the night became strangely peaceful. The
Titanic,
the agonizing suspense, was gone. The shock of what had happened, the confusion and excitement ahead, the realization that close friends were lost forever had not yet sunk in. A curiously tranquil feeling came over many of those in the boats.

With the feeling of calm came loneliness. Lawrence Beesley wondered why the
Titanic,
even when mortally wounded, gave everyone a feeling of companionship and security that no lifeboat could replace. In No. 3, Elizabeth Shutes watched the shooting stars and thought to herself how insignificant the
Titanic
’s rockets must have looked, competing against nature. She tried to bury her loneliness by pretending she was back in Japan. Twice she had left there at night too, lonely and afraid, but everything came out all right in the end.

In Boat 4, Miss Jean Gertrude Hippach also watched the shooting stars—she had never seen so many. She recalled a legend that every time there’s a shooting star, somebody dies.

Slowly—very slowly—life in the boats picked up again. Fourth Officer Boxhall started firing off green flares from Boat 2. Somehow this brought people out of their trance, cheered them up too. It was hard to judge distance, and some thought the green flares were being fired by rescue ships on the horizon.

Oars squealed and splashed in the water, voices sang out as the boats hailed one another in the dark. Nos. 5 and 7 tied up together; so did Nos. 6 and 16. Boat 6 borrowed a stoker for extra rowing power. Other boats were drifting apart. Over a radius of four or five miles, 18 little boats wandered about through the night or drifted together on a sea flat as a reservoir. A stoker in No. 13 thought of times he had spent on the Regent’s Park Lake and blurted, “It reminds me of a bloomin’ picnic!”

At times it did seem like a picnic—the small talk, the children underfoot. Lawrence Beesley tried to tuck a blanket under the toes of a crying baby, discovered that he and the lady holding the baby had close mutual friends in Clonmel, Ireland. Edith Russell amused another baby with her toy pig that played the
Maxixe
whenever its tail was twisted. Hugh Woolner found himself feeding cookies to four-year-old Louis Navatril. Mrs. John Jacob Astor lent a steerage woman a shawl to comfort her little daughter whimpering from the cold. The woman thanked Mrs. Astor in Swedish, wrapped the shawl around her little girl.

About this time Marguerite Frolicher was introduced to an important piece of picnic equipment. Still deathly seasick, she was noticed by a kindly gentleman sitting nearby. He pulled out a silver flask with a cup top and suggested a drink of brandy might help. She took the suggestion and was instantly cured. Perhaps it was the brandy, perhaps the novel experience—in all her 22 years, she had never seen a flask before, and she was fascinated.

But no picnic was ever so cold. Mrs. Crosby shivered so hard in No. 5 that Third Officer Pitman wrapped a sail around her. A stoker in No. 6 sat beside Mrs. Brown, his teeth chattering with the cold. Finally she wrapped her sable stole about his legs, tying the tails around his ankles. In No. 16 a man in white pajamas looked so cold he reminded the other passengers of a snowman. Mrs. Charlotte Collyer was so numb she toppled over in No. 14; her hair caught in an oarlock and a big tuft came out by the roots.

The crew did their best to make the women more comfortable. In No. 5 a sailor took off his stockings and gave them to Mrs. Washington Dodge. When she looked up in startled gratitude, he explained, “I assure you, ma’am, they are perfectly clean. I just put them on this morning.”

In No. 13, Fireman Beauchamp shivered in his thin jumpers, but he refused to take an extra coat offered him by an elderly lady, insisting it go to a young Irish girl instead. For the people in this boat there was additional relief from an unexpected quarter. When Steward Ray left his cabin for the last time, he picked up six handkerchiefs lying in his trunk. Now he gave them out, telling people to tie a knot in each corner and turn them into caps. As a result, he recalls with pride, “six heads were crowned.”