The Other Side of the Night (6 page)

Not all captains enjoyed the social side of their responsibilities, however. Captain William Turner, who was the first captain of both the
Lusitania
and the
Mauretania
, cordially detested most passengers, regarding them as overblown bores and busybodies, and he vastly preferred the company of his officers and the surroundings of his bridge to that of the Captain’s Table in the First Class Dining Saloon. Because Turner’s skills as a mariner made him too valuable to lose, Cunard created the position of Staff Captain, a “second” captain, qualified in every way as a ship’s master, who would relieve Turner of some of the burden of the administrative details of the ship’s operations, as well as take over the duty of entertaining the passengers. Apparently it was a successful solution all around, for the position of Staff Captain became a permanent fixture on Cunard’s larger ships, even though most Captains found presiding over their own table at dinner to be one of the more pleasant aspects of their job.

The
Carpathia
, however, was not large enough to warrant a Staff Captain, and in any event, Arthur Rostron seemed to enjoy the social side of command as much as any ship’s master. Only rarely would a member of the British, Italian or Austrian aristocracy appear on the
Carpathia
’s passenger lists—for the most part their ilk preferred the glamour of the
Lusitania
or
Mauretania
, White Star’s
Olympic
, or the fast German liners. Consequently, the men who, along with their wives, occupied the captain’s table on the
Carpathia
would be men from the world of business, manufacturing or trades, men with whom Rostron could easily relate, who had attained their affluence and social station through intelligence, hard work, and perseverance.

On the voyage in April 1912, the first two days out of New York were utterly uneventful, as was expected, and the passengers and crew of the
Carpathia
settled into a comfortable routine as the ship made her steady progress eastward. The weather was brisk, not particularly warm for April, but not unbearably cold. It would get warmer as the
Carpathia
made her way southward past the Azores and on through Gibraltar into the Med. Captain Rostron knew that the previous winter had been rather mild in the Arctic, and as a result the amount of ice which was drifting down into the North Atlantic was considerably heavier than usual. However, that was not a worry for him or the
Carpathia
, as her course would take her more than eighty miles south of the westbound routes, where the ice might be more of a hazard.

Sunday morning, April 14, was a little different than the previous two days. For the crew, after breakfast was over, there came a faithfully followed Sunday ritual of a passenger ship at sea: the Captain’s Inspection. It was an impressive sight with Captain Rostron leading the way, followed by the Department Heads—Chief Officer, Chief Engineer Johnston, Chief Steward Hughes, Purser Brown—all in their best uniforms. From top deck to bottom, bow to stern, and through all the public rooms, they visited every accessible part of the ship. The inevitable small deficiencies were found—a spotted carpet in one of the lounges, a small spill of oil in one of the engineering spaces, a crewman’s bunk or locker not quite properly squared away. It is as ironclad an unwritten law in the merchant marine as it is in the military that there is no such thing as a perfect inspection. However, of serious deficiencies there were none.

Next came the Boat Drill. As outlined by the Board of Trade, Boat Drill only required a ship’s officers to supervise a picked crew, mustered beforehand, to uncover a designated lifeboat on each side of the ship, swing it out over the ship’s side, and climb aboard. Some officers would require the crewmen to examine the oars, mast, sail, and rigging that were stowed in each boat, and account for the required kegs of water and tins of biscuit. Others weren’t so demanding. Once this was accomplished, the crewmen would climb out of the boat, swing it back inboard, pull the cover back on and return to work. On the
Carpathia,
as on almost every other liner on the North Atlantic, only the crew had assigned boat stations, and these were merely assignments telling the crewmen which boats they were supposed to assist in loading and lowering. As for the passengers, there were no lifeboat assignments of any kind.

At noon, on Sunday as on every day, the captain and his officers gathered on the starboard bridge wing, each with a sextant in hand. They would take a series of sun sightings to work out the ship’s precise position, which would then be recorded in the ship’s log, along with the distance covered in the previous twenty-four hours. Like most of her contemporaries, the
Carpathia
held a sweepstakes for the passengers to wager on the day’s run. Once the noon sun-sightings were taken and the distance known, the ship’s siren blew and those passengers who had placed wagers would gather in the First Class Lounge to await the results. On the larger express liners, the winnings in the sweepstakes could amount to several hundred pounds (or dollars) but that of the
Carpathia
was, of course, far more modest. Still, it was always exciting, particularly for a passage which promised to have very little if anything in the way of other excitement.

In the wireless office, which was located in the after superstructure, above the Second Class smoking room, young Harold Cottam was being kept quite busy. Just 21 years old, Cottam had been the youngest graduate ever of the Marconi School, having completed the course at the age of 17. He had to wait almost three years before having the chance to go to sea, as regulations forbid any operator younger than 21 to be posted to a ship, though sometimes the officials would look the other way when a particularly talented but under-age applicant came forward; in the meantime he worked mainly as a shore operator in Liverpool. Then came his first posting at sea, aboard the White Star Line’s
Medic
, on the Australian run. After four months on the
Medic
, he joined the
Carpathia
in February, and quickly became comfortable aboard her, for Rostron was a good skipper who had a better grasp of the realities of wireless than many of his contemporaries.

Wireless, while becoming more reliable with every passing year, was still a far-from-perfected technology in 1912. Ranges were still limited, the performance of some sets was marginal, and there was a shortage of skilled operators; but the rapidly growing number of conventions and etiquette were adding a much needed measure of discipline to wireless communications. What was most noticeably lacking was standardization—there were a half dozen types of equipment; two different Morse codes, American and International; no regulations concerning the hours wireless watch was to be kept; and no definite order in the ships’ crew organizations as to where the wireless operator belonged. This was due, of course, to the fact that the wireless operators did not actually work for the shipping line that owned their particular vessel, but were actually employees of British Marconi.

Another problem was the sheer volume of work which sometimes beset the operators. Passengers seemed to take an almost childish delight in sending messages to friends and families from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. As a result, a good deal of any Marconi man’s time was taken up with private messages that had nothing to do with the ship itself, mostly of the “Having a wonderful time, wish you were here” variety. These messages had to be handled, since the passengers were paying for the service, but they tended to cause the work to get piled up, and occasionally interfered with traffic important to the safe navigation of the ship. This could present a problem on a smaller vessel like the
Carpathia,
which only had one operator, who typically worked a fifteen- to eighteen-hour shift, taking his meals at his desk, other breaks coming irregularly and infrequently. Adding to the problem was that there were no set, uniform procedures for handling messages unless they were specifically addressed to a ship’s captain. Otherwise, Cottam, like his colleagues throughout the merchant fleet, took care of any incoming messages as best he could.

This Sunday was no exception. In addition to the usual spate of passengers’ messages, there was an unusual number of reports of ice being sent by ships on the northern track. Cottam listened intently, copying down anything that might prove useful for the
Carpathia
, periodically taking the messages up to the bridge when there seemed to be a lull in the traffic. Cottam, like most of his fellow Marconi men, knew little of navigation, so he used his discretion in regard to what went to the bridge and what did not, but he wisely preferred to err on the side of caution.

At about 7:00 p.m. that evening, Cottam heard directly from his friend Jack Phillips, who was the senior operator on board the new White Star liner
Titanic
. Phillips was sending a ship-to-ship message from one of the
Titanic
’s First Class passengers to a Mrs. Marshall aboard the
Carpathia
. The
Titanic
had been silent for most of the afternoon—Cottam suspected it was equipment problems—and Phillips didn’t seem inclined toward much small talk, as fellow operators would sometimes engage in, so Cottam sat back and listened as Phillips sent message after message to the Marconi station at Cape Race. Phillips would send a message, wait for one minute to give operators on other ships a chance to start sending messages of their own, and if none began, would tap out another. It was during these breaks that Cottam picked up ice warnings sent from the liner
Mesaba
and the cargo ship
Californian
.

It was just before 10:00 p.m. that Cottam gathered up his collection of accumulated messages and went forward to the bridge, where he found Captain Rostron, First Officer Dean, and Second Officer Bissett preparing for the change of watch. Rostron took the messages and thanked Cottam, who then returned to the wireless office. Quickly reading the messages, Rostron paid particular attention to the ice warnings, noting that all of the positions given were well to the north of the
Carpathia
’s course. Turning to Bissett, he remarked with a smile, “Wonderful thing, wireless, isn’t it?”

He would soon find out just how wonderful it was.

Though the cachet of the North Atlantic run accrued to the big passenger lines–-the power and glamor of Cunard, White Star, or Germany’s Norddeutscher-Lloyd and Hamburg-Amerika, the handsome ships of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, the homeliness of Holland America, or the elegance of the French Line–-most of the real work of the shipping world was done by the multitude of ships that sailed under the flags of the smaller, less glamorous shipping companies that for more than a hundred years, from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, ran regular services across the North Atlantic. These were ships that would never compete for the Blue Ribband, never be acclaimed for their opulence or their excesses (although some of them were quite luxurious in their own right), or vie for the title of “the largest ship in the world.” Nonetheless, the role they played and the need they filled sustained the lifeline of commerce and trade which was so vital to the two continents which they connected.

In the summer of 1901 one of these small, undistinguished ships was ordered by the Leyland Line, a company which prospered in carrying cargo rather than passengers. Leyland commissioned the Caledon Shipbuilding and Engineering Company Ltd., of Dundee, Scotland, to construct the new vessel. Laid down with the builder’s hull number 159, the new ship was something of a point of pride for Caledon Shipbuilding, and a milestone in the firm’s effort to grow into a genuine competitor to the large Clydeside shipyards, as she was the largest ship yet ordered from the yard.

The new vessel would have a displacement of 6,223 gross registered tons, with a length of 447 feet, a beam of 52 feet and a designed draft of 30 feet. She would be powered by a single reciprocating engine, turning a single screw, with a designed speed of 13½ knots. While typical of hundreds of British merchant ships that traversed the world’s sealanes, these were not particularly impressive figures when compared to the later behemoths that would take to the North Atlantic, or even by the standards of the day. (The largest ship in the world in 1901 was White Star’s
Celtic
with a length of 700 feet, and a displacement of 21,035 tons.)

In appearance, too, No. 159 would be much like a thousand other freighters already crisscrossing the North Atlantic, her aesthetics dictated by function. Beginning at her old-fashioned up-and-down stem, she was built with a steep-sided, almost sheerless hull, her flush weather-deck running unbroken from bow to stern. Her superstructure sat squarely amidships, taking up barely a quarter of her length. Atop it sat a quartet of spindly ventilators, above them looming a single funnel, painted in the salmon-pink and black of the Leyland Line. There were four masts, which also doubled as kingposts for handling cargo. Altogether an unremarkable ship, Hull No. 159 would be almost stereotypical of the ocean-going freighter of the early 20th century.

The stereotype would extend to more than just her size, configuration, and purpose. As designed, she would require a crew of roughly fifty stokers, trimmers, assistant engineers, and deckhands. With more than half the space within her hull given over to cargo, and nearly a third taken up by her boilers and engine room, there would be precious little space in which her crewmen would live. The crew was “comfortably housed below the shelter deck forward,” as the builders euphemistically described what was nothing more than the traditional forecastle, or “fo’c’s’le.”