Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (16 page)

“Already closed, sir.”

“All stop.”

“Aye, sir.” Murdoch turned to the engine room telegraph and rang down for the engines to stop.

Just then Fourth Officer Boxhall came up to the bridge, and together with Smith and Murdoch, stepped out onto the starboard bridge wing, where for several seconds they peered vainly into the night trying to spot the iceberg. Stepping back inside, Smith sent Boxhall on a quick inspection of the ship. After just a few minutes Boxhall returned, saying he could find no damage below decks. His report didn’t satisfy Captain Smith, who told Boxhall, “Go and find the carpenter and get him to sound the ship.” As Boxhall ran down the bridge ladder, the carpenter, Jim Hutchinson, pushed past him on his way up to the bridge, blurting out, “She’s making water fast!”

Right behind Hutchinson came one of the postal clerks, Iago Smith, calling out, “The mail hold is filling rapidly!”

Boxhall worked his way down to the mail hold and for a minute or two watched the other four mail clerks, standing almost knee deep in water already, snatching letters from sorting racks and stuffing them into bags, while around them floated other bags of mail, already full. Boxhall rushed back to the bridge to report what he had seen. Chief Officer Wilde appeared and asked Captain Smith if it was serious. After hearing Boxhall’s report, Smith turned to Wilde and said, “Certainly. It is more than serious.” He asked for Thomas Andrews to be brought to the bridge, then turned and checked the commutator, a device showing if a ship is listing to port or starboard, or down by the bow or stern. At that moment the commutator showed the Titanic listing five degrees to starboard and two degrees down by the head. Smith stared at it for some seconds, then muttered, “Oh, my God!” so softly that only Boxhall heard him.
¹⁹

Next to appear was Ismay. He had hurriedly thrown a suit on over his pajamas and put on a pair of carpet slippers before setting out for the bridge. Without preamble Smith told Ismay the ship had collided with an iceberg. “Do you think the ship is seriously damaged?” Ismay asked.

“I’m afraid she is.”

Smith was waiting anxiously for Thomas Andrews. After dinner Andrews had returned to his cabin, A-36, to go over his notes for the day. When the call came from Captain Smith, Andrews had been poring over blueprints and diagrams of the Promenade Deck—he hadn’t even noticed the collision—as he worked out the details of converting the writing room into more staterooms. It was a mildly amusing problem, since, as Walter Lord put it, “The writing room had originally been planned partly as a place where the ladies could retire after dinner. But this was the twentieth century and the ladies just wouldn’t retire. Clearly, a smaller room would do.”
²⁰

Moments after Andrews arrived on the bridge, he and Captain Smith were making their own inspection of the damage. Working their way deep into the ship, using mostly accesses and corridors used only by the crew to attract less attention, they found the forward cargo holds flooded, the mailroom awash, and the squash court floor covered with water. As they made their way back to the bridge they passed through the A Deck foyer, their faces set in expressions of inscrutability. Once on the bridge, Andrews reviewed the situation: the forepeak and both forward holds were flooded, the mailroom was awash, Boiler Room No. 6 was flooded to a depth of fourteen feet, and water was entering Boiler Room No. 5. For nearly three hundred feet, as the iceberg bumped and ground along the
Titanic’s
side, seams had been split, plating bent, and rivets popped: the first six of the
Titanic’s
sixteen watertight compartments had been opened to the sea, all in the ten seconds’ time it took the berg to brush by.
²¹

Down in the bowels of the ship Andrews’s diagnosis would have come as no surprise. Fireman George Kemish recalled that the ship was “a good job ... not what we were accustomed to in old ships, slogging our guts out and nearly roasted by heat.” The firemen only had to keep the furnaces full, not bothering with rakes or slicer bars, so the men were taking it easy. Fireman James Barrett was talking to Assistant Second Engineer James Hesketh when they heard a thud, the screech of tearing metal, and the clanging of a warning bell. A red warning light began flashing above the watertight door. Barrett and Hesketh barely had time to take this all in when with a tremendous bang the whole starboard side of the ship seemed to split open. The sea thundered in, and the two men barely hardly had time to leap through the rapidly closing watertight door into Boiler Room No. 5.

Room No. 5 had its own problems. A gash two feet long extended past the bulkhead dividing No. 5 from No. 6, and water was pouring in. One of the stokers was digging himself out of a bunker the impact had knocked him into, while the rest of the crew in Boiler Room No. 5, along with Barrett and Hesketh, began to rig hoses and start pumps in a valiant effort to keep the water at a manageable level.

Farther astern in the other four boiler rooms and the engine room the rumor quickly started that the Titanic had run aground off the banks of Newfoundland. This was quickly quelled when an off-duty trimmer came around, announcing, “Blimey! We’ve struck an iceberg!”
²²

Far above, in Andrews’s cabin, A-36, builder and captain stood over a structural diagram of the ship. Andrews quickly outlined the problem for Captain Smith. All of the ship’s six forward watertight compartments were open to the sea. The Titanic could float with any two of her sixteen watertight compartments flooded—in an extreme case she could actually float with four of her forward compartments flooded. But at this point a design flaw emerged: the first two watertight bulkheads extended only as high as D Deck, as did the last five, while the middle eight only carried up to E Deck. With the first five—or in this case six—compartments breached, the weight of the incoming water would pull the ship’s head down until the water level in the flooded compartments rose above the top of the bulkheads; the water in the fifth compartment would spill over into the sixth, pulling the ship down farther until the water in the sixth compartment spilled over into the seventh, and so on, until the ship inevitably sank.

Smith was stunned. After forty uneventful years at sea the worst nightmare of a captain’s career had come for him. How impossibly bitter must have been the memory of six years earlier, when on the bridge of the then-new Adriatic he had told reporters “I cannot imagine any accident happening to this vessel. I cannot conceive of any disaster causing this ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.” Now, he was making his last voyage before retiring, in command of what was supposed to be the largest, safest ship in the world, and the
Titanic’s
builder was telling him that she had at the most an hour and a half before she sank.

Even more unbearable must have been the knowledge shared by Smith, Andrews, and a handful of the officers on board: that night the Titanic was carrying 2,207 passengers and crew, yet because of the hopelessly outdated Board of Trade regulations there were lifeboats for only 1,178 of them. Andrews’s news was not only the ruin of Smith’s career, it was a death sentence for half the people on board the ship.
²³

Captain Smith and Thomas Andrews had just become the unwitting victims of the North Atlantic shipping companies’ incredible run of good luck. It had been forty years since there had been a passenger ship sunk with a serious loss of life, the last being the Atlantic, which struck a submerged rock and sank, with the loss of 491 lives, in 1872. In 1880 the Guion Line’s Arizona had struck an iceberg head-on in a dense fog, but despite the damage done by the shock of the impact, the
Arizona’s
collision bulkhead had held, and she limped into St. John’s, Newfoundland, her crumpled bow apparently mute testimony to the ability of the big ships to stand up to icebergs.

Compounding the folly of that assumption was the sinking of the White Star Line’s own Republic in 1906, which created in the public’s mind a wholly erroneous concept of the role lifeboats were meant to play in an accident at sea. Rammed and mortally damaged by the Florida, the Republic had remained afloat for nearly thirty-six hours, during which a half dozen other vessels came to her assistance. This provided the ship’s crew with more than ample time to load the
Republic’s
passengers into the boats and, working in relays, transfer them safely to the surrounding vessels. When the Republic finally sank, the only lives lost had been those unfortunate souls killed in the collision. It had never occurred to anyone at the time that all of the Republic’s boats combined could hold only about half of the passengers and crew on board at the time: if the ship had foundered within an hour or two of the collision, the only hope of safety would have been those inadequate lifeboats, and more than five hundred people would have been left on her decks to drown
²⁴

With the knowledge that he was facing exactly such a situation, Captain Smith returned to the bridge. At 12:05 A.M. he told Chief Officer Wilde to uncover the lifeboats. Boxhall had already gone to the officers’ quarters to rouse Second Officer Lightoller and Third Officer Pitman; Murdoch was organizing the muster of the passengers. Slowly the alarm began to spread through the ship.

—Hosea 4:l4

 

 

 

SOME PEOPLE DIDN’T NEED TO BE AWAKENED. WHEN FOURTH OFFICER Boxhall burst into the quarters of Second Officer Lightoller, he found him lying on his bunk, wide awake. “You know we have struck an iceberg!” Boxhall exclaimed.

“I know we have struck something,” Lightoller replied. At the time of the collision he was asleep in his bunk, but he woke with a start and ran bare-foot out onto the Boat Deck to see what had happened. Everything seemed quiet, although Lightoller noticed Captain Smith and First Officer Murdoch standing on the starboard bridge wing, staring astern into the darkness.

Lightoller returned to his cabin and lay back down in his bunk, then noticed that the ship’s engines had stopped. Well, he decided, whatever it was that was wrong, he was off duty, and it wasn’t his business to worry about. (Lightoller was probably still miffed about his supersession as first officer.) He lay in that pleasant twilight between sleep and wakefulness for nearly a half hour before he heard a thunderous roar overhead, as the funnels began venting excess steam, which brought him fully awake. Moments later Fourth Officer Boxhall came in announcing the collision, adding, “The water is up to F Deck in the mailroom.” Lightoller pulled a sweater and a pair of trousers over his pajamas while Boxhall went off to rouse Third Officer Pitman.
¹

Pitman, like Lightoller, had been lying in his bunk at the time of the collision. He had heard a sound like “the chain running over the windlass” but wasn’t much concerned by it. However, he was due to go on watch at midnight, so he got up, looked out his cabin door, and seeing nothing unusual, closed the door, lit his pipe, and began getting dressed. He was nearly finished when Boxhall came in and told him about the iceberg. Drawing on a coat, Pitman followed Boxhall out onto the Boat Deck, where he ran into Sixth Officer Moody, who told him there was a large amount of ice in the forward well deck. Pitman made his way forward and stood at the well deck railing for some minutes, watching some of the Third Class passengers playing in the ice, kicking blocks of it back and forth and starting iceball fights. Pitman then went up to the fo’c’s’le, found no sign of damage, and started back across the well deck, heading for the bridge. Halfway there he spotted a group of firemen trooping up from below, their bags slung over their shoulders.

“What is the matter?” Pitman asked.

“Water is coming in our place,” one of the firemen answered.

“That is funny,” Pitman said, chuckling. Then he looked down the No. 1 hatchway and saw seawater pouring in at the bottom of No. 1 hold; suddenly it wasn’t very funny anymore.
²

Pitman’s experience was similar to one Trimmer Samuel Hemming had a few minutes earlier. While lying in his bunk, off duty, he heard an odd hissing sound coming from the forepeak. Getting up, he went forward to investigate the noise, which seemed to be coming from the forepeak chain locker. There he found the chain locker hatch forced upward against its stops, air rushing out from underneath it, forced out by the tremendous pressure of the in-rushing sea below. Just then Chief Officer Wilde put his head around the hawse pipe, and seeing Hemming there called out to him.

“What
is
that, Hemming?”

“The air is escaping from the forepeak tank, sir, but the storeroom is quite dry.”
³

For most of the passengers aboard the Titanic it was almost as if nothing had happened. In the First Class Smoking Room, Steward James Witter went off to learn whatever he could about that odd shudder, but his departure was barely noticed by the two tables of bridge players. Lieutenant Steffanson settled a little deeper into his armchair with his hot lemonade, while Spencer Silverthorne remained engrossed in Owen Wister’s novel, The
Virginian.

A few passengers had noticed an odd detail or two. Mr. and Mrs. Henry B. Harris were playing double Canfield in their cabin on C Deck. Mrs. Harris’s broken arm had left her in considerable pain and feeling quite fatigued, so her heart wasn’t really in the game. As she idly watched her dresses swaying on their hangers in rhythm to the ship’s engines, she noticed that they had suddenly stopped moving.

One deck below, in Second Class, Lawrence Beesley lay in his bunk reading. Abruptly the gentle motion of the mattress ceased. On B Deck Jack Thayer had just called good night to his parents and was buttoning up his pajama jacket when he felt the breeze through the half-opened porthole in his cabin drop off, then stop altogether.