Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (31 page)

A little later, Pusey turned to Sir Cosmo and said, “I suppose you have lost everything?”

“Of course.”

“But you can get more?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we have lost our kit, and the company won’t give us any more. And what’s more, our pay stops from tonight!”

Sir Cosmo, more than a little peeved, decided to end the conversation as. charitably as he could, and snapped, “Very well, I will give you a fiver each to start a new kit!” He was as good as his word, but when the story got out about how Boat 1 failed to pick up swimmers, the promise suddenly appeared to be some sort of payoff, and Sir Cosmo would eventually have to resort to legal action to clear his name.
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One man did go back, and not surprisingly he was Fifth Officer Lowe. The self-described “hard case” was also a man of considerable resource and determination. Once Boat 14 had pulled away from the Titanic, he began rounding up as many of the other boats as he could find. Soon Boats 10 and 12 and Collapsible D were gathered around Lowe’s boat. Standing in the stern of Boat 14, he quickly ordered the boats tied up together, bow to stern, then began transferring his passengers to the other boats and getting some strong backs in Boat 14 to row. When Boat 4 drifted by, Lowe added it to his little flotilla.

Hopping from boat to boat in the darkness wasn’t an easy thing to do, and when an elderly woman with a shawl over her head in Boat 14 seemed a bit too spry, Lowe reached out and yanked the shawl away. A frightened young immigrant (Lowe thought he was another “Italian”; others said he was Irish) stared up at the fifth officer, who said nothing but shoved the man into the bottom of Boat 10 as hard as he could. This incident was also notable for its relative lack of verbal fireworks: Lowe wasn’t a patient man and possessed the full range of a sailor’s vocabulary. It wasn’t surprising that when young Daisy Minahan hesitated in stepping across the gap between two of the boats Lowe suddenly shouted, “Jump, damn you, jump!” Later, some of the women in the lifeboats, shocked at the language Lowe used when he was getting the boats organized, started a rumor that he was drunk. Lowe, a lifelong teetotaler, later found the canard highly amusing.

It took three quarters of an hour before the shuffling of passengers was complete and Boat 14 was finally able to row back to the wreckage. Lowe had originally intended to let the crowd “thin out,” though he never explained exactly what he meant by that, but he had badly overestimated how long people could survive in the frigid water, and by now the cries for help were few and faint. The first person they found was a First Class passenger, W H. Hoyt. A big man, it took the combined efforts of everyone in the boat to bring him aboard. Hoyt was unconscious and bleeding from the nose and mouth—he had been taken down with the wreck, only to be released when the ship began breaking up. But the depth that he had been dragged to had been too great, and Hoyt died within an hour from internal injuries caused by decompression. Other voices called in the darkness, but it was like chasing a will-o-the-wisp, and Boat 14 never seemed to reach those calling for help in time.

Eventually they found Steward John Stewart, who gradually revived after they were able to rub him down and massage his limbs. An Asian man who had lashed himself to a door came floating by, but since he was lying face down with the swell washing over him periodically, Lowe was inclined to pass him by, with the characteristic remark, “What’s the use? He’s dead, likely, and if he isn’t there’s others better worth saving than a Jap!” But then Lowe had second thoughts, and ordered the man brought aboard.

Fifth Officer Lowe was about to be taught a lesson about his prejudices. A few moments after being pulled from the water, the man came to, chattered away in his native tongue at the other men in the boat (though nobody could understand a word he said, not even his name), then stood up, stretched, and began stamping his feet to get his circulation going. Minutes later he had his hands on an oar, pulling hard. “By Jove, I’m ashamed of what I said about the little blighter!” exclaimed a startled Lowe. “I’d save the likes of him six times over if I had the chance!”

But Lowe would not have the chance. He continued looking for another hour but didn’t find anyone else alive. Finally he told his men to lay by their oars, and Boat 14, along with the other boats, drifted in the darkness, riding up and down on the rising swell, twenty boats in the middle of a lonely sea.
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For those left behind in the water, death came quickly. The cold swiftly numbed their hands, their feet, their heads, and they soon lost consciousness. The icy sea sapped the warmth from their bodies until their hearts could take no more and, giving up the unequal struggle, finally stopped. Bodies floated motionless and silent, slowly being swept off by the current, away from the great ice floe and into the open waters of the North Atlantic.

According to the ship’s clock on the
Carpathia’s
bridge, it was almost 3:30 A.M. and she was drawing close to the
Titanic’s
position. Captain Rostron’s heart was sinking: try as he might to keep his hopes up, he knew he was too late.

For a while it hadn’t seemed so. Around 2:40, while talking to Dr. McGhee, Rostron had caught a glimpse of green light—clearly a flare of some sort—on the horizon just off the port bow. “There’s his light!” Rostron exclaimed. “He must still be afloat!” Minutes later, Second Officer Bisset spotted the first iceberg, dimly lit by the reflected light of a star, then a second one, then a third. Carefully timing his helm orders, Rostron began working the Carpathia through the fringes of the ice field—but he never slowed down. Occasionally another flare would be seen, but no sign of the Titanic herself. Hoping to give some hope to those aboard the sinking ship, Rostron began firing colored rockets, interspersed with Cunard Roman candles, every fifteen minutes. Down below the stokers and firemen shoveled coal like they never had before and every plate and rivet in the ship shook with the exertion as the
Carpathia
thundered on. As one crewman later quipped, “The old boat was as excited as any of us.”

Rostron, though, was nearly certain that the Titanic was gone. It had been nearly two hours since Cottam had last heard from her. The last message he received had been at 1:50 and had pleaded, “Come as quickly as possible, old man; the engine room is filling up to the boilers.” Cottam had told Rostron that the
Titanic’s
signals had been getting weaker; with that last message and the ominous silence afterwards, Rostron feared the worst. Those flares, he decided, couldn’t have come from the Titanic herself after all. At 3:50 he rang down to the engine room to “Stand By”; at 4:00 he rang for “All Stop.” The
Carpathia
was at 41.46 N, 50.14 W There was nothing to be seen but darkness: the Titanic was gone.
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As the cries from those left behind in the water slowly faded away and the twenty lifeboats drifted in the rising swell, an odd quiet settled over the survivors. In Boat 2, Fourth Officer Boxhall began firing off green flares. The flares confused people in many of the boats: some thought they came from an approaching steamer, and others used them as beacons to row toward. Soon Boats 5 and 7 came across each other and tied up together; Boats 6 and 16 did the same. Fifth Officer Lowe finally gave up looking for any more survivors, and now Boat 14 rejoined the others. All they could do now was wait for dawn and the rescue ships everyone prayed would arrive.

The survivors did what they could to occupy themselves. It would only be a matter of time, but the magnitude of what they had just seen happen hadn’t yet sunk in. So there was something almost idyllic about Edith Russell entertaining a little child in Boat 11 with her toy pig, the one that played the “Maxixe” when its tail was twisted; or Hugh Woolner in Collapsible C feeding cookies to four-year-old Michel Navatril; or Lawrence Beesley tucking the end of a blanket around the toes of ten-month-old Alden Caldwell, only to discover the woman holding the child, Miss Hilda Slayter, and he had mutual friends in Clonmel, Ireland. In Boat 4, Jean Gertrude Hippach idly watched the night sky; she had never known the stars to shine so bright or had seen so many shooting stars. Unbidden, came the memory of a legend she had once heard: that whenever there was a shooting star, someone dies.

There were some people who, though not necessarily mean-spirited, couldn’t help but bicker. Mrs. J. Stuart White was particularly offended that the stewards in her boat should be smoking cigarettes—she was so put out that she would formally complain to the American inquiry about the stewards smoking, as she put it, “on an occasion like that!” In Boat 3, the women sniped at each other over petty annoyances—nobody ever remembered exactly what. For some strange reason a woman in Boat 11 kept setting off an alarm clock until Maud Slocombe, the
Titanic’s
masseuse, angrily rounded on her and told her to stop.
¹¹

In Boat 6, Quartermaster Robert Hitchens, who was nominally in charge, indulged in a singular display of childishness. The boat’s problems began when Major Peuchen slid down the fall from the
Titanic’s
deck to round out the boat’s crew. Hitchens, who apparently resented Peuchen’s presence and thought that the major would try to take charge of the boat, decided to let everyone know who was in command, and he immediately began ordering Peuchen about. Peuchen, who was used to giving orders, not taking them, demanded that Hitchens turn the tiller over to one of the women and help with rowing the boat. Hitchens would have none of it, telling Peuchen that he was in charge and that Peuchen was to pull at his oar and keep quiet.

With just Lookout Fleet and Peuchen rowing (the only other man in the boat, a Third Class stowaway, had an injured arm), the boat made painfully slow progress away from the Titanic, with Hitchens all the while criticizing them for not pulling harder and claiming the boat would be sucked under when the ship went down. At one point he shouted at Fleet, “Here, you fellow on the starboard side, you’re not putting you oar in the water at the right angle!” Like many a petty tyrant, Hitchens’ newfound authority went to his head, causing him at one point to disobey a direct order from Captain Smith. Just after Boat 6 reached the water, Smith, standing on the port bridge wing, shouted down through his megaphone, “Come alongside the gangway!” Hitchens stared up at the bridge for several minutes, then put the tiller over and said, “No, we are not going back to the boat. It’s our lives now, not theirs.”

After the ship went down, several of the women in the boat, with, predictably, Molly Brown as their leader, began demanding that Hitchens turn the boat around so that they could go back and pick up at least some of those hapless souls struggling in the water. Hitchens refused, giving a lurid description of masses of frenzied swimmers clutching at the sides of the boat, overloading and eventually overturning it. Peuchen added his voice to the protests, but Hitchens shouted him down, saying, “There’s no use going back, ’cause there’s only a lot of stiffs there.” Peuchen lapsed into a hurt silence, and Hitchens told the men to stop rowing and let the boat drift.

This was too much for Molly Brown. Hitchens had settled himself in the stern, pulling the sail around him for warmth, and Mrs. Brown got up, pushed her way passed him, and grabbed the tiller bar. The women, whose husbands and fathers were the “stiffs” Hitchens wanted to leave behind, demanded that Hitchens let them row so they could keep warm. He only wanted to let the boat drift. Mrs. Brown told the women to start rowing, and when Hitchens made a move toward her, she told him if he took one more step she’d throw him overboard. Even Hitchens knew not to call Molly’s bluff, so he sank back under the sail, announcing that all was lost: they had no food, no water, no compass, and no charts. Mrs. Candee pointed out the North Star to him, Mrs. Edgar Meyer called him a coward, and Molly told him to shut up. Hitchens swore at her, and a stoker who had transferred from Boat 16 suddenly spoke up, saying, “I say, don’t you know you’re talking to a lady?”