Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (50 page)

Winnie Troutt eventually settled in Southern California, first in Beverly Hills, where she married a baker, then in the town of Hermosa Beach, where she would ultimately outlive three husbands. Like many survivors, it was only with the passage of time that she was able to speak of her memories of the sinking. Proud that she was celebrated in Hermosa Beach more for civic activities than for being a Titanic survivor, she passed away in 1984, five months after she turned one hundred.

Bruce Ismay would never be able to live down the whispered accusations of cowardice that followed him almost from the moment the
Carpathia
docked in New York. His accusers had a case: the tradition of a captain being the last to leave a sinking ship had its roots in maritime salvage law, for as long as an owner’s representative remained on board, a ship was not considered derelict, the captain usually being the senior representative. While there was no legal imperative for Ismay to stay behind, there was a moral one—one Captain Smith apparently felt compelled to follow. Public sentiment on both sides of the Atlantic felt that Ismay should have as well. Ismay got what many felt were his just deserts, for less than a year after the disaster, he was forced not only to resign as chairman of the White Star Line, which he had planned on doing anyway, but also to step down from the board of IMM, his fellow directors considering him a liability. He became a virtual recluse, rarely leaving the estate he bought in western Ireland, and died there of complications caused by diabetes in 1937. Mrs. Ismay was often heard to remark, “The Titanic ruined our lives....”

Second Officer Lightoller never did receive a command of his own—nor did any of the surviving officers of the Titanic. He retired from the sea in the early 1920s, but never lost his lust for adventure. In 1940 he took his sixty-foot yacht, the
Sundowner,
to Dunkirk, and despite being bombed and machine gunned by the Luftwaffe, managed to bring back 131 British soldiers. He died peacefully in 1952.

Third Officer Pitman soon decided that his eyesight had deteriorated badly enough that he could no longer be watch qualified, so he joined the Pursers’ Department, still with the White Star Line, at one point serving aboard the Olympic. He would spend another thirty-five years at sea before finally retiring to Pitcombe, England, where he died in December, 1961.

Fourth Officer Boxhall, like all the other surviving officers of the Titanic, never attained command rank. Over the years the accuracy of the final position he had worked out for the Titanic would be questioned by critics, but he defended his position of 41.40 N 50.14 W until the end of his days. His last posting was as First Officer of Cunard’s Aquitania in the 1930s. After his death in 1963, in compliance with his last wishes, his ashes were scattered over the North Atlantic, at the spot that marks the
Titanic’s
grave.

Fifth Officer Lowe served in the Royal Navy in World War I, then never went to sea again. He retired to his native Wales and died quietly in 1944.

Harold Bride never could cope with the notoriety of being the
Titanic’s
surviving wireless operator. In 1913 he left the Marconi Company and vanished, his whereabouts becoming a mystery for the next three quarters of a century. In 1987 an enterprising private investigator from Michigan named David Norris, who was also an amateur radio enthusiast, traced this lost “silent key.” Harold Bride had died in a Glasgow, Scotland, hospital in 1956. He had become a traveling salesman after leaving Marconi, and so successfully concealed his past that even his family did not know who he really was until after his death. No one will ever know what drove Bride to such a self imposed silence.
²

Captain Stanley Lord would spend the rest of his life trying to clear his name. Condemned by both the Senate and the Board of Trade Inquiries for failing to come to the
Titanic’s
aid, within months after the disaster he had become enough of an embarrassment to the Leyland Line that he was asked to resign. Though he would find subsequent employment as a master in years to come, his career had effectively ended, as his commands became progressively smaller and slower. Repeated requests by him and on his behalf to the Board of Trade for an inquiry in order to exonerate him were refused. Over the years his case attracted quite a few defenders, some of them very competent and quite clever. But no manipulation of facts, figures, relative positions, curvature of the earth, mystery ships and the like, all of which Captain Lord’s supporters have utilized to attempt to exonerate him, can get past the simple fact that there was a ship firing distress rockets near the
Californian
in the early hours of April 15, 1912. Regardless of whether it was the Titanic or not, somebody needed help, and Captain Lord refused to go to their aid. He died in 1962, his family to this day still carrying on the fight to have his character rehabilitated.

Arthur Rostron’s career was made by his impeccable seamanship in the morning hours of April 15, 1912. In 1915 he was given the
Mauretania,
at the time the most prestigious command on the North Atlantic run, a position he held until 1926. In 1928 he was made Commodore of the Cunard Line, and retired with full honors in 1931. He died in 1940.

The Californian continued on for the Leyland Line until she took two torpedoes from a German U-boat in the fall of 1917.

The
Carpathia
would meet a similar fate on July 17, 1918.

The Gigantic never left the ways. After the disaster the White Star Line abandoned such pretentious names, so it was as the subdued but dignified Britannic that the third sister was launched in April 1914. Extensive modifications were made to her, including a double hull, bulkheads raised to forty feet above the waterline, and cantilever davits that held lifeboats stacked like the cars on a ferris wheel. World War I broke out before she was completed and she was requisitioned by the Royal Navy as a hospital ship. In September 1916, while steaming off the coast of Greece in the Aegean Sea, she struck a mine that ripped open her first six watertight compartments—a coal dust explosion almost blew her bow off—and she sank in an hour and a half. Only plenty of lifeboats and a warm sea kept the death toll down to thirtyfive. The Britannic was gone before the world ever knew she existed.

Only the Olympic was left to carry on for the White Star Line. Her career in World War I was distinguished, to the point of ramming and sinking the
U-103
in May 1918. She returned to passenger service in 1919, becoming one of the best-loved ships on the North Atlantic. But in 1934 she rammed and sank the Nantucket lightship, killing all seven crewmen aboard that hapless vessel. Taken out of service, she was broken up in 1935, many of her interior fixtures and decorations finding their way into houses and pubs in Liverpool, Southampton, and London.

The Titanic herself will continue her slow decay at the bottom of the North Atlantic. Despite fanciful talk and wild speculation by salvage firms about raising the wreck, it is most likely that corrosion has so weakened the already over-stressed hull that it would never stand the strain of being raised. Ultimately, her deterioration will cause her great bulkheads to collapse and her decks to fall in, reducing the once proud hull to a mass of twisted steel. Within a century all that will remain of the “unsinkable ship” will be a pile of unrecognizable rust. The porcelain, glass, and ceramic pieces strewn about the debris field, along with the ship’s brass fittings, will remain unchanged, alternately covered and revealed by the slowly eddying currents.

But farther to the north, in the Labrador Sea, the icebergs still break off from the Greenland glacier and drift down into the North Atlantic, a force of nature, waiting....