Voyagers of the Titanic (24 page)

(Nova Scotia Archives)

Part III

L
IFE AND
D
EATH

In a solitude of the sea

Deep from human vanity,

And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

Steel chambers, late the pyres

Of her salamandrine fires,

Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

Over the mirrors meant

To glass the opulent

The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

Jewels in joy designed

To ravish the sensuous mind

Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

Dim moon-eyed fishes near

Gaze at the gilded gear

And query: “What does this vaingloriousness down here?”. . .

Well: while was fashioning

This creature of cleaving wing,

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

Prepared a sinister mate

For her—so gaily great—

A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

Alien they seemed to be;

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history,

Or sign that they were bent

By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one august event,

Till the Spinner of the Years

Said “Now!” And each one hears,

And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

—T
HOMAS
H
ARDY,
“T
HE
C
ONVERGENCE OF THE
T
WAIN,
(L
INES ON THE LOSS OF THE
T
ITANIC
)”

10

Collision

The weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me . . . Then came sudden alarms; hurrying to and fro; trepidation of innumerable fugitives . . . darkness and lights, tempest and human faces; and at last, with a sense that all was lost, female forms; and the features that were all the world to me, and but a moment allowed—and clasped hands; with heartbreaking partings, and everlasting farewells!

—T
HOMAS DE
Q
UINCEY,
C
ONFESSIONS OF AN
O
PIUM
E
ATER

T
he fifth night of the maiden voyage was moonless: a flat sea, an unclouded sky, with stars gleaming in the frosty air. “Grand weather,” said John Poingdestre, a member of the deck crew, but “terribly cold.”
1
After five thirty on Sunday evening, the sharp fall in temperature drove all but the hardiest passengers indoors. It was so chill that smart women in flimsy dresses retreated to their cabins early. Eloise Smith, for example, who had dined with her husband in the Café Parisien, left him at ten thirty and went to bed. Elizabeth Shutes, the American governess of the Graham family, wrote afterward: “Such a biting cold air poured into my state room that I could not sleep, and the air had so strange an odour, as if it came from a clammy cave. I had noticed the same odour in the ice cave on the Eiger glacier.” She lay in her berth shivering until she switched on her electric stove, which threw a cheerful red glow.
2
The Waldorf-Astoria resident Ella White remembered telling Marie Young, the musician with whom she was sharing her cabin, “We must be very near icebergs to have such cold weather.” Her stateroom, too, was chilly. “Everybody knew we were in the vicinity of icebergs,” she said after she reached New York. The ship’s navigation, she added with a mixture of anger and despondency, “was a careless, reckless thing. It seems almost useless to speak of it.”
3

Captain Smith was sufficiently concerned about ice to leave the Wideners’ dinner early at nine o’clock and return to the bridge. Murdoch, who replaced Lightoller as officer on watch an hour later, had no authority from Smith to reduce speed, although it was clear that the ship had entered an ice zone. The lookouts were told “to keep a sharp look-out for all ice,”
4
but no extra lookouts were posted. Fleet and Lee, the lookouts in the crow’s nest, knew the risks, and were straining to see. At eleven forty Fleet glimpsed a dark object in the ship’s path, rang the crow’s nest bell three times (the warning for “object dead ahead”), and telephoned the bridge: “Iceberg right ahead.”

Murdoch ordered Quartermaster Hichens to turn hard-a-starboard; then he ordered the engine room to reverse engines. He was trying to swing the ship’s bow to port so that it would miss the iceberg and then to swing the stern back to starboard so that it too would miss. But the ship was traveling at twenty-two and a half knots, covering thirty-eight feet per second, and the iceberg was about five hundred yards away. For more than twenty seconds the bow continued to plough straight ahead. Murdoch should have left the engines full ahead—not reverse—to make a sharp turn. Moreover, all officers on Atlantic liners knew that ramming an iceberg was preferable to sideswiping it: a ship with its bows buckled by a collision could remain afloat and reach port under its own steam. If Murdoch had steered the ship headfirst into the iceberg, the prow would have held and the vulnerable side of the ship been protected. Yet Murdoch’s impulse was to slow the ship and turn it away, just as a man has an instinct to flinch and turn his head aside before being punched. It was a fatal impulse.

To Fleet it seemed that a collision had been averted. The liner had swung to starboard at the last moment and seemed to clear. Four saloon stewards were sitting in the first-class dining room discussing their passengers when they heard a grinding sound. James Johnson thought the ship had lost a propeller blade: “another Belfast trip,” said someone, thinking of the repairs, but a man who went down to the engines returned looking worried: “It is a bit hot.”
5
Third Officer Herbert Pitman was woken by a sound resembling “the ship coming to anchor—the chain running out over a windlass.”
6
He lay in his bunk for a few minutes wondering why the ship was anchoring, and lit his pipe meditatively. Lookout George Symons had gone to his bunk after being relieved by Fleet and Lee. “What awakened me was a grinding sound on her bottom. I thought at first she had lost her anchor and chain, and it was running along her bottom.”
7
Another off-duty lookout, William Lucas, had been in the mess room playing nap (a simple card game in which whoever bids the highest number of tricks chooses trumps), but stopped just before the collision “because I was broke.” As he left the mess room he felt “a hard shock,” which “very nearly sent me off my feet.” There was a grating sound, he added, “like a ship running up on gravel, a crushing noise.”
8
Down below in a stokehold, fireman George Beauchamp heard a sound like “the roar of thunder.”
9
Coal slid in one bunker and briefly trapped trimmer George Cavell.
10

Murdoch was unsure if the ship had been damaged but, using an automatic switch, shut the doors between the sixteen watertight compartments. Firemen and stokers near boiler room 6, where there had been a loud bang when the starboard side of the ship broke, scrambled through the watertight doors as they shut, or scurried up escape ladders to a higher deck. Smith appeared on the bridge, ordered the engines to stop, and sent his fourth officer, Boxhall, to inspect the damage. Many passengers noticed when the ship stopped: Renée Harris said that her dresses on their hangers in the wardrobe stopped swaying. Emily Ryerson felt the stilling of the engines and questioned her bedroom steward, Walter Bishop. “There’s talk of an iceberg, ma’am,” he replied, “and they have stopped, not to run over it.”
11

Boxhall soon reported that the mail room on F deck was awash: everyone knew that this meant the ship was badly holed. Ismay arrived in carpet slippers with pajamas peeping from underneath his trousers and was told his liner had hit an iceberg. The ship’s designer, Thomas Andrews, accompanied Smith on a tour of inspection. They were aghast to find that six forward watertight compartments had been breached as the iceberg bumped past. Three cargo holds and two boiler rooms as well as the forepeak had been ripped into below the waterline. Andrews and Smith recognized that with six holed compartments, the bow would be sunk by the weight of seawater pouring in and that the ocean would pour over the top of each successive bulkhead in turn. The closure of the watertight doors was futile. Andrews estimated that the ship would survive for at best two hours before sinking.

Smith visited the Marconi cabin before leaving on his inspection. The ship had struck an iceberg, he told Phillips and Bride. They should prepare to transmit messages summoning help, but not send them until he had checked the damage. Ten minutes later he returned and told Phillips to transmit CQD, the international call for help. At twelve fifteen on April 15, half an hour after the accident, the first distress call was sent. CQ was Marconi code for “all stations,” and D indicated an emergency call: CQD was known in slang as “Come Quick, Danger.” SOS had been introduced in 1908 as an international distress call because it was easier to transmit in Morse code than CQD. It was supposed to denote “Save Our Souls.” At twelve thirty a steamer loaded with steerage passengers making for Canada, the
Mount Temple,
received the CQD and went to the coordinates given by the
Titanic,
but these were inaccurate and the ship played no part in the rescue. The wireless man on the nearest ship, the freighter
Californian,
had switched off his Marconi apparatus forty-five minutes before Phillips sent his first message. The
Californian
captain, Stanley Lord, has been heavily condemned for ignoring the distress rockets that his crewmen later saw fired on Smith’s orders. At twelve forty-five Phillips finally heard from the small liner
Carpathia,
fifty-eight miles away: at full speed it would take four hours to reach the
Titanic
’s calculated position.

At Smith’s order, issued after he had returned from his inspection with Andrews, the boatswain piped “all hands up and get the lifeboats ready.”
12
It is often said that this order was issued at twelve twenty-five and that Smith’s vacillation was culpable; but it is reasonable to surmise that the order was made after he told the Marconi men to begin sending distress calls around twelve fifteen. Smith was, however, so anxious to avert panic, and shaken by his knowledge that there were insufficient lifeboats, that he did not instill enough urgency into their loading. Initially, passengers doubted the gravity of their danger, so that many refused to enter the lifeboats, which left half-empty. Four hundred more people might have survived if the lifeboats had been filled efficiently.

Passengers before the collision had disported in delusive security. Lady Duff Gordon, with a cabin on A deck costing £58 18s, pictured the first-class decks: “A great liner stealing through the vast loneliness of the Atlantic, the sky jewelled with myriads of stars overhead, and a thin little wind blowing cold and even colder straight from the frozen ice fields, tapping its warning of approaching danger on the cosily shuttered portholes of the cabins, causing the look-out man to strain his eyes anxiously into the gloom. Inside this floating palace warmth, lights and music, the flutter of cards, the hum of voices, the gay lilt of a German waltz—the unheeding sounds of a small world bent on pleasure. Then disaster, swift and overwhelming, turning all into darkness and chaos, the laughing voices changed into shuddering wails of despair—a story of horror unparalleled in the annals of the sea.”
13

Eloise Smith had left her husband, Lucien, playing bridge in the Café Parisien with three Frenchmen: the sculptor Paul Chevré, the aviator Pierre Marechal, and Fernand Omont, a cotton broker. They were not nervous gamblers playing for small stakes, like the lookout man Lucas with his game of nap in the mess room, but trenchant men who redoubled bids, trumped aces, and, as they soon proved, appraised their chances well. A mass of ice crunched up against the portholes. The Frenchmen hastened on deck. “Do not be afraid,” an officer said. “We are merely cutting a whale in two.”
14
In the first-class smoking room, Henry Blank, William Greenfield, and Alfred Nourney, the bogus Baron von Drachstedt, made up another card game. Archie Butt sat with Harry Widener, Clarence Moore, and William Carter nearby. Spencer Silverthorne, buyer for a department store in Saint Louis, was reading a novel about Wyoming cattle ranchers lynching rustlers. The lupine moneymen Hugh Woolner and Håkan Björnström-Steffansson were using the smoking room as their lair, too. “We felt a rip that gave a sort of twist to the whole room,” Woolner reported. “Everybody stood up and a number of men walked out rapidly through the swinging doors on the port side, and ran along . . . guessing what it might be, and one man called out, ‘an iceberg has passed astern.’”
15

Lower down in the ship, on Sunday night, the chief second-class steward, John Hardy, had closed the public rooms and extinguished most lights at 11
P.M
. In a second-class berth on D deck costing £13, Lawrence Beesley felt a change in the movement of the ship. “As I read in the quietness of the night, broken only by the muffled sound that came to me through the ventilators of stewards talking and moving along the corridors, when nearly all the passengers were in their cabins, some asleep in bed, others undressing, and others only just down from the smoking-room and still discussing many things, there came what seemed to me nothing more than an extra heave of the engines and a more than usually obvious dancing motion of the mattress on which I sat. Nothing more than that.”
16

Most third-class passengers were already in their berths, for their saloons were closed after ten. Victor Sunderland was a teenage Londoner who had paid £8 1s for a berth on G deck. He was traveling to join an uncle in Cleveland, Ohio; later he became a plumber. He and his cabinmates were smoking in their bunks near the bow. He still wore his trousers, though his jacket hung on a rack. After hearing the jar of the collision, which he likened to the sound of coal falling on an iron plate, he and some others made for the main deck to investigate. A steward sent them back, saying that nothing was amiss. Sunderland smoked more cigarettes in his bunk until water began seeping under the cabin door.
17

Passengers drew different analogies to describe the sound and feel of the collision. In second class, the missionary’s wife Sylvia Caldwell imagined a large dog shaking a young kitten in its mouth. The impact sounded to Emma Bucknell in first class like a “terrific peal of thunder mixed in with many violent explosions.”
18
Ella White was sitting on her bed, stretching to turn off her bedside light at the moment of the collision: “It was just as though we went over about a thousand marbles. There was nothing terrifying about it at all.”
19
George Harder, a young Brooklyn manufacturer honeymooning with his wife, felt the ship shake, then a “rumbling, scraping noise.” Harder went to investigate on deck, where he met Dick Bishop and Jack Astor. People said reassuringly, “Oh, it will be only a few hours before we are on our way again.”
20
In his first-class stateroom, Norman Chambers heard a sound like “jangling chains whipping along the side of the ship,” and was sent by his wife to investigate. At the top of a stairway leading to the mail-sorting room, he found two clerks “wet to their knees, who had just come up from below, bringing their registered mailbags.”
21