Voyagers of the Titanic (29 page)

The ship’s forecastle was sliding under the ocean as D was lowered. This last lifeboat to be launched was less than a hundred yards away when its occupants saw the liner sink. In addition to Quartermaster Arthur Bright, steward John Hardy, and Seaman Lucas, there were two young Finns (whom Hardy mistook for Lebanese “chattering the whole night in their strange language”
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); Erna Andersson, heading for New York; and a pregnant bride, Maria Backström, whose husband and two brothers were left behind and perished. The others were the young Swedish woman Berta Nilsson, traveling out with her fiancé, who was a cook in Missoula, Montana—he was lost; two of the three Lamson sisters, Charlotte Appleton and Caroline Brown (their sister, Malvina Cornell, had previously escaped in lifeboat 2); Lily Futrelle, whose husband stayed on board and died; Renée Harris, wife of the producer who was left on board and lost; Maybelle Thorne, mistress of George Rosenshine, who was left on board and lost; another first-class passenger, Jane Hoyt; Joseph Duquemin, a young mason from Guernsey heading for Albion, New York, who claimed to have been hauled from the ocean but had surely secreted himself; three Irishwomen in their early twenties, Annie Jermyn and Bridget O’Driscoll, both from Ballydehob, County Cork, and Mary Kelly, from Castlepollard, County Westmeath; and three small boys: the Navrátil brothers and a four-year-old Lebanese boy called Michael Joseph.

The foregoing boarded D at the boat deck, but three men boarded it later by more dramatic means. Jane Hoyt’s husband, Frederick Hoyt, a broker on Broadway with houses in Manhattan and Connecticut and a distinguished Long Island yachtsman, dived into the ocean once the lifeboat was afloat and climbed aboard. He sat there, wringing wet, next to Hardy, helping him row. Two other men also joined D after it had been lowered from the boat deck—Hugh Woolner and his young shipboard acquaintance Björnström-Steffansson—and their story merits analysis.

Woolner himself told the story publicly as a witness to the U.S. Senate inquiry on the sinking. The veneer that he put on his actions was devised to stop any surmise that his survival had been unmanly. He was a public school and Cambridge man, trying to revive his credit and reputation after his bankruptcy, and needed to show that although he had saved himself, he was as fine a gentleman as Jack Astor or Archie Butt. After consigning Helen Candee to lifeboat 6, Woolner said that he had looked to see how else he might help. “I did what a man could. It was a very distressing scene—the men parting from their wives.” As he and Björnström-Steffansson helped to load lifeboats, they saw no jostling of women by men until collapsible D was hitched onto the davits. “While that boat was being loaded,” Woolner testified, “there was a sort of scramble on the starboard side, and I looked around and I saw two flashes of a pistol.” He heard Murdoch shouting, “Get out of this, clear out of this,” to a crowd of men swarming around starboard collapsible C. He and Björnström-Steffansson went to help clear C of men who were climbing in, because a bunch of Lebanese women, whom he mistook for Italians, were standing at the edge of the crowd, unable to reach the boat. Supposedly he and Björnström-Steffansson tugged out half a dozen men—“probably third-class passengers”—“by their legs and anything we could get hold of.” Once the men were ejected, they helped to hoist the Lebanese women into the lifeboat—“they were very limp.” With this tale Woolner established his superiority over the panicky foreign men who tried to save themselves before the women. Although he had survived, unlike few if any of the ejected foreigners, he surpassed their level because he had shown Anglo-Saxon self-mastery.

Woolner perhaps missed seeing Ismay step into collapsible C after the Lebanese women: it was certainly an incident that did not fit with the purpose of his narrative. He and Björnström-Steffansson wished exceedingly to board collapsible D, but recognized that they had small hope of doing so under Lightoller’s scrutiny. They descended to deck A, now deserted after the launching of lifeboat 4 with its cargo of American millionairesses, but bathed in a weird light as its electric lights glowed red before they failed. “This is getting rather a tight corner,” Woolner said to Björnström-Steffansson as the ocean lapped their feet. They hopped onto the gunwale, preparing to jump into the water because they were in peril of being trapped under the ceiling. “As we looked out we saw this collapsible, the last boat on the port side, being lowered right in front of our faces . . . I said to Steffanson [
sic
]: ‘There is nobody in the bows. Let us make a jump for it. You go first.’ And he jumped out and tumbled in head over heels into the bow, and I jumped too, and hit the gunwale with my chest . . . and caught the gunwale with my fingers, and slipped off backwards.” Björnström-Steffansson caught hold of him and yanked him in. Then, he said, they pulled Frederick Hoyt from the sea. He sat next to Renée Harris, who had broken her elbow that afternoon after slipping on a cake. The elder Navrátil boy was crying for his doll, and Woolner fed the child biscuits.
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“As far as I know,” wrote Lightoller, who admitted nothing of Bernard McCoy, Joseph Duquemin, and Fahim Leeni, the jump of Woolner and Björnström-Steffansson into collapsible D “was the only instance of men getting away in boats from the port side. I don’t blame them, the boat wasn’t full, for the simple reason that we couldn’t find sufficient women, and there was no time to wait—the water was then actually lapping round their feet on A Deck, so they jumped for it and got away. Good luck to them.”
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This is a sensible judgment: wiser than the judgment that tried to exclude prepubescent boys like John Ryerson and William Carter from lifeboat 4 or had turned away Edith Evans and bullied “dagoes” from this same collapsible D minutes earlier.

Astor, Clinch Smith, John Thayer, and George Widener stayed together in the terrible scenes after the last lifeboat had been lowered. Archie Butt had been standing to one side on the boat deck: no one noticed whether Frank Millet was beside him, but it is unthinkable that he was not. With the final lifeboat gone, passengers and crew began jumping from the decks into the icy ocean. On the starboard deck, seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer and his shipboard friend Clyde Milton Long had watched the crowd “pushing and shoving wildly” around collapsible C: “We thought it best not to try to get in it, as we thought it would never reach the water right side up, but it did.” They stood by the davits of a boat that had left, decided that their best hope was to slide down the davit ropes into the ocean, shook hands, and wished each other luck. As Thayer described the scene in a tender letter to Long’s grieving parents, “We did not give each other any messages for home, because neither of us thought we would ever get back. Then we jumped upon the rail. Your son put his legs over the rail, while I straddled it. Hanging over the side, holding onto the rails with his hands, he looked up at me and said, ‘You’re coming, boy, aren’t you?’ I replied, ‘Go ahead, I’ll be with you in a minute.’ He let go and slid down the side and I never saw him again.” Having slithered down the liner’s side, Long was sucked away in the torrent of water rushing into the now-submerged A deck from which Woolner had recently escaped. Thayer was horrified, but leaped as far from the ship as he could. “I am sending you my picture, thinking you might like to see who was with him at the end,” he wrote to Long’s parents. “I would treasure it very much if you could spare me one of his.”
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Collapsibles A and B were fastened to the roof of the officers’ quarters above the boat deck. Each boat weighed over two tons, and Lightoller superintended crewmen and passengers who tried to slide them down on makeshift ramps made of oars and planking. Collapsible A reached the deck successfully and was fitted into davits, but the
Titanic
suddenly plunged. A steward called Edward Brown cut the lifeboat adrift so that it floated free of the ship, which might otherwise have smashed it. By doing so, he saved twenty lives, including his own; for after being washed into the ocean as the ship’s bridge went underwater, he got through a sea of people fighting one another in panic and clambered onto collapsible A.

Lightoller and another seaman freed the remaining collapsible B atop the officers’ quarters and threw it down onto the waterlogged boat deck, hoping that some of the crowd there might scramble aboard as it floated off. Collapsible B landed upside down and was washed off the deck by a great surge of water. “Just then the ship took a slight but definite plunge—probably a bulkhead went,” as Lightoller described it. “The sea came rolling up in a wave, over the steel-fronted bridge, along the deck below us, washing the people back in a dreadful, huddled mass. Those that didn’t disappear under the water right away, instinctively started to clamber up that part of the deck still out of water, and work their way toward the stern, which was rising steadily out of the water as the bow went down.”
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The frantic struggles of those trying to climb the sloping deck, fighting to keep out of the freezing ocean, made a horrible sight. Captain Smith, who had been busy and visible during the loading of the lifeboats, probably tried to return to his bridge: whether he reached it, and went down with his ship, or slithered overboard from the tilting liner before he reached his bridge, is unknowable. The alternative fancies about his death that journalists later concocted are sensational trumpery.

Two hours and twenty-five minutes after the collision, around two fifteen, the liner’s bridge dipped under the ocean, and the forward funnel—its wires unable to support its weight as the ship tilted ever more steeply—crashed downward, splintering the deck, hitting the sea with an enormous splash near lifeboat B, and crushing several swimmers, probably including Astor. Gravity overwhelmed all the loose fittings, which crashed downward toward the bow. Engines and machinery broke loose from their bolts and plunged through the compartments, smashing everything beneath them. For twenty seconds the noise—“partly a roar, partly a groan, partly a rattle, and partly a smash”—reverberated across the ocean to lifeboat 13. To Beesley it conjured heavy furniture being thrown downstairs from the top of a house, smashing the stairs and every obstacle to bits.
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Lights dimmed, flared up again, and then finally vanished at two twenty—two hours and forty minutes after lookout Fleet had glimpsed the shape of ice. Ismay did not wish to see his liner plunge and sat with his back to the spectacle. Lady Duff Gordon recalled the moment as seen from lifeboat 1: “I could see her dark hull towering like a giant hotel, with light streaming from every cabin porthole. As I looked, one row of these shining windows was suddenly extinguished. I guessed the reason, and turned shudderingly away. When I forced myself to look again, yet another row had disappeared.” She sat in a miserable stupor until her husband cried, “My God! She is going now!” There arose, she said, “an indescribable clamour . . . I felt my very reason tottering.”
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The story of Rhoda Abbott—the only woman aboard collapsible A—is heartbreaking. She was the seamstress separated from her abusive pugilist husband and traveling third class with her sons, Rossmore and Eugene Abbott, aged sixteen and thirteen. On deck they stayed by her side and went into the sea with her when the ship took its final plunge. They stayed with her, grateful to the mother whose loving warmth had always shone so copiously on each of them, and raised and shoved her into collapsible A, which was swamped with a foot of freezing water because its occupants had failed to raise the canvas gunwale. She had shaped their lives by the sound of her voice and the look in her eyes; now she was too cold to speak. Young men weaken and die quickly in freezing temperatures—faster than women, faster than older men, because they have a lower percentage of body fat to act as insulation, and perhaps because their overexcitement sends them faster into shock. With an ever-loosening grip, both boys held the edge of collapsible A with their helpless, dazed mother looking down on them. First Eugene, then Rossmore slipped away in the water with her watching. It must have felt unbelievable. Few women can have suffered as she did.

In the
Titanic
’s last moments, August Wennerström was standing near Alma Pålsson with her five children and a couple named Edvard and Elin Lindell. As the ship sank the group scrabbled up the sloping deck to escape the rising waters. The incline became too steep, and, clasping hands, they slid down into the Atlantic. Wennerström gripped two Pålsson children, but lost hold. He and Edvard Lindell eventually clambered onto collapsible A. Elin Lindell was struggling in the water, and Wennerström took her hand but was too weak from shock and cold to pull her in. Uncertain if she was dead or alive, he relinquished his grip, and she drifted away. He turned apprehensively to Edvard Lindell only to find that he was already dead. Wennerström was frozen numb by the icy water lapping his legs. He only moved when someone died, whereupon he shoved the corpse overboard.

Olaus Abelseth provided further moving testimony. “I asked my brother-in-law if he could swim, and he said no. I asked my cousin if he could swim, and he said no.” They could see the water rising toward them and clung to ropes suspended from a davit, for the deck was so steep that people were sliding horribly into the ocean. “My brother-in-law said to me, ‘We had better jump off or the suction will take us down.’ I said, ‘No. We won’t jump yet. We ain’t got much show anyhow, so we might as well stay as long as we can.’” They were five feet above the ocean when the three men finally jumped. Abelseth’s brother-in-law held his hand as they leaped. “I got a rope tangled around me, and I let loose of my brother-in-law’s hand to get away from the rope. I thought then, ‘I am a goner’ . . . but I came on top again, and I was trying to swim, and there was a man—lots of them were floating around—and he got me on the neck . . . and pressed me under, trying to get on top of me.” Abelseth fought free of him, then paddled in his life jacket—it was impossible to swim on one’s stomach wearing a life jacket—until he saw a dark object, which proved to be collapsible A. “They did not try to push me off and they did not do anything for me to get on. All they said when I got on there was, ‘Don’t capsize the boat.’” Men (and Rhoda Abbott) stood, sat, or lay there. Abelseth kept warm by swinging his arms. “We did not talk very much, except that we would say, ‘One, two, three,’ and scream together for help.”
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