Voyagers of the Titanic (30 page)

Lightoller had dived overboard a few minutes before the liner sank. “Striking the water was like a thousand knives being driven into one’s body, and, for a few moments, I completely lost grip of myself.” He had no sooner mastered himself than suction caught him. A huge air shaft stood on the boat deck with wire grating to prevent rubbish being thrown down. Beneath it was a sheer drop to a stokehold at the bottom of the ship. Lightoller was caught by the rush of ocean pouring down this shaft, and held against this wire grating with the horrifying knowledge that he would plunge to the stokehold if the wire broke. “Although I struggled and kicked for all I was worth, it was impossible to get away, for as fast as I pushed myself off I was irresistibly dragged back, every instant expecting the wire to go, and to find myself shot down into the bowels of the ship.” He was drowning, of course, too, until a blast of hot air came up the shaft, and blew him to the ocean’s surface. Eventually he scrambled onto collapsible B.
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Collapsible B had floated off around two twenty. The suffering of the thirty-odd people who clambered aboard was worst of all, for it was upside down. Those whose names we know, because they survived, included Algernon Barkworth, Eugene Daly, Archibald Gracie, Charles Joughin, Lightoller, stoker Henry Senior, Victor Sunderland, and Jack Thayer. No women are known to have scrambled onto it.

The London teenager from third class, Victor Sunderland, seems to have been one of the few passengers without a life jacket. He had tried to fetch his, but found his cabin was submerged. Fearing that the companions he had left there were drowned, he returned to the boat deck—passing Byles, the Catholic priest, leading kneeling men and women in prayer. Back on the boat deck, a steward in a lifeboat clutching three life jackets refused to give him one. A crewman whom he accosted had no idea where they were to be found. As few starboard lifeboats remained, passengers turned to seek lifeboats on the port side, but were restrained by crewmen from going there as the liner was increasingly listing to port. When the ship began to plunge, Sunderland copied firemen who were jumping overboard. In the ocean he survived the fall of the forward funnel and reached collapsible B. Someone recited the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary, with the others following.
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Archibald Gracie had been knocked over by the surging wave described by Lightoller, and was sucked into a whirlpool, swirling down and down. Knowing that his life depended on it, he swam away with all his strength. His desperation was intensified by his fear of being scalded to death by the boiling water released by exploding boilers, for he recalled that after the British battleship
Victoria
sank in a collision off the Lebanese coast, the Mediterranean resembled a bubbling cauldron of boiling milk and inflicted a scorching death on sailors in the sea.
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Reaching the surface, Gracie clung to floating debris before striking out for collapsible B. The men there stood upright in two rows, back to back, holding one another’s shoulders. Exhausted men fell overboard; others died of exposure during their hours on the swamped boat.

Chevré, Marechal, and Omont recorded that from lifeboat 7, the
Titanic
resembled a picture of fairyland, glittering with lights from bow to stern, or a fantastic backdrop of stage scenery. Then the lights died, and the stern reared high in the air. A terrible clamor arose, and for an hour anguished death cries rang out with wild persistency. Sometimes the cries receded, but then the chorus of death resumed, with more piercing despair. The oarsmen on lifeboat 7 rowed hard to escape from the heartrending cries. “Those shrieks pursued us and haunted us as we pulled away in the night.” “Then one by one the cries ceased and only the noise of the sea remained.”
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The Cornish widow Agnes Davies with her young son in lifeboat 14 watched the lights of the lower decks vanish row by row underwater: “it was awful, terrible.” Her fellow passengers tried to protect her. “When the men in the boat learnt that one of my sons was on the steamer and would not be saved, they formed a line before me, so that I could not see the ship as she plunged beneath the waves.” She heard, though, “the screams, cries and moaning” of the dying.
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Frankie Goldsmith in collapsible C was aged nine: years later, as a young milk-cart driver, he lived near the Detroit Tigers baseball stadium. The roar of the crowd when a player hit a home run never ceased to remind him of the cries of the thousand people freezing to death in the Atlantic. His mother held his head in her hands so that he would not see the horror. In lifeboat 13 they tried to sing to keep the women from hearing the appalling cries.

A minority of the fifteen hundred people who had not reached the lifeboats sank with the ship. Almost all of them wore life jackets, and few drowned. But they were floating in an icy sea; the temperature was probably two degrees below freezing Celsius (28˚ Fahrenheit), cold enough to kill in thirty minutes. They cried for help as they froze to death. This was “the worst part of the disaster” for steward Samuel Rule on lifeboat 15: “the groans were awful, and of course we could do nothing. I shall never forget it.”
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Jack Thayer was traumatized by the memory of that “continuous wailing chant, from the fifteen hundred in the water all around us. It sounded like locusts on a mid-summer night, in the woods in Pennsylvania.” This terrible cry gradually died away, as over a thousand people, tight in their white life jackets, froze to death. People in lifeboats four hundred yards away heard the cries, but did not respond. It became a lifelong question for Thayer: “How could any human being fail to heed those cries? . . . If they had turned back several more hundred would have been saved.”
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Only lifeboat 14, commanded by Harold Lowe, tried to save people in the water. Lowe waited until the dying people had “thinned out” and their cries subsided. “It would not have been wise or safe to have gone there before, because the whole lot of us would have been swamped, and then nobody would have been saved.” Having transferred his passengers to another boat, he rowed back with some volunteers but found only four men alive among the corpses bobbing in their life jackets, and one of those died soon after being hauled aboard. “I made the attempt,” he insisted, “as soon as any man could do so, and I am not scared of saying it. I did not hang back.”
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The death cries distressed Third Officer Herbert Pitman, who ordered lifeboat 5 to row back to rescue frozen survivors. “I told my men to get their oars, and pull toward the wreck,” he testified. The passengers in his boat protested that this was “a mad idea” because their lifeboat “should be swamped with the crowd that was in the water, and it would add another forty to the list of drowned.” It lay heavily with him that his lifeboat “simply took our oars in and lay quiet . . . doing nothing.”
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Despite direct instructions from Captain Smith to row for the light of the ship presumed to be Lord’s
Californian,
Seaman Jones, in charge of lifeboat 8, wanted to return to the wreck site to rescue more people, “but the ladies were frightened.”
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One woman endorsed his initiative, but most of the rest, including some women who had taken up oars, routed his idea. “Ladies,” Jones said, “if any of us are saved, remember
I
wanted to go back, I would rather drown with them than leave them.” The exception in lifeboat 8 was Lady Rothes, wife of a penurious Scottish peer. “I saw the way she was carrying herself, and I heard the quiet determined way she spoke to the others, and I knew she was more of a man than any we had on board,” Jones later said. He installed Lady Rothes at the tiller, and her nineteen-year-old lady’s maid, Roberta Maioni, took an oar and helped every minute. The girl, garbed only in nightgown and kimono, with luxuriant hair streaming over her shoulders and down her back, suggested they should sing to maintain morale, starting with “Pull for the Shore.”
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Emma Bucknell confirmed that Jones protested that they did not have enough people aboard and should wait near the liner to rescue others. She was exasperated to discover that his crew, bedroom steward Crawford and Seaman Pascoe, could not row. “It was tragic. I have known how to row for a great many years as the result of much time spent in the Adirondacks, and I slipped into the seat beside the man and showed him how to work the oar.” She found the three men muddle-headed: they told her that the liner would remain afloat until two o’clock on Monday afternoon, a full twelve hours distant, shortly before it sank. With eight women passengers helping to row, lifeboat 8 pushed toward the light to which they had been directed by Captain Smith. “The men soon learned to handle the oars,” said Bucknell, “but even though they were used to rough work, their hands were soon enflamed and blistered.” The women rowed until they collapsed from exhaustion, whereupon another woman would gently move her aside and work in her place.
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The women rowers in several lifeboats were valiant in meeting a terrible challenge. George Hogg, the seaman in charge of the first lifeboat launched, 7, with its load of Americans from first class, made a point of saying, “the women ought to have a gold medal on their breasts, God bless them! I will always raise my hat to a woman, after what I saw.”
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Whether he was sincere or talking ingratiating cant, there is no doubt that in other lifeboats there was class tension between women from first class and low seamen. Marion Thayer found Walter Perkis, the quartermaster in charge of lifeboat 4, so inefficient, indecisive, and disagreeable that she doubted he was a quartermaster at all. Ella White reported that when Jones, in charge of lifeboat 8, gave an order, Crawford and Pascoe, “who knew nothing about the handling of a boat would say, ‘If you don’t stop talking through that hole in your face there will be one less in the boat.’ We were in the hands of men of that kind. I settled two or three fights between them, and quietened them down.” She resented their smoking tobacco while women rowed and doubted that they recognized their predicament. “They speak of the bravery of the men. I do not think there was any particular bravery, because none of the men thought it was going down. If they had thought the ship was going down, they would not have frivoled as they did.”
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The class and gender skirmishes were worst on lifeboat 6. It contained two seamen, Quartermaster Hichens, and lookout Fleet, together with Arthur Peuchen, a Lebanese youth, and twenty-four women or children. Hichens (who had been steering when the ship hit the iceberg and was panic-stricken) took command and ordered Fleet and Peuchen to row hard to escape the liner’s suction when it foundered. Margaret Brown and a cashier from the à la carte restaurant, Margaret Martin, also took up oars. “Faster! Faster!” Hichens shouted. “If you don’t make better speed with your rowing, we’ll be pulled down to our deaths!” After the
Titanic
sank, Margaret Brown, Helen Candee, and Julia Cavendish (the Chicago-born wife of an Anglo-Irishman) urged Hichens to return to save those crying for help. He refused: “It is our lives now, not theirs. Row, damn you! Our boat will immediately be swamped if we go back . . . there’s no use going back, because there’s nothing in the water but a bunch of stiffs.”
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This was a foul remark, for Hélène Baxter, Julia Cavendish, Eloise Smith, and others had left sons and husbands behind. When, to keep warm, Brown elbowed her way to the stern, took the tiller from him, and threatened that if he resisted, she would knock him overboard, he lapsed into a sulky gloom: “We’re likely to drift for days. There is no water in the casks, and we have no bread, no compass and no chart. If a storm should come up, we are completely helpless! We will either drown or starve.” Brown told him to keep quiet: “By damn, I wish you’d keep your place!” Hichens swore at her at one juncture.
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“Hichens was cowardly and almost crazed with fear,” Helen Candee wrote afterward. “When asked if
Carpathia
would come and pick us up, he replied: ‘No, she is not going to pick us up; she is to pick up bodies.’” Again this was needlessly brutal with bereft women sitting hard by.
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On collapsible A, Abelseth knew that his three friends Humblen, Moen, and Søholt were lost. With him, though, was a shipboard acquaintance from New Jersey who was freezing to death. By dawn this man was comatose, but Abelseth strove to keep him alive. The Dakota homesteader took him by the shoulder, raised him upright from the deck, and told him, “We can see a ship now. Brace up.” He held the dying man’s hand and shook him. “Who are you?” asked the man, “let me be.” Abelseth tried to support him, but got tired, took a piece of cork flotsam from the ocean, and laid it under his head to keep his head above water; but his companion died before rescue came.
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The ship that Abelseth espied was a small Cunarder, the
Carpathia
. Its captain, Arthur Rostron, was the hero of the disaster—a crisp, efficient sea captain who was neither as foolhardy in the ice zone as Smith of the
Titanic
nor as feckless as Lord of the
Californian
. “I had the greatest respect for him as a seaman, a disciplinarian and as a man who could take a decision quickly,” wrote another Cunard officer, James Bisset. “He was not the burly type of jolly old sea dog. Far from it, he was of thin and wiry build, with sharp features, piercing blue eyes, and rapid, agile movements. His nickname in the Cunard service was ‘the Electric Spark.’”
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The
Carpathia
was carrying 743 passengers, three days out of New York, heading for the Mediterranean ports of Gibraltar, Genoa, Naples, Trieste, and Fiume. Its twenty-year-old wireless operator, Harold Cottam, worked and slept in the wireless shack atop the superstructure aft of the funnel. He was preparing for bed, stooping to unlace his boots, and wearing his earphones because he was waiting for acknowledgment of a message he had sent earlier; and it was thus that he heard transmissions from Cape Cod intended for the
Titanic
. He sent a Morse message to MGY, the
Titanic
call sign, checking to see if the liner had received its Cape Cod messages. MGY replied instantly, “Come at once. We have struck an iceberg.” Cottam erupted into Rostron’s cabin with the news.