Voyagers of the Titanic (31 page)

Rostron ordered the
Carpathia
to turn about and his engine room to get up steam. Arc lights were festooned in the gangways. Canvas bags to haul children from the lifeboats, chair slings for the injured, restraints in case anyone had gone mad, as well as blankets and warm drinks were prepared. Passengers woken by the shuddering overcharged engines were asked to keep to their cabins. Rostron and his men made the journey in three and a half hours, taking evasive action to avoid six icebergs on the way, posting an extra lookout, emitting a plume of black smoke, firing rockets from her bows to signal that rescue was approaching. When the
Carpathia
found the scattered lifeboats after dawn, bright sunlight was glistening on a battery of monster icebergs. “They were of different colors as the sun struck them,” said Woolner. “Some looked white and some looked blue, and some sort of mauve, and others were dark gray.” He specified “one double-toothed” iceberg, which was perhaps a hundred feet high and may have been the
Titanic
’s killer.
110
Seaman Scarrott and Henry Stengel both likened this berg to the Rock of Gibraltar.
111

One quality dominated, Rostron recalled, as survivors came aboard, quietness: “there was no noise, no hurry . . . the rescued came solemnly, dumbly, out of a shivering shadow.”
112
The
Carpathia
’s English physician dealt with first-class survivors in the ship’s first-class dining room; the ship’s Italian physician did equivalent work in the second-class dining room; and its Hungarian physician worked in the third-class dining room. The widows Astor, Thayer, and Widener were assigned cabins. Ismay was taken to the ship’s doctor’s cabin, given a sedative, and stayed there until the
Carpathia
reached New York.

On board, some men busied themselves collating experiences, compiling memoranda, and exchanging addresses. Resilient women consoled the broken and bereft and tried to improve their material comforts. Overall, the human cargo of this mourning boat were dazed by shock and sorrow—and angry, too, that their liner had been driven and equipped so heedlessly. It had steamed westward as if it were invulnerable, plunging too fast into an ice zone to stop when an iceberg hove in view. There had been a woeful inadequacy of lifeboats, there had been a shambles loading them, and the crewmen who were put in charge of them often proved blundering or weak nerved. The ship’s last hours had been a climax of deadly folly.

11

The Meaning Shows in the Defeated Thing

Over the water came the lifted song—

Blind pieces in a mighty game we swing;

Life’s battle is a conquest for the strong;

The meaning shows in the defeated thing.

—J
OHN
M
ASEFIELD,
“T
HE
W
ANDERER
”

T
he steamship
Kroonland—
the first ship to send a wireless distress call at sea in 1903—had been plying the New York to Antwerp route for IMM’s Red Star subsidiary for ten years. The novelist Theodore Dreiser, who had flirted with the idea of returning to New York on the
Titanic,
preferred to save money by traveling on the
Kroonland,
which left Antwerp on April 13. Three days later, when the
Kroonland
’s wireless operator learned of the
Titanic
’s doom, the ship’s captain ordered the news to be kept secret. But a busybody on board, Herr Salz, had been bribing the wireless operator with cigars, and to him the calamity was confided. Salz bustled off to the smoking room where Dreiser was sitting and, looking portentous, gestured to the men to come on deck where he could tell some news that the women must not overhear. Someone jested that to judge by Salz’s manner, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company had gone bust. The men’s nonchalance collapsed when Salz told them his story. With one accord, they went to the rail and gazed into the blackness ahead. “The swish of the sea could be heard and the insistent moo of the fog-horn,” Dreiser recorded. “We all began to talk at once, but no one listened. The terror of the sea had come swiftly home to all of us . . . To think of a ship as immense as the
Titanic,
new and bright, sinking in endless fathoms of water. And the two thousand passengers routed like rats from their berths only to float helplessly in miles of water, praying and crying!” The
Kroonland
’s passengers faced several days at sea before reaching New York. Some men became austerely reticent, while others could not stop nervous chatter about the disaster. The women on board pretended not to know. Inwardly, wrote Dreiser, all passengers shrank at the thought of “the endless wastes of the sea” and “the terror of drowning in the dark and cold.” When the
Kroonland
reached New York Harbor, a pilot came on board with newspapers booming the news. Passengers crowded into the saloon to get every detail. “Some broke down and cried. Others clenched their fists and swore over the vivid and painful pen-pictures by eyewitnesses and survivors. For a while we all forgot we were nearly home.”
1

The earliest wireless messages indicating that a catastrophe had occurred in midocean reached the Marconi outpost at Cape Race in Newfoundland. A terse message was relayed to the Allan Steamship headquarters in Montreal from its cargo vessel
Virginian,
taking eighteen thousand barrels of apples to Liverpool, reporting that it had received a distress message from the
Titanic
. Allan gave the news to a Montreal newspaper that had a reciprocal news agreement with the
New York Times
. At 2
A.M
. a journalist from the
New York Times
telephoned Philip Franklin, American vice president of IMM, at his Manhattan home seeking confirmation of reports that the liner was sinking. Franklin called IMM’s Montreal representative seeking Canadian confirmation of the wireless traffic messages. Further bulletins flashed from Cape Race with some accurate details, but garbled transmissions resulted in reports during Monday that passengers had been rescued by the
Virginian
and the
Parisian
as well as the
Carpathia,
and that the wounded leviathan was being towed to Halifax, Nova Scotia. “A great deal of pain was caused to the public by the improper use of wireless,” the British consul-general in New York deplored. “Amateurs with imperfect instruments picked up parts of messages, and piecing them together sent messages that were very far from true.”
2
Aside from recklessly decrypted transmissions, there was at least one forgery, purporting to come from Phillips, the Marconi operator, assuring his parents that all was well and the
Titanic
was proceeding to Halifax.

For much of Monday, April 15, Franklin seemed in a state of raving confidence. He declared his absolute trust in the
Titanic,
even affirmed that the liner was indestructible, despite the alarming messages that were arriving. “During the entire day we considered the ship unsinkable,” he later said, “and it never entered our minds that there had been anything like a serious loss of life.”
3
He was quoted by reporters as saying that there were sufficient lifeboats to save all passengers, he but feared that there might have been fatalities while transferring voyagers to lifeboats. His messages to the family of Charles Hays in Canada raised false hopes that the railway man and his son-in-law, Thornton Davidson, had survived. Later, Franklin issued journalists with a further statement betraying class consciousness even in crisis: “it is customary in cases of this kind for the women to be saved first; even the women in the steerage would be taken off before the men passengers of the first and second cabin.”
4
He trusted rumors that the
Virginian
was towing the wounded
Titanic
toward Halifax. He even chartered a fast train to bring its passengers south to New York. His messages to Captain Herbert Haddock on the
Titanic
’s sister ship, the
Olympic,
were initially guarded but became increasingly urgent in requesting news. It was not until six sixteen New York time on Monday evening that Franklin received confirmation from Haddock that the
Titanic
had foundered: “About 675 souls saved, crew and passengers, latter nearly all women and children.” Franklin was dumbfounded by the news, and for some time his office reeled under the blow.

The news reached England by Atlantic telegraph cable and Marconi’s outpost at Poldhu—a country walk away from the Cornish villages of Constantine and Porthleven, where the dead men Jim Veale, James Drew, and Edgar and Fred Giles had begun their fatal journeys. The London evening newspapers caught the story for their Monday night editions. “
TITANIC SINKING
,” reported the
Globe
. It reported a message from Cape Race that “the liner was sinking by the head, and that the women were being taken off in lifeboats. The last signals came at 12.27 this morning, but these were blurred and ended abruptly.” The ship, it added, was “a floating palace” equipped to provide “the comforts of wealthy Americans.”
5
Tuesday evening’s report in the
Globe
was less accurate. “When the
Titanic
struck the iceberg at 10.25 she was running at reduced speed. Most of the passengers had retired to bed, and were awakened and terrified by a thunderous impact which crushed and twisted the towering bows of the liner and broke them in like an eggshell.” The
Globe
had interviewed a man named Parton, manager of White Star’s Cockspur Street office. “What discipline must have been maintained!” Parton exclaimed. “The fact that nearly all of those who are saved are women and children is evidence of that.”
6

On Monday evening, encouraged by optimistic early reports, a thanksgiving service was held in St. Jude’s Church, Whitechapel, for the survival of the Reverend Ernest Carter and his wife, Lillian—a service that seemed pitifully sad in retrospect, for both had perished. The English could manage to accept that “the unsinkable has sunk,”
7
but it remained unthinkable that over a thousand had died.

Belfast felt poleaxed by the news. A Harland & Wolff worker recalled that he was carrying buckets of water drawn from the well for his horses when he met an acquaintance at the orchard gate:

“And he says, ‘Jack’, he says, ’there’s shocking bad news this morning’.

“ ‘I says, ‘What’s wrong?’

“ ‘He says, ‘This big ship’, he says, ‘the
Titanic
that sailed. She’s to the bottom this morning.’”

A man whose father had worked as a joiner on the
Titanic
recalled this eery interlude when sectarian politics were abeyant and no one argued or fought about Home Rule. “For those of us in Belfast,” he recalled, “this news was beyond all comprehension. My father couldn’t believe it. Later he broke down and cried. He was a big shipyard man and he just cried like a child. You see, his pride was broken.”
8
Dismay, horror, and grief fell on Belfast: it was a failure for Harland & Wolff, humiliation for Ulster Protestantism. “During those awful days in April, when hope of good news at last had gone, the Yard was shrouded in gloom and rough men cried like women.”
9

The news ricocheted round the world. Pierpont Morgan, the corsair of IMM, sent a telegram from the French spa town of Aix-les-Bains: “Have just heard fearful rumor about
Titanic
with iceberg without any particulars. Hope for God’s sake not true.” Absurd rumors sped about Aix as they did London and New York: that everyone had survived, that passengers might be saved by clinging to the wreckage or scrambling to safety atop icebergs. On Wednesday, by which time the extent of the disaster was clear, Morgan was to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday; but in response to subdued greetings from his New York partners, he cabled that he was “exceedingly grieved.”
10
IMM had been a loss-maker since its inception, and now it was a life-loser, too, held up to obloquy. The news was kept from convalescent Lord Pirrie until late on Tuesday.

Paris was convulsed with anxiety and grief. Hundreds of American residents in Paris and the thousands of American tourists in the hotels went to sleep on Monday night assured that almost everyone had been saved. On Tuesday morning
Le Matin
appeared with a front-page headline announcing stupendous news: “
LE PLUS GRAND TRANSATLANTIQUE DU MONDE FAIT NAUFRAGE POUR SA PREMIÈRE TRAVERSÉE
” and warned that only 675 passengers and crew had been saved.
11
White Star’s office was besieged by weeping women, several of whom had sons on board, including William Dulles’s mother who left in a state of collapse. Its English manager was harrowed by the weeping women and longed to rush away. Next day the office was deserted, for all hopes had gone. “The consternation and grief in the American colony in Paris at the
Titanic
disaster passes description,” Reuters telegraphed around the world. “There is hardly a leading hotel without visitors having relatives and friends on board.”
12

Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic went wild at their chance. Journalists had brazen confidence that their readers would forget their lies from one day to the next, as shown by one synthesis of news agency telegrams. When the
Carpathia
reached New York, hundreds of stretchers had been rushed aboard, it began. “Many survivors lost all their clothing . . . There were scores of cases of total coma . . . First Officer Wilde, of the
Titanic,
when the vessel struck, shot himself on the bridge when he realized the accident was so serious. Many women are insane. When the
Titanic
struck the iceberg, the impact was terrific, great blocks of ice were thrown on the deck killing numbers of people . . . Many
Titanic
passengers died aboard the
Carpathia
from exposure to ice floes. Three Italians were shot while struggling for places in the boats . . . All the passengers acclaimed the seamen’s heroic conduct. Men sang sea songs while lowering the boats. Mrs. Jacob Astor, wife of Colonel Astor, is now dead. Five women survivors have saved their pet dogs, and another has saved a little pig.”
13

The dead were beyond blame. Captain Smith, who had maintained full speed in a dangerous ice zone, was untouched by early critics. Stanley Lord, the
Californian
’s captain, was reviled for his failure of judgment, courage, and humanity; but Bruce Ismay became the chief scapegoat, with the bewildered Duff Gordons on his tail. In his cabin on the
Carpathia,
dazed and overwrought, Ismay kept repeating that he should have gone down with the ship. Jack Thayer, who visited his cabin, found him “seated, in his pyjamas, on his bunk, staring straight ahead, shaking like a leaf.” He seemed oblivious of Thayer: “when I spoke to him . . . telling him he had a perfect right to take the last boat, he paid absolutely no attention and continued to look ahead with his fixed stare.”
14
(Ismay thereafter felt gratitude to the Thayers and corresponded with Thayer’s widowed mother for years.) Ismay cannot have anticipated the fusillade of recriminations that awaited him in America. There he was vilified because, instead of sacrificing himself, he had stepped onto collapsible C as it was being lowered, and been saved. He headed the company that had launched the
Titanic
with insufficient lifeboats for its human cargo. He was suspected of cajoling Captain Smith into speeding toward the ice. His restraint under interrogation exasperated a nation that required a fulsome emotional show.