Voyagers of the Titanic (34 page)

English newspapers treated the calamity as vindication of the heroism of the world’s greatest seafaring nation. The self-control of Anglo-Saxon manhood was contrasted with the sneaking cowardice of “Italians” or “Chinese.” The gutter press declared that “women and children first” was not just the law of the sea, but the instinct and instilled discipline of racially superior people. This opinion was upheld in unlikely quarters. “Had the
Titanic
been a vessel manned by Chinese sailors, I can assure you there would not have been a woman or child saved,” declared Henry Moy Foi, of the Chinese Merchants Association of America, speaking in Cleveland, Ohio. “Whenever a Chinese vessel goes down, it is the duty of the sailors to see that the men are taken off first. The children come next, and then the women [because] the Chinese government feels that the men are the most valuable for the nation. In China it would really have been a crime to take care of the women first . . . the average woman would be destitute without her husband. Children are given second choice because childless families always can be found to take care of them.”
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It seems singularly English to find a pretext for racial triumphalism in a national disaster, yet this was a common solace. “In all our minds, there has been a thrill at the heroism and self-sacrifice,” declared a cabinet minister, Lord Beauchamp. “They were ordinary common or garden members of the Anglo-Saxon race. It makes one proud to think that there were so many men ready to face death quietly and in a self-sacrificing spirit, making way for the women and children to be rescued. Not only does it make us proud of our race, but it makes us sure that there is a great destiny reserved in the world still for the Anglo-Saxon race.”
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Beauchamp’s cabinet colleague Winston Churchill, then first lord of the admiralty, followed the
Titanic
story with fascination. “The story is a good one,” he wrote to his wife on Thursday. “The strict observance of the great traditions of the sea towards women & children reflects nothing but honour upon our civilization. Even I hope it may mollify some of the young unmarried lady teachers”—he meant suffragettes—“who are so bitter in their sex antagonism, & think men so base & vile.” He felt “proud of our race and its traditions as proved by this event. Boat loads of women & children tossing on the sea—safe & sound—& the rest—Silence.”
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There was a frantic outcry, not silence, on land. All newspapers, all readers, were eager for the
Carpathia
to reach New York with its shocked and sorrowing survivors. “
CARPATHIA IS PLUNGING TOWARDS PORT WITH REMNANTS OF TITANIC’S THOUSANDS: HUGE RESCUER WITH ITS PITIFULLY FEW SURVIVORS IS EXPECTED TO DOCK IN NEW YORK
,” blared the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
of April 17. Two days later, hours before the
Carpathia
docked, the same paper was proliferating the abundant rumors. “The brief wireless despatches indicate that pneumonia was prevalent among the rescued, and showed that many had gone insane. Some of the most notable men and women on board were reported among those who had lost their minds.”
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The
Carpathia
reached the quayside at nine thirty during the dark night of Thursday, April 18. As the ship approached, the wind began to blow hard and rain fell in torrents, with thunder and lightning breaking over the sky. The ship was harried by tugs, ferries, and yachts carrying reporters shouting questions through megaphones. Photographers took flashlight pictures, which (coupled with the lightning flashes) made a dazzling explosion of luminosity. About twenty-five hundred people—mostly animated by morbid curiosity—stood in the drizzling rain. They were packed so tight in the side streets, through which the survivors would have to leave, that the way was impassable. William Gaynor, mayor of New York City, who in 1910 had been shot in the neck while walking on the deck of the
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosser
at Hoboken, and who was to die in 1913 while sitting in a deck chair on the
Baltic
as it approached Ireland, had ordered an elaborate police operation around Cunard’s pier. Mounted policemen rode back and forth so that their rearing horses would send the crowds into retreat. Lieutenant Charles Becker—a corrupt officer who months later murdered the gambler Herman Rosenthal—led a police squad targeting pickpockets. The Cunard pier was under a police cordon, with two hundred officers restraining journalists, sensation seekers, and souvenir hunters. Twenty-five horse ambulances were standing by—a few attended by a surgeon in a white uniform—their clanging bells exciting the crowd; Salvation Army workers, nurses, and stretcher bearers were gathered in small numbers, and undertakers’ wagons bore coffins. Black-veiled women were helped from cabs and limousines by the police and taken to a reserved area on the pier. The flags on the Singer Building and other skyscrapers were flying at half-mast and lit by arc lights trained on them. A small group—including Vincent Astor and Renée Harris’s brother, Samuel Wallach, a clothing manufacturer—stood by the head of the gangplank in the rain. Pierpont Morgan Junior stood at the dock.

The ship’s docking seemed interminable. When the gangway was put down, hundreds of people waiting on the pier took off their hats. At 9:35
P.M
. disembarkation began. First-class passengers came first, then second, and finally third—immigration officers spared them the customary rough processing through Ellis Island. Dr. and Mrs. Frauenthal ensured that they disembarked first, and were hustled into a motorcar. The three Lamson sisters, Caroline Brown, Charlotte Appleton, and Malvina Cornell, hatless for the first time in their adult lives and grieving for their lost companion, Edith Evans, were met by the magistrate Robert Cornell, Malvina’s husband. The pregnant widow Astor, looking faint, was propped up and hurried away by her stepson, Vincent. The widowed Emily Goldsmith was wearing two wedding rings on her hand—one entrusted to her by Tom Theobald as they parted on the boat deck, with a hasty injunction to give it to his widow. Two brothers had come from Montreal to collect their eleven-month-old nephew, Trevor Allison, whose parents and toddler sister had all been lost. “Bobo” Dodge, aged four, swathed in white wool, excited and merry at the blaze of flares as photographers took pictures, was the only spark of joy in the scene.

Whether they were wide or thin, long or squat, grieving people seemed to shrink in size. Passengers looked dulled and confused as they left the claustrophobic horror of the past days for the limitless bewilderment of the present. Their usually controlled public faces had slipped askew. Survivors looked pinched and stricken: some still scared, with a fright that would never leave them; others dazed, staring, angry; and some distraught. Few had yet clambered back inside the armor of training and manners. Most were bedraggled, although a few, such as the banker Robert Daniel, managed to look spruce. Many felt culpable for surviving, or ashamed at being caught in an event that was already so notorious. As the missionary’s wife Nellie Becker, looking overwrought, alighted with her three children, she told her twelve-year-old daughter, Ruth, “Don’t you
dare
tell anybody we were on the
Titanic
.”
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Inside Cunard’s shed a hushed crowd stood in two lines, allowing a long, narrow passage between them for survivors. As one spectator described the scene, “A woman came hurrying through, refusing to be comforted by her supporting friends, wildly calling, ‘Where’s my husband; where’s my husband; where’s my husband?’ She passed on down the long line, her friends trying in vain to console her. A huddled and muffled figure came moaning by in a nurse’s arms. Then came a stalwart, healthy man, who apparently had suffered comparatively little. He gave a handshake and a cheery salutation to a friend in the crowd: ‘All right, Harry?’ the friend inquired. ‘All right,’ was the reply.” Probably this was the hardened cardsharp Harry Homer. A woman came down the gangplank peering anxiously on all sides. “She uttered a great cry of joy, burst from her friends, and fell into the arms of a man who rushed up the line to meet her. They kissed each other again and again, and uttered extravagant, delighted cries as they staggered together down the line in each other’s arms.” Babies whose mothers were lost were carried in the arms of porters: “one or two of them were crying; one or two were looking out with blank baby wonder.” Near the end came “a little, poorly clad, undersized steerage passenger, with a ghastly white face, bright eyes and cheek bones almost protruding through his skin.” Two women—“from their dress and manner they evidently belonged to the best social class in New York”—approached an official. One explained that her silent companion, who bore a “look of heavy settled despair,” wished to go aboard to seek her husband. The official inquired if his name was listed among the survivors. “No, but she must go and see. She doesn’t know whether he is alive or dead.” The official refused.
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Similarly, the widow and children of Thomas Myles, an Irish-born land developer long resident in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were loath to accept his death, though he was lost like almost all second-class male passengers. A daughter telegraphed his son Frederick with false assurances that their father was safe, and when Frederick discovered the trick, he went hurtling through the streets of Jersey City crazed with grief until detained by the police for disorderly conduct. Despite the absence of Thomas Myles from any survivor list, his physician son, Leo Myles, and two family attorneys went to the Cunard pier hoping to see the old man stamp down the gangway. The young sportswriter Homer Wheaton stood with Leo Myles. “When the last of the line had filed down the plank, and we knew the worst had come, I never will forget the look that came over his face. Hoping against hope he had kept up his courage all the way. When it was all over and he knew the worst, he turned away, and with heaving sides, but dry eyes, sobbed: ‘How can I tell mother?’”
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Another group had come uncertainly to meet the survivors of the Wick party. Colonel George Wick had been the leading businessman in Youngstown, Ohio, and son of a pioneering banker in the Mahoning Valley. As a middle-aged widower he had married Mary Hitchcock, whose father’s ironworks had made him Youngstown’s first millionaire. Wick was active in all the iron and steel enterprises of the Mahoning Valley (the
Titanic
’s third-class decks had contained Croats and Lebanese on their way to work in Wick’s Youngstown foundries) and had promoted a great hotel that was being built at Youngstown in 1912. The Wicks had been touring Europe with his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Natalie, but his fourteen-year-old son had been left in Youngstown. The colonel was lost in the wreck, and until shortly before the
Carpathia
docked, it had been thought that his wife had perished, too. “When the mother stepped from the gangplank, the boy’s happiness that one of his parents had been spared, welling through his grief at the loss of the other, moved bystanders to tears.”
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Mary Wick, like the Myles family, could not accept that her man was dead—she had last seen him from lifeboat 8 standing at the rail waving good-bye—and insisted on remaining in New York for several days in the hope of better news. Only his body would convince her that he was dead. She sent someone to search for him among the recovered corpses lying at Halifax, but his body was never found.
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The morning after the
Carpathia
docked, when definitive passenger lists were available, last desperate hopes were destroyed. The tram conductor Nils Pålsson, looking ashen and ill after four days of suspense, went on Friday to the offices of White Star’s agent in Chicago. In fractured English, he asked for news of his wife and four children. The clerk scanning the list of third-class survivors found no Pålssons, and suggested that perhaps they were traveling by another steamer. Then he checked the embarkation list, and found five Pålssons. Pålsson was stupefied, helped to a chair, doused in cold water to revive him, and taken home by an appalled friend who had accompanied him. Few people lost so much as Pålsson.

Eleanor Widener, who had lost a husband and son, had to be helped down the gangway, and flung herself into the arms of her brother-in-law. At the Pennsylvania Railroad Station three special trains waited. One was to take the Wideners to Philadelphia and another was for the surviving Thayers. Philadelphia’s police chief, with a handpicked corps, escorted other Philadelphia survivors to taxicabs in which they were whirled to the station for the third special.
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At Lynnewood, Eleanor Widener (perhaps as the result of sedation) could not at first be roused. Draped in deepest mourning, she attended a Sunday service in the chapel of the Widener Home for Crippled Children, while her father-in-law rested under medical care in his palatial home. Besides the Widener and Elkins families, the cream of Philadelphia society and ninety-eight disabled boys and girls were arrayed in separate groups in the flower-banked chapel.
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Marion Thayer returned to their house at Haverford, which was guarded by Pennsylvania Railroad detectives, who barred the way to journalists. This did not prevent the
Philadelphia Inquirer
from reporting that “with a well-directed blow from an oar-lock,” Mrs. Thayer had knocked out a drunken sailor who had been rocking and almost capsizing her lifeboat.
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Sid Blake, the New York hotelier, recorded his Cornish guests’ mournful journey to the docks to meet the
Carpathia
. “Everybody [was] trying to bear up. Mrs. Drew was one of the first [of the Cornish] to come off the boat, and with her Mr. William Drew’s boy. Mr. William Drew, I thought, would faint—after hearing that his boy was drowned, and to find him safe. He would hold him up and say, ‘Are you sure you are my boy?’, but his delight was short-lived, as he suddenly thought of his brother, but Mrs. Drew said he was gone. The last she had seen of him was when he assisted her and the boy into a lifeboat. He kissed her and the boy goodbye, and stepped back for more women to get into the boat and be saved.” Blake reported to the Cornish newspapers that Addie Wells with two children, Emily Richards with two children, Eliza and Nellie Hocking, and Ellen Wilks “were all, I think, of the Penzance folk who were saved.” There were poignant tales behind the Cornish death roll, as pronounced by Sid Blake. “Mr. & Mrs. John H. Chapman of St. Neot were right behind Mrs. Richards, and ready to step in the lifeboat, but when Mrs. Chapman found that her husband could not go, she turned back and said, ‘Goodbye, Mrs. Richards, if John can’t go, I won’t go either’.” The Penzance men, Harry Cotterill, Percy Bailey, and George Hocking, had helped their women into the boats. “As George Hocking put his mother into the boat (she was the last of the party to go), Mrs. Hocking begged him to come as well, but he said, ‘No, mother. These men are good enough to stand back for you, and I must stay back and let their wives and mothers go’. He then kissed her, and that was the last she saw of him. For such heroism Cornwall can be proud of her sons. Mrs. Hocking is in a very bad way. She is constantly calling out, ‘Poor George, poor George.’”
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