Voyagers of the Titanic (6 page)

Alexander Carlisle, Harland & Wolff’s general manager, who was in charge of the equipment and decoration of the
Olympic
and
Titanic,
anticipated that the Board of Trade, the government department regulating British-registered ships, would introduce regulations requiring a greater provision of lifeboats on superliners. His brother-in-law Pirrie told him to make plans on that assumption, and he brought proposals for forty-eight or even sixty-four lifeboats to conferences with White Star. At these conferences Pirrie and Ismay did all the talking: Carlisle recalled that he and Ismay’s deputy, Harold Sanderson, “were more or less dummies.”
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At one day-long meeting, they talked for a total of five or ten minutes about lifeboat provision; and despite Carlisle’s misgivings, which he dared not express before Pirrie, the provision of lifeboats was cut from forty-eight to twenty once it became clear that the Board of Trade was not going to alter its regulations. This reduced clutter on the deck as well as costs, but meant that the liner would have lifeboat capacity for a maximum of one-third of its passengers and crew. The risk seemed minimal when the consensus held that the liner was invulnerable.

It is notorious that the
Titanic
was certified to carry 3,547 passengers and crew but had lifeboat capacity for only 1,178 souls. Indeed, the ship was certified to carry 1,134 steerage passengers and would have required nineteen lifeboats if each of them were to have a place. Instead it carried fourteen wooden lifeboats (thirty feet long) with an official capacity of 65; four Engelhardt boats with collapsible canvas sides, which could take 47 passengers apiece; and two cutters for rescuing people who had fallen overboard, which were both capable of taking 40 people (a total deficiency of 2,369 places). This was not markedly worse than the figures for other liners of all nationalities and sizes. The French vessel
La Provence
was best, in providing for 82 percent of passengers and crew; but the Cunarder
Carmania
could only account for 29 percent. Cunard’s
Mauretania
and
Lusitania
both had capacity for 2,350 passengers and 900 crew but with twenty lifeboats had a deficiency of 2,150. Hamburg-Amerika’s two liners
Kaiserin Auguste Victoria
and
Amerika
could each carry 2,770 passengers with 550 crew and had twenty-four boats, leaving a deficiency of 2,000 people. Norddeutscher-Lloyd’s
George Washington
could carry 3,262 passengers and 590 crew and had twenty lifeboats, making a deficiency of 2,752. The figures for the Holland-Amerika line’s
Rotterdam
were 3,585 passengers, 475 crew, and eighteen lifeboats, leaving a deficiency of 3,070.

The Board of Trade’s lifeboat regulations, framed under the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894, had a scale requiring two lifeboats for ships up to 200 tons and ending with a minimum of sixteen lifeboats for ships exceeding 10,000 tons. The board’s scale was futile: there was no reason to stop at 10,000 tons, and superliners had nearly five times that displacement. Sir Alfred Chambers, nautical advisor to the Marine Department of the Board of Trade from 1896 to 1911, exemplified the school of government regulators that disbelieved in regulations. “It was the safest mode of travel in the world, and I thought it neither right nor the duty of a State Department to impose regulations . . . as long as the record was a clean one,” he testified. Asked after the
Titanic
sinking why lifeboat regulations had not been updated despite the increase in the size of vessels, he replied that he preferred the provision of lifeboats to depend on shipowners’ voluntary action rather than the imposition of inflexible rules. He even claimed that if there had been fewer lifeboats, more people would have been saved: passengers would have rushed the boats and filled them to capacity.
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There was also an official feeling that it would be “unfair” if older ships afloat were obliged to increase their lifeboat provision because of the
Olympic
and the
Titanic
.
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There were other unimaginative safety procedures. Captain Maurice Clarke, the inspector who approved the
Titanic
for sailing, oversaw a boat drill that comprised lowering and raising two lifeboats, manned by a special crew, while the ship was docked at Southampton. Questioned by Lord Mersey—who headed the Board of Trade inquiry into the loss of the
Titanic
—he conceded that this was a cursory, unexacting routine that he followed because it was “the custom.” Asked by Mersey if he followed “custom although it was bad,” Clarke replied, “Well, you will remember I am a civil servant. Custom guides us a good bit.”
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Why were White Star and Harland & Wolff content with a lifeboat provision that barely sufficed for a ship less than a quarter of the size of the
Titanic
? Ship designers and shipowners reckoned that lifeboat accommodation encroached on bedroom suites, promenade decks, public rooms, and other amenities; and that lifeboat seats for every passenger and crewman were superfluous. When Arthur Rostron, captain of the small liner
Carpathia,
which steamed to the rescue of the
Titanic
’s survivors, was subsequently interrogated in the U.S. Senate inquiry, he explained why his ship and the biggest superliners, carrying different numbers of passengers and crew, were required by Board of Trade regulations to carry the same number of lifeboats. “The ships are built nowadays to be practically unsinkable, and each ship is supposed to be a lifeboat in itself,” Rostron testified. He regarded actual lifeboats “merely . . . as a standby.”
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The
Titanic
’s first-class passenger accommodation was placed amidships and extended over five decks: the promenade deck (A), bridge deck (B), shelter deck (C), saloon deck (D), and upper deck (E). Two grand staircases, three electric elevators, and sundry stairways provided access to the different decks. The expanse of decks amidships ran for almost two-thirds of the total length of the ship. With the exception of the officers’ quarters on the boat deck, the second-class smoking room at the after end of B deck, and the second-class library and third-class lounge and smoking room on C deck, most of this superstructure was dedicated to the needs of first-class passengers. In first class everything seemed spacious: the public rooms were vast, the corridors were wide and high, the stairs and landings were broad; nothing was cramped or mean. “She has everything but taxi-cabs and theatres: Table d’Hôte, Restaurant à la Carte, Gymnasium, Turkish Baths, Squash Court, Palm Gardens, smoking-rooms for ‘Ladies and Gents’, intended I fancy to keep the women out of the men’s smoking-room which they infest in the German and French steamers”—so wrote Frank Millet, an American on the maiden voyage, who was reminded of the Jacobean interior of the Duke of Rutland’s seat, Haddon Hall. “As for the rooms they are larger than the ordinary hotel room, and much more luxurious with wooden bedsteads, dressing-tables, hot and cold water, etc., electric fans, electric heater. The suites with their damask hangings and mahogany oak furniture are really very sumptuous.”
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In addition to the first-class public rooms listed by Millet there were a dining saloon, lounge, reading and writing room, lending library, veranda café, barber shop, photographers’ dark room, and clothes-pressing room. There was a lounge for the first-class ladies’ maids and gentlemen’s valets. There were quarters for first-class dogs. The
Titanic
included the first swimming pool to be installed on board a ship. Instead of a crude sick bay, its medical facilities included an operating theater. White Star had been at the forefront since the 1890s in raising standards for second- and third-class transatlantic passengers. On the
Titanic
the public saloons on the lower decks were spacious, welcoming, and spic-and-span, creating a festive holiday mood, while the berths were as airy, hygienic, and agreeable as Andrews’ team of designers could devise. The ship’s power plant supplied electricity for evaporation and refrigeration, four passenger elevators, a telephone system, the Marconi wireless station, hundreds of heaters, eight electric cargo cranes, electric pumps, motors, and winches.

The interiors were a medley of styles that were intended to give an eclectic rather than bastardized effect. “You may sleep in a bed depicting one ruler’s fancy, breakfast under another dynasty altogether, lunch under a different flag and furniture scheme, play cards, smoke or indulge in music under three other monarchs, have your afternoon tea in a veranda which is modern and cosmopolitan, . . . [and dinner] in imperial style,” one publicist wrote approvingly.
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The first-class suites had beds rather than berths, telephones, and (instead of round portholes) panoramic windows that looked out over the blue sea like the windows of a cliff-top castle. Instead of stoves or radiators, there were open grates in which coal fires burned brightly. The suites had varied styles: Second Empire, Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI, Tudor, Early Dutch, Old Dutch, Adams, Hepplewhite, Regency, Italian Renaissance, Georgian, Colonial, Jacobean, and Queen Anne.

The sixty-foot-high main staircase was supposedly in William and Mary style, but Frenchified à la Louis XIV, with ironwork relieved by bronze flowers and foliage. Atop the staircase was a large dome of iron and glass, beneath which, on the uppermost landing, there was a carved panel containing a clock flanked by bronze female figures representing Honor and Glory crowning Time. The first-class dining saloon was the largest room afloat, seating 532 diners, running the full 92 feet of the ship’s width and 114 feet in length. Its style was Jacobean, but instead of the somber oak panels found in great English houses, the walls and ceilings were painted a shiny, hygienic white. Oak furniture was meant to heighten the Jacobean air, but the effect was marred by patterned linoleum floor tiles. The separate restaurant on B deck, measuring sixty by forty-five feet, was in a fake Louis XVI style, with fawn-colored walnut paneling, gilded moldings, brass and gilt light brackets, a long buffet table with a marble
fleur de pêche
top, and fawn silk curtains across the bay windows, with flowered borders and embroidered pelmets. The plaster ceiling was patterned with trellises and garlands, the Axminster carpet was of Louis XVI design, the walnut chairs upholstered in tapestry of a
treillage
of roses; and there was the inevitable bandstand.

The reception room extended the width of the ship. It, too, had white paneling in Jacobean style, hung with Aubusson tapestry work. The first-class lounge situated on promenade deck A was derived from the style of the Palace of Versailles. The reading and writing room was in the Georgian style of the 1780s. The smoking room, where convivial men foregathered in sprawling apathy, was mahogany paneled, supposedly in the Georgian style of the 1720s. There was a French café with little tables, cane settees, wicker easy chairs, and climbing plants trained on green trellises to create the illusion of being ashore. The Turkish baths were designed in seventeenth-century Moorish style, tiled in blue and green. It was “all very marvellous,” declared a Philadelphia journalist, “the luxurious hotel transferred to the ocean; the glittering lobster palace afloat.”
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5

Sailors

It is a blessing, no doubt, to be rid, at least for a time, of

All one’s friends and relations.

—A
RTHUR
H
UGH
C
LOUGH,
“A
MOURS DE
V
OYAGE
”

T
he
Titanic
was the greatest steamship in the world, but its officers were called sailors for a reason: they were all men who had been trained at sea under sail. Herbert Pitman, its third officer, who had sixteen years’ experience as a mariner before joining the
Titanic,
had four years as an apprentice under sail followed by three years on sailing ships before serving on the Blue Anchor Line steamships running to Australia. The fifth officer, twenty-eight-year-old Harold Lowe, had been seafaring half his life, having run away from his apprentice master at the age of fourteen and served on seven schooners and several square-rigged vessels before graduating to West African steamships. William Murdoch, the
Titanic
’s first officer, had left school at fifteen to become an apprentice seaman on a barque plying between Liverpool and the Pacific Coast of America. Neither their pride nor their sentiment let White Star officers forget that they had learned seamanship in the days of rigging, not funnels. The components of the rigging, with such names as buntlines, gooseneck, halyard, parrel beads, and stay mouse, and the varieties of sail, including crab claw, laleen, moonsail, spanker, and topgallant, already seemed picturesque in the age of the
Titanic
. The dangers and hardships of sailing ships were extreme: the men who had served on them were not prone to idealize or prettify past conditions, but most regretted the obsolescence of sail and hankered for the old days. With little prompting, they shared hair-raising memories of typhoons, accidents, and privations, as incontrovertible proof of the masculine hardiness they had shown when young.

Arthur Rostron, born in 1869, apprenticed in 1887 to the full-rigged ship
Cedric the Saxon,
spent eight winters in the South Atlantic and ten years under sail. He recalled with pride, not loathing, being “up aloft for hours on end, very often all through the raging night; six or eight hours on a foreyard trying to furl the foresail, the canvas soaked with rain and sea spray, hard as sheet-iron, until the finger-nails were torn off, leaving raw bleeding wounds; drenched to the skin, oilskins blown to ribbons and sea-boots full of water.” It was a memory that no one could take from him, “the eternal rolling and pitching and the almost constant hurricanes . . . down below the Horn.”
1
Charles Herbert Lightoller, second officer on the
Titanic,
recalled his first voyage on a steamship from New York in the 1890s: “Frankly, I didn’t like it. Good times; good food. Always sure of your watch below. Yet I loathed the smoke and the smell, and longed for the towering tiers of bellying canvas, the sound of water rushing past the scupper holes, in place of the monotonous clank and bang of machinery. I sadly missed the feel of something living under my feet.”
2
It was consolation, though, that his steamer took only a fortnight to reach Glasgow.

James Bisset, a future Cunard captain, recalled that when he passed his exams as first mate in 1905, aged twenty-one, he had served as an apprentice and second mate on four round-the-world voyages (on a 1,098-ton barque and full-rigged ship of 1,323 tons carrying coal and guano) but never in a steamship. “My commonsense told me that windjammers were doomed to extinction by the competition of steam; yet, in 1905, there were still many hundreds of sailing vessels under the British flag, and hundreds more under the American, French, German, Scandinavian and other national flags. They were owned and manned by diehards, of an ageing generation, and were kept going, with increasing financial difficulties, by the force of habit inherited from centuries of tradition.”
3
Officers of Bisset’s generation—he was born in 1883—recognized that steamers promised better pay and conditions, swifter voyages, and better chances of promotion, but he felt devalued when he moved over from sail to steam in 1905: “No more hounding men aloft, at risk of life and limb, to take in or make sail in a howling hurricane; no more tedious pully-hauly, sweltering in the doldrums; no more starvation on the bare whack of putrid pork and hard biscuits! But . . . no more of the peace and quiet of a sailing ship, snoring along in the trades with all sails set and everything drawing; no more exhilaration of running the easting down; no more thrills of gazing aloft at graceful curving sails . . . For the rest of my nautical life, I would be going to sea in oblong steel boxes with smoking funnels, thumping engines, vibrating propellers, rattling derricks and clattering winches; I would be dolled up like a gilded popinjay in my brassbound uniform, to impress the passengers; and perhaps there would be little real sailorizing to be done.”
4

There was constant anxiety about a nighttime collision with an iceberg. The only way to detect them on a moonless night was by the white foam at their base: with moonlight it was easier to spot a glint of what is called “ice blink.” Lightoller recounted an occasion in the South Atlantic when the cold became piercing, the wind fell away, and suddenly the crew were confronted by the threatening, spectral outline of the monstrous berg that had been taking the wind out of their sails. With difficulty the ship drew off from the menacing ice walls—all the crew worrying whether there were protruding underwater ledges that might hole the ship beneath the waterline and sink it. “With the first streak of dawn it was easy to see what a narrow shave it had been,” Lightoller recalled. “With the full day there was revealed an impenetrable wall of ice for close on fifteen miles astern, and more than double that distance ahead.” The ship had to sail for two days before it left that mass of ice. “Pinnacles, bays, chasms and cathedral-like structures, huge ravines and bridges, bridges of ice, looking for all the world as if they had been built by some clever engineers, and would have done credit to them at that.”
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A worse danger than icebergs were the derelicts drifting about the seas: often dismasted, waterlogged Nova Scotia schooners carrying timber and hard to sink. The hull of a schooner might float for months, entombing a starving crew without control of its navigation or means of contact with other ships, and could hole an unwary liner. Infectious diseases were another common hazard. Lightoller was once on a sailing ship two weeks out of Rio de Janeiro when the crew began to fall sick. “The first chap we said was loafing, until he died. That’s nearly always the verdict on a sailing ship, anyway. A man is invariably ‘mouching’ until he dies, and then we say, ‘Oh, he must have been bad after all.’” In this case, it was smallpox; there was, of course, no ship’s doctor, and the only medicine on board, a half cup of castor oil, was drunk by a patient in mistake for water. “We just had to rely upon our cast-iron constitutions and stick it out,” Lightoller averred. “Twice I read the burial service, or such parts as I could find, in a gale of wind when the Mate couldn’t leave the poop. Sometimes we couldn’t get the body over the rail: then it was beastly.”
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On March 16, 1912, just a month before the
Titanic
sank, another liner built by Harland & Wolff, P&O’s
Oceana,
outward bound from the Port of London to Bombay, was lost in the English Channel after a collision with a German steel barque. The
Oceana
stayed afloat for six hours after the collision, and 241 passengers and crew were rescued. Nine, however, drowned when the first lifeboat capsized after its launch—a memory that surely contributed to the initial reluctance of the
Titanic
passengers to board their lifeboats. Another
Oceana
lifeboat was so leaky that, despite constant bailing of water, it was foundering by the time its scared occupants were finally saved by a lifeboat sent from the nearby town of Eastbourne. There were claims of panicking Asiatic seamen, whose reliability was questioned in Parliament. The
Spectator
felt that insufficient precautions were taken to “police” passengers and crew in a crisis. “The crew, as in the case of the P&O Company, may contain Asiatics and Africans, who may or may not behave well. In P&O ships the Lascars are generally to be trusted, but one cannot speak so certainly of the Hindu firemen.”
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After the
Titanic
calamity, there was a general feeling that liners had been steaming ahead too dangerously fast. Even so, there were those who mitigated the risks of speed. The shipping publicist who wrote
Travelling Palaces
in 1913 declared that for businessmen competing against keen competitors, every wasted hour was money lost. “How, too,” it asked, “can the American tourist, taking a month’s holiday, cross the Atlantic twice and ‘do’ the United Kingdom and Ireland and most of Europe to his own satisfaction in the rest of the month if hours, minutes, and seconds be not saved?” The Pittsburgh banker Thomas Mellon, for example, took longer to cross the Atlantic both ways than he allowed for his entire European holiday. The hastening American divorcée in Edith Wharton’s story “Autres Temps” (1911) chafed because her liner, the
Utopia,
took eight days to cross from Cherbourg to New York. The steamship companies profited from rich passengers in a hurry. In the publicist’s words, “the hustler and rusher help fill the most expensive cabins, and to pay for the luxuries in speed and surroundings they require. If it were not for the comforts and luxuries, and the enforced rest, and the recuperative effect of a sea voyage . . . some American tourists would die of exhaustion, and many of the commercial men who rush from one side of the Atlantic to the other . . . would collapse under the strain.”
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There was an unnecessary cost to this thoughtless haste. Rostron recalled his first winter crossing of the Atlantic on a Cunarder, the
Umbria
. “We bore into the heavy seas and I was staggered at the speed that was maintained in spite of the damage the weather was causing to the ship. But in those days speed was the be-all and end-all of the crack ships.”
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Damage costing thousands of pounds to repair would be sustained in a few minutes because captains would not lose a few hours. Lightoller, who joined White Star in 1900 and spent twenty years in the Atlantic service, also deplored the relentless driving of ships through gales. Liners lurching through heavy seas, with the propeller coming out of the water, were more stomach-turning than a passenger elevator plunging from an upper floor of a skyscraper; but junior officers dared not even murmur their objections. As liners grew bigger and faster, their captains were urged by their companies to reduce speed when necessary, but seldom did so.
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Crashing into storm waves was not the heaviest jeopardy. Cocksure attitudes by Atlantic captains and unimaginative complacency by Board of Trade regulators were worse. Crewmen and officers who had begun their working lives on vulnerable little ships of sails and rigging—blown hither and thither by winds, creeping slowly across the water’s surface as the natural elements ordained—felt impervious on these great steel liners that sped across the ocean so swiftly that they were called Atlantic greyhounds.

The elation of a working life under sail was lost to most seamen by 1912, and the sense of perils at sea had diminished, too. Yet on Atlantic steamships, sailors continued to work as lookouts, scanning for icebergs, derelicts, schooners, or the perilous little skiffs of Newfoundland cod fishermen. For the lookouts, a great Atlantic liner deep in the night seemed vast, uncanny, deserted: they felt alone with the steady onward drive of the screws,

. . . the beat of the off-shore wind,

And the thresh of the deep-sea rain.
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