A Night to Remember (2 page)

It seemed stronger to some than to others. Mrs. Albert Caldwell pictured a large dog that had a baby kitten in its mouth and was shaking it. Mrs. Walter B. Stephenson recalled the first ominous jolt when she was in the San Francisco earthquake—then decided this wasn’t that bad. Mrs. E. D. Appleton felt hardly any shock at all, but she noticed an unpleasant ripping sound … like someone tearing a long, long strip of calico.

The jar meant more to J. Bruce Ismay, Managing Director of the White Star Line, who in a festive mood was going along for the ride on the
Titanic
’s first trip. Ismay woke up with a start in his deluxe suite on B Deck—he felt sure the ship had struck something, but he didn’t know what.

Some of the passengers already knew the answer. Mr. and Mrs. George A. Harder, a young honeymoon couple down in cabin E-50, were still awake when they heard a dull thump. Then they felt the ship quiver, and there was “a sort of rumbling, scraping noise” along the ship’s side. Mr. Harder hopped out of bed and ran to the porthole. As he looked through the glass, he saw a wall of ice glide by.

The same thing happened to James B. McGough, a Gimbel’s buyer from Philadelphia, except his experience was somewhat more disturbing. His porthole was open, and as the berg brushed by, chunks of ice fell into the cabin.

Like Mr. McGough, most of the
Titanic
’s passengers were in bed when the jar came. On this quiet, cold Sunday night a snug bunk seemed about the best place to be. But a few shipboard die-hards were still up. As usual, most were in the First Class smoking room on A Deck.

And as usual, it was a very mixed group. Around one table sat Archie Butt, President Taft’s military aide; Clarence Moore, the traveling Master of Hounds; Harry Widener, son of the Philadelphia streetcar magnate; and William Carter, another Main Liner. They were winding up a small dinner given by Widener’s father in honor of Captain Edward J. Smith, the ship’s commander. The Captain had left early, the ladies had been packed off to bed, and now the men were enjoying a final cigar before turning in too. The conversation wandered from politics to Clarence Moore’s adventures in West Virginia, the time he helped interview the old feuding mountaineer Anse Hatfield.

Buried in a nearby leather armchair, Spencer V. Silverthorne, a young buyer for Nugent’s department store in St. Louis, browsed through a new bestseller,
The Virginian.
Not far off, Lucien P. Smith (still another Philadelphian) struggled gamely through the linguistic problems of a bridge game with three Frenchmen.

At another table the ship’s young set was enjoying a somewhat noisier game of bridge. Normally the young set preferred the livelier Café Parisien, just below on B Deck, and at first tonight was no exception. But it grew so cold that around 11:30 the girls went off to bed, and the men strolled up to the smoking room for a nightcap. Most of the group stuck to highballs; Hugh Woolner, son of the English sculptor, took a hot whisky and water; Lieutenant Hokan Bjornstrom Steffanson, a young Swedish military attaché on his way to Washington, chose a hot lemonade.

Somebody produced a deck of cards, and as they sat playing and laughing, suddenly there came that grinding jar. Not much of a shock, but enough to give a man a start—Mr. Silverthorne still sits up with a jolt when he tells it. In an instant the smoking-room steward and Mr. Silverthorne were on their feet … through the aft door … past the Palm Court … and out onto the deck. They were just in time to see the iceberg scraping along the starboard side, a little higher than the Boat Deck. As it slid by, they watched chunks of ice breaking and tumbling off into the water. In another moment it faded into the darkness astern.

Others in the smoking room were pouring out now. As Hugh Woolner reached the deck, he heard a man call out, “We hit an iceberg—there it is!”

Woolner squinted into the night. About 150 yards astern he made out a mountain of ice standing black against the starlit sky. Then it vanished into the dark.

The excitement, too, soon disappeared. The
Titanic
seemed as solid as ever, and it was too bitterly cold to stay outside any longer. Slowly the group filed back, Woolner picked up his hand, and the bridge game went on. The last man inside thought, as he slammed the deck door, that the engines were stopping.

He was right. Up on the bridge First Officer William M. Murdoch had just pulled the engine-room telegraph handle all the way to “Stop.” Murdoch was in charge of the bridge this watch, and it was his problem, once Fleet phoned the warning. A tense minute had passed since then—orders to Quartermaster Hitchens to turn the wheel hard a-starboard … a yank on the engine-room telegraph for “Full-Speed Astern” … a hard push on the button closing the watertight doors … and finally those 37 seconds of breathless waiting.

Now the waiting was over, and it was all so clearly too late. As the grinding noise died away, Captain Smith rushed onto the bridge from his cabin next to the wheelhouse. There were a few quick words:

“Mr. Murdoch, what was that?”

“An iceberg, sir. I hard-a-starboarded and reversed the engines, and I was going to hard-a-port around it, but she was too close. I couldn’t do any more.”

“Close the emergency doors.”

“The doors are already closed.”

They were closed, all right. Down in boiler room No. 6, Fireman Fred Barrett had been talking to Assistant Second Engineer James Hesketh when the warning bell sounded and the light flashed red above the watertight door leading to the stern. A quick shout of warning—an ear-splitting crash—and the whole starboard side of the ship seemed to give way. The sea cascaded in, swirling about the pipes and valves, and the two men leaped through the door as it slammed down behind them.

Barrett found things almost as bad where he was now, in boiler room No. 5. The gash ran into No. 5 about two feet beyond the closed compartment door, and a fat jet of seawater was spouting through the hole. Nearby, Trimmer George Cavell was digging himself out of an avalanche of coal that had poured out of a bunker with the impact. Another stoker mournfully studied an overturned bowl of soup that had been warming on a piece of machinery.

It was dry in the other boiler rooms farther aft, but the scene was pretty much the same—men picking themselves up, calling back and forth, asking what had happened. It was hard to figure out. Until now the
Titanic
had been a picnic. Being a new ship on her maiden voyage, everything was clean. She was, as Fireman George Kemish still recalls, “a good job … not what we were accustomed to in old ships, slogging our guts out and nearly roasted by the heat.”

All the firemen had to do was keep the furnaces full. No need to work the fires with slice bars, pricker bars, and rakes. So on this Sunday night the men were taking it easy—sitting around on buckets and the trimmers’ iron wheelbarrows, shooting the breeze, waiting for the 12-to-4 watch to come on.

Then came that thud … the grinding, tearing sound … the telegraphs ringing wildly … the watertight doors crashing down. Most of the men couldn’t imagine what it was—the story spread that the
Titanic
had gone aground just off the Banks of Newfoundland. Many of them still thought so, even after a trimmer came running down from above shouting, “Blimey! We’ve struck an iceberg!”

About ten miles away Third Officer Charles Victor Groves stood on the bridge of the Leyland Liner
Californian
bound from London to Boston. A plodding 6,000-tonner, she had room for 47 passengers, but none were being carried just now. On this Sunday night she had been stopped since 10:30
P.M.,
completely blocked by drifting ice.

At about 11:10 Groves noticed the lights of another ship, racing up from the east on the starboard side. As the newcomer rapidly overhauled the motionless
Californian,
a blaze of deck lights showed she was a large passenger liner. Around 11:30 he knocked on the Venetian door of the chart room and told Captain Stanley Lord about it. Lord suggested contacting the new arrival by Morse lamp, and Groves prepared to do this.

Then, at about 11:40, he saw the big ship suddenly stop and put out most of her lights. This didn’t surprise Groves very much. He had spent some time in the Far East trade, where they usually put deck lights out at midnight to encourage the passengers to turn in. It never occurred to him that perhaps the lights were still on … that they only seemed to go out because she was no longer broadside but had veered sharply to port.

A
LMOST AS IF NOTHING
had happened, Lookout Fleet resumed his watch, Mrs. Astor lay back in her bed, and Lieutenant Steffanson returned to his hot lemonade.

At the request of several passengers Second Class Smoking Room Steward James Witter went off to investigate the jar. But two tables of card players hardly looked up. Normally the White Star Line allowed no card playing on Sunday, and tonight the passengers wanted to take full advantage of the Chief Steward’s unexpected largesse.

There was no one in the Second Class lounge to send the librarian looking, so he continued sitting at his table, quietly counting the day’s loan slips.

Through the long white corridors that led to the staterooms came only the murmurs of people chatting in their cabins … the distant slam of some deck-pantry door … occasionally the click of unhurried high heels—all the usual sounds of a liner at night.

Everything seemed perfectly normal—yet not quite. In his cabin on B Deck, 17-year-old Jack Thayer had just called good night to his father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. John B. Thayer of Philadelphia. The Thayers had connecting staterooms, an arrangement compatible with Mr. Thayer’s position as Second Vice President of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Now, as young Jack stood buttoning his pajama jacket, the steady hum of the breeze through his half-opened porthole suddenly stopped.

On deck below, Mr. and Mrs. Henry B. Harris sat in their cabin playing double Canfield. Mr. Harris, a Broadway producer, was dog-tired, and Mrs. Harris had just broken her arm. There was little conversation as Mrs. Harris idly watched her dresses sway on their hangers from the ship’s vibration. Suddenly she noticed they stopped jiggling.

Another deck below, Lawrence Beesley, a young science master at Dulwich College, lay in his Second Class bunk reading, pleasantly lulled by the dancing motion of the mattress. Suddenly the mattress was still.

The creaking woodwork, the distant rhythm of the engines, the steady rattle of the glass dome over the A Deck foyer—all the familiar shipboard sounds vanished as the
Titanic
glided to a stop. Far more than any jolt, silence stirred the passengers.

Steward bells began ringing, but it was hard to learn anything. “Why have we stopped?” Lawrence Beesley asked a passing steward. “I don’t know, sir,” came a typical answer, “but I don’t suppose it’s much.”

Mrs. Arthur Ryerson, of the steel family, had somewhat better results. “There’s talk of an iceberg, ma’am,” explained Steward Bishop. “And they have stopped, not to run over it.” While her French maid Victorine hovered in the background, Mrs. Ryerson pondered what to do. Mr. Ryerson was having his first good sleep since the start of the trip, and she hated to wake him. She walked over to the square, heavy glass window that opened directly on the sea. Outside, she saw only a calm, beautiful night. She decided to let him sleep.

Others refused to let well enough alone. With the restless curiosity that afflicts everyone on board ship, some of the
Titanic
’s passengers began exploring for an answer.

In C-51 Colonel Archibald Gracie, an amateur military historian by way of West Point and an independent income, methodically donned underwear, long stockings, trousers, shoes, a Norfolk jacket, and then puffed up to the Boat Deck. Jack Thayer simply threw an overcoat over his pajamas and took off, calling to his parents that he was “going out to see the fun.”

On deck there was little fun to be seen; nor was there any sign of danger. For the most part the explorers wandered aimlessly about or stood by the rail, staring into the empty night for some clue to the trouble. The
Titanic
lay dead in the water, three of her four huge funnels blowing off steam with a roar that shattered the quiet, starlit night. Otherwise everything normal. Toward the stern of the Boat Deck an elderly couple strolled arm in arm, oblivious of the roaring steam and the little knots of passengers roving about.

It was so bitterly cold, and there was so little to be seen, that most of the people came inside again. Entering the magnificent foyer on A Deck, they found others who had also risen but preferred to stay inside where it was warm.

Mingling together, they made a curious picture. Their dress was an odd mixture of bathrobes, evening clothes, fur coats, turtleneck sweaters. The setting was equally incongruous—the huge glass dome overhead … the dignified oak paneling … the magnificent balustrades with their wrought-iron scrollwork … and, looking down on them all, an incredible wall clock adorned with two bronze nymphs, somehow symbolizing Honor and Glory crowning Time.

“Oh, it’ll be a few hours and we’ll be on the way again,” a steward vaguely explained to First Class passenger George Harder.

“Looks like we’ve lost a propeller, but it’ll give us more time for bridge,” called Howard Case, the London manager of Vacuum Oil, to Fred Seward, a New York lawyer. Perhaps Mr. Case got his theory from Steward Johnson, still contemplating a sojourn in Belfast. In any event, most of the passengers had better information by this time.

“What do you think?” exclaimed Harvey Collyer to his wife, as he returned to their cabin from a tour around the deck. “We’ve struck an iceberg—a big one—but there’s no danger. An officer told me so!” The Collyers were traveling Second Class, on their way from Britain to a fruit farm just purchased in Fayette Valley, Idaho. They were novices on the Atlantic, and perhaps the news would have roused Mrs. Collyer, but the dinner that night had been too rich. So she just asked her husband if anybody seemed frightened, and when he said no, she lay back again in her bunk.