The Loss of the S. S. Titanic - Its Story and Its Lessons (13 page)

The extent to which all these qualities were found present and the
manner in which they were exercised stands to the everlasting credit
of the Cunard Line and those of its servants who were in charge of the
Carpathia. Captain Rostron's part in all this is a great one, and
wrapped up though his action is in a modesty that is conspicuous in
its nobility, it stands out even in his own account as a piece of work
well and courageously done.

As soon as the Titanic called for help and gave her position, the
Carpathia was turned and headed north: all hands were called on duty,
a new watch of stokers was put on, and the highest speed of which she
was capable was demanded of the engineers, with the result that the
distance of fifty-eight miles between the two ships was covered in
three and a half hours, a speed well beyond her normal capacity. The
three doctors on board each took charge of a saloon, in readiness to
render help to any who needed their services, the stewards and
catering staff were hard at work preparing hot drinks and meals, and
the purser's staff ready with blankets and berths for the shipwrecked
passengers as soon as they got on board. On deck the sailors got ready
lifeboats, swung them out on the davits, and stood by, prepared to
lower away their crews if necessary; fixed rope-ladders,
cradle-chairs, nooses, and bags for the children at the hatches, to
haul the rescued up the side. On the bridge was the captain with his
officers, peering into the darkness eagerly to catch the first signs
of the crippled Titanic, hoping, in spite of her last despairing
message of "Sinking by the head," to find her still afloat when her
position was reached. A double watch of lookout men was set, for there
were other things as well as the Titanic to look for that night, and
soon they found them. As Captain Rostron said in his evidence, they
saw icebergs on either side of them between 2.45 and 4 A.M., passing
twenty large ones, one hundred to two hundred feet high, and many
smaller ones, and "frequently had to manoeuvre the ship to avoid
them." It was a time when every faculty was called upon for the
highest use of which it was capable. With the knowledge before them
that the enormous Titanic, the supposedly unsinkable ship, had struck
ice and was sinking rapidly; with the lookout constantly calling to
the bridge, as he must have done, "Icebergs on the starboard,"
"Icebergs on the port," it required courage and judgment beyond the
ordinary to drive the ship ahead through that lane of icebergs and
"manoeuvre round them." As he himself said, he "took the risk of full
speed in his desire to save life, and probably some people might blame
him for taking such a risk." But the Senate Committee assured him that
they, at any rate, would not, and we of the lifeboats have certainly
no desire to do so.

The ship was finally stopped at 4 A.M., with an iceberg reported dead
ahead (the same no doubt we had to row around in boat 13 as we
approached the Carpathia), and about the same time the first lifeboat
was sighted. Again she had to be manoeuvred round the iceberg to pick
up the boat, which was the one in charge of Mr. Boxhall. From him the
captain learned that the Titanic had gone down, and that he was too
late to save any one but those in lifeboats, which he could now see
drawing up from every part of the horizon. Meanwhile, the passengers
of the Carpathia, some of them aroused by the unusual vibration of the
screw, some by sailors tramping overhead as they swung away the
lifeboats and got ropes and lowering tackle ready, were beginning to
come on deck just as day broke; and here an extraordinary sight met
their eyes. As far as the eye could reach to the north and west lay an
unbroken stretch of field ice, with icebergs still attached to the
floe and rearing aloft their mass as a hill might suddenly rise from a
level plain. Ahead and to the south and east huge floating monsters
were showing up through the waning darkness, their number added to
moment by moment as the dawn broke and flushed the horizon pink. It is
remarkable how "busy" all those icebergs made the sea look: to have
gone to bed with nothing but sea and sky and to come on deck to find
so many objects in sight made quite a change in the character of the
sea: it looked quite crowded; and a lifeboat alongside and people
clambering aboard, mostly women, in nightdresses and dressing-gowns,
in cloaks and shawls, in anything but ordinary clothes! Out ahead and
on all sides little torches glittered faintly for a few moments and
then guttered out—and shouts and cheers floated across the quiet sea.
It would be difficult to imagine a more unexpected sight than this
that lay before the Carpathia's passengers as they lined the sides
that morning in the early dawn.

No novelist would dare to picture such an array of beautiful climatic
conditions,—the rosy dawn, the morning star, the moon on the horizon,
the sea stretching in level beauty to the sky-line,—and on this sea
to place an ice-field like the Arctic regions and icebergs in numbers
everywhere,—white and turning pink and deadly cold,—and near them,
rowing round the icebergs to avoid them, little boats coming suddenly
out of mid-ocean, with passengers rescued from the most wonderful ship
the world has known. No artist would have conceived such a picture: it
would have seemed so highly dramatic as to border on the impossible,
and would not have been attempted. Such a combination of events would
pass the limit permitted the imagination of both author and artist.

The passengers crowded the rails and looked down at us as we rowed up
in the early morning; stood quietly aside while the crew at the
gangways below took us aboard, and watched us as if the ship had been
in dock and we had rowed up to join her in a somewhat unusual way.
Some of them have related that we were very quiet as we came aboard:
it is quite true, we were; but so were they. There was very little
excitement on either side: just the quiet demeanour of people who are
in the presence of something too big as yet to lie within their mental
grasp, and which they cannot yet discuss. And so they asked us
politely to have hot coffee, which we did; and food, which we
generally declined,—we were not hungry,—and they said very little at
first about the lost Titanic and our adventures in the night.

Much that is exaggerated and false has been written about the mental
condition of passengers as they came aboard: we have been described as
being too dazed to understand what was happening, as being too
overwhelmed to speak, and as looking before us with "set, staring
gaze," "dazed with the shadow of the dread event." That is, no doubt,
what most people would expect in the circumstances, but I know it does
not give a faithful record of how we did arrive: in fact it is simply
not true. As remarked before, the one thing that matters in describing
an event of this kind is the exact truth, as near as the fallible
human mind can state it; and my own impression of our mental condition
is that of supreme gratitude and relief at treading the firm decks of
a ship again. I am aware that experiences differed considerably
according to the boats occupied; that those who were uncertain of the
fate of their relatives and friends had much to make them anxious and
troubled; and that it is not possible to look into another person's
consciousness and say what is written there; but dealing with mental
conditions as far as they are delineated by facial and bodily
expressions, I think joy, relief, gratitude were the dominant emotions
written on the faces of those who climbed the rope-ladders and were
hauled up in cradles.

It must not be forgotten that no one in any one boat knew who were
saved in other boats: few knew even how many boats there were and how
many passengers could be saved. It was at the time probable that
friends would follow them to the Carpathia, or be found on other
steamers, or even on the pier at which we landed. The hysterical
scenes that have been described are imaginative; true, one woman did
fill the saloon with hysterical cries immediately after coming aboard,
but she could not have known for a certainty that any of her friends
were lost: probably the sense of relief after some hours of journeying
about the sea was too much for her for a time.

One of the first things we did was to crowd round a steward with a
bundle of telegraph forms. He was the bearer of the welcome news that
passengers might send Marconigrams to their relatives free of charge,
and soon he bore away the first sheaf of hastily scribbled messages to
the operator; by the time the last boatload was aboard, the pile must
have risen high in the Marconi cabin. We learned afterwards that many
of these never reached their destination; and this is not a matter for
surprise. There was only one operator—Cottam—on board, and although
he was assisted to some extent later, when Bride from the Titanic had
recovered from his injuries sufficiently to work the apparatus, he had
so much to do that he fell asleep over this work on Tuesday night
after three days' continuous duty without rest. But we did not know
the messages were held back, and imagined our friends were aware of
our safety; then, too, a roll-call of the rescued was held in the
Carpathia's saloon on the Monday, and this was Marconied to land in
advance of all messages. It seemed certain, then, that friends at home
would have all anxiety removed, but there were mistakes in the
official list first telegraphed. The experience of my own friends
illustrates this: the Marconigram I wrote never got through to
England; nor was my name ever mentioned in any list of the saved (even
a week after landing in New York, I saw it in a black-edged "final"
list of the missing), and it seemed certain that I had never reached
the Carpathia; so much so that, as I write, there are before me
obituary notices from the English papers giving a short sketch of my
life in England. After landing in New York and realizing from the
lists of the saved which a reporter showed me that my friends had no
news since the Titanic sank on Monday morning until that night
(Thursday 9 P.M.), I cabled to England at once (as I had but two
shillings rescued from the Titanic, the White Star Line paid for the
cables), but the messages were not delivered until 8.20 A.M. next
morning. At 9 A.M. my friends read in the papers a short account of
the disaster which I had supplied to the press, so that they knew of
my safety and experiences in the wreck almost at the same time. I am
grateful to remember that many of my friends in London refused to
count me among the missing during the three days when I was so
reported.

There is another side to this record of how the news came through, and
a sad one, indeed. Again I wish it were not necessary to tell such
things, but since they all bear on the equipment of the trans-Atlantic
lines—powerful Marconi apparatus, relays of operators, etc.,—it is
best they should be told. The name of an American gentleman—the same
who sat near me in the library on Sunday afternoon and whom I
identified later from a photograph—was consistently reported in the
lists as saved and aboard the Carpathia: his son journeyed to New York
to meet him, rejoicing at his deliverance, and never found him there.
When I met his family some days later and was able to give them some
details of his life aboard ship, it seemed almost cruel to tell them
of the opposite experience that had befallen my friends at home.

Returning to the journey of the Carpathia—the last boatload of
passengers was taken aboard at 8.30 A.M., the lifeboats were hauled on
deck while the collapsibles were abandoned, and the Carpathia
proceeded to steam round the scene of the wreck in the hope of picking
up anyone floating on wreckage. Before doing so the captain arranged
in the saloon a service over the spot where the Titanic sank, as
nearly as could be calculated,—a service, as he said, of respect to
those who were lost and of gratitude for those who were saved.

She cruised round and round the scene, but found nothing to indicate
there was any hope of picking up more passengers; and as the
Californian had now arrived, followed shortly afterwards by the Birma,
a Russian tramp steamer, Captain Rostron decided to leave any further
search to them and to make all speed with the rescued to land. As we
moved round, there was surprisingly little wreckage to be seen: wooden
deck-chairs and small pieces of other wood, but nothing of any size.
But covering the sea in huge patches was a mass of reddish-yellow
"seaweed," as we called it for want of a name. It was said to be cork,
but I never heard definitely its correct description.

The problem of where to land us had next to be decided. The Carpathia
was bound for Gibraltar, and the captain might continue his journey
there, landing us at the Azores on the way; but he would require more
linen and provisions, the passengers were mostly women and children,
ill-clad, dishevelled, and in need of many attentions he could not
give them. Then, too, he would soon be out of the range of wireless
communication, with the weak apparatus his ship had, and he soon
decided against that course. Halifax was the nearest in point of
distance, but this meant steaming north through the ice, and he
thought his passengers did not want to see more ice. He headed back
therefore to New York, which he had left the previous Thursday,
working all afternoon along the edge of the ice-field which stretched
away north as far as the unaided eye could reach. I have wondered
since if we could possibly have landed our passengers on this ice-floe
from the lifeboats and gone back to pick up those swimming, had we
known it was there; I should think it quite feasible to have done so.
It was certainly an extraordinary sight to stand on deck and see the
sea covered with solid ice, white and dazzling in the sun and dotted
here and there with icebergs. We ran close up, only two or three
hundred yards away, and steamed parallel to the floe, until it ended
towards night and we saw to our infinite satisfaction the last of the
icebergs and the field fading away astern. Many of the rescued have no
wish ever to see an iceberg again. We learnt afterwards the field was
nearly seventy miles long and twelve miles wide, and had lain between
us and the Birma on her way to the rescue. Mr. Boxhall testified that
he had crossed the Grand Banks many times, but had never seen
field-ice before. The testimony of the captains and officers of other
steamers in the neighbourhood is of the same kind: they had "never
seen so many icebergs this time of the year," or "never seen such
dangerous ice floes and threatening bergs." Undoubtedly the Titanic
was faced that night with unusual and unexpected conditions of ice:
the captain knew not the extent of these conditions, but he knew
somewhat of their existence. Alas, that he heeded not their warning!