The Night Lives On (11 page)

By now there was no lack of people willing to leave the
Titanic,
but a new problem arose. The officers in charge of launching the boats were afraid to put too
many passengers in them for fear they might buckle and pitch everyone into the sea. Actually, there was no danger of this. Harland & Wolff had designed all the boats on the
Olympic
and
Titanic
to be lowered with their full complement of people. In a test on May 9, 1911, the shipyard even loaded one of the
Olympic’s
boats with weights corresponding to 65 persons, then raised and lowered it six times without any sign of strain.

Neither Captain Smith nor his officers seem to have been aware of the test. Harland & Wolff never told them that the boats could be lowered fully loaded; the builders simply assumed they knew this as “a matter of general knowledge.” If they ever knew, nobody remembered it that night. Boat 6 rowed off with a maximum of 28 people; Boat 8 with 39; Boat 2 with 26.

Acting on his own, Lightoller decided he might get more people into the boats by utilizing the portside lower deck gangway. He sent six seamen down to open the doors, and ordered the boats, once afloat, to row down to the opening and receive additional passengers. It didn’t work. The doors were never opened; the men sent down were never seen again. They were probably trapped by some sudden inflow of water before they could get the job done.

There was apparently a similar plan for boats on the starboard side. Lawrence Beesley recalled hearing an officer—Murdoch, he thought—calling down to the crew of No. 13, “Lower away, and when afloat, row around to the gangway and wait for further orders.” Captain Smith was also calling on the boats to stay within hailing distance.

Some did…for a while. But the sight of that great
hulk, lights ablaze, sagging into the ocean proved too frightening. She was clearly doomed now, and there was talk of suction and a huge wave that would swamp any boats that remained too close. One by one they crept away into the night.

On the
Titanic
herself, the mood had changed to desperation. By 1:15 the water was lapping at the letters of her name on the bow. Drunkenly, she staggered from a slight list to starboard to a heavy list to port. The downward tilt of the deck grew steeper.

Time was running out. The officers in charge of loading the boats no longer hesitated to fill them: No. 11 went off with 70; No. 14 with 63; No. 15 with 70.

But haste could also be costly. It probably explains the worst case of the night of a boat leaving the
Titanic
with too few people. Technically, No. 1 was called an “emergency boat”—smaller than a regular lifeboat, manned by a specially trained crew, and ready for instant launching in such untoward situations as a man overboard. It was the first boat on the starboard side, just aft of the bridge.

Since No. 1 was always kept swung out, the crew did not bother with it when they first came on deck to clear the boats. Instead, they started with No. 3 and worked their way aft. The crowd on the Boat Deck followed along, and by the time First Officer Murdoch turned his attention to No. 1, the only passengers in the vicinity were a rather haughty English couple, Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon, and Miss L. M. Francatelli, who was Lady Duff Gordon’s secretary. There seems no clear reason why they didn’t go aft with the mob; perhaps it just wasn’t their way of doing things.

When the boat was ready for launching, Murdoch
called for women and children, but none appeared. Lady Duff Gordon had already made up her mind that she would never leave her husband, and Miss Francatelli wouldn’t go alone. Finally, Sir Cosmo stepped up and asked if all three couldn’t enter the boat. Murdoch replied, “Yes, I wish you would.” They climbed in, as he again called for women and children. This time two American businessmen came up, and Murdoch put them in too.

Hundreds of women must have been still on the Boat Deck, but Murdoch apparently felt there was no time to search for them. His one idea seems to have been to get the boat away. The ship was sinking fast, and he needed the empty davits for the two starboard collapsibles. He plucked two seamen and five stokers from members of the crew standing by, put Lookout George Symons in charge, and told him to lay off 200 yards, ready to come back when summoned. At 1:10, Boat 1, capacity 40 persons, dropped down to the sea with just 12 people aboard, only 5 of them passengers.

There would have been less need to hurry, if the
Titanic’s
crew had been better trained in loading and lowering the lifeboats. Two hours should have been enough to do the job properly. But Captain Smith’s casual approach to the whole matter of boat drill now took its toll. His custom on the
Olympic
—carried over to the
Titanic
—was merely to test two lifeboats once a voyage, always while the ship was tied up at dock. A picked crew of experienced seamen—usually the same team every time—would lower the boats to the water, then raise them up again. The stewards participated only occasionally, and the firemen not at all. As a result, there were not enough trained hands, and on the night of
April 14, the boats could not be lowered simultaneously, but had to be launched one at a time.

Boat 4 offers a prime example of what could happen. This was the boat that Second Officer Lightoller had been unable to load from the Promenade Deck because all the windows were closed. They were soon opened, but by that time Lightoller and his team of “old hands” had moved on to Boat 6…then to Boat 8…and finally to Collapsible D, which was still lashed to the Boat Deck. More than an hour passed before he got a chance to break off and finish launching No. 4. Meanwhile the women waiting to enter the boat simply cooled their heels.

By now it was nearly 2:00, and the water was only ten feet below the Promenade Deck. The women were hurriedly rounded up and passed through the windows into the boat. The pace was so frantic that Lightoller was bathed in sweat, despite the 32° temperature. Colonel Gracie and some of the other First Class men pitched in to help—experience no longer mattered. In the rush to get the boat off, 20 places were left unfilled.

Even the last boat lowered, Collapsible D, was launched with plenty of room in the bow. As it dropped by the open end of the Promenade Deck, Hugh Woolner and Bjornstrom Steffanson were standing there and noticed the empty space. They decided to jump for it as the water washed onto the deck and over their evening slippers. This was a dangerous thing to do, for boats hanging in davits are notoriously tippy, but they got away with it, and Collapsible D pulled away with 44 of its 47 places filled.

There remained Collapsibles A and B, stowed on the roof of the officers’ quarters on either side of the
forward funnel. These boats, too, were never fully utilized, but here the explanation was not haste or complacency. It was a case of poor design. It’s hard to imagine what Harland & Wolff had in mind when they put two boats in such an inaccessible spot. There was absolutely no mechanism for getting them down to the Boat Deck, where they then had to be fitted into the empty davits used by the two emergency boats.

Nevertheless, the crew did their best. Murdoch led a small group trying to free Collapsible A on the starboard side, while Lightoller’s men struggled with Collapsible B on the port side. With enormous effort the two boats were wrestled to the edge of the roof, and oars were placed against the wall of the officers’ quarters to slide them down to the Boat Deck. A handful of passengers quietly looked on, trying to calculate their chances. Should they wait here on the slim hope of a place in these two boats, or should they head aft toward the momentary safety of the poop deck?

Colonel Gracie and Clinch Smith decided to head aft, but suddenly their way was blocked by a great mass of steerage passengers—hundreds of them—surging up the companionway and deck ladders from somewhere below. Who they were, or where they had been until now, remains a mystery. Had they been restrained until this last desperate moment? Had they been waiting to be escorted to the Boat Deck, when time simply ran out? No one will ever know, for all were soon engulfed by the water now sweeping up the deck.

There were women as well as men in this crowd, and it offers our best clue to what happened to the Goodwin family. Sticking together, they probably reached the Boat Deck too late for a chance at the boats. Now,
somewhere in this nameless, faceless mass of human beings, Frederick and Augusta Goodwin stood with their six children, quietly prepared to meet the end.

A
T LEAST THE
T
ITANIC
was spared the horror of a panic. The crew did not battle the passengers for the lifeboats, as they did when the French liner
La Bourgogne
went down in 1898. No officer “stole” a boat, as happened when the Collins Liner
Arctic
sank in 1854.

With few exceptions, the passengers behaved admirably, and the crew did their duty—often at a fearful price. The statistics tell the story: the Captain, Chief Officer, and First Officer—all lost; the engineers—all lost; the pursers and officers of the Victualling Department—all lost; the eight bandsmen—all lost; the five bellboys—all lost.

Fearing there might be trouble, the officers loading the boats were armed with pistols, but in more than 2,000 pages of testimony at the hearings, there is only one thoroughly documented case in which a gun was fired. As Boat 14 was being lowered, a group of steerage passengers tried to jump in, and Fifth Officer Lowe fired several shots along the side of the ship to keep them out.

There also seems to have been some gunfire during the loading of Collapsible C—the last boat lowered on
the starboard side forward—which takes on added interest since it was the boat that took off Bruce Ismay, head of the White Star Line. Ismay never mentioned any disorder at the hearings, nor did Quartermaster George Thomas Rowe or Pantryman Albert Pearcey, the only other persons in the boat to testify. Yet Hugh Woolner was quite specific on the point, both in a letter written on the
Carpathia
and later in his testimony at the Senate investigation.

According to Woolner, he and Steffanson had just finished helping Lightoller load Collapsible D, all the way forward on the port side, when they heard a commotion across the deck on the starboard side. They crossed over just in time to see First Officer Murdoch fire his pistol twice in the air, trying to stop a rush on “a collapsible”—which could only have been Collapsible C. Woolner and Steffanson helped restore order, then saw the boat safely away.

In an account privately published for his family and friends in 1940, First Class passenger Jack Thayer partially corroborated Woolner’s story….

There was some disturbance in loading the last two forward starboard boats. A large crowd of men was pressing to get into them. No women were around as far as I could see. I saw Ismay, who had been assisting in the loading of the last boat, push his way into it. It was really every man for himself….Purser H. W. McElroy, as brave and as fine a man as ever lived, was standing up in the next to last boat, loading it. Two men, I think they were dining room stewards, dropped into the boat from the deck above. As they
jumped, he fired twice in the air. I do not believe they were hit, but they were quickly thrown out.

There are, of course, nagging discrepancies between Woolner’s and Thayer’s accounts. Woolner thought First Officer Murdoch fired the shots; Thayer thought Purser McElroy did. Woolner thought it was the last boat; Thayer thought it was the next-to-last. But survivors often saw things differently in the dimly lit confusion of the
Titanic’s
Boat Deck; and overriding any discrepancies, it seems to me, is the basic similarity: both Woolner and Thayer, responsible witnesses, independently recalled an officer firing twice into the air to stop a rush on one of the last boats on the starboard side forward.

In both Woolner’s and Thayer’s accounts it should be emphasized that the shots were fired into the air, not at anybody. Through the years there have also been stories of actual shootings, but serious students have largely written them off as the concoctions of a sensationalist press that stopped at nothing for dramatic effect. I have always gone along with this reasoning.

It was, then, quite a surprise some years ago to run across a personal letter from a survivor—not just another wild newspaper story—describing an actual shooting in the last minutes on the Boat Deck. The letter was from Third Class passenger Eugene Daly to his sister in Ireland. It is undated, but was clearly written right after the disaster, since it appeared in the London
Daily Telegraph
on May 4, 1912. Describing the scene, Daly wrote:

At the first cabin [deck] when a boat was being
lowered an officer pointed a revolver and said if any man tried to get in, he would shoot him on the spot. I saw the officer shoot two men dead because they tried to get in the boat. Afterwards there was another shot, and I saw the officer himself lying on the deck. They told me he shot himself, but I did not see him. I was up to my knees in the water at the time. Every one was rushing around, and there were no more boats. I then dived overboard.

Daly ended up among the survivors who reached one of the collapsibles that floated off the ship; so he was at least in a position to see. Still, it was only one letter. To be taken seriously, it needed some sort of confirmation.

That came in 1981 with the publishing of
The Titanic, the Psychic and the Sea
by Rustie Brown. In the course of her research, Mrs. Brown ran across an unpublished letter from First Class passenger George Rheims to his wife in France. It is dated April 19, 1912, the day after the
Carpathia
reached New York with the
Titanic’s
survivors. Rheims was one of the few who jumped near the end and ultimately reached Collapsible A; he, too, was in a position to see. Originally written in French, here is a translation of the pertinent part of his letter

While the last boat was leaving, I saw an officer with a revolver fire a shot and kill a man who was trying to climb into it. As there remained nothing more for him to do, the officer told us, “Gentlemen, each man for himself, Good-bye.” He gave a military salute and then fired a bullet into his head. That’s what I call a man!!!