The Night Lives On (6 page)

T
HE BRIDGE WAS AS
surprised as the gentlemen in the smoking room. How could the
Titanic
have collided with an iceberg so suddenly, so unexpectedly? Second Officer Lightoller wasn’t on the bridge at the time, but he was senior surviving officer, and at the British Inquiry (technically the Wreck Commissioner’s Court) he had an almost mystical explanation:

Of course, we know now the extraordinary combination of circumstances that existed at that time which you would not meet again in 100 years; that they should all have existed just on that particular night shows, of course, that everything was against us.

Pressed to particularize, Lightoller pointed out that there was no moon, no wind, no swell. The Court did not seem overly impressed, but the notion has persisted that the accident was of the one-in-a-million variety, that it couldn’t have been foreseen, and that the lost liner was, in fact, a helpless victim of fate.

Was she really? To find the answer, we must start
back on the afternoon of April 12 as the
Titanic
—one day out of Queenstown—steamed westward across a calm, sunny sea. Around sunset a wireless message arrived from the French Liner
La Touraine
warning of ice ahead. Captain Smith gave the position to Fourth Officer Boxhall, and Boxhall noted it on the map in the chart room, but it was over a thousand miles away and far to the north of the
Titanic’s
track—no need to worry.

The wireless was quiet on the 13th, but late that night the
Titanic
met the Furness Withy Liner
Rappahannock,
eastbound from Halifax to London. She had recently encountered heavy pack ice, twisting her rudder and denting her bow. Now, as the two ships passed within signaling distance, the
Rappahannock
warned the
Titanic
by blinker of the danger ahead. The great White Star Liner, decks blazing with light, flashed back a brief acknowledgement and hurried on into the night.

Sunday, April 14, and the wireless brought a spate of fresh warnings. At 9
A.M.
(Titanic
time) the Cunard Liner
Caronia
reported “bergs, growlers, and field ice in 42°N, from 49° to 51°W.” At 11:40 the Dutch liner
Noordam
also reported “much ice” in roughly the same position, and at 1:42
P.M.
the White Star Liner
Baltic
reported “icebergs and large quantity of field ice in 41°51’N, 49°9’W”—about 250 miles ahead.

At 1:45
P.M
. still another ice message arrived—the fourth of the day. The German liner
Amerika
reported passing two large icebergs at 41’27’N, 50°8’W. The
Amerika’s
message was addressed to the U.S. Hydro-graphic Office in Washington, but this was beyond her own range; so, in the custom of the times, she asked the
Titanic
to relay it. This the
Titanic
did, thus adding her
own voice to the chorus of warnings.

Nothing more till 7:30
P.M
.; then a fifth message, this one from the Leyland Liner
Californian,
position 42°3’N, 49°9’W: “Three large bergs five miles to southward of us.” The ice was now only 50 miles ahead.

Finally, at 9:40
P.M.,
the Atlantic Transport Liner
Mesaba:
“Lat. 42°N to 41°25’N, Longitude 40°W to 50°30’W, saw much heavy pack ice and great number large icebergs, also field ice.” The
Titanic
was already in the rectangle blocked out by this warning.

Put together, the six messages indicated an enormous belt of ice stretching some 78 miles directly across the big ship’s path.

But the messages were not “put together.” If the recollections of the four surviving officers are any guide, most of the warnings went unnoticed on the bridge. Fourth Officer Boxhall, who was always Captain Smith’s choice for marking the ship’s chart, could only remember pricking off the
La Touraine’s
sighting on April 12.

Of the six ice messages received on the 14th, the day of the collision, there is firm information about only the first two. The
Caronia’s
sighting, received at 9
A.M.,
appears to have been noted by Boxhall. Third Officer Pitman distinctly remembered seeing him jot the single word “ice” on a slip of paper, with the
Caronia’s
sighting underneath, and then tuck the slip into a frame above the chart room table. Other officers recalled seeing the same sighting pricked off on the chart—also Boxhall’s work. And around 12:45 Captain Smith showed the complete
Caronia
message to Second Officer Lightoller, senior officer on the bridge at the time.

About an hour later Captain Smith had the
Baltic’s
warning, too, but there’s no evidence that he showed it to anybody on the bridge. Instead, he took it with him as he started down for lunch about 1:30. On the Promenade Deck he ran into Bruce Ismay, who was taking a pre-lunch constitutional. They exchanged greetings, and the Captain handed the Managing Director the
Baltic’s
message as a matter of interest. Ismay glanced at it, stuffed it in his pocket, and went on down to lunch.

He still had it late in the afternoon when he ran into Mrs. Thayer and Mrs. Ryerson, two of the most socially prominent ladies aboard. Ismay, who liked to remind people who he was, lost no time producing the
Baltic
message and reading them the titillating news about icebergs ahead.

Coming out of the smoking room that evening just before dinner, he again met Captain Smith. The Captain asked if Ismay still had the message, explaining that he wanted to post it for his officers to read. Ismay fished it out of his pocket and returned it without any further conversation. Then the two men continued down to the Á la Carte Restaurant—Ismay to dine alone with the ship’s surgeon, old Dr. O’Laughlin; Smith to join the small party the Wideners were giving in his honor. There’s no evidence that the
Baltic’s
information was ever noted on the bridge before the whole affair became academic.

As for the four other ice messages received on the 14th—those from the
Noordam, Amerika, Californian,
and
Mesaba
—none of them were remembered by any of the surviving officers. The
Noordam’s
warning was acknowledged by Captain Smith, but what he did with it nobody knows. The
Californian
’s message was received by Second Wireless Operator Harold Bride, who testified that he took it to the bridge but didn’t know whom
he gave it to. The
Amerika
and
Mesaba
warnings were received by First Wireless Operator John Phillips, but what happened to them remains a mystery.

Almost any student of the
Titanic
knows by heart the famous scene where a weary Jack Phillips tucks the
Mesaba’
s warning under a paperweight and goes on working off his backlog of commercial traffic. Yet there’s very little evidence to support the story. Lightoller said Phillips told him so while they were clinging to an upturned collapsible boat after the sinking, but nobody else on the collapsible remembered such a conversation. Even Lightoller never mentioned it at the hearings, although it was vitally important and would have helped White Star, which he was trying to do. Nor did Lightoller mention the incident to Fourth Officer Boxhall, while they were on the
Carpathia
going over together every detail of the disaster. Boxhall never heard of the
Mesaba
until he reached New York. The story first emerged in Lightoller’s memoirs, 25 years later, where it should be accorded the latitude normally granted an old sea dog reminiscing.

The
Mesaba
message remains a mystery. Perhaps it did end up under the paperweight, but it seems equally possible that sometime after Lightoller went off duty Phillips passed it on to the bridge, where it received the same attention given the warnings from the
Noordam, Amerika,
and
Californian
—which was none at all.

What went wrong? To begin with, there seems to have been little coordination between the radio room and the bridge. The procedure for handling incoming messages was fuzzy at best. Any message affecting the navigation of the ship was meant to go straight to the bridge, but Phillips and Bride were no navigators; the
jumble of longitudes and latitudes meant nothing to them. Their method of handling a message really depended on how it was addressed, rather than what it was about.

If the message was addressed to Captain Smith, one of the operators would take it directly to the Captain and hand it to him personally. If addressed simply to the ship, it might be delivered by a messenger, and to anyone on duty on the bridge. If sent just to be relayed on, like the
Amerika’s
alert to the Hydrographic Office in Washington, there seems to have been no standard practice at all.

Some messages were even picked up by eavesdropping, and their handling was left to the operator’s discretion. The
Californian’s
warning, for instance, was addressed to the liner
Antillian.
Bride just happened to catch it, jotted it down, and took it to the bridge himself—but never knew whom he gave it to.

Nor does there seem to have been any clear-cut procedure for handling the messages once they reached the bridge. According to Third Officer Pitman, every captain had his own system, but it’s hard to explain the system on the
Titanic.
Of the three messages addressed to Captain Smith personally, the
Caronia’s
was posted, the
Noordam’s
can’t be traced, and the
Baltic’s
spent the day in Bruce Ismay’s pocket. Of the rest, there’s no record that they were ever seen by any officer on the bridge.

As a result, some important information was missed altogether. The
Titanic’s
surviving officers all thought the ice lay to the north of the track, but the
Amerika
and
Mesaba
warnings clearly placed it to the south as well. Nor did the officers appear to understand the nature of the danger. Third Officer Pitman thought there was only
a berg or two; Lightoller also worried about “small ice and growlers.” Nobody on the bridge visualized the great berg-studded floe drifting slowly across the ship’s path. The missed messages told a lot.

Above all, the cumulative effect of the messages—warning after warning, the whole day long—was lost completely. The result was a complacency, an almost arrogant casualness, that permeated the bridge.

This complacency is perhaps the most exasperating feature of the whole affair. Fourth Officer Boxhall did not even read the one message he saw. Third Officer Pitman saw the chit marked “ice” above the chart room table, but it failed to stir his interest—“I only looked at it casually.” Fifth Officer Lowe also looked at the chit “casually,” but once he saw the ship wouldn’t reach the position during
his
watch, he put it out of his mind. Second Officer Lightoller never even saw the chit when he came on duty that last Sunday night, “because I did not look.”

Strangest of all was an exchange between Lightoller and Sixth Officer Moody, who shared the watch from 8:00 to 10:00
P.M.
Early on, Lightoller asked Moody when the ship would be up to the ice. Moody said about 11:00. Working it out for himself, Lightoller decided the time would really be closer to 9:30. But he never told Moody. Instead, he merely made a mental note of the Sixth Officer’s lapse, as though Moody were an errant schoolboy who had made some minor mistake in math, not worth fussing over.

Later Lightoller said he thought that Moody’s calculations might have been based on some other ice message that Lightoller himself hadn’t seen, but this still doesn’t explain his silence. Nor does it help that the
collision did not occur until 11:40—well after the time even Moody expected ice. The incident remains a striking illustration of the complacency that seems to have affected the whole bridge.

Yet there was still ample opportunity to avoid disaster. Every officer on the bridge, from Captain Smith to the very junior Moody, knew that sometime before midnight the
Titanic
might encounter ice. It was with this thought in mind that the Captain left the Wideners’ party shortly before 9:00 and joined Lightoller on the bridge.

The conversation was oddly laconic. As they peered into a black cloudless night, Smith remarked it was cold. Lightoller “Yes, it is very cold, sir. In fact, it is only one degree above freezing.” He described the precautions he was taking: a warning to the carpenter to watch his fresh water supply…another to the engine room to keep an eye on the steam winches.

Smith got back to the weather: “There is not much wind.”

“No, it is a flat calm, as a matter of fact.”

“A flat calm. Yes, quite flat.”

Then, to the ice. Lightoller remarked that it was rather a pity the breeze didn’t keep up while they were going through the danger area. Icebergs were so much easier to spot at night, if the wind stirred up some surf. But they decided that even if the berg “showed a blue side,” they would have enough warning. At 9:25 the subject was exhausted and the Captain turned in: “If it becomes at all doubtful, let me know at once. I’ll be just inside.”

Not one word about slowing down. Why was this most obvious of all precautions not even mentioned?
The usual answer is that Captain Smith thought the
Titanic
was unsinkable. But even if the ship were unsinkable, the Captain surely didn’t want to hit an iceberg.

Actually, he didn’t slow down because he was sure that on this brilliantly clear night any iceberg could be spotted in time to avoid it. In reaching that decision, Smith did not feel he was doing anything rash. He was following the practice of all captains on the Atlantic run, except for a few slowpokes like James Clayton Barr of the Cunarder
Caronia,
whose legendary caution at the slightest sign of haze had earned him the derisive nickname “Foggy.”

Knuckling under the competitive pressure of keeping schedule, most captains ran at full steam, despite strong evidence that ice was not as easily sighted as generally claimed. Especially noteworthy was the harrowing ordeal of the Guion Liner
Arizona
in November 1879. Like the
Titanic,
she was the largest liner of her day. Eastbound off the Banks of Newfoundland, she raced through a night that was cloudy, but with good visibility. Taking advantage of the calm seas, the passengers gathered in the lounge for a concert.