The Other Side of the Night (12 page)

To match wi Scotia’s noblest speech yon orchestra sublime

Whaurto—uplifted like the Just—the tail-rods mark the time.

The crankshaft-throws give the double-bass, the feed pump sobs an’ heaves,

An’ now the main eccentrics start their quarrel in the sheaves:

Her time, her own appointed time, the rocking link-head bides,

Till—hear that note?—the rod’s return whings glimmerin’ through the guides.

They’re all awa’! True beat, full power, the clangin’ chorus goes

Clear to the tunnel where they sit, my purrin’ dynamos.

Interdependence absolute, foreseen, ordained, decreed,

To work, Ye’ll note, at ony tilt an’ every rate o’ speed.

Fra’ skylight-lift to furnace bars, backed, bolted, braced an’ stayed,

An’ singin’ like the Mornin’ Stars for joy that they are made;

While, out o’ touch o’ vanity, the sweatin’ thrust-block says:

“Not unto us the praise, or man—not unto us the praise!”

Now, a’ together, hear them lift their lesson—theirs an’ mine:

“Law, Orrder, Duty an’ Restraint, Obedience, Discipline!”

Mill, forge an’ try-pit taught them that when roarin’ they arose,

An’ whiles I wonder if a soul was gied them wi’ the blows.

And so the
Carpathia
’s engines pounded, pushing her, driving her forward with an urgency no steamship had ever known before, or would ever know again. Up, down, up, down, up, down, the pistons pounded, as Chief Engineer Johnston watched the revolutions steadily increasing. The gauges showed the ship going faster and faster as she drove ahead—14½ knots…15½…16…16½…17 knots—the old
Carpathia
had never gone so fast.

(Decades later purists with a revisionist bent, citing a multitude of technical and technological details, among them the
Carpathia
’s size, hull form, engine design, and age, would claim–-possibly correctly–-that the ship was never capable of a speed of 17 knots, and in all probability barely reached 16. It’s a debating point certain to delight the most avid rivet-counter and technophile; but what remains unchallenged and unchallengeable is that in the early hours of April 15, 1912, the
Carpathia
was driven faster than her designers and builders would have ever believed possible.)

This was the sort of situation for which a man like Alexander Johnston was born. Fifty-nine years old, a burly man with a fine white moustache, he hailed from Scotland’s western coast, a prototypical Scots “artifex”—engineer—reminiscent of “the auld chief engineer” who is the hero of “McAndrew’s Hymn.” He tended his boilers and engines with the same sort of devotion many men reserved for their children, knowing the strengths, weaknesses, quirks, and eccentricities of each piece of machinery in his charge. Yet it was his lavish care and attention to the details of their operations over the years that caused the
Carpathia
’s twelve-year-old boilers and engines to be equal to such an ordeal. Whatever claims might be made or denied about the speeds the
Carpathia
attained that night, what could never be denied was that her engines never missed a beat. By 12:20, Captain Smith had given orders for the
Titanic
’s passengers to be put into the lifeboats—“Women and children first!”—and assigned the starboard side boats to First Officer Murdoch, giving the portside responsibilities to Second Officer Lightoller. Both men took their responsibilities very seriously, although their interpretation of their orders somewhat differed. Murdoch took “Women and children first!” to mean just that—they had first priority when a boat was being loaded. But when there were no women forthcoming, or those who were at hand refused to leave their husbands, he would relent and allow husbands and wives together into the boats. When there were no more married couples standing by, a handful of single men were given permission to climb into the lifeboats.

Lightoller, on the other hand, took “Women and children first!” a little further, interpreting it to mean women and children only. And sometimes he would be the one to decide where the line between child and adult was to be drawn. At one point, while putting passengers into Boat No. 4, he suddenly spotted a teenage boy, Jack Ryerson, climbing over the gunwale, and called out, “That boy can’t go!” Jack’s father, Arthur Ryerson bristled. Placing his arm around Jack’s shoulders he said, “Of course the boy goes with his mother—he’s only thirteen.” Lightoller relented, but was heard to mutter, “No more boys.”

The lifeboats were filled and launched haphazardly, as many women refused to leave their husbands, and passengers of both sexes questioned the wisdom of leaving the warm, brightly lit
Titanic
in order to splash about in mid-ocean in a open boat, especially when the air temperature was only about 25º, the water barely 28º. Eventually, at about 12:45, Boat No. 5, filled to about a third of its actual capacity, was lowered down to the water, the first lifeboat to get away from the sinking liner.

Once the
Carpathia
’s boats were readied, her officers divided the crew into work gangs, each assigned to a particular task. Seaman Vaughn found himself collecting unused blankets from throughout the ship and depositing them in the First Class Lounge, where he and several other crewmen began shifting tables, chairs, and sideboards; some of the men were busy transferring the contents of the liquor cabinet to the buffet. It was all so mysterious. Vaughn heard a rumor that Captain Rostron had given instructions that the ship be prepared to take on as many as 3,000 additional people, but where they were to come from, the crew had no idea—and they were too busy at the moment to try to figure it out.

Once the lounges were readied, the next job was preparing the gangways along the side of the ship. The first step in the task was to rig the electric lights. Rostron had calculated that the
Carpathia
would reach the
Titanic
’s position by 4:00 a.m., still complete darkness at those latitudes at that time of year. He was determined that there be no accidents due to passengers or crewmen from the
Titanic
trying to grope their way into the
Carpathia
in the darkness, so Dean’s men hurriedly strung cables and affixed clusters of bright lamps to brackets on the liner’s hull above each of the four gangways on each side of the ship. While this was being done, other seamen were busily rigging block-and-tackle at each of the gangways, with slings and heavy canvas bags at hand for use in lifting survivors aboard. Rostron was trying to cover every eventuality, and he realized that the people rescued from the
Titanic
might well be so physically and emotionally exhausted that they would be unable to climb any sort of ladder up the side of the ship from the bottom of a lifeboat. At the same time, he realized that some of them might be able to do just that, hence the presence of the rope ladders and cargo nets at the gangway doors.

The optimist and the pessimist existed side-by-side in the work the
Carpathia
’s crew was finishing. The ship’s forward derricks were rigged and topped, with steam in the winches—the
only
steam generated by the ship’s boilers that was
not
going to the engines, for in the event that the
Titanic
was still afloat when the
Carpathia
arrived, Rostron intended to do his best to bring as much of her luggage and cargo aboard as he could, particularly the Royal Mail. At the same time, gash-bags of oil were prepared, ready to be cut open and their contents pumped over the ship’s side, in case the seas became rough. Rostron knew the North Atlantic well enough to know that it could be two entirely different oceans just sixty miles apart.

By 1:15 the
Titanic
’s wireless operator, Phillips, was beginning to worry. Where was everybody? It had been nearly an hour since the
Carpathia
informed him that she was putting about and “coming hard,” but that had been the only good news he’d had so far. And even that had come with a depressing qualification: the
Carpathia
was fifty-eight miles away and it would be nearly four hours before she arrived. Though Captain Smith hadn’t said as much, in his heart Phillips probably knew that the
Titanic
didn’t have four hours left to live. Anxiously he continued tapping away, hoping that some ship—any ship—would be closer and finally answer.

He was beginning to feel the strain. Perhaps it didn’t seem possible to the other ships that the “unsinkable”
Titanic
could be in mortal danger, and in vain Phillips was trying to make them understand. When at 1:25 the
Olympic
asked, “Are you steering south to meet us?” Phillips tapped back in exasperation, “We are putting the women off in the boats,” feeling that should make the situation clear enough to anyone. The
Frankfurt
’s operator, who appeared to ignore any communication not addressed directly to his ship, broke in with, “Are there any ships around you already?” Then, a few seconds later: “The
Frankfurt
wishes to know what is the matter? We are ten hours away.”

This was too much for Phillips, who suddenly jumped up, tearing the headphones from his ears, and shouted, “The damn fool! He says, ‘What’s up, old man?’!” Furiously he tapped back, “You are jamming my equipment! Stand by and keep out!”

Every few minutes Captain Smith would drop by to see if Phillips was having any success raising a ship closer than the
Carpathia
, and to provide Phillips with further information. It was a quarter past one when Smith informed Phillips that the power was beginning to fade, maybe ten minutes later when he told him the water was reaching the engine rooms. At 1:45 a.m. Phillips again called the
Carpathia
, this time telling her, “Come as quickly as possible, old man; engine room filling up to the boilers.”

On the
Carpathia
, now that the officers all had their assigned tasks and the crew was set to work, the navigation worked out, and perhaps most important of all for Rostron, prayers offered up to the Almighty, the most difficult part of this morning’s sudden challenge began–-the waiting. He was confident of his crew and ship, confident of the course he had laid out, confident of his skills as a navigator and ship handler. Yet there were still many things that could go wrong! Rostron was determined that no detail would go overlooked that might delay the
Carpathia
, or cost some poor victim their life once the ship reached the
Titanic
’s side; yet there was always the element of chance, the unknown, that could mean peril for the
Carpathia.

For Rostron was under no illusion as to the fact that he
was
taking his ship, his crew, and his passengers into the unknown. The greatest threat was, of course, ice. Had the
Titanic
, by the most evil mis-chance, struck a solitary iceberg adrift in mid-ocean, or had she run deep into an icefield before coming to grief? When the
Carpathia
arrived at the
Titanic
’s position, would she be able to get close enough to help the sinking ship and her passengers and crew, or would the icefield intervene, forcing the
Carpathia
to stand off in the distance, impotent to do nothing more than watch the
Titanic
’s last moments?

On the
Titanic
, Phillips was still bent over the wireless key, mechanically tapping out his call, hoping that by some miracle a closer ship would suddenly respond. Even if the
Frankfurt
, the
Olympic
, or any of the other ships didn’t realize it—though thankfully Cottam on the
Carpathia
had understood the seriousness of the situation–-by now Phillips knew that the ship was doomed. Just a few moments earlier, he had been relieved by Bride while he took a turn around the Boat Deck. When he returned to the wireless shack a few minutes later, all he could do was shake his head as he took over from Bride again and mutter, “Things look very queer outside, very queer indeed.” He had watched as the sea swept over the foredeck, washing past the foot of the foremast, swirling around the winches and cranes, flooding into the forward well deck. It was clear that the
Titanic
’s remaining time would be measured in minutes, not hours.

The news was spreading, however. Ships within range of the
Titanic
passed the word on to other ships that were not, and the Marconi station at Cape Race was able to pick up Phillips’ signals directly. Soon the operator there began relaying the
Titanic
’s messages inland, where they were picked up by the wireless station atop the
New York Times
building in New York city. In Philadelphia, Wannamaker’s department store had recently installed a wireless office, capitalizing on the public’s interest in the new technology. The office had actually been set up in one of the store’s front windows, and this was where a young wireless operator named David Sarnoff caught the signals from Cape Race. He in turn quickly passed the word on to other stations farther inland; slowly the New World was becoming aware of the unfolding tragedy in the North Atlantic.