The Other Side of the Night (15 page)

“Are they company signals?” Lord asked.

“I don’t know, sir, but they appear to me to be all white.”

“Well, go on Morsing.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And when you get an answer, let me know by Gibson.”

“Yes, sir.”

So began a series of exchanges, actions, and inactions that have no parallel in maritime history. From this moment on, the words and actions of Captain Stanley Lord have baffled maritime authorities for nearly a hundred years. The language and terminology that Second Officer Stone used in his report to Lord were very precise and very clear: the ship to the south was firing “white rockets”—Stone repeated this fact twice. It was a significant detail, for in 1912, the governing convention for the use of signals at sea was Article 31 from the International Rules of the Road, which was accepted in total by the British Board of Trade. The Article stated, among other provisions, that
“Rockets or shells, throwing stars of any color or description, fired one at a time at short intervals
” were to be regarded as a signal of distress. “Distress” at sea has one meaning, and one meaning only—somebody, somewhere, is about to die.

Yet somehow, despite Stone’s report, from this moment onward, Lord never appeared to consider the idea that the rockets seen by Stone and Gibson were actually a distress signal—in fact, his actions (or more correctly, his inactions) appear as if Lord deliberately refused to entertain the idea. How or why he refused to do so would never be adequately explained, by himself or anyone else, for nearly a century.

That it did not immediately occur to him that the rockets might indeed be a distress signal was nothing inexcusable; sometimes the most obvious answers to a mystery are the most readily overlooked for just that reason. But the answer to Lord’s next question—“Are they company signals?”—should have made clear to him that what Stone and Gibson were seeing was not simply an attempt by the stranger to the south at identifying herself. The regulations of the British Board of Trade issued to the masters of all ships calling at British ports listed registered company signals. These were pyrotechnics that ships sometimes used to identify themselves to other vessels they encountered—and made it clear that the complicated arrangements of lights and shapes and colors of those signals were nothing like “rockets throwing stars of any color or description.”

To further remove any possible misunderstanding, the preface to the Board of Trade regulations publication was clear: “Note—if these signals are used in any other place, for any other purpose than stated, they may be signals of distress, and should be answered accordingly by passing ships, and claims sent in for payment of salvage.” In other words, when in doubt, take no chances—investigate.

Yet when Stone answered, “I don’t know, sir, but they appear to me to be all white,” Lord’s response—“Well, go on Morsing”—would damn him for all time. Later he would maintain that he barely recalled this exchange with Stone, claiming that he had been half-asleep throughout and responded to his Second Officer in monosyllables, yet the recollections under oath of both Stone and, later, Gibson, was that their captain was alert and lucid each time they spoke with him.

For the next hour, until the strange ship to the south had disappeared, Stanley Lord, who as a certified Master Mariner was fully cognizant of the Board of Trade regulations, would studiously avoid any use of the word “distress” in his exchanges with Stone and Gibson—not a minor point, for even mentioning the word would acknowledge that possibility, compelling Lord to take action. Likewise he would avoid any suggestion that Cyril Evans, the wireless operator, be awakened to see what he might learn, lest Evans receive a message of such an unambiguous nature that it laid a moral and legal obligation on Lord to respond. It was as if by a careful evasion of even the idea that the distant ship might be in distress, he would never have to confront the responsibility that went with it, or the potential dangers it might entail to him personally. Whatever his specific motives, a dark side of Stanley Lord’s character, one that he may have never realized existed, was being awakened in those early morning hours. By the time it reached its full dimensions, it would become a frightening persona indeed.

Lord returned to his nap on the chartroom settee and Stone returned to studying the distant ship. The
Californian
continued to drift, slowly turning to starboard, her bows gradually coming around until they were bearing directly on the other ship, both her red and green running lights now visible to the stranger. About this time Gibson returned to the bridge, and Stone told him about the strange ship firing rockets. Gibson raised his glasses to his eyes and as he focused on the unknown vessel he was rewarded with the sight of another rocket being fired off. Gibson’s glasses, which were more powerful than Stone’s, allowed him to see detail Stone couldn’t pick up: the white detonating flash…the fiery trail of the rocket streaking up into the sky…the near blinding white flash as the rocket burst…the spray of slowly falling white stars…

On the
Titanic
’s Boat Deck, the mood had shifted dramatically once the rockets started going up. The lights were still bright, the music was still cheerful, but Lightoller and Murdoch found that they no longer had to coax people into the lifeboats. Captain Smith went out to the starboard bridge wing were Fourth Officer Boxhall and Quartermaster Rowe were firing off the rockets. The young officer still hadn’t accepted the fact that the
Titanic
was sinking. “Captain, is it really serious?” he asked.

“Mr. Andrews tells me that he gives her an hour to an hour and a half.”

Back in the wireless room, Phillips was all too painfully aware of how little time the
Titanic
had left to live. Anxiously he continued tapping away, hoping that some ship—any ship—closer than the
Carpathia
would finally answer. It is easy to imagine Phillips wondering just where was that damned fool who had nearly blown his ears off just a couple of hours ago.

Up on the bridge Captain Smith seethed with a frustration similar to Phillips’ as he continued to stare at the lights of the ship on the horizon, so tantalizingly close. Smith, Fourth Officer Boxhall, and Quartermaster Rowe all agreed that it was a ship. While all three men watched as the rockets were being fired, she had slowly swung around, as if drifting on the current, so that by the time Rowe had fired the sixth rocket both her starboard and port sidelights showed, indicating that she was bows on to the
Titanic
. For a moment Boxhall thought this meant she was steaming toward the stricken liner, but it soon became disappointingly clear that this wasn’t the case. Yet even if that ship couldn’t hear the tremendous bangs of the
Titanic
’s rockets bursting, surely she must be able to see the rockets themselves. Why didn’t she respond? Boxhall finally gave up on trying to reach her by Morse lamp, but Rowe was eager to try, so Captain Smith gave him permission. Once he thought he saw a reply, but after studying the stranger through the captain’s glasses he decided it was only her masthead light flickering. Discouraged, Rowe went back to firing off the rest of his rockets.

It seemed strange, Stone thought, that a ship would fire rockets at night. As the two officers on the
Californian
watched, a seventh rocket climbed into the sky and burst above the stranger. Stone borrowed Gibson’s glasses and studied her for some minutes, then handed them back to the apprentice officer, remarking, “Have a look at her now. She looks very queer out of the water—her lights look queer.”

Gibson peered at the stranger carefully. She seemed to be listing, and had, as he later described it “a big side out of the water.” Stone noticed her red sidelight had disappeared: did that mean her bearing had changed and the light was obscured, or had the light simply vanished—submerged in the Atlantic? The
Californian
continued her slow, drifting turn to starboard until the stranger was now off her port bow. Gibson suddenly realized that the
Californian
was continuing to swing with the current, and her bow was now pointing to the east, as if she has turned completely around, 180 degrees. The other ship would now only be able to see her green sidelight. About 1:40 a.m. they saw an eighth rocket burst over the ship.

“A ship is not going to fire rockets at sea for nothing,” Stone remarked, and Gibson agreed. “There must be something wrong with her.” Gibson said he thought she might be in some sort of distress. It was a pivotal moment, in hindsight throwing into stark relief the characters of the three men around whom so much attention would focus in the weeks and years to come: Gibson, a mere apprentice officer, lacking the authority to take any action; Stone, possessing such authority, but personally insecure, hesitant, and vacillating despite his experience as a watch-keeping officer; and Lord, autocratic, overbearing, passionately concerned with his own self-protection, his oppressive personality a brooding presence on the bridge that effectively crushed any initiative the two junior officers might have shown.

Another rocket shot up into the sky from the
Titanic
’s bridge. Quartermaster Rowe had fired off a half-dozen already, going to the Morse lamp occasionally, still vainly trying to get the attention of that ship on the horizon. Like Rowe, Captain Smith, was convinced that she couldn’t be more than ten or twelve miles away, and had come by and muttered something to Rowe about wanting a six-inch naval gun to “wake that fellow up.” Rowe didn’t catch all of the captain’s remark, but he silently agreed with the gist of it. Rowe’s frustration, like Phillips’ in the wireless room, was beginning to build, but like the wireless operator, he kept at his work, hoping for a miracle.

As the men on the
Californian
continued to watch, the stranger slowly began to disappear. Stone would later suggest that she had seemed to be steaming away from the time she began firing the rockets, and now she seemed to be changing her bearing. He couldn’t see her red sidelight anymore—Gibson hadn’t noticed any bearing change, though he too decided that she was gradually disappearing. He didn’t think she was steaming away. He had no idea what exactly the stranger was doing, but he remarked that it was curious how the stranger had always shown her red sidelight but never her green, as would have been the case with a ship steaming away to the southwest.

At 2:00 a.m. Stone sent Gibson down to wake up Captain Lord. “Tell him that the ship is disappearing in the southwest and that she had fired altogether eight rockets.” Gibson knocked on the chartroom door, opened it, and relayed Stone’s message. Sleepily, Lord asked, “Were they all white rockets?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What time is it?”

“2:05 by the wheelhouse clock, sir.”

Lord nodded, turned out the light, and went back to sleep, and Gibson went back to the bridge. At 2:20 Stone thought he could still faintly make out the strange ship, then her lights seemed to fade away completely.

The
Titanic
’s lights were glowing a dull red now, and it was difficult for those in the lifeboats to see what was happening aboard the ship. The stern began swinging up into the sky, the ship’s hull shrieked with agony, subjected to stresses it was never designed to withstand, as bulkheads, frames and hull plates began to sheer and break under the strain.

With a long moan of tortured metal, the
Titanic
stopped moving. The lights, which had been glowing a dark red, suddenly went out completely, snapped on again with a searing flash, then went out again forever. From the fourth funnel aft, the
Titanic
stood almost perpendicular, a huge black shape silhouetted against the impossibly bright stars, suspended as it were between the sea and the sky.

The noise died away and a pall settled over the scene. Then the weight of the water-filled forward half of the ship began to drag the liner down. She seemed to sag for a moment, as the stern settled back somewhat toward the sea. The over-strained hull finally gave way and began to break apart, causing some of those watching in the boats to imagine that somehow she would miraculously right herself, leading others to believe that she had broken completely in two. The
Titanic
began to slip under, gathering speed as she went, as if to hurry and bring an end to this final indignity. Standing on an overturned lifeboat, less than fifty yards from the
Titanic
, Second Officer Lightoller heard a sound that would haunt him for the rest of his life: as the ship began her final plunge, he could hear people—husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children—crying out to one another, “I love you.”

Little more than twenty seconds after the liner began its plunge, the waters of the North Atlantic closed over the Blue Ensign at the Titanic’s stern. An eerie silence settled over the sea for some seconds, as if everyone, passengers and crew, those in the boats and those in the water, were momentarily unable to accept that the ship had vanished. Finally, in Boat 5, Third Officer Pitman glanced at his watch and quietly announced, “It is 2:20 a.m.”

By 2:40 Stone was certain that the stranger was gone, and whistled down the speaking tube to the chartroom. When Lord answered, Stone told him that the other ship had disappeared to the southwest and was completely out of sight. One last time Lord asked about the rockets, and Stone assured him that there were no colors, “just white rockets.” Lord told Stone to record it in the log, then went back to sleep.

With the stranger, for whatever cause or reason, having stopped firing her rockets and apparently vanishing, Stone and Gibson resumed their watch. For the next hour nothing happened. Then at 3:30 a.m., Gibson suddenly saw another rocket, this one off to the south-southeast and farther away than the other rockets had been. Drawing Stone’s attention to it, Gibson watched as a second, then a third rocket was launched. The ship firing these rockets was still below the horizon, so the two officers hadn’t yet actually seen her, but both men immediately noted that these rockets were company signals, not the white rockets the other ship had fired earlier. Oddly, Stone did not report these new rockets to the captain.