The Other Side of the Night (36 page)

One of the consequences of the
Titanic
disaster was a decision by the company’s directors that
Gigantic
was too pretentious a name, and changed it to the more subdued but still dignified
Britannic
. It wasn’t until July 1914, after expensive and time-consuming modifications to her inner hull and watertight bulkheads, that the
Britannic
was finished, and hardly had she completed her sea trials than the Great War exploded across Europe. The Royal Navy quickly requisitioned her to serve as a hospital ship. In November 1916, while steaming off the coast of Greece in the Aegean Sea, she struck a mine and sank in an hour and a half. Only plenty of lifeboats and a warm sea kept the death toll down to thirty-five.

Once the guns fell silent, only the
Olympic
was left of what was to have been that grand trio of ships to carry on for the White Star Line. Her career as a troopship in the First World War was distinguished, and even turned heroic when she rammed and sank the
U-103
in May 1918. She returned to passenger service in 1919, becoming one of the best-loved ships on the North Atlantic. But the effect of losing both her sisters could never be undone—even with the addition of two liners seized from Germany as war reparations (they became the
Homeric
and the
Majestic
), the planned express service never materialized. Although by the mid-1920s the numbers of passengers crossing the North Atlantic began to approach those of the pre-war years, the line suffered. Revenues fell and costs rose as the 1920s progressed, and the White Star Line began a dangerous decline as profits shriveled, then vanished. In 1928, work was begun on a 1,000-foot, 80,000-ton superliner, to be called the
Oceanic
, that would, it was hoped, be the salvation of the line, but when the Great Depression struck in 1929, it devastated White Star’s finances so that the money to complete the new ship was never found.

By 1932, crippled and impotent, the White Star Line was merged with Cunard, which was in dire straits of its own, at the instigation of the British government. Very much the junior partner in the new Cunard-White Star Line, the company saw most of its aging fleet sent to the breakers during the 1930s. The
Olympic
was taken out of service in 1934, after she rammed and sank the Nantucket lightship, killing all seven crewmen aboard that hapless vessel. She was broken up in 1935, many of her interior fixtures and decorations finding their way into houses and pubs in Liverpool, Southampton, and London. By 1950, the last of the line’s assets were dissolved; after eighty years of service on the North Atlantic, the White Star Line had ceased to exist.

Second Officer Lightoller never received a command of his own—nor did any of the surviving officers of the
Titanic
. He retired from the sea in the early 1920s, but never lost his lust for adventure. In 1940 he took his sixty-foot yacht, the
Sundowner
, to Dunkirk, and despite being bombed and strafed by the Luftwaffe, managed to bring back 131 British soldiers. After an adventure-filled life he died peacefully in 1952.

Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall would spend another twenty years at sea, but like Lightoller, would never command his own ship. Over the years the accuracy of the final position he had worked out for the
Titanic
would be questioned by critics, but he defended his position of 41.40 N 50.14 W until the end of his days. His last posting was as First Officer of Cunard’s
Aquitania
in the 1930s. After his death in 1963, in compliance with his last wishes, his ashes were scattered over the North Atlantic, at the spot that marks the
Titanic
’s grave.

The story of the Cunard line after the
Titanic
disaster would be far, far different from that of the White Star Line.

Even before the Great War, Cunard had established a pre-eminence on the North Atlantic that it would never relinquish. The
Lusitania
and
Mauretania
proved to be so much faster than any of their rivals that the company’s grip on the Blue Ribband seemed unbreakable. Passengers flocked to the Cunard ticketing offices. A new ship, the
Aquitania
, was introduced in 1913, and many people felt that her interiors were the most beautiful ever installed on an ocean-going vessel. The First World War took a severe toll on the Cunard fleet, but despite the loss of nearly a dozen ships to German U-boats—most terribly the
Lusitania
on May 7, 1915—when the war ended Cunard was still in a stronger position than any other passenger line on the North Atlantic.

When the merger with the White Star Line came in 1932, Cunard was able to complete its own superliner, known up to the moment of her launching only as Hull 532, but beloved forever after as the
Queen Mary
. Prosperity gradually returned to the North Atlantic trade in the 1930s, and a second superliner, the
Queen Elizabeth
, was launched in 1938. Yet in 1939, war once more swept across Europe, and the two liners, soon to become revered as the “Warrior Queens,” began carrying troops across the Atlantic from the United States to Great Britain in such huge numbers that they ultimately provided the margin of victory for the Allies over Nazi Germany.

The 1940s and 1950s were a Golden Age for Cunard, as the company utterly dominated the transatlantic trade. The rise of air travel in the 1960s, however, saw a corresponding decline in Cunard’s fortunes, despite the introduction of a new liner, the
Queen Elizabeth 2
, in 1965. By the end of the decade, both the
Queen Mary
and
Queen Elizabeth
had been retired, while the Cunard fleet, which had once boasted more than fifty ships, was now reduced to the
QE 2
and a handful of lesser vessels. By the end of the 1970s, the very existence of the line was in jeopardy.

Cunard staggered through the last two decades of the 20th century, going though a series of owners who never quite seemed to be able to find a niche for the line to return it to profitability. In 1996, however, a white knight appeared in the form of Carnival Corporation, which bought Cunard with the avowed purpose of returning the line to its former prestige. The
Queen Elizabeth 2
was completely refurbished and in 2004, the
Queen Mary 2
, the largest passenger liner ever built, was introduced to the North Atlantic run. Fittingly, Cunard, which was the first company to introduce regular transatlantic passenger service, has become the last company to offer it.

One of the last losses suffered by Cunard during the Great War was the
Carpathia
. When World War I broke out she remained on the Mediterranean run, at one point being the source of a minor
contretemps
for the company. On September 5th, 1914 the Italian government levied a fine against her for carrying immigrants without a license. In early 1915 she was requisitioned by the British government and converted to a troopship. Refitted, the
Carpathia
could now carry more than 3,000 officers and other ranks, or alternatively, a thousand cavalry mounts and troopers, along with a thousand tons of supplies.

On July 17, 1918 as part of a convoy bound for Boston, she was 120 miles west of Fastnet when two torpedoes fired by a German submarine slammed into her starboard side, and she immediately began to sink. Five crewmen were killed in the explosions, while the rest of the crew immediately saw to the safety of the fifty-seven military personnel aboard, getting them away in lifeboats. A third torpedo struck the ship, but despite the severe damage she had taken, the
Carpathia
remained afloat long enough for the rest of her officers and crewmen to escape. She went down at 12:40 a.m. and her survivors were picked up a few hours later by the destroyer H.M.S.
Snowdrop
and taken to Liverpool. For the most part, the world soon forgot about the
Carpathia
, save for her part in rescuing the
Titanic
’s survivors. Few people knew her ultimate fate, and even fewer had any idea where she lay.

All that changed on September 22, 2002, when an American by the name of Clive Cussler brought the
Carpathia
back to the front pages of the world’s newspapers. At a press conference held at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, Nova Scotia, video footage was first shown to the world’s press which confirmed that a wreck discovered by Cussler and his associates a year before was in fact the remains of the
Carpathia
. Using side-scan sonar and surveying the wreck with remote operating vehicles, Cussler and his team methodically combed the area where the
Carpathia
was believed to have gone down, and were finally able to pinpoint the wreck’s location. They found her, as expected, lying in just over 500 feet of water, not far from the east coast of Ireland.

Searching for shipwrecks was at first just a hobby for Cussler, who was best known as a phenomenally successful novelist whose fictional adventures take place on or below the sea. His interest began with what he unashamedly admits were fairly amateurish efforts in 1979, but as his searches grew in scope and sophistication, he was persuaded to form a non-profit, volunteer foundation “dedicated to preserving our maritime heritage through the discovery, archaeological survey and conservation of shipwreck artifacts.” Over Cussler’s objections, the board of directors, in a sly nod to the fictional government agency which features prominently in all of Cussler’s novels, promptly named the foundation NUMA, the National Underwater and Marine Agency.

While the name of the foundation may have been a bit tongue in cheek, the quality of the work done by NUMA has become serious and professional. The foundation’s greatest success came in 1995, when it discovered the wreck of the Confederate submarine
Hunley
, whose location had eluded similar efforts for a century and a quarter, just outside the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Over the years, Cussler and NUMA have searched for—and usually found—more than eighty crashed aircraft or sunken ships of historical significance (as well as one locomotive, but that’s a different story). Yet for all of NUMA’s accomplishments, Cussler regarded finding the wreck of the
Carpathia
as one of the most fulfilling. At the news conference he would remark, the intensity in his voice unmistakable, that “we have footage of the RMS
Carpathia
in her watery grave at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Ireland. It humbles me. My goal in founding NUMA was to increase awareness of maritime history. We have been succeeding beyond my wildest dreams. I did not think this would happen in my life time.”

While the
Carpathia
may have soon faded from the public’s consciousness, not so Captain Arthur Rostron. In recognition of his efforts on the morning of April 15, 1912, he was presented with a silver cup and gold medal by a group of the survivors. Presented to President William Howard Taft at the White House, Rostron was given a formal letter of thanks signed by the President, and a few months later he was presented with a Congressional Gold Medal (not, as is sometimes asserted, the Medal of Honor) unanimously voted him by the United States Congress. In Great Britain he would be given the Shipwreck and Humane Society’s medal by Lord Derby; yet another gold medal was awarded him by the Shipwreck Society of New York.

Remaining on the bridge of the
Carpathia
for a year, he then was transferred to the
Caronia
, a larger and more glamorous command. In the next two years he would be named master of the
Carmania
, the
Campania
, and the
Lusitania
. When the
Lusitania
was briefly taken out of service in August 1914, Rostron was given the
Aulania
, and continued as her captain after she was turned into a troopship later that autumn, carrying the first Canadian troops sent from Halifax to Plymouth, then later spending time on the passage from India. The spring and summer of 1915 saw Rostron, who was now known as Commander Arthur Rostron, RNR (Royal Naval Reserve), and the
Aulania
carrying troops to Gallipoli. In September 1915, Rostron was given command of the
Mauretania
, and six months later the Royal Navy transferred him to the
Ivernia
, on which he continued his service in the Mediterranean Sea. It must have been something like a home-coming for him, as the
Ivernia
was the Carpathia’s sister ship. He returned to the bridge of the
Mauretania
in 1917, and then in the last year of the war, variously commanded the
Andania
,
Saxonia
, and
Carmania
before returning to the
Mauretania
yet again. His name was posted on the Acting list of the Royal Navy Reserve as a captain in December 1918, and in the following year, in recognition of his wartime service, Rostron was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Now properly styled Arthur Rostron, CBE, RNR, he remained in command of the
Mauretania
after she was returned to Cunard and went back into passenger service in June, 1919. The
Mauretania
was always his favorite ship, and he remained her master until July 1928, when he was given the
Berengaria
, then the largest ship in the Cunard fleet, one of the trio of German-built giants awarded to the Allies as reparations. In the meantime, in 1926, he had been made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KCBE), and was appointed the commodore of the Cunard fleet. The same day that his KCBE was announced, he was awarded the Freedom of New York, “For his splendid services to humanity, to the City of New York and to the people of the United States over many years.” An appointment as aide-de-camp to King George V soon followed, and he was even invested by the Admiral in Command at Cherbourg with the French
Legion d’Honneur
.