The Other Side of the Night (8 page)

He was right. In 1899, Morgan began acquiring stock in the two big German lines, Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutscher-Lloyd, with an eye toward gaining a controlling interest in both. Within the next two years he also gained either ownership or control of the Leyland Line, the Dominion Line, and the Red Star Line, mainly by cutting fares until his lines were offering a Third Class passage to America for as little as £2. Morgan next set his sights on the two British shipping giants, the White Star Line and Cunard, the jewels in the crown of the transatlantic passenger trade.

When Morgan made his first advances to the White Star Line, Thomas Ismay’s son and successor as owner and managing director, Bruce Ismay, was at first as determined as his father had been to resist the American. But Morgan received help from an unexpected ally: Lord Pirrie, the Chairman of the Board of Harland and Wolff, the huge Belfast shipyard that was the exclusive builder of White Star’s ships. Pirrie was also, after Ismay himself, the single largest shareholder of White Star stock. Realizing that Morgan’s rate war would leave White Star with little capital for building new ships, and having made Harland and Wolff heavily dependent on White Star for new construction, Pirrie began to pressure the younger Ismay to accept Morgan’s offer to buy the line. Thomas Ismay would have told Lord Pirrie to be damned, and fought the “Yankee pirate” tooth and nail, but though Bruce Ismay was his father’s son in many ways, he didn’t possess the innate ruthlessness of his parent. Rather than stand up to Pirrie, the younger Ismay eventually caved in, and in late 1902 Morgan’s shipping combine acquired ownership of the White Star Line.

All the while, IMM had continued its overtures to Norddeutscher-Lloyd and Hamburg-Amerika, seeking a controlling interest of each company’s shares, while still allowing them to operate with a considerable degree of autonomy. The terms were carefully calculated to appeal to the German companies, which were heavily subsidized by the German government, and Morgan realized that these subsidies made them far less financially vulnerable than their British counterparts. Certainly he knew he wasn’t dealing from the same position of strength as he had been with White Star, so no attempt was made to gain outright ownership of Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutscher-Lloyd.

Cunard, meanwhile, under the canny leadership of its chairman, Lord Inverclyde, would soon skillfully exploit Morgan’s purchase of White Star, and ultimately wring considerable concessions from the British government in order to keep the company in British hands. After almost eighteen months of intense negotiation, an agreement drawn up between the government and Cunard was signed in October 1902. His Majesty’s Government agreed to finance the construction of two new ships—destined to become the
Mauretania
and
Lusitania
— at a cost of nearly £2,600,000, the sum to be repaid over a ten-year period at 2.75% interest, while an annual subsidy of £75,000 would help defray the operating expenses. In return Cunard guaranteed that control of the line would never pass from British hands—thus thwarting IMM in one deft stroke.

The
Californian
’s part in Morgan’s grand scheme was, naturally, quite small. She was first and foremost a cargo carrier, destined for service between ports in England and the American Gulf Coast, as well as the Caribbean, with occasional crossings in the North Atlantic as well. The Leyland Line had acquired a well-earned reputation in the shipping world for being soundly managed and efficiently run, her ships earning the line handsome, if not extravagant, profits. Characteristically deep-laden, Leyland ships often sat so low in the water that it became something of a standing joke for other lines’ vessels to report that they “Passed four masts and a funnel bound west, presumed Leyland’s.” All jests aside, Leyland ships were known to be reliable and sturdy money-makers.

The
Californian
went through her sea trials on January 23, 1902, and as soon as she was certified by the Board of Trade she was readied for her maiden voyage. On January 31, she left Dundee, Scotland, and arrived at New Orleans on March 3. Her return trip brought her to Liverpool, which was her company’s home port, arriving on March 21. In April that same year, the Dominion Line—yet another acquisition of IMM—chartered the
Californian
for a series of five crossings between Liverpool and Portland, Maine. Once these were completed in December 1902, the
Californian
was returned to Leyland, which put her back on the southerly Atlantic crossings the following month.

For her first ten years in service, the
Californian
had four different captains. In 1911, she was given her fifth master, the man with whom her name would forever after be associated: Captain Stanley Lord.

Lord had been born on September 13, 1877, in Bolton, Lancashire, a British textile center (and near the birthplace of Arthur Rostron). He was the youngest of six surviving sons, a younger seventh brother having died at age seven; his family was middle-class, prosperous, and, according to Lord, his parents had plans for him to embark on a career as a businessman. But as so often happened in heyday of the British Empire, as a young boy Stanley Lord was captured by the romance of the sea, and he insisted that he was going to live the life of an officer in the British Merchant Marine. Even at a young age, Lord possessed a willful personality as well as considerable powers of persuasion, and he eventually won his parents’ grudging approval to be apprenticed to a Liverpool shipping firm, the J.B. Walmsley Company. At the age of thirteen Stanley Lord put to sea aboard a barque, the
Naiad
, out of Liverpool, for the South American run.

Perhaps Lord sensed something in himself that his parents never recognized, for he took to the seafaring life as if he had been born with saltwater in his veins. Serious, studious, he quickly learned the ways of sail, as well as beginning his studies for his Mates certificates (“tickets”), the first stepping stone along the path leading to command. After seven years under canvas, he switched to steam, having already earned his Second and First Mate’s tickets, signing on with the West India and Pacific Steam Navigation Company of Liverpool.

The degree of Lord’s determination to succeed at his profession, as well as a measure of his skills, was demonstrated when, by the age of twenty-four, he earned both his Master’s and Extra Master’s (“any tonnage, any ocean”) tickets, a feat many merchant officers five or even ten years his senior had yet to accomplish. The only blemish on Stanley Lord’s otherwise spotless career was a notation in his Board of Trade file which read, “Mr. Stanley Lord is the holder of an OC [Officer Commanding] Certificate, No. 030740. He failed to join the
Barbadian
on 7 September 1899.” It was far from the grievous offense it appears to be, and Lord had good reason not to join his ship: he had broken his leg and was physically unable to reach his ship before she sailed!

There was no doubt that Lord was a man who would go far in the shipping world, and would likely finish his career commanding one of the great passenger liners. Without exception Lord’s employers had nothing but the highest praise for his professional abilities. There can be no doubt that Lord himself aspired to such heights; command of a large transatlantic liner was the goal of every rising officer in the British merchant marine. Command of one of these ships carried a special prestige, a cachet which was unmatched anywhere else in the civilian world. Only the peculiar “dash” that attached to officers of the more fashionable cavalry regiments in some of the European armies matched it. In a profession top-heavy with talent, to rise to command a passenger liner on the Liverpool- or Southampton-to-New York run was the pinnacle of professional achievement. It was everything Stanley Lord had gone to sea at the age of thirteen to achieve.

What is also beyond doubt is that Lord was clearly convinced of his own worth: when in 1901 he applied for a position with the White Star Line, he was told he would be taken on as either a Third or Fourth Officer and allowed to work his way up from there. Having already earned both his Master’s and Extra Master’s certificates, Lord felt, with some justification, that this was nothing short of an insult and chose to look elsewhere.

Eventually “elsewhere” became the Leyland Line, where in a little more than six years Lord worked his way up to a posting as Captain, earning £20 a month, with an annual bonus usually of £50. It was not a princely sum by any accounting. Captain Edward J. Smith of the White Star Line earned more than ten times that amount, but then Smith had gone to sea more than twelve years before Stanley Lord was born and was White Star’s senior captain. But what mattered most about Lord’s posting was that it gave him a command. Should he later choose to reapply with White Star, or possibly Cunard or the P. & O., he would be assured of rapid advancement, as they gave preferential treatment to officers who had previously held command with other lines. With a posting to one of them there was always the possibility of one day being given command of one of the crack transatlantic liners, the goal Stanley Lord had set out to attain when he went to sea as barely more than a boy.

Physically and temperamentally, Lord embodied the sharp social discrimination which separated merchant officers from merchant seamen. Nearly six feet in height—tall for those days—with a lean build and erect if somewhat rigid bearing, he was stern-looking, with deep creases at the corners of a thin-lipped, firmly set mouth. His nose was prominent, almost aquiline, while his eyes were narrowed from years of squinting into glaring sun and driving rain. All in all, he was an imposing figure, “a veritable Caesar in a sailor’s suit,” as one writer described him.

His character closely matched his appearance. Even given the social gulf which separated officers from the lower decks, Lord was noticeably aloof and autocratic, not only with his crewmen but with his officers as well. Though not overtly a bully, he was an intimidating presence, and not surprisingly, his crew generally feared him more than they respected him, in particular dreading his wrath should some job be performed to anything less than his exacting standards, for he had a particularly sharp tongue. Familiarity between Lord and his crewmen, of course, was quite simply impossible. In the British Merchant Marine the social gulf between the wardroom and the fo’c’s’le was as great as that between the aristocracy and the working class ashore. All the same, Lord’s austere, intimidating character made no allowance for the sort of avuncular command style which earned Edward Smith the respectfully familiar nickname “E.J.” among his crewmen. Lord deliberately held himself as a distant figure of near-omnipotent authority.

This was not merely a pose: until the advent of wireless allowed some contact between ship and shore, the isolation which immediately enveloped a ship once it left sight of land endowed the ship’s master with an awesome range of powers and an incredible weight of responsibility. The last true autocracy, the word of a ship’s captain
was
the law at sea. He had the authority to conduct marriages (though with nowhere near the frequency that later romantics would suppose), to issue birth and death certificates, to place a crewman or passenger in irons for criminal infractions, and in extreme cases to administer capital punishment. The introduction of wireless created a notable abatement in a captain’s authority, but tradition still imbued him with an aura of near-infallibility. Looking on his men as little more than a seagoing rabble, “underpaid, unwashed, indifferently fed, and over-worked,” a man like Stanley Lord felt no need to do anything to encourage personal loyalty among them. While some captains such as Cunard’s Arthur Rostron or White Star’s E.J. Smith felt inclined to treat their crews with something approaching a paternal, or at least benevolent, regard, such sentiments were not only beyond Stanley Lord’s ability to inspire, they were beyond anything he desired.

Lord appears to have been well aware of the gulf between the bridge and the fo’c’s’le, and to have almost reveled in it. One particularly telling–-and ironic–-incident early in his career throws a stark light on his personality. While serving as an apprentice officer aboard the barque
Iquique
, Lord attempted to give orders to a fellow crewman who, though he was some years older, he assumed to be another apprentice, or possibly even a deckhand. The other man turned out to be one of the ship’s officers, and of course thoroughly outranked Lord; however, the officer was of a more collegial nature than Lord, and although he put the young apprentice properly in his place, nothing more was said about the incident. The officer’s name was William Murdoch; neither man could have had any idea how Stanley Lord’s life would become inextricably intertwined with William Murdoch’s death.

In 1906 Stanley Lord was given his first command, the Leyland Line’s
Antillian.
Having reached a point in his career where he could turn his thoughts to domestic life and a family, Lord married Miss Mabel Tutton on March 19, 1907; a son, Stanley Tutton Lord, was born on August 15, 1908. Meanwhile, over the next six years Captain Lord would be named the master of the
William Cliff
and the Leyland Line’s
Louisianian
, before moving to the
Californian
in early 1912.

The
Californian
’s first crossing that year took her from her home port of Liverpool to New Orleans, where she loaded a cargo of cotton bales. Stopping in New York to take on additional cargo, she then made for Le Havre, France. It was not a good crossing. The weather was particularly rough, and some of the cargo suffered from the heavy seas—about six hundred bales of cotton were damaged to some degree. After calling at London on March 30 to unload more cargo, the
Californian
returned to Liverpool. From there she would be going back to Boston, her departure date set for April 5.