Titanic (15 page)

The
Titanic
had twenty lifeboats on the Boat Deck, but the boats were not all the same.

Fourteen were wooden lifeboats about thirty feet long that could carry sixty-five people each. There were two smaller wooden boats called “emergency cutters” with room for forty people. These sixteen boats were all known by numbers, with odd-numbered boats on the starboard side and even numbers on the port side.

The
Titanic
was also equipped with four additional boats with canvas along the sides that collapsed for easier storage. These four emergency boats (A and C on the starboard side and B and D on the port side) were made by the Engelhardt company and were often called the “Engelhardt collapsibles.” Each could carry forty-seven people.

The upper decks of the
Titanic
were seventy feet above the water, so loading the boats meant swinging them out over the side and lowering them safely down to the water without tipping out the passengers.

At about five minutes before 1 a.m. on the starboard side, governess Elizabeth Shutes was being loaded into Lifeboat 3, the third boat away. Right after the collision, an officer passing by her cabin had said that there was no danger. But when she’d stuck her head into the hallway a few minutes later, she’d heard the same officer say they’d only be able to keep the water out for a while. That’s when Elizabeth knew the danger was real.

As she walked past the beautiful rooms of the ship, Elizabeth couldn’t help thinking about the last few days: Here was where she had listened to a concert, this stairway had been full of happy, laughing men and women. No one was laughing now. As she passed stewards, Elizabeth noticed that their faces were as pale as the white life preservers they offered to passengers.

Then it was time. “Our lifeboat, with thirty-six in it, began lowering to the sea. This was done amid the greatest confusion. Rough seamen all giving different orders. No officer aboard,” Elizabeth recalled. “As only one side of the ropes worked, the lifeboat at one time was in such a position that it seemed we must capsize in mid-air. At last the ropes worked together, and we drew nearer and nearer the black, oily water.”

Like so many others, Elizabeth felt nervous about leaving the safety of the great ship. In that cold, black, moonless night her lifeboat seemed so small. “The first touch of our lifeboat on that black sea came to me as a last goodbye to life, and so we put off — a tiny boat on a great sea — rowed away from what had been a safe home for five days.”

The people in the lifeboat didn’t want to drift too far away.

“The first wish on the part of all was to stay near the
Titanic
,” Elizabeth explained. “We all felt so much safer near the ship. Surely such a vessel could not sink. I thought the danger must be exaggerated, and we could all be taken aboard again.”

But those in the lifeboats also had a view of the progress of the flooding that passengers and crew couldn’t see. Sometime around one in the morning or a little after, lookout George Symons, from his seat in Lifeboat 1, noticed that seawater was washing over the ship’s name at the bow (probably around D Deck). The water was continuing to rise.

Charlotte Collyer had an even harder time deciding to leave the
Titanic
than Elizabeth Shutes. Charlotte didn’t want to go without her husband. She clung to Harvey’s arm as she heard the orders: “‘Women and children first!’”

“Someone was shouting these last few words over and over again. ‘Women and children first! Women and children first!’ They struck utter terror into my heart and now they will ring in my ears until the day I die,” she said. “They meant my own safety but they also meant the greatest loss I have ever suffered — the life of my husband . . .”

Charlotte hung back, watching two other boats being loaded, holding on to her husband and daughter. The minutes kept ticking by, and still she refused to go. Then suddenly everything happened at once.

“The third boat was about half full when a sailor caught Marjorie in his arms and tore her away from me and threw her into the boat. She was not even given a chance to tell her father goodbye!

“‘You too!’ a man yelled close to my ear. ‘You’re a woman, take a seat in that boat or it will be too late.’

“The deck seemed to be slipping under my feet. It was leaning at a sharp angle for the ship was then sinking fast, bows down,” remembered Charlotte. “I clung desperately to my husband. . . . A man seized me by the arm then another threw both his arms about my waist and dragged me away by main strength.

“I heard my husband say, ‘Go Lotty, for God’s sake be brave and go! I’ll get a seat in another boat.’

“The men who held me rushed me across the deck and hurled me bodily into the lifeboat. I landed on one shoulder and bruised it badly. Other women were crowding behind me, but I stumbled to my feet and saw over their heads my husband’s back as he walked steadily down the deck and disappeared among the men. His face was turned away so that I never saw it again, but I know that he went unafraid to his death.”

Charlotte Collyer was separated from her husband on the port side, where Second Officer Charles Lightoller was so strict about “women and children first” that his policy could well be called “women and children only.” On the starboard side, First Officer William Murdoch, assisted by junior officers Harold Lowe and James Moody and other crew members, was more lenient. Male passengers were allowed into the lifeboats if no women could be found.

Luckily for him, teacher Lawrence Beesley ended up in the right place at the right time. Lawrence had been watching the crew when a rumor started that men were to get into boats on the port side. Almost all the male passengers in the group left, leaving the starboard side nearly deserted. Lawrence was never quite sure why he didn’t go with the others. But the decision probably saved his life. A short time later, he heard a cry: “‘Any more ladies?’”

Glancing down, he saw a lifeboat about to be lowered from the deck below. A crew member spotted him looking over the rail and called up, “‘Any ladies on your deck?’”

When Lawrence replied no, the crew member told him he had better jump.

“I sat on the edge of the deck with my feet over, threw the dressing-gown (which I had carried on my arm all of the time) into the boat, dropped, and fell into the boat near the stern. . . .”

Lawrence landed in Lifeboat 13, with sixty-four people aboard. The lifeboat began to descend jerkily, foot by foot. The ropes and the gear creaked under the strain. Above, the sailors were trying to lower the boat safely. The crew in the boat kept calling up: “‘Lower aft!’ ‘Lower stern!’ and ‘Lower together!’”

As Lifeboat 13 was being lowered, it was hit by a stream of water discharged from the
Titanic
’s pump system. The water pushed the lifeboat astern, directly underneath the spot where Lifeboat 15 was coming down. Lawrence and the other people in Lifeboat 13 shouted up a warning, but no one on board could see what was happening.

Lawrence and one of the stokers in the lifeboat stood up and touched the bottom of the other lifeboat that was now swinging directly above their heads, trying to push their own boat away from it.

“It seemed now as if nothing could prevent her dropping on us, but at this moment another stoker sprang with his knife to the ropes that still held us and I heard him shout, ‘One! Two!’ as he cut them through,” Lawrence said.

Just in time, Lifeboat 13 swung away, and the other lifeboat landed right where it had just been. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. At last they were on the sea, with the mighty
Titanic
still towering over their tiny boat.

First class passenger Colonel Archibald Gracie was a man of action. He and his friend James Clinch Smith were not the type of men who were content to stand around waiting for instructions. Colonel Gracie escorted ladies to where they could board the lifeboats, although crew members weren’t letting male passengers help load. He had to stay back to let the women through.

But Colonel Gracie kept busy. On his own, he asked a steward to help him find more blankets for the lifeboats. And later, as it became clear time was running out, he and Clinch Smith stepped in to help Lightoller and others load women and children into the boats.

Gracie described Lightoller at work: “One of his feet was planted in the lifeboat, and the other on the rail of Deck A, while we, through the wood frames of the lowered glass windows on this deck, passed women, children, and babies in rapid succession. . . .”

Colonel Gracie was on hand when Madeleine Astor, the eighteen-year-old wife of the American millionaire John Jacob Astor IV was handed into Lifeboat 4. Madeleine was pregnant, and her husband was worried about her.

Gracie described what Astor did next: “Leaning out over the rail he asked permission of Lightoller to enter the boat to protect his wife, which, in view of her delicate condition, seems to have been a reasonable request, but the officer, intent upon his duty, and obeying orders, and not knowing the millionaire from the rest of us, replied: ‘No, sir, no men are allowed in these boats until women are loaded first.’

“Colonel Astor moved away . . . and I never saw him again,” said Gracie.