Titanic (18 page)

“‘For God’s sake go,’ he fairly screamed at me as he tried to push me away and I could see how he suffered. ‘It’s your last chance, go.’”

May paid tribute to the men who stood back and urged the women and children to get into the lifeboats. They were magnificent, she said. “A few cowards tried to scramble into the boats but they were quickly thrown back by the others.”

Her husband assured her he would get a place in another boat. His last words were, “‘Hurry up. May, you’re keeping the others waiting.’ He lifted me into a lifeboat and kissed me goodbye.”

The ship was being pulled lower into the sea each minute. Lightoller was standing partly in the boat to help May and others get in. At that moment he was given an unexpected chance to save himself.

“As we were ready for lowering the Chief (chief officer Wilde) came over to my side of the deck and, seeing me in the boat and no seaman available said, ‘You go with her, Lightoller.’”

Lightoller refused and jumped back on board. He would take his chances with the rest.

Collapsible D was launched at 2:05 a.m.

Hugh Woolner and his friend Mauritz Björnström-Steffanson were on A Deck. They could see that the end was near. “Looking out we saw the sea pouring over the bows and through the captain’s bridge,” said Woolner. As the lifeboat came down from the deck above, Hugh cried, “‘Let’s make a jump for it! There is plenty of room in her bows!’”

His friend replied, “‘Right you are!’”

So, as A Deck was flooding, the two men climbed over a railing and leaped into Collapsible D.

Hugh looked back to where they had been standing just seconds before. “The water was pouring in through the door we had just walked through. It rose so rapidly that if we had waited another minute we should have been pinned between the deck and its roof.”

With both men safely inside Collapsible D, Hugh climbed over some women and children, got out two oars, and began to row away from the ship for dear life.

Jack Phillips and Harold Bride were still at their posts in the radio room at two in the morning. Phillips had not stopped his frantic efforts to get help on the wireless.

“He was a brave man,” remembered Harold Bride. “I learned to love him that night, and I suddenly felt for him a great reverence to see him standing there sticking to his work while everybody else was raging about. I will never live to forget the work of Phillips for the last awful fifteen minutes.”

Harold Bride fetched his life belt from under his bunk. “Then I remembered how cold the water was. I remembered I had some boots, and I put those on, and an extra jacket and I put that on. I saw Phillips standing out there still sending away, giving the
Carpathia
details of just how we were doing.”

Jack Phillips wouldn’t even stop to put on his own life belt, so Harold Bride strapped it on for him.

Captain Smith came to the Marconi room. Bride recalled his words: “‘Men you have done your full duty. You can do no more. Abandon your cabin. Now it’s every man for himself.’”

It was time to leave.

After launching Collapsible D, Lightoller turned his attention to Collapsible B, inconveniently lashed on top of the roof of the officers’ quarters on the port side. Together with another seaman whose face he couldn’t make out in the dark, Lightoller cut and threw off the lashings and got ready to throw the lifeboat down to the deck.

Lightoller heard the seaman call out, “‘All ready, sir.’”

To his surprise, Lightoller realized that the voice belonged to Sam Hemming, who’d been helping him earlier. Surely Hemming had gotten into a lifeboat to help row long ago!

When he asked Sam Hemming about it, Lightoller received a cheerful reply: “‘Oh, plenty of time yet, sir.’”

But there was not plenty of time.

Lightoller and Sam Hemming managed to get the boat unlashed and down from the roof. It landed on the deck upside down. Lightoller knew there wouldn’t be time to launch it properly, but hoped that it might be possible to right it and hold it steady for people to climb into it before it floated away in the rising sea.

Lightoller began to move across the roof to the starboard side. Hemming had already left the roof, hurrying over to assist First Officer William Murdoch with Collapsible A.

Hemming spotted Captain Smith and heard what were probably the captain’s last orders. “The captain was there and he sung out: ‘Everyone over to the starboard side, to keep the ship up as long as possible.’

“He was by himself when I saw him last,” said Hemming.

2:10 a.m. The
Titanic
’s bow was probably twenty to thirty feet below water by now. Cold, dark seawater was swirling around the forward part of A Deck, although the insides of the upper decks were still somewhat dry. The roll to port was increasing.

Pressure from the flooding was building in the interior of the ship. As one writer has put it: “The
Titanic
had a pressure fuse building inside her which was about to set off a catastrophic plunge forward, taking everyone by surprise.”

And that’s what happened.

“Just then the ship took a slight but definite plunge — probably a bulkhead went — and the sea came rolling up in a wave, over the steel-fronted bridge, along the deck below us, washing people back in a dreadful huddled mass,” said Lightoller.

As the ship plunged forward, seawater surged over the Boat Deck. Many people standing near Collapsible A, including Rhoda Abbott and her two boys, were swept off the ship and into the ocean. Hundreds rushed toward the stern, which was still above water, to escape the surging sea.

Lightoller knew that trying to make for the stern would only postpone the inevitable dive into the ocean. He didn’t want to get caught in a large crowd either. He was afraid that people would panic and pull him down as they lashed and grabbed out at anything within reach in a desperate struggle to survive.

From his perch on the roof of the officers’ quarters, Lightoller saw a strange sight: The crow’s nest, usually ninety feet above the sea, was now just above the waterline.

As the ship plunged, the cold, dark sea he had watched all night was now washing over his feet.

“I just walked into the water,” said Lightoller.

A little earlier, after helping to load the lifeboats on the port side, Colonel Archibald Gracie and his friend James Clinch Smith had made their way to the starboard side. They too began to help with the last boats. While Lightoller and Hemming worked on Collapsible B, Colonel Gracie helped First Officer Murdoch and others get Collapsible A down from the roof of the officers’ quarters.

Colonel Gracie couldn’t help thinking, “What was one boat among so many eager to board her?”

A crew member shouted out, wanting to know if anyone had a knife to cut the lashings. Gracie tossed up his penknife. The men scurried to lean oars against the wall of the officers’ quarters, hoping to break the fall of the boat so that this last hope would not shatter. Finally it tumbled down onto the deck, breaking several oars on the way.

That was the moment when the ship seemed to dive forward and seawater surged toward them. Colonel Gracie and Clinch Smith looked for the nearest high place. They tried to jump onto the roof of the officers’ quarters. It was no good. Their bulky coats and clumsy life preservers got in the way.

As Gracie landed back on deck from his first jump, the water struck him on his right side. Thinking fast, he crouched down, and then, like riding a wave at the beach, he pushed off and leaped again. This time he let the force of the surging water propel him forward and up onto the roof.

He was now a little farther aft, lying on his stomach on top of the first class entrance above the grand stairway, not far from the base of the
Titanic
’s gigantic second funnel. Colonel Gracie gasped for breath and looked around for his friend. But Clinch Smith — and many others — had disappeared from sight.

“. . . the wave . . . had completely covered him, as well as all people on both sides of me,” he said.

He had no time to grieve. The ship was now sinking — the deck disappearing fast. “. . . before I could get to my feet I was in a whirlpool of water, swirling round and round, as I still tried to cling to the railing as the ship plunged to the depths below.

“Down, down I went: it seemed a great distance.”

Harold Bride was also caught in the wave.

Minutes before, he’d gone to where Lightoller and others were trying to free the last collapsible boats from the roof of the officers’ quarters. “I went up to them and was just lending a hand when a large wave came awash of the deck.

“The big wave carried the boat off. I had hold of an oarlock, and I went off with it.”