Titanic (4 page)

Saalfeld lived in Manchester, England, and worked as chairman of a wholesale drug firm. He boarded
Titanic
in Southampton, bound for Chicago and Montreal, where he planned to visit friends and test the waters for expanding his perfume business.

In his haste to get into a lifeboat, Saalfeld left his sample case in his room. Spooked by the sinking, Saalfeld stayed at his company but gave up his dream of an American business.

Or consider the First Class passengers who identified themselves as Mr. and Mrs. George Thorne. The fact is, there was no “George Thorne.” Nor were the couple a “mister” and a “missus.” George Rosenshine of New York City boarded
Titanic
at Cherbourg with his mistress, Gertrude Maybelle Thorne, who went by her middle name. To divert attention from their awkward status, Rosenshine became “Thorne” for the voyage.

In Europe, Rosenshine had bought 12 cases of ostrich feathers for his family-run importing business. A salvage expedition to
Titanic
recovered a collection of Rosenshine business documents, including some that linked Rosenshine to the ostrich feathers in
Titanic'
s cargo hold.

Titanic
historian Walter Lord learned Rosenshine's false identity in 1964. Over tea and biscuits at her New York home,
Titanic
survivor Renee Harris told Lord that Thorne was Rosenshine, and that he and his mistress had fallen deeply in love. They were returning to America after sharing a holiday mixed with fashion business.

Rosenshine/Thorne was last seen standing near a rail on the starboard side, complaining to his mistress about bad investments.

Rosenshine died, but the cable repair ship
Mackay-Bennett
recovered his body. The pockets of his clothes contained a gold watch, $423 in cash, and a letter of credit. His brother claimed the body at Halifax and forwarded it to New York City. Rosenshine now lies in Bayside Cemetery, Brooklyn; Maybelle Thorne survived.

Titanic
teemed with the rich and famous in First Class. Long before film actors and rock musicians topped celebrity lists, millionaires served as the glitterati.

Some, such as the internationally known journalist W. T. Stead, enjoyed the attention. Some did not. Among the latter were Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon of Scotland. They traveled under the last name of Morgan, possibly to throw off suspicion of Lady Duff Gordon, whose dress business had run afoul of U.S. Customs. Also incognito were four men whose real names did not appear on the ship's passenger list. Professional gamblers George Bradley, C. H. Romaine, Harry Homer, and Jay Yates skinned unsuspecting passengers at the card tables on North Atlantic liners. If fellow passengers had recognized their names and true professions, the gamblers wouldn't have been able to get anyone to join them in a game, and thus would have lost their main source of income.

Some of the other First Class passengers included:

• John Jacob Astor IV. His great-grandfather had started the family fortune in furs, then parlayed it into one of the world's biggest money piles by buying property in New York. Astor had divorced his first wife and boarded
  Titanic
  with his second, a woman less than half his age who was four months pregnant (after four months of marriage).
  
• Benjamin Guggenheim, a millionaire from his family's mining background. Like Rosenshine, he traveled with a woman who was not his wife.
  
• Margaret Brown, wife of a Denver mining millionaire. After
  1912, people knew her by her nickname: Unsinkable Molly.
  

One step below the ranks of the upper crust, the 271 Second Class passengers enjoyed accommodations that would have passed for First Class on most ships. Second Class enjoyed the same food, albeit with fewer choices and on slightly less elegant chinaware than First, and had its own library, a favorite of children for its books and of adults for its relaxed atmosphere conducive to reading, card games, and conversation. Second Class staterooms had comfy beds, sofas, and desks.

New research has shed light on Second Class passengers Franz Pulbaum, a German-born machinist, and Edgar Samuel Andrew, an Argentine studying in England. For 27-year-old Pulbaum, the voyage from Cherbourg to New York carried him closer to his dream of American citizenship. He lived in New York City, worked at Coney Island, and found in his trunk recovered from the ocean floor is a badly water-stained but still legible “Declaration of Intention” to switch his national allegiance. He had just made a visit home to Germany and while in Europe, he had stopped at Luna Park in Paris. His luggage contained a card perfumed with Aeolian, a Parisian scent.

Pulbaum was returning in 1912 to the land he intended to make his new home. He did not survive the sinking. His body was not recovered.

Seventeen-year-old Andrew, Pulbaum's fellow Second Class passenger, became a victim of chaos theory, the science that explains how the tiniest of changes in a physical system eventually may spawn enormous consequences. Andrew's original sailing date of April 17 on
Oceanic
had been moved up a week and his ticket transferred to
Titanic
because of a coal strike that kept many ships from having enough fuel to sail. He rued having to miss seeing an Argentine friend, Josefina “Josey” Cowan, who planned to arrive
in England shortly after
Titanic
sailed. Andrew couldn't wait for her, as he had to reach America in time for his brother Silvano's wedding.

The boy wrote somewhat petulantly about not having time with Josey: “I am boarding the greatest steamship in the world, but I don't really feel proud of it at all, right now I wish the
Titanic
were lying on the bottom of the ocean.”

Andrew's body was never found. His suitcase, recovered in 2001, contained more than 70 books and documents, including an arithmetic text giving instructions on calculating proportions.

Other Second Class passengers included:

• Annie Funk, a Christian missionary from India. She found a place in a lifeboat but gave it up so a mother with two children could survive in her place.
  
• Secret lovers Kate Florence Phillips, age 19, and Henry Samuel Morley, 39, who left behind his wife and English sweetshop to run away with Kate to America. Morley gave Phillips a sapphire necklace. She lived; he died.
  
• Jane Richards Quick and her young daughters, Winnifred and Phyllis. Jane's husband, Frederick, had taken a job in Detroit and sent for his family in Plymouth. The Quicks slept through
  Titanic'
  s collision and had to be roused by a steward. All survived.
  
• Second Class passengers Michel Navratil (three) and his brother Edmond (two), of Nice, France, traveled with their father, Michel, who went down with the ship. They were thought to be orphans until their mother, Marcelle Navratil, recognized them in a newspaper story. Her husband had kidnapped the children during what was to be a weekend visit and set sail for America. The White Star Line brought Marcelle to New York in a well-publicized event to retrieve her children.
  

The coal strike that changed Andrew's life also brought Third Class passenger Marion Meanwell to
Titanic
. Her manifest, recovered from the wreck, has the ship name
Majestic
crossed out. Like Andrew, she got rerouted.

She found
Titanic'
s Third Class magnificent. “Nothing but a pleasant voyage is anticipated,” she wrote.

Indeed, Third Class rooms were clean and comfortable. For some of the poorer families, dinners of mutton, fish, and boiled potatoes eclipsed anything they had eaten.

The 712 Third Class passengers boarded at E Deck. They hailed from not only from Britain and America, but also Italy, Germany, the Middle East, and other founts of immigration. Single men and married couples and families had berths in the forward section, while single women lived aft. Married couples and families had their own rooms. Single men and women in groups of three to five shared common rooms. One amenity was decidedly lacking: Third Class had only two bathtubs, both in the stern. It was not an oversight; many low-income people viewed bathing as unhealthy, an attitude that only reinforced the upper classes' desire for maintaining their strict physical separation.

Like many in Third Class, Marion Meanwell sought a new life in America. She passed herself off as a widow. In fact, she had a husband and children but could not afford a divorce. Nor did she desire one, as Victorian society deemed it a sign of moral failure. Calling herself a widow avoided awkward questions. When her son-in-law in America died, Meanwell, a hatmaker, decided at age 63 to leave England to help her daughter raise Meanwell's grandchildren.

Meanwell did not survive. RMS Titanic, Inc. discovered her alligator bag in 2000. Among its contents were family papers, a tin box, a baggage insurance certificate indicating she had checked two trunks, a boarding card with her name, and a landlord's letter confirming
she had been a good tenant.

Fourteen of
Titanic'
s Third Class passengers came from Addergoole Parish, a lovely corner of Ireland marked by pasture, heath, and bog. Most were young women, and all knew each other. Author Pauline Barrett, a relative of one of the 14, published their history in
The Addergoole Titanic Story
in 2010.

Eleven of the 14 died when
Titanic
sank, likely causing their parish to suffer greater loss, proportionately, than any other place. The dead included newlyweds John and Catherine Bourke, and John's sister Mary. They had planned to visit Catherine's sister in Chicago.

Stewards roused aft Third Class passengers after the collision, but when Annie Kate Kelly of Addergoole investigated she found no danger.

A jerk of the ship and a siren reawakened concern. Passengers were told to dress but not told why.

John Bourke and Kelly's cousin, Patrick Canavan, began rounding up steerage passengers and moving toward the Boat Deck. A steward guided a frightened Kelly to Lifeboat No. 16. There, Catherine Bourke refused to leave her husband's side to enter, allowing Kelly to take her seat. Once in the lifeboat, Kelly looked up to see Canavan at the rail, blessing her with his rosary.

Addergoole's Kelly, Annie McGowan, and Delia McDermott survived.

In New York, according to a newspaper, White Star agents forced a semiconscious Kelly to sign a legal release and pinned $25 to her underwear.

Terrible memories plagued Kelly. At 29 she joined the Adrian Dominican Sisters. Known for her sharp wit, she taught school until a few months before her death in 1969.

Other Third Class passengers included:

• Anna Turja of Finland, age 18. Her family believed her dead
  when her name appeared on the list of
  Titanic'
  s victims. Anna told them otherwise.
  
• Rhoda Mary Abbott, returning to her home in Rhode Island. She was the only female passenger to survive immersion in the icy ocean. Having not initially secured a seat in a lifeboat, she jumped into the water and was soon picked up by other survivors manning a partially swamped Engelhardt collapsible lifeboat.
  
• Austin Blyler van Billiard, a diamond merchant. When his body was found afloat, he had 12 diamonds in his pockets.
  

While passengers' lives have helped breathe life into historical accounts of the world of a century ago, those with the most knowledge of what went wrong on the night of April 14-15, 1912, went down with the ship. The captain, along with his chief officer and first officer, was not among the 207 crew members who survived. Neither was chief designer Thomas Andrews of Harland & Wolff, who knew more about
Titanic
than anyone.

Captain Edward John “E. J.” Smith had led the
Titanic
crew of 892. They ranged from officers, tasked with navigation, steering, and updating log and charts, to a diverse organization that included seamen, stewards, waiters, engineers, boiler room stokers, barbers, doctors, cashiers, teenage bellboys, and elevator operators. Not to mention a masseuse and a Turkish bath attendant. The crew's presence throughout the ship served two functions: to quietly and efficiently keep
Titanic
to its schedule, and to attend to the needs and wants of its passengers.

Henry Wilde served as chief officer.
Titanic
originally had been assigned William Murdoch in that role. However, Smith balked at Murdoch's relative inexperience aboard big ships and asked for Wilde, who had served aboard
Olympic
. Wilde's last-minute arrival on
Titanic
temporarily demoted Murdoch to first officer, which pushed Charles Lightoller to second officer. Murdoch, a coolheaded
Scotsman, had also served aboard
Olympic
. He had demonstrated his exceptional navigational competence once on a voyage aboard the
Arabic
, when he had avoided a collision by steering out of harm's way at the last second. Lightoller had sailed with White Star since 1900. He was the highest ranking officer to survive.

Ensuring that the ship met the builder's high standards, nine Harland & Wolff employees known as the Guarantees sailed on
Titanic
to fix any problems they saw. Harland & Wolff dispatched the so-called Guarantee Group on every maiden voyage. They included men skilled in plumbing, electrical systems, carpentry, and machine fitting.

Andrews, who led the group, named the rest of
Titanic'
s Guarantees at the last minute: William Campbell, Roderick Chisholm, Alfred Cunningham, Anthony Frost, Robert Knight, Francis Parkes, William Henry Parr, and Ennis Watson. These nine men and their legacies are the subject of a National Geographic Channel special,
Save the Titanic with Bob Ballard
.

Andrews noted a few small things in
Titanic'
s brief time at sea, particularly problems with a hot press (a device for heating food) in the First Class galley and the too dark pebbled dashing, or faux stucco, between the half-timbers of the private promenades.

No doubt the Guarantee Group sprang into action after
Titanic
began taking on water, although details of their work have mostly died with them. Frost was last seen trying to reach the flooded engine rooms. Passengers last spotted Andrews in the First Class smoking room, ignoring a nearby life jacket and staring at a painting of Plymouth harbor. Survivors' accounts hailed him as a hero, more concerned about getting people into lifeboats than with his own survival.