Voices from the Titanic (16 page)
Read Voices from the Titanic Online
Authors: Geoff Tibballs
There were three rooms in the wireless cabin. One was a sleeping room, one a dynamo room, and one an operating room. I took off my clothes and went to sleep in the bed. Then I was conscious of waking up and hearing Phillips sending to Cape Race. I read
what he was sending. It was only routine matter. I remembered how tired he was, and got out of bed without my clothes on to relieve him. I didn't even feel the shock. I hardly knew it had happened until after the captain had come to us. There was no jolt whatever.
I was standing by Phillips, telling him to go to bed, when the captain put his head in the cabin. âWe've struck an iceberg,' the captain said, âand I'm having an inspection made to tell what it has done for us. You had better get ready to send out a call for assistance, but don't send it until I tell you.' The captain went away, and in ten minutes, I should estimate, he came back. We could hear terrible confusion outside, but not the least thing to indicate any trouble. The wireless was working perfectly. âSend a call for assistance,' ordered the captain, barely putting his head in the door. âWhat call should I send?' Phillips asked. âThe regulation call for help, just that.' Then the captain was gone.
Phillips began to send âC.Q.D.' He flashed away at it, and we joked while he did so. All of us made light of the disaster. We joked that way while we flashed the signals for about five minutes. Then the captain came back. âWhat are you sending?' he asked. âC.Q.D.,' Phillips replied.
The humour of the situation appealed to me, and I cut in with a little remark that made us all laugh, including the captain. âSend S.O.S.,' I said. âIt's the new call, and it may be your last chance to send it.' Phillips, with a laugh, changed the signal to âS.O.S.' The captain told us we had been struck amidships, or just aft of amid-ships. It was ten minutes, Phillips told me, after he noticed the iceberg, but the slight jolt was the only signal to us that a collision had occurred. We thought we were a good distance away. We said lots of funny things to each other in the next few minutes. We picked up the first steamship
Frankfurt
, gave her our position, and said we had struck an iceberg, and needed assistance. The
Frankfurt
operator went away to tell his captain. He came back, and we told him we were sinking by the head, and that we could observe a distinct list forward.
The
Carpathia
answered our signal, and we told her our position, and said we were sinking by the head. The operator went to tell the captain, and in five minutes returned, and told us the
Carpathia
was putting about and heading for us.
Our captain had left us at this time, and Phillips told me to run and tell him what the
Carpathia
had answered. I did so, and I went through an awful mass of people to his cabin. The decks were full of scrambling men and women. I came back and heard Phillips giving the
Carpathia
further directions. Phillips told me to put on my clothes. Until that moment I forgot I wasn't dressed. I went to my cabin and dressed. I brought an overcoat to Phillips, and as it was very cold I slipped the overcoat upon him while he worked. Every few minutes Phillips would send me to the captain with little messages. They were merely telling how the
Carpathia
was coming our way, and giving her speed.
I noticed as I came back from one trip that they were putting off the women and children in lifeboats, and that the list forward was increasing. Phillips told me the wireless was growing weaker. The captain came and told us our engine rooms were taking water, and that the dynamos might not last much longer. We sent that word to the
Carpathia
.
I went out on deck and looked around. The water was pretty close up to the boat deck. There was a great scramble aft, and how poor Phillips worked through it I don't know. He was a brave man. I learnt 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 Phillips did for the last awful fifteen minutes.
Phillips clung on, sending and sending. He clung on for about ten minutes, or maybe fifteen minutes, after the captain released him. The water was then coming into our cabin. From aft came the tunes of the band. It was a ragtime tune. I don't know what. Then there was âAutumn'. Phillips ran aft, and that was the last I ever saw of him alive.
WATCHING AND WAITING
There were some 2,228 passengers on board the
Titanic
but the twenty lifeboats had a total capacity of just 1,178. Even-numbered boats were launched from the port side; odd-numbered from the starboard side. The first lifeboat, No. 7, was lowered at 12.45 a.m. â over an hour after the collision. Its capacity was sixty-five yet it left with only twenty-eight passengers.
Among the passengers on this boat were newlyweds
Mrs Helen Bishop
and husband Dickinson.
When we got on deck there were few people there. We were in the first lifeboat to be lowered over the side. Someone said: âPut the brides and grooms in first.'
There were three newly married couples who went in that boat. Altogether, there were twenty-eight in our boat. There might as well have been forty or so, but the half hundred men on deck refused to leave, even though there was room for them.
John Jacob Astor was standing at the foot of the stairway as I started to go back the second time. He told us to get on our life-belts and we did. Before our boat was lowered into the water, Mr and Mrs Astor were on the deck. She didn't want to go, saying that she thought we were all silly, that the
Titanic
couldn't sink.
Because the Astors' state room was close to ours, we had had considerable to do with them on the voyage and I disliked to leave them on deck. As a matter of fact I believed, much as they did, that there was little chance of being picked up in the lifeboats.
The water was like glass. There wasn't even the ripple usually found on a small lake. By the time we had pulled 100 yards, the lower row of portholes had disappeared. When we were a mile away the second row had gone, but there was still no confusion. Indeed everything seemed to be quiet on the ship until her stern was raised out of the water by the list forward. Then a veritable wave of humanity surged up out of the steerage and shut the lights from our view. We were too far away to see the passengers individually, but we could see the black masses of human forms and hear their death cries and groans.
For a moment the ship seemed to be pointing straight down, looking like a gigantic whale submerging itself, head-first.
One dining room steward, who was in our boat, was thoughtful enough to bring green lights â the kind you burn on the Fourth of July. They cast a ghostly light over the boat, but you know we had no light of any kind. Whenever we would light one of these diminutive torches, we would hear cries from the people perishing aboard. They thought it was help coming.
We were afloat in the lifeboat from about 12.30 Sunday night until five o'clock Monday morning. Although we were the first boat to leave the
Titanic
, we were about the fourth picked up by the
Carpathia
. The scenes on that little craft adrift in mid-ocean with little hope of rescue were most heartrending. Still the characters of the individuals appealed to me.
For instance, there was a German baron aboard who smoked an obnoxious pipe incessantly and refused to pull an oar. The men were worn out with the work, and I rowed for considerable time myself. There was a little French aviator in our boat, Pierre Maréchal, who never took his monocle from his eye all the time we were on the water, but he did assist in the rowing.
Whenever a light, however small, was flashed in a lifeboat,
those in the other drifting crafts were given false hopes of rescue. After we had been afloat for several hours without food or water and with everyone suffering from the cold, I felt certain we should all perish. I took off my stockings and gave them to a little girl who hadn't as much time to dress as I had.
When the day broke and the
Carpathia
was sighted, there were indescribable scenes of joy. After we had pulled alongside the rescue ship, many of the women were lifted aboard in chairs, tied to a rope. I was sufficiently composed to climb the ladder alongside to the deck.
Those on board the
Carpathia
did everything in their power for our comfort. They shared everything with us and the captain of that boat was not like Captain Smith of the
Titanic
. You didn't see him at fashionable dinners. He was always on duty.
Mrs Lucian Smith of Huntington, West Virginia, a dear little woman who lost her husband in the disaster, said that before they parted on the deck he told her he had seen Captain Smith at a dinner at 11 p.m. that night. When he left the dining room, the captain was still there, although he may have gone to the bridge before the collision, but it doesn't seem likely. For some reason, for which we will probably never know, the bulkhead doors refused to work. I watched the men for several minutes endeavouring to turn the screws that would lower them and make the compartments watertight, but they were unsuccessful. It may be that the impact so wrenched them as to throw them out of line.
(
Dowagiac Daily News
, 20 April 1912)
American stockbroker
William Thompson Sloper
revealed how he owed his salvation to actress Dorothy Gibson, whom he had met that evening over a game of bridge with her mother and Frederick Seward. One American newspaper alleged that Sloper had dressed in women's clothing to escape the sinking ship, an accusation which he spent the remaining forty-three years of his life denying.
Standing in the shelter of the ship's superstructure we helped each other adjust our life preservers while the terrific racket overhead caused by the steam from the ship's boilers made it almost impossible for us to hear anything we said to each other. Shortly afterwards the First Officer said to the fifty or sixty passengers who in the meantime had collected on the deck, speaking through a megaphone held to his mouth: âAny passengers who would like to do so may get into this lifeboat.' After a few of the passengers standing between us and the First Officer had been handed into the lifeboat by him and his assistants or had balked at getting into it and stepped aside, our time came to decide whether to get into the boat or pull back.
Every passenger seemed to have taken a firm grip on his nerves. Dorothy Gibson was the only one who seemed to realize the desperate situation we were in because she had become quite hysterical and kept repeating over and over so that people standing near us could hear, âI'll never ride in my little grey car again.' There was no doubt in Dorothy's mind what she wanted to do and her mother was satisfied to go along with Dorothy. So with the help of the First Officer, I handed Dorothy down into the bow of the lifeboat. Mr Seward and the junior officer handed Mrs Gibson down after her daughter. Luckily for both Seward and me, Dorothy held onto my hand and demanded that we get into the boat with them. âWe don't go unless you do,' she said. âWhat do you say?' I asked Seward. âWhat's the difference? We may as well go along with them.' Finding seats for ourselves, we sat in the lifeboat designed for sixty-five persons for about ten minutes looking up into the faces of the passengers looking down at us, trying to make up their minds to get in with us. After nineteen people had finally made up their minds and had been lowered into the boat, the First Officer asked for the last time through his megaphone: âAre there any more who would like to get into this boat before we lower away?' When no one else made the move towards him, he gave the signal to lower away. Then began a jerky descent to the surface of the ocean sixty feet below.
Fortunately for us the three sailors knew their business, for in a few minutes they skilfully launched our boat without accident.
The sea was perfectly calm â not even a ripple on the surface. For the next hour and a half we just sat there and drifted farther and farther away. Two hours after our lifeboat was launched, the sailors estimated that we had drifted more than two miles from where the
Titanic
was sinking. The ship remained until two or three minutes before she sank as brilliantly lighted as she was directly after the accident occurred and all the lights had been turned on. Then suddenly (like the house lights in a brilliantly lighted theatre just before the curtain goes up) all the lights dipped simultaneously to a pale glow. A moment or two later everyone watching in the lifeboats saw silhouetted against the starlit sky the stern of the ship rise perpendicularly into the air from about midship. Then with a prolonged rush and a roar like 10,000 tons of coal sliding down a metal chute several hundred feet long, the great ship went down out of sight and disappeared beneath the surface of the ocean. Then a great cry arose on the air from the surface of the calm sea where the ship had been.
One of the sailors divided the rugs among the women, some of whom were not too warmly dressed. The night air was very cold and Dorothy felt the cold very much. I used Sunday night as an excuse for not changing at dinner time into my evening clothes. I had been wearing a brand new suit of heavy woollen material. When I went down to get my life preserver I had pulled on a heavy Shetland wool sweater and my winter overcoat. With my life preserver I was cumbersomely dressed so that a few minutes of pulling an oar in the lifeboat threw me into a dripping perspiration. So I was glad to take off my winter coat and put it on Dorothy.
It took us an hour to awkwardly row our boat to the side of the
Carpathia
. During the hour we had been rowing the sun came out of the ocean like a ball of fire. Its rays reflected on the numerous icebergs sticking up out of the sea around us.
Sculptor
Paul Chevré
made his escape from the
Titanic
in the company of two other Frenchmen, aviator Pierre Maréchal and cotton dealer Alfred Omont.
