Voyagers of the Titanic (25 page)

The
Titanic
had been steaming at twenty-two and a half knots: “the instant the engines were stopped the steam started roaring off at all eight exhausts, kicking up a row that would have dwarfed the row of a thousand railway engines thundering through a culvert,” Second Officer Lightoller recalled.
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The crew responded immediately to the call for “All hands on deck,” but it was impossible to give verbal orders: hand gestures set the crew swinging lifeboats out, hauling tight the falls, and coiling them on deck and ready for lowering. As passengers emerged on deck, the cacophony increased their alarm. When later the deafening din of venting steam stopped, the silence seemed sinister.

Officers and crew deceived the passengers in order to avoid panic—and perhaps to protect themselves from full realization of their predicament. Passengers kept asking if the situation was serious. “I tried to cheer them up,” wrote Lightoller, “by telling them ‘No,’ but that it was a matter of precaution to get the boats in the water, ready for any emergency. That in any case they were perfectly safe, as there was a ship not more than a few miles away, and I pointed out the lights on the port bow which they could see as well as I could.”
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The ship was probably the
Californian,
at whose dozy, heedless master Lightoller flung recriminatory barbs for forty years. “Wrap up warmly, for you may have a little trip for an hour or so in one of our lifeboats,” Lady Duff Gordon’s steward told her comfortingly. “If it had not been for this ill-advised reticence hundreds more lives would have been saved,” she felt. “The appalling danger we were in was concealed from us all until it was too late and in the ensuing panic many of the boats were lowered half-filled because there was no time to fill them.”
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Yet it was the stewards’ duty to assuage worries and deter panic. Many of them did not recognize the danger, or realize that the ship must sink, until long after the first lifeboats were primed.

By no means all passengers were duped or assuaged. Olaus Abelseth, returning third class to his South Dakota homestead and chaperoning a party of fellow Norwegians, later gave the best of only three third-class accounts of the sinking submitted to the official inquiries that followed: it is touching because Abelseth did not know English nautical words and described the ship as if it were one of his livestock. He shared a two-berth cabin with Adolf Humblen, also from Ålsund. The two men were stirred awake around a quarter to midnight. They donned their clothes and went to investigate. “There was quite a lot of ice on the starboard part of the ship. They wanted us to go down again, and I saw one of the officers, and I said to him: ‘Is there any danger?’ He said, ‘No.’ I was not satisfied with that, however.” He told his brother-in-law Sigurd Moen and cousin Peter Søholt, who were sharing a cabin, to get up and dress. They walked “to the hind part of the ship” and roused two Norwegian girls, his cousin Karen Abelseth and Anna Salkjelsvik, who were traveling under his protection and Humblen’s. They traipsed on deck and, gazing over the port side of the ship, saw a light. An officer told them a rescue ship was coming, though he did not say when. Abelseth and Søholt collected life jackets for their group. Third-class passengers were by then crawling along the arm of a crane on their deck as their nearest way to the boat deck.
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Rich men were more resistant than poor to believing that life could go smash. Arthur Peuchen, a Canadian chemical manufacturer, took Charles Hays (of Canada’s Grand Trunk Pacific Railway) to inspect the ice on deck. He felt the liner’s situation was grave, and told Hays, “Why, she is listing; she should not do that, the water is perfectly calm, and the boat has stopped.” Hays, whose delusions of invincibility were driving his railway toward ruin, replied confidently, “You cannot sink this boat. No matter what we have struck, she is good for eight or ten hours.”
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In first class the New Jersey manufacturer Henry Stengel had been moaning in his sleep. His wife had just roused him from his dream when they heard a slight crash, but he felt no concern until the throbbing engines ceased. Then, with his wife in her kimono, they went to investigate. They saw Smith returning from inspecting the damage with a grave expression, and George Widener follow the captain upstairs—doubtless with the intention of quizzing him. Worried by Smith’s look, the Stengels fetched their life jackets from their stateroom and hastened on deck. Even after the lifeboat loading began, White Star officers were assuring them, “There is no danger: this is simply a matter of precaution.”
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Martha Stephenson—also in first class—“was awakened by a terrible jar with ripping and cutting noises.” The steward told her, “Go to bed, it’s nothing,” but she saw a man in an opposite cabin retrieve his shoes, which he had left in the corridor for the Boots to polish overnight, and resolved to dress. The door of another cabin had jammed, and the passenger inside was calling for help. Richard Williams, a sporting young American on his way to Harvard, rammed his shoulders to the panel and broke it in. An indignant steward threatened to have him arrested. Mrs. Stephenson and her sister, Elizabeth Eustis, “dressed as if for breakfast, putting on our burglar pockets containing our letters of credit and money. I determined also to do my hair and put on a lined waistcoat and old winter suit as it was so cold. While Elizabeth was doing her hair, the ship suddenly settled, frightening me very much.” John Thayer senior came to collect them as Miss Eustis was hooking her waist. It was the methodical details that they remembered afterward. “I put on my fur coat over everything and Elizabeth said she would wear her watch, which reminded me that mine was hanging by the bureau and I quickly put it on. I took my glasses and small change purse, also a clean handkerchief.” As the sisters left with Thayer, they were told to don life jackets. They realized the situation must be serious and were “frightened though very quiet.”
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Another woman in first class was the redoubtable widow Emma Bucknell: seventy years later her great-granddaughter would marry Jack Thayer’s grandson. At the age of fifty-nine she exuded mature vigor and resolve and shone with confidence in her person, position, and way of life. “Exceedingly intellectual and much traveled,” was the description of her by Margaret Brown, who had a good brain and had circumnavigated the world.
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Her calm, clear head impressed many in the next hours and days. Awakened by the crash, she made a foray along the corridor outside her cabin. There she found lumps of ice, which had crashed through an open porthole when the iceberg struck. A steward came along the corridor denying any danger, “but while his voice was calm and he delivered his message easily, his face belied the confidence of his words.” Emma Bucknell dressed as warmly as she could. “I anticipated that there would come greater difficulties, and I intended to be prepared. I told my maid to dress also. About this time another man came through the hallways crying out that everyone should dress immediately and go on deck. I called to my maid to fasten my gown, and only tarried long enough to get a heavy fur coat.” Back in the corridor a woman was declaring that it was impossible for the liner to have hit an iceberg. Mrs. Bucknell picked up some ice from the floor and, displaying it in the palm of her hand, said with scornful emphasis, “Here is ice! It is an iceberg!” Her maid, Albina Bazzani, pleaded with her not to go up on deck: “she cried out that we would surely be lost if we did not stay in the safety of our room, but I told her the only thing to do under the circumstances was to obey orders.” On deck Emma Bucknell joined the Astors and Wideners talking together. As the call came for women and children, the Astors crossed to the port side of the ship: “he was bending over her as they walked. And it was then that I saw the Wideners for the last time. They were all together.”
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Harry Widener had recently bought a rare 1598 edition of Bacon’s essays. “Mother,” he said on deck, “I have placed the volume in my pocket: little ‘Bacon’ goes with me!” (A fellow bibliophile has called this “the most touching, most pathetic, withal the most glorious incident in the romance of book-collecting.”
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)

Jack Astor’s life had been as perfectly pitched as a concert-hall piano, with nothing skewed about the keys and nothing slack in the strings to mar the tone. Now everything went discordant and awry. On the boat deck, where he went to investigate the disturbance, he met Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, whose wife had been alarmed by the venting of the boilers. They agreed that their wives should dress. Lady Duff Gordon donned a mauve silk kimono and a squirrel coat. Madeleine Astor dressed in a black coat with sable trim, a diamond necklace, and a fur muff. In the A deck foyer the Astors met Captain Smith, whom Astor took aside and quizzed discreetly. His wife needed reassurance about her life jacket. The Astors were glimpsed sitting side by side on two mechanical horses in the gymnasium while he sliced open a life jacket with a penknife to show her its cork contents.

In second class, the Cornishwoman Agnes Davies felt a jar and rang for a steward, who assured her party that they could safely remain in their berths. But when Robert Phillips, the widowed fishmonger who wanted a new start in America, told his daughter to dress, the Cornishwoman followed suit. She decided to wake and dress her eight-year-old son, although their steward repeated that there was no danger. “Had it not been for our curiosity to learn what was going on, we might have perished. We went on deck about 12.15.”
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Also in second class, that troublemaker Imanita Shelley declared that she and Lutie Parrish were awakened by the stopping of the engines. They heard excited voices in the corridor speaking of a collision with an iceberg, but a steward who appeared after her continuous ringing insisted that nothing was amiss and that passengers should return to bed. Half an hour later, second-class passengers heard stewards running down the passages, pounding on cabin doors or bursting them open and yelling, “Everybody on deck with life belts on, at once.”
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Both women donned their life jackets and went to the boat deck. “There was practically no excitement on the part of anyone during this time,” Mrs. Shelley avowed, “the majority seeming to think that the big boat could not sink altogether, and that it was better to stay on the steamer than trust to the lifeboats.”
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The Polish-born leather worker Berk Trembisky was berthed in a third-class cabin. “We knew something was wrong, and we jumped out of bed and we dressed ourselves and went out.” Other passengers started arguing: “one said that it was dangerous and the other said that it was not; one said white and the other said black. Instead of arguing with those people, I instantly went to the highest spot.” He decided that if the ship was going to sink, he should be at the top of it: “That was my first idea, which was the best.” He found an open door into second class, where he saw few people, and climbed a ladder into first class.
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The Irish immigrant Daniel Buckley recounted that he and three other youths were asleep in a cabin. “I heard some terrible noise and I jumped out on the floor, and the first thing I knew my feet were getting wet; the water was just coming in slightly. I told the other fellows to get up, that there was something wrong, and that the water was coming in. They only laughed at me. One of them says: ‘Get back into bed. You are not in Ireland now.’ I got on my clothes as quick as I could.” As their cabin was tiny, he stepped out to give the three others room to dress. Two sailors came along shouting, “All up on deck unless you want to get drowned!” He hastened to the boat deck, where he realized that he had forgotten his life jacket in his cabin; but when he went to retrieve it, water rising up the stairs forced him back. Returning to the boat deck, he met a first-class passenger with two life jackets: “He gave me one, and fixed it on me.”
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It is worth recapitulating that there were twenty boats for escape. Two (number 1 on the starboard and 2 on the port) were wooden emergency boats with a capacity of forty occupants each, built for rescuing people overboard. There were fourteen wooden lifeboats designed to carry sixty-five occupants each, with odd numbers arrayed on the starboard and even numbers on the port. There were also four Engelhardt lifeboats, named after their designer, made of clinker with collapsible canvas gunwales and a rounded bottom like a canoe. Each was capable of carrying forty-seven occupants. These were designated A, B, C, and D: C was stowed underneath emergency lifeboat 1 forward on the starboard boat deck; D was under emergency lifeboat 2 on the port side; while A and B were lashed to the inaccessible roof of the officers’ quarters.

The recent capsizing in the English Channel of a lifeboat from P&O’s
Oceana,
which drowned nine people, discouraged passengers from being jerked down the tall precipitous side of a liner that was not expected to sink. They anticipated a delay in reaching New York, but nothing worse, and were reluctant to leave the warm comforts of the liner for the chill perils of a frail craft bobbing on the ocean. The P&O fatalities inhibited White Star’s officers, too, from filling their lifeboats. They feared that the davits and tackle for lowering the lifeboats would buckle if the boats were lowered at full capacity. Lightoller, an able seaman testified, “was frightened of the falls.”
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Harland & Wolff had tested one of the
Olympic
’s lifeboats—raising and lowering it six times bearing the equivalent weight of sixty-five people—without buckling or strain. The shipbuilders assumed that this was known to the crew of the
Titanic,
which had identical equipment, but the officers filling the lifeboats either did not know or forgot. The capacity of many lifeboats was therefore squandered. Only at the last were the lifeboats full, for by then it was clear that the ship was about to plunge two miles deep.