Voyagers of the Titanic (26 page)

People were right to be scared. Lifeboat 13, for example, was lowered into a frightening outrush of water from the ship’s side about ten feet above the ocean. This cascade was swamping the boat until its occupants wielded an oar against the ship’s side and reached the ocean without overturning. Because of the
Titanic
’s shifting tilt
,
lifeboat 15, which was lowered quickly afterward, nearly crushed lifeboat 13, to the horror of the latter’s shouting, screaming occupants. On reaching the ocean, they could not detach it from the falls and tackle. A stoker finally severed the ropes with his knife. The turbulent outflow then swept the lifeboat away from the
Titanic
into calm waters, but its occupants had endured a terrifying ten minutes.

Murdoch, who was in charge of loading the starboard lifeboats, interpreted Smith’s order “Put the women and children in and lower away,” to mean women and children
first
. Lightoller, his counterpart on the port side, interpreted the order to mean women and children
only
. Both men ordered the lowering of boats that were not filled to capacity, but Murdoch allowed men to board if there were no women and children about. Lightoller feared, he said, that if some men were allowed to board lifeboats, excluded men would rush and overwhelm them, yet he also testified that there was no jostling of women and children by men during the loading of the earlier boats: “they could not have stood quieter if they had been in church.” In the belief that he was applying “the rule of human nature” as well as a rule of the sea, Lightoller was relentless in excluding men, youths, and even pubescent boys.
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His prohibition on boys seemed deplorably callous to Samuel Rule, chief bathroom steward: “I kept a special look-out for the lift-boys and bell-boys. Little lads they were. If I had seen any of them, I would have bundled them in the boats with the women.”
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When early lifeboats were loaded the boat decks seemed nearly empty. Seaman Lucas, who helped load the port lifeboats, said they were not filled “because there were no women knocking about.”
40
This strengthens the supposition that the launching times of early lifeboats were earlier than is generally propounded. If the empty look of the boat decks sounds improbable, it is worth noting that Frank Millet, who as an artist had a strong visual sense, was awed by the size of decks as large as a tennis court or courtyard: “500 people don’t make a show on the decks.”
41

A man of the world lives by notions: he minds the opinion of the world, is driven by fear of worldly disapproval, and judges by the world’s standards. It was part of the world’s masculine code that gentlemen acted as squires to women traveling alone. “Though being a gentleman sometimes gets one into scrapes it also gets one out of them,” Earl Cowper had recently written.
42
This was to be exemplified by Hugh Woolner in the early hours of April 15. He felt responsible for Helen Churchill Candee, got her life jacket from atop her wardrobe, tied her into it, fetched his own life jacket, and gave the spare in his cabin to a third-class passenger: perhaps Daniel Buckley. His supreme wish was to get Mrs. Candee into the first port lifeboat, which he did. Other women were reluctant to board until Lightoller assured them that it was “a matter of precaution,” whereupon they came forward more freely.
43
Even so, lifeboat 6 left with thirty-seven empty places and only twenty-eight occupants.

Archie Butt was another squire. He had known Marie Young when she taught music to the Roosevelt children in the White House, and handed her into lifeboat 8, where he tucked a blanket around her as if she were going for a blowy ride in an open motorcar. Washington Roebling escorted Edith and Margaret Graham with Elizabeth Shutes into lifeboat 3. “We passed by the palm room, where two short hours before we had listened to a beautiful concert,” Shutes recalled, and mounted stairs that had undergone a sinister transmutation. “No laughing throng, but on either side stand quietly, bravely, the stewards, all equipped with the white, ghostly life-preservers . . . only pale faces, each form strapped about with those white bars. So gruesome a scene. We passed on.”
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The emergency door from third class into second class was opened early on. There was a route from there up the center of the liner, past the second-class smoking room, straight to the boat deck.
45
However, an organized call for third-class passengers to proceed to the boat deck was not made until about fifty minutes after the collision. There was no realization that, given the deficiency of lifeboats, this was fatal to the chances of most third-class passengers. The explanation was not malign Edwardian snobbery, but rather human failure: Captain Smith never gave specific instructions, and Chief Officer Henry Wilde was too dazed to think for himself. Without crew escorts, some third-classers were baffled by the maze of corridors and excluded by the locked gates that U.S. immigration laws required between third-class decks and other parts of the ship, though these were unlocked by twelve thirty. There were claims that three young Irishwomen were excluded by a locked gate guarded by a seaman until Jim Farrell, a laborer from Aghnacliffe, County Longford, shouted “Great God, man! Open the gate, and let the girls through!”
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The men in third class were held back initially, forbidden to accompany women and children being guided to the boat deck and discouraged from going upward in the ship where they had better chances of survival. “Jack” Poingdestre saw a distraught mass of men from third class, some with luggage, gathered beneath a ladder to second class, which was blocked by stewards.
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However, “steerage passengers,” so far as Berk Trembisky saw, “were not prevented from getting up to the upper decks by anybody, or by closed doors, or anything else.”
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John Hart was a third-class steward in charge of a section of single women, wives traveling with children, and nine married couples with children: a total of about fifty-eight. He testified that some refused to don life jackets: “They did not believe the ship was hurt in any way.”
49
Around twelve thirty he received the order “Pass your women to the boat deck.”
50
The routes from the third-class berths to the boat deck were few and circuitous, so, holding back the men, Hart guided a group of about twenty-five women and children upward to the boat deck. As he testified, “some were not willing to go to the boat deck and stayed behind. Some of them went to the boat deck and found it rather cold, and saw the boats being lowered away, and thought themselves more secure on the ship, and consequently returned to their cabin.” A few of his entourage declared that “they preferred to remain on the ship than be tossed about on the water like a cockle-shell.”
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The Finnish girls in his rescue party stayed in lifeboat 8, but other women under his aegis jumped out and scurried back into the liner, where it was warm. After expostulating, Hart descended to collect another twenty-five third-class passengers, including the Swedish and Irish. Even at this critical stage passengers refused to leave their cabins. Some women refused to leave their husbands, and children clutched at their fathers. All the adults owned was in their luggage, which some were loath to abandon. Hart insisted on taking only women and children, despite men clamoring to join his group, and altogether saved over fifty of them. His second group reached lifeboat 15 at about one fifteen (an hour and thirty-five minutes after the collision). He started to return for another muster of third-class passengers, but was ordered to man lifeboat 15. As this lifeboat was prepared to leave, there was a renewed cry for women and children, but wives still would not leave their husbands.
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This was not a night when millionaires used their money like a heavy suitcase to clear their way through the crowd. Astor, the railway president Hays, his stockbroker son-in-law Davidson, the New Jersey millionaire Roebling, John Thayer, and George Widener helped women into lifeboats but stepped back themselves. The stories of millionaires’ abnegation became world famous, although the dignified fatalism of the poor passed almost into oblivion. After the collision the young Swedish socialist August Wennerström came across Johan Lundahl, a fifty-one-year-old tailor and sojourner returning to Spokane, Washington, after a spell in Småland. “Good-bye friend, I’m too old to fight the Atlantic,” he said, and went to sit in a chair in the third-class smoking room.
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Lundahl had learned to lose without a struggle.

The first lifeboat to be launched was lifeboat 7, which left from the starboard side carrying three crewmen and twenty-three passengers (all from first class): twenty-six escapees with thirty-nine vacancies. It is almost uniformly stated that the lifeboat was launched at twelve forty-five, but it may have left as much as twenty minutes earlier. The twelve forty-five timing is about sixty-five minutes after the collision, and yet no one felt there was an unconscionable delay in launching it. George Hogg, the lookout man who was in charge of lifeboat 7, had no thought when he left the liner that the
Titanic
would sink. The boat decks were not full of passengers yet. All this suggests an earlier time. The three French bridge players from the Café Parisien, Chevré, Marechal, and Omont, fully charged with the desire to live, boarded lifeboat 7. So, too, did Blank, Greenfield, and Nourney, who had been gambling in the first-class smoking room. All six knew that the ship had grazed an iceberg, but few passengers yet suspected that the ship was stricken. Chevré, Omont, and Marechal recalled that passengers shrank from joining them in their lifeboat, everyone asking, “What’s the use?”
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The twenty-three passengers on lifeboat 7 comprised twelve men and eleven women. The men included two honeymooning husbands, Dickinson Bishop and John Snyder, with their young brides, so perhaps Murdoch had no wish to enforce separation on newlyweds. There was also Gilbert Tucker, who escorted three young women to the lifeboat, including Margaret Hays, for whom he had an obvious tendresse, which may have made him seem nearly as deserving as a honeymooning husband. Two other men, Frederic Seward and William Sloper, had been playing bridge with the actress Dorothy Gibson and her mother. They took the Gibsons to the lifeboat and were induced to board with them—perhaps to hearten or shield them, for at this stage it seems that all women shrank from boarding the lifeboats, which looked more vulnerable than the big liner.

Helen Bishop feared that “there was little chance of being picked up in the lifeboats” from the vast ocean.
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Dickinson Bishop declared that “the officers implored people to get aboard, but they seemed to fear hanging out over the water at a height of over 75 feet, and the officers ordered the boat lowered with only a small portion of what it could carry.”
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The seamen were desperate to get people aboard. James McGough, a buyer for a department store in Philadelphia, who had alerted Margaret Brown so promptly that she had disembarked in lifeboat 6, explained how he ended up in lifeboat 7. “I had my back turned,” he testified, “and was caught by the shoulders by one of the officers, who gave me a push, saying, ‘Here, you are a big fellow: get into the boat.’”
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After launching lifeboat 7, Murdoch moved to the next starboard lifeboat aft, 5, and called for passengers. Again women were reluctant to board, and again he let men accompany their timorous womenfolk as a way of hastening the loading. It was a good decision, which preserved lives. Among those standing nearby was a party of six first-class voyagers. Sallie Beckwith, originally from Columbus, Ohio, was traveling with her second (and younger) husband, Richard Beckwith, a Yale man who was vice president of a New York real estate firm, and her nineteen-year-old daughter, Helen Newsom. The girl was attended by her beau, Karl Behr: they married the following year. Behr was also a Yale man, a member of the U.S. tennis team for the Davis Cup, currently working as a Wall Street lawyer. Attached to their group were Edwin Kimball, who owned a piano business in Boston, and his wife, Gertrude. Sallie Beckwith asked if all six of them, men and women, could board, and was told, “Of course, madam, every one of you.”

Lifeboat 5 is conventionally believed to have been launched an hour and a quarter after the collision, around twelve fifty-five (two-thirds full with thirty-six passengers and five crewmen), but this estimate may be ten or fifteen minutes late. Both Behr and Kimball later described their escape into lifeboat 5. “All was perfectly calm,” said Behr. “We waited while the first boat was being filled and lowered. We went in the second boat. At the time we supposed there were plenty of lifeboats for all the passengers.”
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Kimball stressed “the dread of being lowered a sheer 77 feet in a frail lifeboat in mid-Atlantic at night . . . and the unshakeable confidence of many passengers and many of the vessel’s crew that the
Titanic
could not sink.” He had first been alarmed by seeing a postal clerk wet to the knees—“he seemed very serious and said it was pretty bad”—although the ship’s officer who helped the party into their life jackets assured them “that there was no danger and that everything would be alright.” As a result of these mixed messages, and the long drop to the water, officers had difficulty in coaxing people aboard lifeboat 5, despite assuring them that “it would not be a long while before they would probably be back on the big boat.”
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