Of this we may be as sure as of the existence of the ship: that there were on board theTitanicpeople watching the slip of moon setting early on those April nights for whom time and the world were quite arrested in their course, and for whom the whole ship and her teeming activities were but frame and setting for the perfect moment of their lives; for whom the thronging multitudes of their fellow passengers were but a blurred background against which the colour of their joy stood sharp and clear. The fields of foam-flecked blue, sunlit or cloud-shadowed by day; the starlight on the waters; the slow and scarcely perceptible swinging of the ship’s rail against the violet and spangled sky; the low murmur of voices, the liquid notes of violins, the tramplingtune of the engines—to how many others have not these been the properties of a magic world; for how many others, as long as men continue to go in ships upon the sea, will they not be the symbols of a joy that is as old as time, and that is found to be new by every generation! For this also is one of the gifts of the sea, and one of the territories through which the long road passes.
Sundaycame, with nothing to mark it except the morning service in the saloon—a function that by reason of its novelty, attracts some people at sea who do not associate it with the shore. One thing, however, fire or boat muster, which usually marks Sunday at sea, and gives it a little variety, did not for some reason take place. It is one of the few variants of the monotony of shipboard life, where anything in the nature of a spectacle is welcomed; and most travellers are familiar with the stir caused by the sudden hoarse blast of the foghorn and the subsequent patter of feet and appearance from below of all kinds of people whose existence the passengerhad hardly suspected. Stewards, sailors, firemen, engineers, nurses, bakers, butchers, cooks, florists, barbers, carpenters, and stewardesses, ranged in two immense lines along the boat deck, answer to their names and are told off, according to their numbers, to take charge of certain boats. This muster did not take place on theTitanic; if it had it would have revealed to any observant passenger the fact that the whole crew of nine hundred would have occupied all the available accommodation in the boats hanging on the davits and left no room for any passengers. For the men who designed and built theTitanic, who knew the tremendous strength of the girders and cantilevers and bulkheads which took the thrust and pull of every strain that she might undergo, had thought of boats rather as a superfluity, dating from the days when ships were vulnerable, when they sprangleaks and might sink in the high seas. In their pride they had said “theTitaniccannot spring a leak.” So there was no boat muster, and the routine occupations of Sunday went on unvaried and undisturbed. Only in the Marconi room was the monotony varied, for something had gone wrong with the delicate electrical apparatus, and the wireless voice was silent; and throughout the morning and afternoon, for seven hours, Phillips and Bride were hard at work testing and searching for the little fault that had cut them off from the world of voices. And at last they found it, and the whining and buzzing began again. But it told them nothing new; only the same story, whispered this time from theCalifornian—the story of ice.
The day wore on, the dusk fell, lights one by one sprang up and shone within the ship; the young moon rose in a cloudlesssky spangled with stars. People remarked on the loveliness of the night as they went to dress for dinner, but they remarked also on its coldness. There was an unusual chill in the air, and lightly clad people were glad to draw in to the big fireplaces in smoke-room or drawing-room or library, and to keep within the comfort of the warm and lamplit rooms. The cold was easily accounted for; it was the ice season, and the airs that were blowing down from the north-west carried with them a breath from the ice-fields. It was so cold that the decks were pretty well deserted, and the usual evening concert, instead of being held on the open deck, was held in the warmth, under cover. And gradually people drifted away to bed, leaving only a few late birds sitting up reading in the library, or playing cards in the smoking-rooms, or following a restaurant dinner-party byquiet conversation in the flower-decked lounge.
The ship had settled down for the night; half of her company were peacefully asleep in bed, and many lying down waiting for sleep to come, when something happened. What that something was depended upon what part of the ship you were in. The first thing to attract the attention of most of the first-class passengers was a negative thing—the cessation of that trembling, continuous rhythm which had been the undercurrent of all their waking sensations since the ship left Queenstown. The engines stopped. Some wondered, and put their heads out of their state-room doors, or even threw a wrap about them and went out into the corridors to see what had happened, while others turned over in bed and composed themselves to sleep, deciding to wait until the morningto hear what was the cause of the delay.
Lower down in the ship they heard a little more. The sudden harsh clash of the engine-room telegraph bells would startle those who were near enough to hear it, especially as it was followed almost immediately afterwards by the simultaneous ringing all through the lower part of the ship of the gongs that gave warning of the closing of the water-tight doors. After the engines stopped there was a moment of stillness; and then the vibration began again, more insistently this time, with a certain jumping movement which to the experienced ear meant that the engines were being sent full speed astern; and then they stopped again, and again there was stillness.
Here and there in the long corridors amidships a door opened and some one thrust a head out, asking what was thematter; here and there a man in pyjamas and a dressing-gown came out of his cabin and climbed up the deserted staircase to have a look at what was going on; people sitting in the lighted saloons and smoke-rooms looked at one another and said: “What was that?” gave or received some explanation, and resumed their occupations. A man in his dressing-gown came into one of the smoking-rooms where a party was seated at cards, with a few yawning bystanders looking on before they turned in. The newcomer wanted to know what was the matter, whether they had noticed anything? They had felt a slight jar, they said, and had seen an iceberg going by past the windows; probably the ship had grazed it, but no damage had been done. And they resumed their game of bridge. The man in the dressing-gown left the smoke-room, and never saw any of the players again.So little excitement was there in this part of the ship that the man in the dressing-gown (his name was Mr. Beezley, an English schoolmaster, one of the few who emerges from the crowd with an intact individuality) went back to his cabin and lay down on his bed with a book, waiting for the ship to start again. But the unnatural stillness, the uncanny peace even of this great peaceful ship, must have got a little upon his nerves; and when he heard people moving about in the corridors, he got up again, and found that several people whom the stillness had wakened from their sleep were wandering about inquiring what had happened.
But that was all. The half-hour which followed the stoppage of the ship was a comparatively quiet half-hour, in which a few people came out of their cabins indeed, and collected together in the corridors and staircases gossiping, speculatingand asking questions as to what could have happened; but it was not a time of anxiety, or anything like it. Nothing could be safer on this quiet Sunday night than the great ship, warmed and lighted everywhere, with her thick carpets and padded armchairs and cushioned recesses; and if anything could have added to the sense of peace and stability, it was that her driving motion had ceased, and that she lay solid and motionless-like a rock in the sea, the still water scarcely lapping against her sides. And those of her people who had thought it worth while to get out of bed stood about in little knots, and asked foolish questions, and gave foolish answers in the familiar manner of passengers on shipboard when the slightest incident occurs to vary the regular and monotonous routine.
Thiswas one phase of that first half-hour. Up on the high bridge, isolated from all the indoor life of the passengers, there was another phase. The watches had been relieved at ten o’clock, when the ship had settled down for the quietest and least eventful period of the whole twenty-four hours. The First Officer, Mr. Murdoch, was in command of the bridge, and with him was Mr. Boxhall, the Fourth Officer, and the usual look-out staff. The moon had set, and the night was very cold, clear and starry, except where here and there a slight haze hung on the surface of the water. Captain Smith, to whom the night of the sea was like day, and to whom allthe invisible tracks and roads of the Atlantic were as familiar as Fleet Street is to aDaily Telegraphreporter, had been in the chart room behind the bridge to plot out the course for the night, and afterwards had gone to his room to lie down. Two pairs of sharp eyes were peering forward from the crow’s nest, another pair from the nose of the ship on the fo’c’stle head, and at least three pairs from the bridge itself, all staring into the dim night, quartering with busy glances the area of the black sea in front of them where the foremast and its wire shrouds and stays were swinging almost imperceptibly across the starry sky.
At twenty minutes to twelve the silence of the night was broken by three sharp strokes on the gong sounding from the crow’s nest—a signal for something right ahead; while almost simultaneously came a voice through the telephone from thelook-out announcing the presence of ice. There was a kind of haze in front of the ship the colour of the sea, but nothing could be distinguished from the bridge. Mr. Murdoch’s hand was on the telegraph immediately, and his voice rapped out the order to the quartermaster to starboard the helm. The wheel spun round, the answering click came up from the startled engine-room; but before anything else could happen there was a slight shock, and a splintering sound from the bows of the ship as she crashed into yielding ice. That was followed by a rubbing, jarring, grinding sensation along her starboard bilge, and a peak of dark-coloured ice glided past close alongside.
As the engines stopped in obedience to the telegraph Mr. Murdoch turned the switches that closed the water-tight doors. Captain Smith came running out of the chart room. “What is it?” he asked.“We have struck ice, Sir.” “Close the water-tight doors.” “It is already done, Sir.” Then the Captain took command. He at once sent a message to the carpenter to sound the ship and come and report; the quartermaster went away with the message, and set the carpenter to work. Captain Smith now gave a glance at the commutator, a dial which shows to what extent the ship is off the perpendicular, and noticed that she carried a 5° list to starboard. Coolly following a routine as exact as that which he would have observed had he been conning the ship into dock, he gave a number of orders in rapid succession, after first consulting with the Chief Engineer. Then, having given instructions that the whole of the available engine-power was to be turned to pumping the ship, he hurried aft along the boat-deck to the Marconi room. Phillips was sitting at his key,toiling through routine business; Bride, who had just got up to relieve him, was sleepily making preparations to take his place. The Captain put his head in at the door.
“We have struck an iceberg,” he said, “and I am having an inspection made to tell what it has done for us. Better get ready to send out a call for assistance, but don’t send it until I tell you.”
He hurried away again; in a few minutes he put his head in at the door again; “Send that call for assistance,” he said.
“What call shall I send?” asked Phillips.
“The regulation international call for help, just that,” said the Captain, and was gone again.
But in five minutes he came back into the wireless room, this time apparently not in such a hurry. “What call are yousending?” he asked; and when Phillips told him “C.Q.D.,” the highly technical and efficient Bride suggested, laughingly, that he should send “S.O.S.,” the new international call for assistance which has superseded the C.Q.D. “It is the new call,” said Bride, “and it may be your last chance to send it!” And they all three laughed, and then for a moment chatted about what had happened, while Phillips tapped out the three longs, three shorts, and three longs which instantaneously sent a message of appeal flashing out far and wide into the dark night. The Captain, who did not seem seriously worried or concerned, told them that the ship had been struck amidships or a little aft of that.
Whatever may have been happening down below, everything up here was quiet and matter-of-fact. It was a disaster, of course, but everything was working well,everything had been done; the electric switches for operating the bulkhead doors had been used promptly, and had worked beautifully; the powerful wireless plant was talking to the ocean, and in a few hours there would be some other ship alongside of them. It was rough luck, to be sure; they had not thought they would so soon have a chance of proving that theTitanicwas unsinkable.
Wemust now visit in imagination some other parts of the ship, parts isolated from the bridge and the spacious temple of luxury amidships, and try to understand how the events of this half hour appeared to the denizens of the lower quarters of the ship. The impact that had been scarcely noticed in the first-class quarters had had much more effect down below, and especially forward, where some of the third-class passengers and some of the crew were berthed. A ripping, grinding crash startled all but the heaviest sleepers here into wakefulness; but it was over so soon and was succeeded by so peaceful a silence that no doubt any momentary panic it might have caused was soon allayed. Oneof the firemen describing it said: “I was awakened by a noise, and between sleeping and waking I thought I was dreaming that I was on a train that had run off the lines, and that I was being jolted about.” He jumped out and went on deck, where he saw the scattered ice lying about. “Oh, we have struck an iceberg,” he said, “that’s nothing; I shall go back and turn in,” and he actually went back to bed and slept for half an hour, until he was turned out to take his station at the boats.
The steerage passengers, who were berthed right aft, heard nothing and knew nothing until the news that an accident had happened began slowly to filter down to them. But there was no one in authority to give them any official news, and for a time they were left to wonder and speculate as they chose. Forward, however, it became almost immediately apparent to certain people that there was somethinggrievously wrong; firemen on their way through the passage along the ship’s bottom leading between their quarters and No. 1 stokehold found water coming in, and rapidly turned back. They were met on their way up the staircase by an officer who asked them what they were doing. They told him. “There’s water coming into our place, Sir,” they said; and as he thought they were off duty he did not turn them back.
Mr. Andrews, a partner in Harland and Wolff’s, and one of theTitanic’sdesigners, had gone quietly down by himself to investigate the damage, and, great as was his belief in the giant he had helped to create, it must have been shaken when he found the water pouring into her at the rate of hundreds of tons a minute. Even his confidence in those mighty steel walls that stretched one behind the other in succession along thewhole length of the ship could not have been proof against the knowledge that three or four of them had been pierced by the long rip of the ice-tooth. There was just a chance that she would hold up long enough to allow of relief to arrive in time; but it is certain that from that moment Mr. Andrews devoted himself to warning people, and helping to get them away, so far as he could do so without creating a panic.
Most of the passengers, remember, were still asleep during this half hour. One of the most terrible things possible at sea is a panic, and Captain Smith was particularly anxious that no alarm should be given before or unless it was absolutely necessary. He heard what Mr. Andrews had to say, and consulted with the engineer, and soon found that the whole of the ship’s bottom was being flooded. There were other circumstances calculated tomake the most sanguine ship-master uneasy. Already, within half an hour, theTitanicwas perceptibly down by the head. She would remain stationary for five minutes and then drop six inches or a foot; remain stationary again, and drop another foot—a circumstance ominous to experienced minds, suggesting that some of the smaller compartments forward were one by one being flooded, and letting the water farther and farther into her hull.
Therefore at about twenty-five minutes past midnight the Captain gave orders for the passengers to be called and mustered on the boat deck. All the ship’s crew had by this time been summoned to their various stations; and now through all the carpeted corridors, through the companion-ways and up and down staircases, leading to the steerage cabins, an army of three hundred stewards was hurrying, knocking loudly on doors, andshouting up and down the passages, “All passengers on deck with life-belts on!” The summons came to many in their sleep; and to some in the curtained firelight luxury of their deck state-rooms it seemed an order so absurd that they scorned it, and actually went back to bed again. These, however, were rare exceptions; for most people there was no mistaking the urgency of the command, even though they were slow to understand the necessity for it. And hurry is a thing easily communicated; seeing some passengers hastening out with nothing over their night clothes but a blanket or a wrapper, others caught the infection, and hurried too; and struggling with life-belts, clumsily attempting to adjust them over and under a curious assortment of garments, the passengers of theTitaniccame crowding up on deck, for the first time fully alarmed.
Whenthe people came on deck it was half-past twelve. The first-class passengers came pouring up the two main staircases and out on to the boat deck—some of them indignant, many of them curious, some few of them alarmed. They found there everything as usual except that the long deck was not quite level; it tilted downwards a little towards the bow, and there was a slight list towards the starboard side. The stars were shining in the sky and the sea was perfectly smooth, although dotted about it here and there were lumps of dark-coloured ice, almost invisible against the background of smooth water. A long line of stewards was forming up beside the boats on either side—thosesolid white boats, stretching far aft in two long lines, that became suddenly invested with practical interest. Officers were shouting orders, seamen were busy clearing up the coils of rope attached to the davit tackles, fitting the iron handles to the winches by which the davits themselves were canted over from the inward position over the deck to the outward position over the ship’s side. Almost at the same time a rush of people began from the steerage quarters, swarming up stairways and ladders to reach this high deck hitherto sacred to the first-class passengers. At first they were held back by a cordon of stewards, but some broke through and others were allowed through, so that presently a large proportion of the ship’s company was crowding about the boat deck and the one immediately below it.
Then the business of clearing, filling,and lowering the boats was begun—a business quickly described, but occupying a good deal of time in the transaction. Mr. Murdoch, the Chief Officer, ordered the crews to the boats; and with some confusion different parties of stewards and sailors disentangled themselves from the throng and stood in their positions by each of the sixteen boats. Every member of the crew, when he signs on for a voyage in a big passenger ship, is given a number denoting which boat’s crew he belongs to. If there has been boat drill, every man knows and remembers his number; if, as in the case of theTitanic, there has been no boat drill, some of the men remember their numbers and some do not, the result being a certain amount of confusion. But at last a certain number of men were allotted to each boat, and began the business of hoisting them out.
First of all the covers had to be takenoff and the heavy masts and sails lifted out of them. Ship’s boats appear very small things when one sees a line of them swinging high up on deck; but, as a matter of fact, they are extremely heavy, each of them the size of a small sailing yacht. Everything on theTitanichaving been newly painted, everything was stiff and difficult to move. The lashings of the heavy canvas covers were like wire, and the covers themselves like great boards; the new ropes ran stiffly in the new gear. At last a boat was cleared and the order given, “Women and children first.” The officers had revolvers in their hands ready to prevent a rush; but there was no rush. There was a certain amount of laughter. No one wanted to be the first to get into the boat and leave the ship. “Come on,” cried the officers. There was a pause, followed by the brief command, “Put them in.”
The crew seized the nearest women and pushed or lifted them over the rail into the first boat, which was now hanging over the side level with the deck. But they were very unwilling to go. The boat, which looked big and solid on the deck, now hung dizzily seventy-five feet over the dark water; it seemed a far from attractive prospect to get into it and go out on to the cold sea, especially as everyone was convinced that it was a merely formal precaution which was being taken, and that the people in the boats would merely be rowed off a little way and kept shivering on the cold sea for a time and then brought back to the ship when it was found that the danger was past. For, walking about the deck, people remembered all the things that they had been thinking and saying since first they had seen theTitanic; and what was the use of travelling by an unsinkable ship if, at thefirst alarm of danger, one had to leave her and row out on the icy water? Obviously it was only the old habit of the sea asserting itself, and Captain Smith, who had hitherto been such a favourite, was beginning to be regarded as something of a nuisance with his ridiculous precautions.
The boats swung and swayed in the davits; even the calm sea, now that they looked at it more closely, was seen to be not absolutely like a millpond, but to have a certain movement on its surface which, although utterly helpless to move the huge bulk of theTitanic, against whose sides it lapped, as ineffectually as against the walls of a dock, was enough to impart a swinging movement to the small boats. But at last, what with coercion and persuasion, a boat was half filled with women. One of the things they liked least was leaving their husbands; they felt that they were being sacrificedneedlessly to over-elaborate precautions, and it was hard to leave the men standing comfortably on the firm deck, sheltered and in a flood of warm yellow light, and in the safety of the great solid ship that lay as still as a rock, while they had to go out, half-clad and shivering, on the icy waters.
But the inexorable movements of the crew continued. The pulleys squealed in the sheaves, the new ropes were paid out; and jerking downwards, a foot or two at a time, the first boat dropped down towards the water, past storey after storey of the great structure, past rows and rows of lighted portholes, until at last, by strange unknown regions of the ship’s side, where cataracts and waterfalls were rushing into the sea, it rested on the waves. The blocks were unhooked, the heavy ash oars were shipped, and the boat headed away into the darkness. Andthen, and not till then, those in the boat realized that something was seriously wrong with theTitanic. Instead of the trim level appearance which she presented on the picture postcards or photographs, she had an ungraceful slant downwards to the bows—a heavy helpless appearance like some wounded monster that is being overcome by the waters. And even while they looked, they could see that the bow was sinking lower.
After the first boat had got away, there was less difficulty about the others. The order, “Women and children first,” was rigidly enforced by the officers; but it was necessary to have men in the boats to handle them, and a number of stewards, and many grimy figures of stokers who had mysteriously appeared from below were put into them to man them. Once the tide of people began to set into the boats and away from the ship, there camea certain anxiety to join them and not to be left behind. Here and there indeed there was over-anxiety, which had to be roughly checked. One band of Italians from the steerage, who had good reason to know that something was wrong, tried to rush one of the boats, and had to be kept back by force, an officer firing a couple of shots with his pistol; they desisted, and were hauled back ignominiously by the legs. In their place some of the crew and the passengers who were helping lifted in a number of Italian women limp with fright.
And still everyone was walking about and saying that the ship was unsinkable. There was a certain subdued excitement, natural to those who feel that they are taking part in a rather thrilling adventure which will give them importance in the eyes of people at home when they relate it. There was as yet no call forheroism, because, among the first-class passengers certainly, the majority believed that the safest as well as the most comfortable place was the ship. But it was painful for husbands and wives to be separated, and the wives sent out to brave the discomforts of the open boats while the husbands remained on the dry and comfortable ship.
The steerage people knew better and feared more. Life had not taught them, as it had taught some of those first-class passengers, that the world was an organization specially designed for their comfort and security; they had not come to believe that the crude and ugly and elementary catastrophes of fate would not attack them. On the contrary, most of them knew destiny as a thing to fear, and made haste to flee from it. Many of them, moreover, had been sleeping low down in the forward part of the ship;they had heard strange noises, had seen water washing about where no water should be, and they were frightened. There was, however, no discrimination between classes in putting the women into the boats. The woman with a tattered shawl over her head, the woman with a sable coat over her nightdress, the woman clasping a baby, and the woman clutching a packet of trinkets had all an equal chance; side by side they were handed on to the harsh and uncomfortable thwarts of the lifeboats; the wife of the millionaire sat cheek by jowl with a dusty stoker and a Russian emigrant, and the spoiled woman of the world found some poor foreigner’s baby thrown into her lap as the boat was lowered.
By this time the women and children had all been mustered on the second or A deck; the men were supposed to remain up on the boat deck while the boats werebeing lowered to the level of the women, where sections of the rail had been cleared away for them to embark more easily; but this rule, like all the other rules, was not rigidly observed. The crew was not trained enough to discipline and coerce the passengers. How could they be? They were trained to serve them, to be obsequious and obliging; it would have been too much to expect that they should suddenly take command and order them about.
There were many minor adventures and even accidents. One woman had both her legs broken in getting into the boat. The mere business of being lowered in a boat through seventy feet of darkness was in itself productive of more than one exciting incident. The falls of the first boat jammed when she was four feet from the water, and she had to be dropped into it with a splash. And there was one very curious incident which happened to theboat in which Mr. Beezley, the English schoolmaster already referred to, had been allotted a place as a helper. “As the boat began to descend,” he said, “two ladies were pushed hurriedly through the crowd on B deck, and a baby ten months old was passed down after them. Then down we went, the crew shouting out directions to those lowering us. ‘Level,’ ‘Aft,’ ‘Stern,’ ‘Both together!’ until we were some ten feet from the water. Here occurred the only anxious moment we had during the whole of our experience from the time of our leaving the deck to our reaching theCarpathia.
“Immediately below our boat was the exhaust of the condensers, and a huge stream of water was pouring all the time from the ship’s side just above the water-line. It was plain that we ought to be smart away from it if we were to escape swamping when we touched the water.We had no officers on board, and no petty officer or member of the crew to take charge, so one of the stokers shouted, ‘Some one find the pin which releases the boat from the ropes and pull it up!’ No one knew where it was. We felt as well as we could on the floor, and along the sides, but found nothing. It was difficult to move among so many people. We had sixty or seventy on board. Down we went, and presently we floated with our ropes still holding us, and the stream of water from the exhaust washing us away from the side of the vessel, while the swell of the sea urged us back against the side again.
“The result of all these forces was that we were carried parallel to the ship’s side, and directly under boat No. 14, which had filled rapidly with men, and was coming down on us in a way that threatened to submerge our boat.
“‘Stop lowering 14,’ our crew shouted, and the crew of No. 14, now only 20 feet above, cried out the same. The distance to the top, however, was some 70 feet, and the creaking of the pulleys must have deadened all sound to those above, for down she came, 15 feet, 10 feet, 5 feet, and a stoker and I reached up and touched the bottom of the swinging boat above our heads. The next drop would have brought her on our heads. Just before she dropped another stoker sprang to the ropes with his knife open in his hand. ‘One,’ I heard him say, and then ‘Two,’ as the knife cut through the pulley rope.
“‘The next moment the exhaust stream carried us clear, while boat No. 14 dropped into the water, taking the space we had occupied a moment before. Our gunwales were almost touching. We drifted away easily, and when our oars were got out, we headed directly away from the ship.’”
But although there was no sense of danger, there were some painful partings on the deck where the women were embarked; for you must think of this scene as going on for at least an hour amid a confusion of people pressing about, trying to find their friends, asking for information, listening to some new rumour, trying to decide whether they should or should not go in the boats, to a constant accompaniment of shouted orders, the roar of escaping steam, the squeal and whine of the ropes and pulleys, and the gay music of the band, which Captain Smith had ordered to play during the embarkation. Every now and then a woman would be forced away from her husband; every now and then a husband, having got into a boat with his wife, would be made to get out of it again. If it was hard for the wives to go, it was harder for the husbands to see them goto such certain discomfort and in such strange company. Colonel Astor, whose young wife was in a delicate state of health, had got into the boat with her to look after her; and no wonder. But he was ordered out again and came at once, no doubt feeling bitterly, poor soul, that he would have given many of his millions to be able to go honourably with her. But he stepped back without a word of remonstrance and gave her good-bye with a cheery message, promising to meet her in New York. And if that happened to him, we may be sure it was happening over and over again in other boats. There were women who flatly refused to leave their husbands and chose to stay with them and risk whatever fate might be in store for them, although at that time most of the people did not really believe that there was much danger. Yet here and there there were incidents both touchingand heroic. When it came to the turn of Mrs. Isidore Straus, the wife of a Jewish millionaire, she took her seat but got back out of the boat when she found her husband was not coming. They were both old people, and on two separate occasions an Englishman who knew her tried to persuade her to get into a boat, but she would not leave her husband. The second time the boat was not full and he went to Mr. Straus and said: “Do go with your wife. Nobody can object to an old gentleman like you going. There is plenty of room in the boat.” The old gentleman thanked him calmly and said: “I won’t go before the other men.” And Mrs. Straus got out and, going up to him, said: “We have been together for forty years and we will not separate now.” And she remained by his side until that happened to them which happened to the rest.
Wemust now go back to the Marconi room on the upper deck where, ten minutes after the collision, Captain Smith had left the operators with orders to send out a call for assistance. From this Marconi room we get a strange but vivid aspect of the situation; for Bride, the surviving operator, who afterwards told the story so graphically to theNew York Times, practically never left the room until he left it to jump into the sea, and his knowledge of what was going on was the vivid, partial knowledge of a man who was closely occupied with his own duties and only knew of other happenings in so far as they affected his own doings. Theyhad been working, you will remember, almost all of that Sunday at locating and replacing a burnt-out terminal, and were both very tired. Phillips was taking the night shift of duty, but he told Bride to go to bed early and get up and relieve him as soon as he had had a little sleep, as Phillips himself was quite worn out with his day’s work. Bride went to sleep in the cabin which opened into the operating-room.
He slept some time, and when he woke he heard Phillips still at work. He could read the rhythmic buzzing sounds as easily as you or I can read print. He could hear that Phillips was talking to Cape Race, sending dull uninteresting traffic matter; and he was about to sink off to sleep again when he remembered how tired Phillips must be, and decided that he would get up and relieve him for a spell. He never felt the shock, or saw anything, or had any other notification of anythingunusual except no doubt the ringing of the telegraph bells and cessation of the beat of the engines. It was a few minutes afterwards that, as we have seen, the Captain put his head in at the door and told them to get ready to send a call, returning ten minutes later to tell them to send it.
The two operators were rather amused than otherwise at having to send out the S.O.S.; it was a pleasant change from relaying traffic matter. “We said lots of funny things to each other in the next few minutes,” said Bride. Phillips went stolidly on, firmly hammering out his “S.O.S., S.O.S.,” sometimes varying it with “C.Q.D.” for the benefit of such operators as might not be on the alert for the new call. For several minutes there was no reply; then the whining voice at Phillips’ ear began to answer. Some one had heard. They had picked up thesteamerFrankfurt, and they gave her the position and told her that theTitanichad struck an iceberg and needed assistance. There was another pause and, in their minds’ eye, the wireless men could see theFrankfurt’soperator miles and miles away across the dark night going along from his cabin and rousing theFrankfurt’sCaptain and giving his message and coming back to the instrument, when again the whining voice began asking for more news.
They were learning facts up here in the Marconi room. They knew that theTitanicwas taking in water, and they knew that she was sinking by the head; and what they knew they flashed out into the night for the benefit of all who had ears to hear. They knew that there were many ships in their vicinity; but they knew also that hardly any of them carried more than one operator, and that evenMarconi operators earning £4 a month must go to bed and sleep sometimes, and that it was a mere chance if their call was heard. But presently the Cunard linerCarpathiaanswered and told them her position, from which it appeared that she was about seventy miles away. TheCarpathia, which was heading towards the Mediterranean, told them she had altered her course and was heading full steam to their assistance. TheCarpathia’svoice was much fainter than theFrankfurt’s, from which Phillips assumed that theFrankfurtwas the nearer ship; but there was a certain lack of promptitude on board theFrankfurtwhich made Phillips impatient. While he was still sending out the call for help, after theFrankfurthad answered it, she interrupted him again, asking what was the matter. They told Captain Smith, who said, “That fellow is a fool,” an opinion which Phillipsand Bride not only shared, but which they even found time to communicate to the operator on theFrankfurt. By this time theOlympichad also answered her twin sister’s cry for help, but she was far away, more than three hundred miles; and although she too turned and began to race towards the spot where theTitanicwas lying so quietly, it was felt that the honours of salving her passengers would go to theCarpathia. The foolishFrankfurtoperator still occasionally interrupted with a question, and he was finally told, with such brusqueness as the wireless is capable of, to keep away from his instrument and not interfere with the serious conversations of theTitanicandCarpathia.
Then Bride took Phillips’s place at the instrument and succeeded in getting a whisper from theBaltic, and gradually, over hundreds of miles of ocean, the invisibleether told the ships that their giant sister was in distress. The time passed quickly with these urgent conversations on which so much might depend, and hour by hour and minute by minute the water was creeping up the steep sides of the ship. Once the Captain looked in and told them that the engine-rooms were taking in water and that the dynamos might not last much longer. That information was also sent to theCarpathia, who by this time could tell them that she had turned towards them with every furnace going at full blast, and was hurrying forward at the rate of eighteen knots instead of her usual fifteen. It now became a question how long the storage plant would continue to supply current. Phillips went out on deck and looked round. “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’tknow. 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. While I live I shall never forget the work Phillips did for that last awful fifteen minutes.”
Bride felt that it was time to look about and see if there was no chance of saving himself. He knew that by this time all the boats had gone. He could see, by looking over the side, that the water was far nearer than it had yet been, and that the fo’c’s’le decks, which of course were much lower than the superstructure on which the Marconi cabin was situated, were already awash. He remembered that there was a lifebelt for every member of the crew and that his own was under his bunk; and he went and put it on. And then, thinking how cold the water would be, he went back and put his bootson, and an extra coat. Phillips was still standing at the key, talking to theOlympicnow and telling her the tragic and shameful news that her twin sister, the unsinkable, was sinking by the head and was pretty near her end. While Phillips was sending this message Bride strapped a lifebelt about him and put on his overcoat. Then, at Phillips’s suggestion, Bride went out to see if there was anything left in the shape of a boat by which they could get away. He saw some men struggling helplessly with a collapsible boat which they were trying to lower down on to the deck. Bride gave them a hand and then, although it was the last boat left, he resolutely turned his back on it and went back to Phillips. At that moment for the last time, the Captain looked in to give them their release.
“Men, you have done your full duty, you can do no more. Abandon your cabinnow; it is every man for himself; you look out for yourselves. I release you. That’s the way of it at this kind of time; every man for himself.”
Then happened one of the strangest incidents of that strange hour. I can only give it in Bride’s own words:
“Phillips clung on, sending, 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.
“While he worked something happened I hate to tell about. I was back in my room getting Phillips’s money for him, and as I looked out of the door I saw a stoker, or somebody from below decks, leaning over Phillips from behind. Phillips was too busy to notice what the man was doing, but he was slipping the lifebelt off Phillips’s back. He was a big man, too.
“As you can see, I’m very small. I don’t know what it was I got hold of, but I remembered in a flash the way Phillips had clung on; how I had to fix that lifebelt in place, because he was too busy to do it.
“I knew that man from below decks had his own lifebelt, and should have known where to get it. I suddenly felt a passion not to let that man die a decent sailor’s death. I wished he might have stretched a rope or walked a plank. I did my duty. I hope I finished him, but I don’t know.
“We left him on the cabin floor of the wireless room, and he wasn’t moving.”
Phillips left the cabin, running aft, and Bride never saw him alive again. He himself came out and found the water covering the bridge and coming aft over the boat deck.
Thereis one other separate point of view from which we may look at the ship during this fateful hour before all points of view become merged in one common experience. Mr. Boxhall, the Fourth Officer, who had been on the bridge at the moment of the impact, had been busy sending up rockets and signals in the effort to attract the attention of a ship whose lights could be seen some ten miles away; a mysterious ship which cannot be traced, but whose lights appear to have been seen by many independent witnesses on theTitanic. So sure was he of her position that Mr. Boxhall spent almost all his time on the bridge signalling to her with rockets and flashes; but noanswer was received. He had, however, also been on a rapid tour of inspection of the ship immediately after she had struck. He went down to the steerage quarters forward and aft, and he was also down in the deep forward compartment where the Post Office men were working with the mails, and he had at that time found nothing wrong, and his information contributed much to the sense of security that was spread amongst the passengers.
Mr. Pitman, the Third Officer, was in his bunk at the time of the collision, having been on duty on the bridge from six to eight, when the Captain had also been on the bridge. There had been talk of ice among the officers on Sunday, and they had expected to meet with it just before midnight, at the very time, in fact, when they had met with it. But very little ice had been seen, and the speed of the ship had not been reduced. Mr. Pitman says thatwhen he awoke he heard a sound which seemed to him to be the sound of the ship coming to anchor. He was not actually awake then, but he had the sensation of the ship halting, and heard a sound like that of chains whirling round the windlass and running through the hawseholes into the water. He lay in bed for three or four minutes wondering in a sleepy sort of way where they could have anchored. Then, becoming more awake, he got up, and without dressing went out on deck; he saw nothing remarkable, but he went back and dressed, suspecting that something was the matter. While he was dressing Mr. Boxhall looked in and said: “We have struck an iceberg, old man; hurry up!”
He also went down below to make an inspection and find out what damage had been done. He went to the forward well deck, where ice was lying, and into thefo’c’s’le, but found nothing wrong there. The actual damage was farther aft, and at that time the water had not come into the bows of the ship. As he was going back he met a number of firemen coming up the gangway with their bags of clothing; they told him that water was coming into their place. They were firemen off duty, who afterwards were up on the boat deck helping to man the boats. Then Mr. Pitman went down lower into the ship and looked into No. 1 hatch, where he could plainly see water. All this took time; and when he came back he found that the men were beginning to get the boats ready, a task at which he helped under Mr. Murdoch’s orders. Presently Mr. Murdoch ordered him to take command of a boat and hang about aft of the gangway. Pitman had very little relish for leaving the ship at that time, and in spite of the fact that she was taking inwater, every one was convinced that theTitanicwas a much safer place than the open sea. He had about forty passengers and six of the crew in his boat, and as it was about to be lowered, Mr. Murdoch leant over to him and shook him heartily by the hand: “Good-bye, old man, and good luck,” he said, in tones which rather surprised Pitman, for they seemed to imply that the good-bye might be for a long time. His boat was lowered down into the water, unhooked, and shoved off, and joined the gradually increasing fleet of other boats that were cruising about in the starlight.
There was one man walking about that upper deck whose point of view was quite different from that of anyone else. Mr. Bruce Ismay, like so many others, was awakened from sleep by the stopping of the engines; like so many others, also, he lay still for a few moments, and thengot up and went into the passage-way, where he met a steward and asked him what was the matter. The steward knew nothing, and Mr. Ismay went back to his state-room, put on a dressing-gown and slippers, and went up to the bridge, where he saw the Captain. “What has happened?” he asked. “We have struck ice,” was the answer. “Is the injury serious?” “I think so,” said the Captain. Then Mr. Ismay came down in search of the Chief Engineer, whom he met coming up to the bridge; he asked him the same question, and he also said he thought the injury serious. He understood from them that the ship was certainly in danger, but that there was hope that if the pumps could be kept going there would be no difficulty in keeping her afloat quite long enough for help to come and for the passengers to be taken off. Whatever was to be the result, it was a terrible momentfor Mr. Ismay, a terrible blow to the pride and record of the Company, that this, their greatest and most invulnerable ship, should be at least disabled, and possibly lost, on her maiden voyage. But like a sensible man, he did not stand wringing his hands at the inevitable; he did what he could to reassure the passengers, repeating, perhaps with a slight quaver of doubt in his voice, the old word—unsinkable. When the boats began to be launched he went and tried to help, apparently in his anxiety getting rather in the way. In this endeavour he encountered the wrath of Mr. Lowe, the Fifth Officer, who was superintending the launching of boat No. 5. Mr. Lowe did not know the identity of the nervous, excited figure standing by the davits, nor recognize the voice which kept saying nervously, “Lower away! lower away!” and it was therefore with no misgivingsthat he ordered him away from the boat, saying brusquely, “If you will kindly get to hell out of this perhaps I’ll be able to do something!”—a trifling incident, but evidence that Mr. Ismay made no use of his position for his own personal ends. He said nothing, and went away to another boat, where he succeeded in being more useful, and it was not till afterwards that an awe-stricken steward told the Fifth Officer who it was that he had chased away with such language. But after that Mr. Ismay was among the foremost in helping to sort out the women and children and get them expeditiously packed into the boats, with a burden of misery and responsibility on his heart that we cannot measure.
One can imagine a great bustle and excitement while the boats were being sent away; but when they had all gone, and there was nothing more to be done,those who were left began to look about them and realize their position. There was no doubt about it, theTitanicwas sinking, not with any plunging or violent movement, but steadily settling down, as a rock seems to settle into the water when the tide rises about it.
Down in the engine-room and stokeholds, in conditions which can hardly be imagined by the ordinary landsman, men were still working with a grim and stoic heroism. The forward stokeholds had been flooded probably an hour after the collision; but it is practically certain that the bulkheads forward of No. 5 held until the last. The doors in those aft of No. 4 had been opened by hand after they had been closed from the bridge, in order to facilitate the passage of the engineering staff about their business; and they remained open, and the principal bulkhead protecting the main engine-room, held until the last. Water thus found its wayinto some compartments, and gradually rose; but long after those in charge had given up all hope of saving the ship, the stokehold watch were kept hard at work drawing the fires from under the boilers, so that when the water reached them there should be no steam. The duty of the engine-room staff was to keep the pumps going as long as possible and to run the dynamos that supplied the current for the light and the Marconi installation. This they did, as the black water rose stage by stage upon them. At least twenty minutes before the ship sank the machinery must have been flooded, and the current for the lights and the wireless supplied from the storage plant. No member of the engine-room staff was ever seen alive again, but, when the water finally flooded the stokeholds, the watch were released and told to get up and save themselves if they could.
And up on deck a chilly conviction ofdoom was slowly but certainly taking the place of that bland confidence in the unsinkable ship in which the previous hour had been lightly passed. That confidence had been dreadfully overdone, so much so that the stewards had found the greatest difficulty in persuading the passengers to dress themselves and come up on deck, and some who had done so had returned to their state-rooms and locked themselves in. The last twenty minutes, however, must have shown everyone on deck that there was not a chance left. On a ship as vast and solid as theTitanicthere is no sensation of actual sinking or settling. She still seemed as immovable as ever, but the water was climbing higher and higher up her black sides. The sensation was not that of the ship sinking, but of the water rising about her. And the last picture we have of her, while still visible, still a firm refuge amid thewaters, is of the band still playing and a throng of people looking out from the lamplit upper decks after the disappearing boats, bracing themselves as best they might for the terrible plunge and shock which they knew was coming. Here and there men who were determined still to make a fight for life climbed over the rail and jumped over; it was not a seventy foot drop now—perhaps under twenty, but it was a formidable jump. Some were stunned, and some were drowned at once before the eyes of those who waited; and the dull splashes they made were probably the first visible demonstration of the death that was coming. Duties were still being performed; an old deck steward, who had charge of the chairs, was busily continuing to work, adapting his duties to the emergency that had arisen and lashing chairs together. In this he was helped by Mr. Andrews, who was lastseen engaged on this strangely ironic task of throwing chairs overboard—frail rafts thrown upon the waters that might or might not avail some struggling soul when the moment should arrive, and the great ship of his designing float no longer. Throughout he had been untiring in his efforts to help and hearten people; but in this the last vision of him, there is something not far short of the sublime.
The last collapsible boat was being struggled with on the upper deck, but there were no seamen about who understood its stiff mechanism; unaccustomed hands fumbled desperately with it, and finally pushed it over the side in its collapsed condition for use as a raft. Many of the seamen and stewards had gathered in the bar-room, where the attendant was serving out glasses of whiskey to any and all who came for it; but most men had an instinct against being undercover, and preferred to stand out in the open.
And now those in the boats that had drawn off from the ship could see that the end was at hand. Her bows had gone under, although the stern was still fairly high out of the water. She had sunk down at the forward end of the great superstructure amidships; her decks were just awash, and the black throng was moving aft. The ship was blazing with light, and the strains of the band were faintly heard still playing as they had been commanded to do. But they had ceased to play the jolly rag-time tunes with which the bustle and labour of getting off the boats had been accompanied; solemn strains, the strains of a hymn, could be heard coming over the waters. Many women in the boats, looking back towards that lighted and subsiding mass, knew that somewhere, invisible among thethrong, was all that they held dearest in the world waiting for death; and they could do nothing. Some tried to get the crews to turn back, wringing their hands, beseeching, imploring; but no crew dared face the neighbourhood of the giant in her death agony. They could only wait, and shiver, and look.
Theend, when it came, was as gradual as everything else had been since the first impact. Just as there was no one moment at which everyone in the ship realized that she had suffered damage; just as there was no one moment when the whole of her company realized that they must leave her; just as there was no one moment when all in the ship understood that their lives were in peril, and no moment when they all knew she must sink; so there was no one moment at which all those left on board could have said, “She is gone.” At one moment the floor of the bridge, where the Captain stood, was awash; the next a wave came along and covered it with four feet of water, in which the Captain was for a moment washed away, although hestruggled back and stood there again, up to his knees in water. “Boys, you can do no more,” he shouted, “look out for yourselves!” Standing near him was a fireman and—strange juxtaposition—two unclaimed solitary little children, scarce more than babies. The fireman seized one in his arms, the Captain another; another wave came and they were afloat in deep water, striking out over the rail of the bridge away from the ship.
The slope of the deck increased, and the sea came washing up against it as waves wash against a steep shore. And then that helpless mass of humanity was stricken at last with the fear of death, and began to scramble madly aft, away from the chasm of water that kept creeping up and up the decks. Then a strange thing happened. They who had been waiting to sink into the sea found themselves rising into the air as the slope of the decks grew steeper. Up and up, dizzily highout of reach of the dark waters into which they had dreaded to be plunged, higher and higher into the air, towards the stars, the stern of the ship rose slowly right out of the water, and hung there for a time that is estimated variously between two and five minutes; a terrible eternity to those who were still clinging. Many, thinking the end had come, jumped; the water resounded with splash after splash as the bodies, like mice shaken out of a trap into a bucket, dropped into the water. All who could do so laid hold of something; ropes, stanchions, deck-houses, mahogany doors, window frames, anything, and so clung on while the stern of the giant ship reared itself towards the sky. Many had no hold, or lost the hold they had, and these slid down the steep smooth decks, as people slide down a water chute into the sea.
We dare not linger here, even in imagination; dare not speculate; dare notlook closely, even with the mind’s eye, at this poor human agony, this last pitiful scramble for dear life that the serene stars shone down upon. We must either turn our faces away, or withdraw to that surrounding circle where the boats were hovering with their terror-stricken burdens, and see what they saw. They saw the after part of the ship, blazing with light, stand up, a suspended prodigy, between the stars and the waters; they saw the black atoms, each one of which they knew to be a living man or woman on fire with agony, sliding down like shot rubbish into the sea; they saw the giant decks bend and crack; they heard a hollow and tremendous rumbling as the great engines tore themselves from their steel beds and crashed through the ship; they saw sparks streaming in a golden rain from one of the funnels; heard the dull boom of an explosion while the spouting funnel fell over into the sea with a slapthat killed every one beneath it and set the nearest boat rocking; heard two more dull bursting reports as the steel bulkheads gave way or decks blew up; saw the lights flicker out, flicker back again, and then go out for ever, and the ship, like some giant sea creature forsaking the strife of the upper elements for the peace of the submarine depths, launched herself with one slow plunge and dive beneath the waves.
There was no great maelstrom as they had feared, but the sea was swelling and sinking all about them; and they could see waves and eddies where rose the imprisoned air, the smoke and steam of vomited-up ashes, and a bobbing commotion of small dark things where theTitanic, in her pride and her shame, with the clocks ticking and the fires burning in her luxurious rooms, had plunged down to the icy depths of death.