Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World (27 page)

Dorothy Gibson in a Harrison Fisher illustration
(photo credit 1.76)

After eleven, the smoking rooms in first and second class were usually the only two public rooms that were kept open. When the café closed, the remaining men from “our coterie” made their way up to the first-class smoking room. Archibald Gracie joined a table where Charles Melville Hays, the stocky, grizzle-bearded president of Canada’s Grand Trunk Railway, was holding forth with a cigar in hand. Gracie overheard Hays make a pronouncement that “
the White Star, the Cunard, and the Hamburg-American lines are now devoting their attention to a struggle for supremacy in obtaining the most luxurious appointments for their ships, but the time will soon come when the greatest and most appalling of all disasters at sea will be the result.” In recalling this, Gracie would write that “the pleasure and comfort which all of us enjoyed upon this floating palace” seemed “an ominous feature to many of us … who felt it almost too good to last without some terrible retribution inflicted by the hand of an angry omnipotence.” It is unlikely that Charles Hays believed that luxurious accommodations would lead to God’s retribution, since he was embarked on the building of a string of luxury railway hotels and was returning home for the opening of the first of them, the Château Laurier in Ottawa, on April 26. A bust of the former Canadian prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, for whom the hotel was named, was to be unveiled, and accompanying the Hays party was its sculptor, Paul Romaine Chevré. With his drooping mustache Chevré looked every inch the Left Bank
artiste
as he sat at a nearby table enveloped in
tabac noir
smoke and absorbed in auction bridge with
two other Frenchmen and one American.

Archie Butt was by then playing bridge whist with Clarence Moore, and two men from the dinner party, Harry Widener and William Carter. Bridge whist was also the game of choice for the three professional gamblers who were setting up an American oil company executive as their next victim. Earlier René Harris had pointed out one of the suspected cardsharps to May Futrelle, who had noted his cold, calculating smile. At a smaller table, Frank Millet was playing cards with a New York stockbroker and yachting enthusiast named Frederick Hoyt, who was returning from a combined business trip and vacation in England with his wife. Arthur Peuchen sat chatting and smoking with two of “the Three Musketeers,” Thomson Beattie and Thomas McCaffry, and an Englishman who was headed for Canada. At around eleven-twenty Peuchen bade them good night and headed down to his room on C deck. In cabin C-83, the Harrises were not yet in bed as the pain in René’s arm was quite intense, and she had refused to take the morphine the doctor had left. Harry had cut a sleeve out of a pair of pajamas for her, helped her into a bathrobe, and then wrapped her in a blanket on a chair. He sat opposite while they played a game of double Canfield.

Up in the crow’s nest the two lookouts were into the second hour of their watch. A slight haze had emerged on the horizon which Fred Fleet had pointed out to Reginald Lee, but neither of them thought it was important enough to report to the bridge. The stars were still twinkling overhead and the sea remained a flat calm. At about ten-thirty the freighter
Californian
had steamed into the ice field that lay ahead of the
Titanic
’s course and had decided to stop there for the night. The captain asked the ship’s wireless operator to notify ships in the area about the ice. Just before eleven, Jack Phillips was busily transmitting passenger messages when the
Californian
’s call blasted into his headset: “
Say, old man, we are stopped and surrounded by ice.” An exhausted Phillips angrily tapped back, “Keep out! Shut up! I am busy. I am working Cape Race.” The
Californian
’s operator listened in as Phillips apologized to Cape Race for the interruption and asked for a repeat of the last message. Twenty-five minutes later the
Californian
’s wireless man could still hear Phillips sending messages to Newfoundland, so at 11:35 he took off his headset, turned off his equipment, and went to bed.

On the
Titanic
’s bridge Quartermaster Robert Hichens was at the ship’s wheel, with Sixth Officer Moody standing beside him in the wheelhouse. All the lights on the bridge had been extinguished so that they could see clearly through the windows. The ship was now moving at twenty two and a half knots. Suddenly Fred Fleet spied a large, dark shape directly ahead. It could be only one thing. Reaching past Lee, he quickly rang the crow’s nest bell three times. He then grabbed the telephone and heard it being picked up in the wheelhouse.

“
Is someone there?” Fleet asked.

“Yes,” replied Moody. “What do you see?”

“Iceberg right ahead!”

(photo credit 1.6)

The iceberg struck the liner’s starboard bow only thirty-seven seconds after lookout Fred Fleet telephoned the bridge.
(photo credit 1.42)

A
blue-white cliff face suddenly loomed out of the darkness. The liner raced on, its prow aimed directly toward it. Fred Fleet braced for a crash. Then slowly, slowly, the ship began to turn. Would they miss it? He saw the tip of the bow slide past. But then came a shuddering jar on the starboard side. Large chunks of ice thudded into the well deck. Fleet heard a grating noise from deep below as the berg scraped along the starboard hull. Less than a minute had passed since he had first sighted it.

As he stood on the staircase landing, William Sloper felt the ship lurch slightly to starboard. It reminded him of a ferryboat striking the planks of a landing slip. Dorothy Gibson came hurrying up the stairs and they ran out onto the A-deck promenade. Peering over the side into the starlit darkness, they could just make out a large white shape disappearing behind the stern. In the smoking room, Hugh Woolner sensed a heavy grinding shock passing right under his feet. Several men headed for the door at the back of the room and he quickly followed. On reaching the afterdeck, Woolner heard excited talk in the night air. Over the clamor a loud voice called out, “
An iceberg just passed astern!” Archie Butt soon appeared with the other men from his card game—William Carter, Harry Widener, and Clarence Moore—and just then the engines stopped. The unusual silence caused everyone to become quiet. Algernon Barkworth, a Yorkshire justice of the peace, spotted W. T. Stead, who told him “
An iceberg has ground against the starboard side.” Soon the words “iceberg” and “nothing to worry about” were passed along. The men nodded, shrugged, and returned to the smoking room and their card games. William Carter, however, left to go down to his cabin on B deck to check on his wife and two sleeping children. Hugh Woolner thought of Helen Candee and decided that he should look in on her. Frank Millet took Carter’s place at Archie’s table as the bridge whist resumed.

The collision was less noticeable to passengers in their staterooms. Many were in bed and sensed only a slight, grating jar. Ella White was about to turn out the light when it seemed as if the ship ran over
a thousand marbles. Lucy Duff Gordon was awakened by an odd rumbling noise that sounded like a giant hand was playing bowls deep beneath her. Madeleine Astor thought there had been an accident in the kitchens. René Harris was still up playing cards with Harry and noticed that the dresses in her open closet were swaying. It wasn’t until the engines stopped that René, like many other passengers, realized something might be amiss.

Captain Smith knew it immediately. “
What have we struck?” he demanded as he hurried onto the bridge from his cabin behind the wheelhouse.

“An iceberg, sir,” First Officer Murdoch replied. He explained how he had tried to maneuver around it but the berg had been too close.

“Close the watertight doors,” the captain ordered.

“The watertight doors are closed, sir,” Murdoch replied.

In Boiler Room 6
stoker Frederick Barrett had just been sprayed by a geyser of water that had shot through the hull about two feet away from him. When the light above the room’s watertight door suddenly began flashing he had been forced to make a run for it and had jumped through the closing door followed by another man, while a third stoker scrambled up an emergency ladder. After climbing to a higher deck, Barrett looked down to Boiler Room 6 and saw that it was already eight feet deep in seawater.

In a small cabin deep in the forward bow, steerage passenger Daniel Buckley was awakened by a shuddering noise. He jumped down from his bunk and felt water under his bare feet. His three roommates from County Cork were still snoring in their bunks and protested groggily when he roused them. Buckley dressed and went out into the corridor. There he heard two crewmen shouting, “
All up on deck unless you want to get drowned.” As Buckley headed upward, the third-class corridors began to fill with steerage passengers carrying their belongings toward the stern.

As he lay reading on his bunk on D deck, Lawrence Beesley noticed that the dancing motion of his mattress had stopped. Slipping on a dressing gown and shoes, he went out into the corridor and up the staircase to the boat deck. As he peered over the side at the calm black sea below, nothing seemed amiss, so he went into the second-class smoking room and asked some of the cardplayers if they knew what had happened. They told him that they had seen an iceberg pass by and gave estimates that it had been anywhere from sixty to a hundred feet high. One of them said, “
I expect the iceberg has scratched off some of her new paint and the captain doesn’t like to go on until she is painted up again.” Another pointed to his glass of whiskey and quipped, “Just run along the deck and see if any ice has come aboard. I would like some for this.” Amid the general laughter, Beesley returned to his cabin and resumed reading. But on hearing voices in the corridor, he donned a warm jacket and once again went up to the boat deck. There he saw that the ship was moving ahead slowly and noticed a little white foam breaking at the bow.