The Loss of the S. S. Titanic - Its Story and Its Lessons (7 page)

The crew was made up of cooks and stewards, mostly the former, I
think; their white jackets showing up in the darkness as they pulled
away, two to an oar: I do not think they can have had any practice in
rowing, for all night long their oars crossed and clashed; if our
safety had depended on speed or accuracy in keeping time it would have
gone hard with us. Shouting began from one end of the boat to the
other as to what we should do, where we should go, and no one seemed
to have any knowledge how to act. At last we asked, "Who is in charge
of this boat?" but there was no reply. We then agreed by general
consent that the stoker who stood in the stern with the tiller should
act as captain, and from that time he directed the course, shouting to
other boats and keeping in touch with them. Not that there was
anywhere to go or anything we could do. Our plan of action was simple:
to keep all the boats together as far as possible and wait until we
were picked up by other liners. The crew had apparently heard of the
wireless communications before they left the Titanic, but I never
heard them say that we were in touch with any boat but the Olympic: it
was always the Olympic that was coming to our rescue. They thought
they knew even her distance, and making a calculation, we came to the
conclusion that we ought to be picked up by her about two o'clock in
the afternoon. But this was not our only hope of rescue: we watched
all the time the darkness lasted for steamers' lights, thinking there
might be a chance of other steamers coming near enough to see the
lights which some of our boats carried. I am sure there was no feeling
in the minds of any one that we should not be picked up next day: we
knew that wireless messages would go out from ship to ship, and as one
of the stokers said: "The sea will be covered with ships to-morrow
afternoon: they will race up from all over the sea to find us." Some
even thought that fast torpedo boats might run up ahead of the
Olympic. And yet the Olympic was, after all, the farthest away of them
all; eight other ships lay within three hundred miles of us.

How thankful we should have been to know how near help was, and how
many ships had heard our message and were rushing to the Titanic's
aid. I think nothing has surprised us more than to learn so many ships
were near enough to rescue us in a few hours. Almost immediately after
leaving the Titanic we saw what we all said was a ship's lights down
on the horizon on the Titanic's port side: two lights, one above the
other, and plainly not one of our boats; we even rowed in that
direction for some time, but the lights drew away and disappeared
below the horizon.

But this is rather anticipating: we did none of these things first. We
had no eyes for anything but the ship we had just left. As the oarsmen
pulled slowly away we all turned and took a long look at the mighty
vessel towering high above our midget boat, and I know it must have
been the most extraordinary sight I shall ever be called upon to
witness; I realize now how totally inadequate language is to convey to
some other person who was not there any real impression of what we
saw.

But the task must be attempted: the whole picture is so intensely
dramatic that, while it is not possible to place on paper for eyes to
see the actual likeness of the ship as she lay there, some sketch of
the scene will be possible. First of all, the climatic conditions were
extraordinary. The night was one of the most beautiful I have ever
seen: the sky without a single cloud to mar the perfect brilliance of
the stars, clustered so thickly together that in places there seemed
almost more dazzling points of light set in the black sky than
background of sky itself; and each star seemed, in the keen
atmosphere, free from any haze, to have increased its brilliance
tenfold and to twinkle and glitter with a staccato flash that made the
sky seem nothing but a setting made for them in which to display their
wonder. They seemed so near, and their light so much more intense than
ever before, that fancy suggested they saw this beautiful ship in dire
distress below and all their energies had awakened to flash messages
across the black dome of the sky to each other; telling and warning of
the calamity happening in the world beneath. Later, when the Titanic
had gone down and we lay still on the sea waiting for the day to dawn
or a ship to come, I remember looking up at the perfect sky and
realizing why Shakespeare wrote the beautiful words he puts in the
mouth of Lorenzo:—

"Jessica, look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."

But it seemed almost as if we could—that night: the stars seemed
really to be alive and to talk. The complete absence of haze produced
a phenomenon I had never seen before: where the sky met the sea the
line was as clear and definite as the edge of a knife, so that the
water and the air never merged gradually into each other and blended
to a softened rounded horizon, but each element was so exclusively
separate that where a star came low down in the sky near the clear-cut
edge of the waterline, it still lost none of its brilliance. As the
earth revolved and the water edge came up and covered partially the
star, as it were, it simply cut the star in two, the upper half
continuing to sparkle as long as it was not entirely hidden, and
throwing a long beam of light along the sea to us.

In the evidence before the United States Senate Committee the captain
of one of the ships near us that night said the stars were so
extraordinarily bright near the horizon that he was deceived into
thinking that they were ships' lights: he did not remember seeing such
a night before. Those who were afloat will all agree with that
statement:
we
were often deceived into thinking they were
lights of a ship.

And next the cold air! Here again was something quite new to us: there
was not a breath of wind to blow keenly round us as we stood in the
boat, and because of its continued persistence to make us feel cold;
it was just a keen, bitter, icy, motionless cold that came from
nowhere and yet was there all the time; the stillness of it—if one
can imagine "cold" being motionless and still—was what seemed new and
strange.

And these—the sky and the air—were overhead; and below was the sea.
Here again something uncommon: the surface was like a lake of oil,
heaving gently up and down with a quiet motion that rocked our boat
dreamily to and fro. We did not need to keep her head to the swell:
often I watched her lying broadside on to the tide, and with a boat
loaded as we were, this would have been impossible with anything like
a swell. The sea slipped away smoothly under the boat, and I think we
never heard it lapping on the sides, so oily in appearance was the
water. So when one of the stokers said he had been to sea for
twenty-six years and never yet seen such a calm night, we accepted it
as true without comment. Just as expressive was the remark of
another—"It reminds me of a bloomin' picnic!" It was quite true; it
did: a picnic on a lake, or a quiet inland river like the Cam, or a
backwater on the Thames.

And so in these conditions of sky and air and sea, we gazed broadside
on the Titanic from a short distance. She was absolutely still—indeed
from the first it seemed as if the blow from the iceberg had taken all
the courage out of her and she had just come quietly to rest and was
settling down without an effort to save herself, without a murmur of
protest against such a foul blow. For the sea could not rock her: the
wind was not there to howl noisily round the decks, and make the ropes
hum; from the first what must have impressed all as they watched was
the sense of stillness about her and the slow, insensible way she sank
lower and lower in the sea, like a stricken animal.

The mere bulk alone of the ship viewed from the sea below was an
awe-inspiring sight. Imagine a ship nearly a sixth of a mile long, 75
feet high to the top decks, with four enormous funnels above the
decks, and masts again high above the funnels; with her hundreds of
portholes, all her saloons and other rooms brilliant with light, and
all round her, little boats filled with those who until a few hours
before had trod her decks and read in her libraries and listened to
the music of her band in happy content; and who were now looking up in
amazement at the enormous mass above them and rowing away from her
because she was sinking.

I had often wanted to see her from some distance away, and only a few
hours before, in conversation at lunch with a fellow-passenger, had
registered a vow to get a proper view of her lines and dimensions when
we landed at New York: to stand some distance away to take in a full
view of her beautiful proportions, which the narrow approach to the
dock at Southampton made impossible. Little did I think that the
opportunity was to be found so quickly and so dramatically. The
background, too, was a different one from what I had planned for her:
the black outline of her profile against the sky was bordered all
round by stars studded in the sky, and all her funnels and masts were
picked out in the same way: her bulk was seen where the stars were
blotted out. And one other thing was different from expectation: the
thing that ripped away from us instantly, as we saw it, all sense of
the beauty of the night, the beauty of the ship's lines, and the
beauty of her lights,—and all these taken in themselves were
intensely beautiful,—that thing was the awful angle made by the level
of the sea with the rows of porthole lights along her side in dotted
lines, row above row. The sea level and the rows of lights should have
been parallel—should never have met—and now they met at an angle
inside the black hull of the ship. There was nothing else to indicate
she was injured; nothing but this apparent violation of a simple
geometrical law—that parallel lines should "never meet even if
produced ever so far both ways"; but it meant the Titanic had sunk by
the head until the lowest portholes in the bows were under the sea,
and the portholes in the stern were lifted above the normal height. We
rowed away from her in the quietness of the night, hoping and praying
with all our hearts that she would sink no more and the day would find
her still in the same position as she was then. The crew, however, did
not think so. It has been said frequently that the officers and crew
felt assured that she would remain afloat even after they knew the
extent of the damage. Some of them may have done so—and perhaps, from
their scientific knowledge of her construction, with more reason at
the time than those who said she would sink—but at any rate the
stokers in our boat had no such illusion. One of them—I think he was
the same man that cut us free from the pulley ropes—told us how he
was at work in the stoke-hole, and in anticipation of going off duty
in quarter of an hour,—thus confirming the time of the collision as
11.45,—had near him a pan of soup keeping hot on some part of the
machinery; suddenly the whole side of the compartment came in, and the
water rushed him off his feet. Picking himself up, he sprang for the
compartment doorway and was just through the aperture when the
watertight door came down behind him, "like a knife," as he said;
"they work them from the bridge." He had gone up on deck but was
ordered down again at once and with others was told to draw the fires
from under the boiler, which they did, and were then at liberty to
come on deck again. It seems that this particular knot of stokers must
have known almost as soon as any one of the extent of injury. He added
mournfully, "I could do with that hot soup now"—and indeed he could:
he was clad at the time of the collision, he said, in trousers and
singlet, both very thin on account of the intense heat in the
stoke-hole; and although he had added a short jacket later, his teeth
were chattering with the cold. He found a place to lie down underneath
the tiller on the little platform where our captain stood, and there
he lay all night with a coat belonging to another stoker thrown over
him and I think he must have been almost unconscious. A lady next to
him, who was warmly clad with several coats, tried to insist on his
having one of hers—a fur-lined one—thrown over him, but he
absolutely refused while some of the women were insufficiently clad;
and so the coat was given to an Irish girl with pretty auburn hair
standing near, leaning against the gunwale—with an "outside berth"
and so more exposed to the cold air. This same lady was able to
distribute more of her wraps to the passengers, a rug to one, a fur
boa to another; and she has related with amusement that at the moment
of climbing up the Carpathia's side, those to whom these articles had
been lent offered them all back to her; but as, like the rest of us,
she was encumbered with a lifebelt, she had to say she would receive
them back at the end of the climb, I had not seen my dressing-gown
since I dropped into the boat, but some time in the night a steerage
passenger found it on the floor and put it on.

It is not easy at this time to call to mind who were in the boat,
because in the night it was not possible to see more than a few feet
away, and when dawn came we had eyes only for the rescue ship and the
icebergs; but so far as my memory serves the list was as follows: no
first-class passengers; three women, one baby, two men from the second
cabin; and the other passengers steerage—mostly women; a total of
about 35 passengers. The rest, about 25 (and possibly more), were crew
and stokers. Near to me all night was a group of three Swedish girls,
warmly clad, standing close together to keep warm, and very silent;
indeed there was very little talking at any time.