by Tim Maltin
There were women in the crowd, as well as men, and they seemed to be steerage passengers who had just come up from the decks below. Instantly, when they saw us and the water on the deck chasing us from behind, they turned in the opposite direction towards the stern. This brought them at that point plumb against the iron fence and railing which divide the first and second cabin passengers. Even among these people there was no hysterical cry, or evidence of panic, but oh, the agony of it!
These were probably third-class men who were not allowed up to the boat deck under the order of women and children first, and women who had elected to wait with them. As well as Gracie’s own experiences and observations, The Truth about the Titanic also includes several shorter accounts by other survivors, including a wonderful one written by Miss Elizabeth W. Shutes. Gracie introduces this account as “one which I freely confess moves me to tears whenever re-read,” and it is a haunting account of that night, very accurately remembered and well described.
Gracie’s book also gives us a very good idea of the relative calm aboard the Titanic, even as every lifeboat was being launched. His attempt to explain the history of each lifeboat is a useful one, especially his piecing together the extraordinary story of the lifeboat identified as Collapsible A, which he called a “boat of mystery” at the outset of his research. Most significantly though, he documents how on the port side of Titanic, the order was apparently women and children only, whereas on the starboard side of the ship, men were freely admitted into the lifeboats once all the women who were immediately available had been loaded.
Titanic did not have enough trained deck crew to adequately man and launch her sixteen lifeboats within the time available. The loading and lowering of each of her boats therefore had to be rushed as quickly as possible. In addition, the lifeboats could not very practicably hold the sixty-five persons that each of them was certified to carry; moreover, no general alarm was given, and the passengers truly believed that the Titanic was unsinkable. As a result, many of Titanic’s lifeboats went away grossly underfilled, at least on paper. Nevertheless, women and children accounted for only about 10 percent of the 1,500 people who died in the Titanic disaster, even though more men were saved than women.
Gracie’s account is followed by four thrilling accounts that came out as a result of the U.S. Inquiry into the Titanic disaster. Third-class passenger Daniel Buckley tells us there was water on the floor of his cabin as soon as he jumped out of bed, and his story about a woman throwing a shawl over his head so that he could remain in the lifeboat in which he escaped is almost certainly the genesis of the myth that several men escaped disguised as women. It’s important to note that his testimony that the third-class passengers had as much chance of escape as the first- and second-class passengers is not inconsistent with his earlier testimony that steerage passengers were prevented from accessing the first- and second-class deck area immediately after the collision; this was normal practice before the order to abandon ship had been given, and this was not given until 12:30 A.M., fifty minutes after the collision.
John Collins, Titanic’s assistant cook for the first-class galley, gives an amazing and moving account, including how he was washed off Titanic’s deck with a whole crowd of people and the tragic fate of a child passenger.
Titanic’s baker, Charles Joughin shares his unusual account, which begins in the A deck pantry when he heard Titanic begin to break up and rushed toward the stern with hundreds of other passengers. He describes how these passengers were then thrown together as the ship gave a great list over to port and how he escaped over the outside of the starboard rail and then stepped off the back of the sinking ship, without even getting his head wet!
Last in this section of testimonies from the U.S. Inquiry is Junior Marconi Operator Harold Bride’s statement to his employers, which he submitted to the inquiry and which details important wireless information, as well as his final moments aboard ship and his scramble to get onto an overturned collapsible lifeboat.
Bride’s long account of his experiences on the sinking liner, published in the New York Times on April 19, 1912, then opens a selection of survivor accounts published in newspapers at the time. These all give unexpected details about the sinking, such as when Bride explains that even Captain Smith laughed at his joke that they should send the new SOS distress signal, because it might be their last chance to send it.
Third-class passenger Laura Cribb casually notes the violence she witnesses by an officer, and first-class passenger Hugh Woolner graphically describes the terrific roar as Titanic took her final plunge as being “like thousands of tons of rocks rumbling down a metal chute.”
An account given by Margaret “Molly” Brown to the Newport Herald and serialized by that newspaper on May 28–30, 1912, is also included. Contrary to her portrayal in various films about the Titanic, Molly was a highly sophisticated and very well-educated champion of women’s rights; she had been holidaying with the Astors in Egypt. Her account of the atmosphere in the corridor outside her room immediately after the collision is revealing and tragic:
On emerging from my stateroom, I found many men in the gangway in their pajamas, whom I had overheard a few moments before entering their staterooms saying that they were nearly frozen and had to leave the smoking-rooms. They, while standing, were chaffing each other, one of them remarked, “Are you prepared to swim in those things?” referring to the pajamas. Women were standing along the corridors in their kimonos. All seemed to be quietly listening, thinking nothing serious had occurred. . . . This gallows humor immediately after the collision is also borne witness to in many other survivor accounts. Colonel Archibald Gracie immortalized his friend James Clinch Smith, who did not survive the disaster, when he recalled in The Truth about the Titanic how it was from him that he first learned that they had struck an iceberg:
He opened his hand and showed me some ice, flat like my watch, coolly suggesting that I might take it home for a souvenir. All of us will remember the way he had of cracking a joke without a smile.
All of these jokes were one way of coping with the terrible situation in which Titanic’s passengers suddenly found themselves. By this time most of them had less than three hours to live.
First-class passenger William Sloper remembers the over-politeness of passengers and the difficulty in filling the first lifeboats owing to the faith the passengers had in the unsinkability of the Titanic. On the contrary, newlywed Vera Dick casually describes the band playing jolly, happy tunes “when the guards shot the jaw off an immigrant who tried to crowd into one of the boats, brushing the women aside.”
Finally in this section of survivor accounts published in newspapers, Assistant Saloon Steward Walter Nichols describes the horrible shriek that went up after the sinking, the cries for help and weird shouts that sounded like the noise “if you’ve ever been around when they were feeding a kennel of dogs.” All of these accounts are unique and bear the hallmark of authenticity in the surprising facts they reveal.
The final section comes from Logan Marshall’s The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters, published in 1912. We have included seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer’s description of becoming separated from his parents, jumping from the Titanic, and watching her break up while swimming in the water nearby, before drifting all night on an upturned collapsible lifeboat, as well as James McGough’s account, which is interesting when compared with Molly Brown’s, whom he was responsible for placing in a lifeboat, especially where he says that he was forced to enter a lifeboat “though I admit that the ship looked a great deal safer to me than any small boat.”
Besides survivor narratives, this edition includes a contemporary report about the preparations on land to receive the survivors, as well as one on the arrival in New York of the rescue ship Carpathia and the work of collecting bodies from Titanic’s wreck site.
Although not written by survivors, these chapters really bri
ng home the contemporary impact of the disaster, which still reverberates to this day. In 1912, the Titanic created one of the first global media storms, with the New York Times devoting its first twelve pages to the disaster. This impact is rarely put into context today. The sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912, was as shocking to the world as the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. The only difference between the following details written in 1912 and a contemporary disaster is that now helicopters would be thumping the air, and there would be an international press camp broadcasting live to the world via satellite:
In anticipation of the enormous number that would . . . surge about the Cunard pier at the coming of the Carpathia, Mayor Gaynor and the police commissioner had seen to it that the streets should be rigidly sentineled by continuous lines of policemen. . . . there were 200 men, including twelve mounted men and a number in citizens’ clothes. . . . twenty ambulances [were] ready for instant movement on the city’s pier at the foot of East Twenty-sixth Street. . . . hospitals in the city stood ready to take the Titanic’s people and those that had ambulances promised to send them. The Charities ferryboat, Thomas S. Brennan, equipped as a hospital craft, lay off the department pier with nurses and physicians ready to be called to the Cunard pier on the other side of the city. St Vincent’s Hospital had 120 beds ready, New York Hospital twelve, Bellevue and the reception hospital 120 and Flower Hospital twelve.”
These chapters from Logan Marshall’s 1912 edition also include a poignant, early list of survivors, details of the mission to recover bodies from Titanic’s wreck site, a list of the identified dead and a firsthand observation of scores of bodies being seen from the rail of the steamship Bremen as she steamed near the awful scene:
We saw one woman in her night dress, with a baby clasped closely to her breast. . . . The bodies of three men in a group, all clinging to one steamship chair, floated near by, and just beyond them were a dozen bodies of men, all of them encased in life-preservers, clinging together as though in a last desperate struggle for life.
The final section of this edition includes a letter to the New York Times by Lawrence Beesley, published on April 29, 1912. This highly intelligent survivor reviews the disaster, its probable causes, and the means of preventing such an accident in the future, then asks—and answers—many of the questions that are still being asked today. Nicholas Wade, a grandson of Lawrence Beesley, contributes an afterword to this edition, reflecting on the centennial of the Titanic’s sinking as a family member of one of the ship’s most noted survivors.
One hundred years on, the world is still gripped by the Titanic disaster. This is because Titanic—the floating city—is a metaphor for the whole of civilization, and her untimely death at the hand of God or nature is a metaphor for the human condition. The story of the Titanic shows us our utter helplessness, our best achievement confounded by a lump of ice, and leaves us asking the eternal question: Why? The Titanic forces us to confront this question, which generations of experts and newcomers have grappled with, turning for more information to the first accounts of those who were there.
TIM MALTIN
A Note on the Texts
Text selections for this edition have been drawn from the following archival sources and books: Brooklyn Public Library; Cleveland Public Library (Cleveland Plain Dealer); Library of Congress (New York Evening Journal, Hartford Times, New York Sun); Missouri Historical Society Archives (St. Louis Post-Dispatch); Newport Herald; New York Times; Washington Post; The Truth about the Titanic, by Archibald Gracie; and Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters, edited by Logan Marshall.
Lawrence Beesley, “Chapter IV. The Sinking of the Titanic Seen from a Lifeboat,” from The Loss of the Titanic: How I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic, ISBN 9781445604435, published by Amberley Publishing 2011, is reprinted with permission.
U.S. Senate and British Inquiries are drawn from the following: Evidence Before Senate, 62d Congress, 2d Session, Titanic Disaster. Report No. 806. Report of the Committee on Commerce United States Senate pursuant to S. RES. 283 directing the Committee on Commerce to investigate the causes leading to the wreck of the White Star Liner Titanic. Washington Government Printing Office.
In the Wreck Commissioner’s Court: Proceedings before the Right Hon. Lord Mersey, on the Formal Investigation Ordered by the Board of Trade Into the Loss of the SS Titanic. Printed for His Majesty’s Stationary Office by Jas. Truscott and Son, Ltd. (959 pages + 18 pages of appendices).
Titanic Classics
Lawrence Beesley’s
The Loss of the Titanic
CHAPTER IV
The Sinking of the Titanic Seen from a Lifeboat
Looking back now on the descent of our boat down the ship’s side, it is a matter of surprise, I think, to all the occupants to remember how little they thought of it at the time. It was a great adventure, certainly: it was exciting to feel the boat sink by jerks, foot by foot, as the ropes were paid out from above and shrieked as they passed through the pulley blocks, the new ropes and gear creaking under the strain of a boat laden with people, and the crew calling to the sailors above as the boat tilted slightly, now at one end, now at the other, “Lower aft!” “Lower stern!” and “Lower together!” as she came level again—but I do not think we felt much apprehension about reaching the water safely. It certainly was thrilling to see the black hull of the ship on one side and the sea, 70 feet [c. 21 metres] below, on the other, or to pass down by cabins and saloons brilliantly lighted; but we knew nothing of the apprehension felt in the minds of some of the officers whether the boats and lowering-gear would stand the strain of the weight of our sixty people. The ropes, however, were new and strong, and the boat did not buckle in the middle as an older boat might have done. Whether it was right or not to lower boats full of people to the water—and it seems likely it was not—I think there can be nothing but the highest praise given to the officers and crew above for the way in which they lowered the boats one after the other safely to the water; it may seem a simple matter, to read about such a thing, but any sailor knows, apparently, that it is not so. An experienced officer has told me that he has seen a boat lowered in practise from a ship’s deck, with a trained crew and no passengers in the boat, with practised sailors paying out the ropes, in daylight, in calm weather, with the ship lying in dock—and has seen the boat tilt over and pitch the crew headlong into the sea. Contrast these conditions with those obtaining that Monday morning at 12.45 a.m., and it is impossible not to feel that, whether the lowering crew were trained or not, whether they had or had not drilled since coming on board, they did their duty in a way that argues the greatest efficiency. I cannot help feeling the deepest gratitude to the two sailors who stood at the ropes above and lowered us to the sea: I do not suppose they were saved.
Perhaps one explanation of our feeling little sense of the unusual in leaving the Titanic in this way was that it seemed the climax to a series of extraordinary occurrences: the magnitude of the whole thing dwarfed events that in the ordinary way would seem to be full of imminent peril. It is easy to imagine it—a voyage of four days on a calm sea, without a single untoward incident; the presumption, perhaps already mentally half realized, that we should be ashore in forty-eight hours and so complete a splendid voyage—and then to feel the engine stop, to be summoned on deck with little time to dress, to tie on a lifebelt, to see rockets shooting aloft in call for help, to be told to get into a lifeboat—after all these things, it did not seem much to feel the boat sinking down to the sea: it was the natural sequence of previous events, and we had learned in the last hour to take things just as they came. At the same time, if any one should wonder what the sensation is like, it is quite easy to measure 75 feet [c. 23 metres] from the windows of a tall house or a block of flats, look down to the ground and fancy himself with some sixty other people crowded into a boat so tightly that he could not sit down or move about, and then picture the boat sinking
down in a continuous series of jerks, as the sailors pay out the ropes through cleats above. There are more pleasant sensations than this! How thankful we were that the sea was calm and the Titanic lay so steadily and quietly as we dropped down her side. We were spared the bumping and grinding against the side which so often accompanies the launching of boats: I do not remember that we even had to fend off our boat while we were trying to get free.
As we went down, one of the crew shouted, “We are just over the condenser exhaust: we don’t want to stay in that long or we shall be swamped; feel down on the floor and be ready to pull up the pin which lets the ropes free as soon as we are afloat.” I had often looked over the side and noticed this stream of water coming out of the side of the Titanic just above the waterline: in fact so large was the volume of water that as we ploughed along and met the waves coming towards us, this stream would cause a splash that sent spray flying. We felt, as well as we could in the crowd of people, on the floor, along the sides, with no idea where the pin could be found—and none of the crew knew where it was, only of its existence somewhere—but we never found it. And all the time we got closer to the sea and the exhaust roared nearer and nearer—until finally we floated with the ropes still holding us from above, the exhaust washing us away and the force of the tide driving us back against the side—the latter not of much account in influencing the direction, however. Thinking over what followed, I imagine we must have touched the water with the condenser stream at our bows, and not in the middle as I thought at one time: at any rate, the resultant of these three forces was that we were carried parallel to the ship, directly under the place where boat 15 would drop from her davits into the sea. Looking up we saw her already coming down rapidly from B deck: she must have filled almost immediately after ours. We shouted up, “Stop lowering 14,” (in an account which appeared in the newspapers of 19 April I have described this boat as 14, not knowing they were numbered alternately) and the crew and passengers in the boat above, hearing us shout and seeing our position immediately below them, shouted the same to the sailors on the boat deck; but apparently they did not hear, for she dropped down foot by foot—twenty feet, fifteen, ten—and a stoker and I in the bows reached up and touched her bottom swinging above our heads, trying to push away our boat from under her. It seemed now as if nothing could prevent her dropping on us, but at this moment another stoker sprang with his knife to the ropes that still held us and I heard him shout, “One! Two!” as he cut them through. The next moment we had swung away from underneath 15, and were clear of her as she dropped into the water in the space we had just before occupied. I do not know how the bow ropes were freed, but imagine that they were cut in the same way, for we were washed clear of the Titanic at once by the force of the stream and floated away as the oars were got out.