by Brad Matsen
Soon after the New Year in 1909, when Andrews was two months away from laying the keel for the second ship, he received a telegram from Bruce Ismay telling him RMS Republic had collided with SS Florida near Nantucket but was still afloat.
Republic was 570 feet long, had a gross weight of 15,000 tons, and could cruise at 15½ knots. It carried one of the first Marconi wireless stations, advertised in White Star brochures as a convenience to first-class passengers who might want to keep their families and businesses up-to-date on their voyage.
Andrews got the whole story in a dispatch from Pirrie’s London office. On the morning of January 23, Republic was running at half speed in darkness and heavy fog through the main shipping lane south of Nantucket Island, sounding its foghorn and whistle. At five-thirty A.M., its captain heard an answering whistle close off his port bow. He rang full reverse to the engine room, signaled his emergency order with short blasts on his horn, and threw his helm hard over to port. Before his ship reacted to his commands, the bow of the Italian liner Florida slammed into Republic at a right angle amidships, tearing open its side from top to bottom. Three sleeping passengers aboard Republic and three crewmen in Florida’s bow died instantly.
The crash woke up Republic’s telegraph operator, Jack Binns. His cabin and the telegraph shack next door were a shambles. The roof was gone, the lights were off, and he could hear nothing over the shrieking steel as the ships disengaged and drifted apart in a swift current. Binns clawed his way to his station in the darkness, hooked up emergency batteries, and tapped out the new Marconi company distress call in Morse code: CQD. CQ meant “Calling all stations.” D meant “Disaster.” Binns added Republic’s position to his call for help.
The operator on duty at the Marconi station on nearby Nantucket Island picked up the CQD and relayed it to the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service, which sent out the patrol boats Seneca, from New York, and Gresham, from Boston. Three other ships, including the White Star liner Baltic, heard Republic’s CQD and sped to the scene of the collision.
Still in heavy fog, Florida’s captain nosed his ship back up to Republic. The much bigger White Star liner had a huge hole in its side and was obviously taking water. The sea was calm, so he tied up his ship on the other side, and in less than an hour 742 passengers and crew were safe aboard the heavily damaged but stable Florida.
Baltic arrived at noon the day after the collision, picked up the passengers from both Florida and Republic, and headed for New York. Florida made it to New York under its own power. Thirty-eight hours after the collision, Republic went down in 250 feet of water.
An hour after Andrews read the dispatch, every man in the shipyard knew about Republic. It was the biggest ship that had ever sunk.
The sinking of a Harland and Wolff ship was no cause for celebration, but Andrews was quietly pleased. The wireless telegraph—now installed on all White Star ships—had summoned help within minutes of the collision. The ship had been strong enough to last for a day and a half after such catastrophic damage to its hull. Even though mortally wounded, it had been its own lifeboat. Andrews had designed 400 and 401 using the same architectural strategies to ensure strength he’d put into Republic. They were going to be strong ships.
On March 31, 1909, as the frames of No. 400 were starting to look like the lines of a ship, Andrews laid the keel of No. 401. The riveting hammers rang around the clock. Andrews put the yard into the warm-weather routine of three eight-hour shifts, hoping to have 400 fully framed and 401 half framed by November, when the winter would slow him down again. Pirrie was having a good year with the order book, and Harland and Wolff had fourteen other ships in the yard. The workforce had swollen to fifteen thousand men.
It took a half hour to move a full shift through the Market Square time stile, tradesmen first, then apprentices, then day laborers. Since Edward Harland’s time, the shipyard had kept track of hours and wages with a simple system. The timekeeper gave a new man two varnished chips of wood called “boards” (pronounced “birds”). Each was the size of a large matchbook. On the end of each board, the man’s number was die-stamped into the wood.
At the beginning of his shift, a man shouted his number to the timekeeper, who handed him his board, which he kept with him through the workday. If he left his station, even to go to the toilet, he had to get a boss to chalk his initial on the board or risk being fired for moving around the yard without permission. When he returned to his station, the boss erased his mark. At the end of his shift, a man slipped his board into its numbered pigeonhole on his way past the timekeeper. The timekeeper, having logged the numbers of the boards taken by men on their way in to work, compared them with the boards the men pigeonholed on the way out and marked down their hours. The second board was held in reserve in case a man lost one, which cost him half a day’s pay. A man kept the same number until he was fired, quit, got hurt too badly to work, or died.
Few men in the shipyard knew each other’s real names. As soon as the boss or the other shipwrights in a new man’s shed or work gang decided to speak to him, one of the first things they told him was his yard name. A man who stepped on a nail became Nail-in-the-Boot. A man with a raspy voice was Barking Dog. There were Big Harry, Wee Harry, Steelchest, Big Nose, Wing Ears, Dread-the-Winter, Bits and Pieces, Wash Rag, His Nibs, Iodine Willie, Broken Leg, Flat Hat, No Neck, Stumble, Hot Rivet, Cold Rivet, Horse Face, and No Talk. There were thousands of nicknames, and they could change as a man’s exploits and failures marked him over and over again.
With eight thousand men working on the White Star sisters, Andrews met his November deadline for framing the first ship. They plated it in six months. As spring hinted at an early arrival, No. 400 was beginning to look like an ocean liner. And beside it, No. 401, fully framed and ready for plating, was also on schedule.
At some point—perhaps it was when the walls of steel ran unbroken the length of four city blocks from bow to stern; perhaps when dignitaries and reporters started coming to the shipyard to see the floating palaces rising against the Belfast skyline—Andrews noticed that the men were referring to the ships by name instead of hull number. He asked the carpenters to build signs the size of barn doors, and had them hung on the scaffolding at the bows.
White Star
Royal Mail Steamer
“Olympic”
White Star
Royal Mail Steamer
“Titanic”
Andrews began plating Titanic on April 6, 1910, but the steel had been arriving from the Clyde for weeks. The platers’ shed was an around-the-clock hive. Many of the men who worked in it were deaf, some because they had lived with the cacophony of the steel punches for too many years, some because they had been born deaf and had found the perfect place to work. Deaf men came from all over Ireland to work in the platers’ sheds at Harland’s, living as a colony with their families in a neighborhood of East Belfast.
The platers’ shed covered an acre on the west side of the yard and had its own dock along the river. With a forty-foot-high trussed ceiling, it was lit by skylights in the daytime and electric bulbs at night. The noise never stopped. The men used hand signals to communicate, but no shout of alarm was loud enough if a plate or beam got loose on the end of a hoist chain. Of the hundreds of injuries and deaths in the shipyard each year, most came while manhandling steel.
At the end of April 1910, when the first three tiers of plates shaped Titanic’s bow, Comet Halley appeared in the night sky over Belfast. Comet hysteria was rampant, since another of the visitors from space, known as the Great Daylight Comet, had put in a sensational appearance in January that same year. The difference with Halley’s, the newspapers reported, was that the earth was going to pass through its tail, which they said was made of poisonous cyanide gas. The end of the world was a possibility. At the shipyard, a rumor circulated among the men that somehow the two gigantic ships they were building had something to do with throwing the universe off-kilter, triggering divine retribution.
Andrews
did not believe that the world would end. He was not ordinarily a superstitious man, but he felt the comet was a good omen, a fitting cosmic tribute to the ships that were coming along so well.
On an evening in May, Andrews brought his wife, Helen, to the shipyard to enjoy the view of his masterpieces-in- progress with Comet Halley overhead. Olympic and Titanic had been stealing time from their life together since their courtship, which had begun just after Pirrie announced the White Star order in the drawing office during the summer of 1907. The couple had married on June 24, 1908, a month before Ismay came to Belfast to approve the plans.
Two years later, Helen was carrying their first child as she stood arm in arm with her husband, watching an uncountable number of men swarm over Olympic and Titanic. A breeze off Belfast Lough carried the double strikes of the riveting hammers, which sounded like hundreds of badly tuned church bells. The shipyard smelled like coal fires, sulfur, horse manure, and the salt of the nearby sea. Helen had never been so close to her husband’s giant ships. They were as otherworldly to her as the diamond-bright comet in the sky.
Carlisle retired during the summer of Comet Halley, leaving Andrews to finish the ships on his own. He hit two marks perfectly when he finished plating Titanic on October 19, 1910, and, the next day, launched Olympic into the river Lagan.
Even the launching of Oceanic in 1899—hailed as the most extravagant launching in the history of Harland and Wolff—could not compare with the party Pirrie threw for Olympic. An unusually warm autumn was fending off the arrival of winter, and the launch day dawned bright and sunny. A brisk north wind off the lough, which could have been a problem for a gigantic, powerless ship adrift on the river, died down shortly after the sun came up.
Pirrie arrived early, dressed in his customary launch-day tweed suit, topped off with his lucky yachting cap, and squired Lady Pirrie around to greet their guests. A special train from Dublin pulled into the Great Northern Railway terminal, and its passengers joined a steady stream of cars and horse carriages flowing to the shipyard. The turbine steamer Duke of Cumberland arrived, bringing Bruce and Florence Ismay, the White Star executives, their wives, and a hundred English and American reporters. J. P. Morgan was ill, and sent his regrets. Every other member of the board of International Mercantile Marine was in Belfast to celebrate the launching of the ship that might put the combine on its feet for the first time.
Pirrie assembled his personal guests in Market Square just after ten o’clock and led them around his shipyard on special planked walkways. The two hundred lords, ladies, and dignitaries walked two abreast through the platers’ shed, past the slipways, and through the machine shop, mast shed, and molding loft. At the end of the tour, near the river at the stern of the ship, Pirrie seated them in a grandstand draped with crimson-and-white banners.
Pirrie had also had grandstands built for Harland and Wolff department heads, their friends, and other invited guests. He sold tickets to all comers for seats in a third set of stands farther away from the ship, against the platers’ shed, raising £456, which he donated to his wife’s ambulance corps. By midmorning, thousands of people who could not get into the shipyard lined the banks on the Belfast side of the river, hoping to catch a glimpse of the leviathan splashing into the water.
The hulls of White Star ships had been dark gray for fifty years. Pirrie and Ismay thought white would look better in photographs, so they’d had Andrews paint Olympic white for the launching. Next to Titanic’s unpainted, sooty-black plates, Olympic gleamed in the sunlight. The white paint made the ship look even bigger than it was, and the deep red bottom paint gave it a finished appearance, though months of work in the shipyard lay ahead before its maiden voyage.
At ten-fifty, two rockets hissed into the sky and blossomed red over the river to warn ships and boats to steer clear of the launchway. At eleven o’clock, a third rocket exploded to signal that the launch was imminent. In the crimson-and-white grandstand, Pirrie shouted, “Now!”
Olympic moved. By the time its entire length was in the water sixty-two seconds later, the ship was going 12½ knots. In another forty seconds, six anchors connected to the ship by eight-inch wire hawsers stopped it dead in the water. The sounds of applause, horns, bells, and the shipyard whistles went on for five minutes, as five tugboats that looked like toys beside the giant ship nudged Olympic upriver to the outfitting wharf.
Andrews had just seven months to finish Olympic, so his men returned to work before the crowds had left the shipyard for an afternoon of celebration in Belfast. Bosses and men tied up the ship, swung two triple-width gangways into place, and moved the 250-ton floating crane into position. The next day, the full force that would swell to four thousand men began installing Olympic’s engines, boilers, and passenger accommodations to transform the bare hull into a warm, safe ship.
Seven months and nine days later, Olympic was ready for sea trials. Pirrie had spent most of his time in Belfast during the last two months of fitting out, and could not have been happier with the way his nephew had handled the job. On April 1—right on time—Andrews dry-docked the ship to put on its propellers. A gang of two thousand men gave it a fresh coat of paint, this time black for the hull, with a white superstructure and yellow trim. On May 2, engineers lit the boilers and started the engines, which ran perfectly for twenty-four hours. Later that week, Pirrie brought the ship to the dock and opened it to the public at a cost of five shillings apiece. More than ten thousand people trooped through the floating palace. Again, the money went to Lady Pirrie’s ambulances.
On May 27, a collier delivered three thousand tons of coal, enough for Olympic’s two-day sea trials and the run to Liverpool and Southampton. The following morning, a crew of 250 officers, firemen, and able-bodied seamen under the command of White Star’s senior captain, Edward John Smith, boarded the ship.
Andrews and Wilding set up shop aboard Olympic with two hundred Harland and Wolff designers, carpenters, and engineers, to check and record every detail about the performance of the ship. While Captain Smith ran at half speed on the first day of the sea trials, Andrews roamed around Olympic from bow to stern on every deck, feeling the life in the ship he had built. He lingered for the better part of the morning in the stupendous cavern of the engine room, hashing out his misgivings about so large an open space on so large a ship. He was happy to see that the catwalks around the boilers were the right height for the stokers and that the bunkers were convenient for the trimmers, who were in constant motion shuttling coal to the furnaces. He prowled the passageways, opened stateroom doors, and walked each deck, stopping every few paces to make notes in a fiber-bound journal. On the boat deck, he noted that the sixteen lifeboats slung beneath the davits left plenty of space for the first- and second-class promenades. In the wireless room, he sent telegrams to Pirrie and Ismay, telling them that Olympic was exceeding even his wildest expectations.
On the second day of sea trials, Olympic made a sweeping turn off the Irish coast to head back to Belfast. Andrews asked Captain Smith to bring the ship up to cruising speed and hold it there for at least an hour. Andrews stepped out of the wheelhouse onto the bridge wing to enjoy the wind in his face. He felt the ship shudder as it picked up speed, a distinct shivering in the yellow pine deck beneath his feet that increased as Smith brought Olympic to its cruising speed of 24 knots for the first time.
Andrews looked over the railing at the froth of the bow wave in the light chop. His eyes swept down past the white superstructure to the dark sides of the hull. For a long minute, Andrews watched the steel that formed the starboard side of Olympic moving in and out. Not much. Maybe two inches, three inches. But it was definitely moving in and out. He turned, walked calmly through the wheelhouse, and continued out to the port rail. Andrews looked down. Same thing. Maybe it was just that he had never before looked at the sides of so big a ship. From the bridge to the stern was a distance of three city blocks. Each side of the hull was covered by an acre and a half of steel. Andrews knew that the whole
ship was flexing. He had designed it to flex. But should the sides be panting?
Andrews took out his notebook and wrote: Sides panting at cruising speed.
Nine
TITANIC
The increase in the size of ships is not progress. If it were, elephantiasis, which causes a man’s legs to become as large as tree trunks, would be a sort of progress, whereas it is nothing but a disease, and a very ugly disease at that.
—Joseph Conrad, 1911
Olympic finished its sea trials and would sail on time in May 1911. Titanic was ready for launching. International Mercantile Marine, however, was in a shambles. J. P. Morgan had become a symbol of everything that could go wrong when too much wealth was in the hands of too few men. The New York Times quoted a senator’s description of Morgan as “a beefy, red-faced, thick-necked financial bully, drunk with wealth and power, who bawls his orders to stock markets, directors, courts, governments and nations.” An editorial cartoon depicted Morgan devouring buildings, ships, and steel mills in one panel, and belching grotesquely in another.
Morgan took it all personally. He suffered from sleeplessness, depression, high blood pressure, rotting teeth, and the other infirmities of a man over seventy years old. His health was not improved by his reading accounts of his greatest blunder—International Mercantile Maritime—in the same newspapers that were celebrating Cunard’s brilliant new ships. Morgan juggled cash, bonds, and loans to keep IMM afloat, but the combine was running deeply in the red.
While Morgan, Ismay, International Mercantile Marine, and White Star were enduring the worst of times, Harland and Wolff had never been stronger. Pirrie poured money into the shipyard, replacing the decrepit main office with a three-story brick building—including a new suite for himself—and completed improvements to the sheds and slipways. He fattened his order book by buying control of the Union-Castle Mail Steamship Company, with its forty-four ships. All repair work and new construction for Union-Castle would come to Harland and Wolff. With Olympic, Titanic, and a dozen other ships in the works, the Belfast yard was already running at capacity. To handle the overflow, Pirrie bought majority shares in two shipyards on the Clyde River. He also bought the White Star maintenance yard in Southampton and was negotiating with Ismay for his repair docks in Liverpool. Yet even as Pirrie was buying ships and shipyards, he started rumors that Harland and Wolff might be interested in selling out, to confuse his competition. He didn’t want them to know that he was in the early stages of negotiations for the exclusive British license to build engines that ran on oil instead of coal.