Titanic's Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler

by Brad Matsen

  Rudolf Diesel had invented the new engine a decade earlier, and it had been tested successfully on ships. Though supplies of oil were far from reliable, Pirrie intended to be ready. He was convinced that freeing ships from their dependence on coal would be as revolutionary a transformation as the switch from sails to steam.

  After Olympic’s sea trials, Andrews left the ship at the deep-water dock and went to Pirrie’s office. Margaret Pirrie had decorated the chairman’s suite like a gentlemen’s club, with leather armchairs and a mahogany conference table that Pirrie used as a desk. A fireplace, its mantel supported by four classic marble columns, was shuttered by a filigreed iron screen for the summer. Over it, light flooded into the room through a huge stained glass window of blue, green, and white panes depicting the eastern and western hemispheres above a steamship under way.

  With a Board of Trade surveyor standing by to sign the seaworthiness certificates, and Ismay there to formally accept delivery, Andrews told Pirrie that he had seen the hull panting. Pirrie said all ships panted. Pirrie was accompanying the delivery party to Liverpool, so he’d get a firsthand look at the panting for the initial leg of the trip. He wasn’t going on to New York, for reasons he didn’t care to discuss.

  Pirrie ordered Andrews to lead an inspection party to New York and back on Olympic and, when the time came, on Titanic. Watch the hulls, Pirrie said. Watch everything. If we have to, we can double up steel on the seams over the bottom. We can stiffen the superstructure. We can do the same to Titanic. These are big ships, but they are only ships.

  Pirrie was not going to let a slight tremor in the ship’s hull derail the spectacular party he had orchestrated for launching Titanic and sending Olympic off on its maiden voyage. The chartered steamer Duke of Argyll brought four hundred reporters, White Star executives, and guests, including, this time, J. P. Morgan. All morning, the crowd streamed into the shipyard. Dignitaries toured the yard, then sat in the crimson-and-white grandstands. On the banks of the river, 150,000 people waited to watch Titanic move for the first time, and to wave as Olympic sailed for Liverpool, Southampton, and New York in the afternoon.

  Olympic towered over Belfast. Against the pewter sky of the spring morning, the ship seemed to glow in its White Star livery of dark gray hull, bright white superstructure, and yellow piping. Its four yellow funnels, striped at the top with gray bands, rose higher into the sky than any other man-made structure in Ireland.

  On the gangways, an endless stream of men loaded the ship. Inside, stewards made up the staterooms with linen and filled vases with flowers. Waiters set the tables for the meals they would serve to the company guests in the first-class dining room that evening on the way across the Irish Sea. Porters lugged crates of fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat to the larders. On the bridge, Captain Smith and his skeleton crew of officers and engineers met to plan for a four-thirty P.M. departure from Belfast. The full crew would board the next day in Liverpool.

  Under the gantry where it had risen for the past year and a half, Titanic rested on wooden platforms coated with twenty-two tons of tallow to ease its passage into the water. At noon, the bosses blew their whistles. More than two hundred shipyard workers, who looked like ants beneath the gigantic hull, scurried to safety. The bosses counted their men and discovered that one of them was missing. After a frantic search, they found a laborer, James Dobbins, pinned beneath one of the wooden timbers that had been removed to free the ship.

  Dobbins was the third man to die working on Titanic. The first had been a fifteen-year-old rivet catcher, Samuel Scott, who’d fallen from a ladder into the open hull of the ship; the second, a nineteen-year-old heater boy, John Kelly, had dropped from scaffolding to the floor of the concrete slipway. Six men had died building Olympic. In the two and a half years since Andrews had laid the keel for the first of the sisters, two hundred injured men had been loaded into Lady Pirrie’s ambulances for the trip to the hospital. Fewer than half of them had recovered fully enough to return to work.

  After the ambulance carted Dobbins away, a barrage of red signal flares exploded in the air. The voices of 150,000 people faded, and the clatter of the waterfront fell silent as though all of Belfast had drawn a deep breath. Pirrie stood in the front row of the grandstand, waved his arm in a circle over his head, and shouted his launch command: “Now!”

  Two of the bosses released the last of the restraining cables. The launch cradle broke free of the greased slipway, and Titanic creaked and groaned until a riot of horns, whistles, and cheering drowned out the sounds of the ship’s battle with inertia. In seconds, it was sliding smoothly, picking up speed until it was afloat in the river and stopped dead by straining tugs and anchors. Alongside the glistening Olympic just upriver, the raw, unfinished Titanic looked like the tough cousin of a dandy.

  Pirrie, Ismay, Morgan, their wives, and their titled guests had lunch in the Harland and Wolff dining room. They lifted their glasses to their new ships and then again, to toast Margaret Pirrie; her birthday, May 31, happened to coincide with launch day.

  Reporters, company executives, and lesser dignitaries went to the Grand Central Hotel in Belfast to celebrate with a dance band, their own toasts, an extravagant meal, and champagne. They ended the afternoon by sending a telegram across the river to the shipyard, congratulating Lord and Lady Pirrie on the launching, Olympic’s impending departure, and Lady Pirrie’s birthday.

  Afterward, five hundred men and women in the White Star and Harland and Wolff parties boarded Olympic as the Belfast City Band played a selection of rags, waltzes, and marches. At four-fifteen, the band struck up “Rule, Britannia!” and the crew stowed the gangways, and longshoremen slipped the lines free of the dock. Tugs on the bow and the outboard side of the ship roared and belched smoke. Almost imperceptibly at first, and then as inexorably as a force of nature, Olympic moved toward the mouth of the river Lagan.

  Many of the thousands of people who had lined the banks to watch the launching of Titanic had picnicked for the afternoon. They were stunned to silence as Olympic drew abreast of them, then recovered from their awe and began cheering and clapping. The ship took an eternity to pass by. As Olympic cleared the end of Queen’s Island, its propellers began to turn faster, sending up a swirl of white water as though a submarine explosion had taken place under the stern. The tugs dropped their lines and joined the flotilla escorting Olympic into the Irish Sea in a noisy parade of horns and sirens. In ten minutes, the final notes of Belfast’s appreciation for what its shipyard had done went silent. The escorts turned for home. Olympic was on its own.

  Before Olympic had faded from view, the bunting was off the grandstands, bosses were barking instead of smiling, and two thousand men were crawling all over Titanic at the fitting-out dock. Without its engines and boilers, the ship rode high on its lines, half the red-painted bottom visible above the water. From across the river, an observer could easily measure the progress of fitting out. Titanic would sink deeper and deeper into the water until it sailed on its maiden voyage, scheduled for March 20, 1912.

  The 250-ton floating crane was busy around the clock lowering machinery into the ship through openings that would eventually be covered by the four funnels. The engines were assembled onshore, tested, dismantled, and put back together on the ship. Rivet squads and carpenters roughed out the rabbit warren of passageways and staterooms on the accommodations decks, turning over sections of the ship to finishers and carpet layers.

  Four months into fitting out Titanic, Thomas Andrews was savoring the predictable routines of building another on-time ship. With the good weather and a full order book, the Belfast yard was alive around the clock. Every few days, couriers from the Harland and Wolff yards in Scotland and England arrived with progress reports, which Andrews compiled for monthly meetings of the company directors.

  Olympic was such a magnificent, profitable ship that Ismay was thinking about ordering a third, to make a trio of perfect sisters. After Olympic had completed its first crossing in 5 days, 16
hours, and 42 minutes at an average speed of 21.7 knots, with five boilers unlit, he cabled Pirrie from New York. He told Pirrie that he was thoroughly pleased with Olympic and offered his warm and sincere congratulations, signing the telegram, as always, “Yamsi.”

  Ismay followed up with a letter in which he pointed out a few problems. The mattresses were a bit too soft, accentuating the vibrations from the engines. The first-class reception room needed fifty additional cane chairs and ten tables because it was so popular. A potato peeler should be installed in the crew galley. The first-class bathrooms needed cigar holders. And the first-class suites on B Deck could be enlarged because there was plenty of space for private promenades.

  It was the busiest time Andrews had ever known at Harland and Wolff, but he kept pace by working steady shifts from six A.M. to six P.M. On the afternoon of September 21, 1911, he was about to go home to his wife and infant daughter when the courier from Southampton arrived.

  Just after noon the day before, the dispatch from Pirrie said, the 360-foot heavy cruiser HMS Hawke had slammed into Olympic, which was leaving Southampton harbor on its fifth voyage. Hawke was a twenty-year-old warship with five-inch-thick steel plating, armed with guns, torpedoes, and an underwater ram made of steel and concrete for sinking enemy ships.

  Hawke’s bow tore a massive triangular hole in Olympic’s flank, just above the starboard propeller where the hull tapered into the overhanging stern. The warship’s ram punctured Olympic below the waterline. People onshore a mile away heard the collision.

  Olympic was never in danger of sinking. The liner was under the control of a pilot when the collision occurred, a maritime custom that put an officer with explicit knowledge of local waters aboard an arriving or departing ship. Though E. J. Smith was Olympic’s captain, the pilot was making navigational decisions in the harbor. After the collision, Smith instantly took over and brought his ship into Osborne Bay, on the Isle of Wight. He unloaded the passengers onto tenders that took them back to the mainland, and inspected the damage. Two compartments were flooded, but the watertight doors had worked perfectly. On the next high tide, Smith took Olympic back to Southampton, where the Harland and Wolff repair yard went into emergency shifts to close the holes with steel plating below the waterline and wood above. As soon as possible, the courier told Andrews, Olympic would come back to Belfast for dry-docking.

  The holing of the largest ship in the world was front-page news for weeks as an Admiralty court held an inquiry to assess blame for the collision. HMS Hawke’s captain, Commander William Blunt, claimed that the enormous suction of Olympic’s giant propellers had drawn his cruiser into the liner. Captain Smith said Blunt was showing off for Olympic’s passengers lining the rail as the ship left port and misjudged the clearance on the stern. The Admiralty sued White Star for damages to Hawke; White Star sued the Admiralty for damages to Olympic. White Star lost but took no action against Smith, who was the company’s most senior captain, and the highest-paid sailor on the ocean. Ismay believed Smith more than he believed the Admiralty.

  Ismay and Pirrie were annoyed by the interruption in service and the bad publicity surrounding the collision, but it gave them the opportunity to point out that Olympic was not only the biggest and most luxurious ship afloat but the strongest. While Captain Smith was ashore testifying at the inquiry, he also gave interviews to the press.

  “My ship’s frame took the shock well,” he said. “There was no panic. Many passengers did not even know there had been a collision, so slight was the shock felt in the dining saloon. The watertight doors held the compartments sealed. Anyhow, Olympic is unsinkable, and Titanic will be the same when she is put in commission. Either vessel could be cut in halves and each section would remain afloat. I venture to add that even if the engines and boilers were to fall through their bottoms, the vessels would remain afloat.”

  Smith’s conclusions about Olympic’s seaworthiness were reassuring, but the collision left Andrews with an enormous problem. Only one dry dock on earth was big enough to take Olympic. At the moment, it was occupied by the ship’s half-finished sister. Titanic had to come out of the dry dock, which meant it was going to be at least a month late.

  Pirrie had skipped Olympic’s first crossing to New York, in May, because he had been plagued with a pain in his groin and a constant urge to urinate. He’d left the ship in Southampton. A week later, in London, a surgeon said it was only a matter of time before Pirrie was either going to keel over from the pain or agree to have his prostate gland removed. The gland was enlarged and getting bigger. He might have a cancer. He might not. No matter what, the problem wasn’t going to disappear by itself.

  To Pirrie, surgeons fell into the same hazy category as palm readers. He decided to wait and see what happened. The pain and urination problems were intermittent. As soon as they eased up, he went back to work and waited for the next round. There was simply no other choice, given the fabulous boom he was riding. He definitely didn’t want to tell Ismay, Andrews, or anybody else except Margaret that he might have a cancer. When Hawke rammed Olympic, he was just getting over an agonizing bout with the ailment, but he was feeling pretty good.

  Pirrie thought it would inspire confidence if he and Ismay rode their crippled ship from Southampton to Belfast. The wounded Olympic steamed back into the river Lagan on the morning of October 5. When the ship was dry-docked, Pirrie and Andrews were shocked at the extent of the gashes in its hull, but they could not banish their pride. The collision with HMS Hawke would cost White Star more than £250,000 in repairs and lost revenue. Titanic was behind schedule. But Olympic had survived a blow that would have sunk most ships.

  What the surveyors found farther forward on the ship a few days later was not such good news. Under the navigation bridge, right where Andrews had watched the hull panting during the sea trials, there were cracks in the steel. Not big cracks—small ones radiating from the windows and rivets. They didn’t have much of a pattern except that they were in the front of the ship on both sides. The surveyors also found cracks on both sides of the ship where the plates of the main hull joined the plates of the bottom. The cracks weren’t serious, but some steel was moving that shouldn’t be moving. There was no time to do anything about the bow of Olympic, but Pirrie, Andrews, and Ismay decided to reinforce Titanic before sending it to sea.

  Any misgivings Ismay had about the strength of Olympic’s hull did not prevent him from placing an order for the third ship on October 23. At a ceremony in Pirrie’s office, work officially began on Harland and Wolff Hull No. 433 with signatures in the order book. Construction would begin the following month. Ismay said he would name the ship Britannic. The first White Star liner to bear that name had made more than three hundred voyages in twenty-nine years of service before retiring in 1903.

  Olympic left the dry dock on November 14, 1911, a week before the riveters stitched together the first pieces of Britannic under the gantry crane. Andrews decided to keep working on Titanic at the outfitting wharf and bring it back into dry dock for propellers and bottom paint in early February. Moving the ship once instead of twice would save three or four days. White Star was still selling tickets for Titanic’s first voyage dated March 20, hoping that Harland and Wolff could make up the time lost due to the Hawke incident.

  Work slowed predictably as December and January brought rain, snow, and dismally short days. The engines, the boilers, and the rest of the machinery were done. The four funnels were on the ship. The bulk of the work was inside now. In January, Andrews pulled riveters and platers from Britannic and put them to work enclosing the A Deck promenades on both sides of Titanic.

  The enclosed promenade allowed for the addition of another café, but most importantly, it strengthened Titanic where Olympic was cracking. The added steel stiffened the front of the ship from just behind the bridge to the base of the second funnel. Andrews also reinforced the seams in the bow where the double plates of the bottom met the single plates of the main hull. If Titanic panted like
Olympic, the extra steel would reduce the chances that cracks in the hull would develop at that point. He was building Britannic from the same set of plans he’d used for the first two ships, so he made notes in red pencil to add the steel in the superstructure and bow seams.

  In late February, Andrews put Titanic in the dry dock to fit its propellers, give it a final coat of bottom paint, and trim the rudder. Just as the men finished timbering the hull, the bosses shouted at them to stop work and stand by for new orders. Olympic was coming back. They had to flood the dock and tow Titanic back into the river.

  Andrews could hardly believe his bad luck. Two days out of New York, about 750 miles south of Newfoundland, Olympic had started shuddering violently; the ship had thrown a propeller blade. It took Smith a week to limp home on two engines.

  Replacing a propeller blade was only a five-day job, but Titanic’s March 15 delivery date and March 20 maiden voyage were lost. While Olympic was in the dry dock, a Board of Trade surveyor inspected the front of the ship. The results stunned Andrews. The fractures on the bridge deck had grown. And there were more loose rivets and plates on the seams above the double bottom.