by Brad Matsen
Andrews wrote to Pirrie, telling him that he had added steel to Titanic. They had to do the same thing to Olympic as soon as possible.
Ten
MILLIONAIRE’S CAPTAIN
E. J. Smith arrived in Belfast to take command of Titanic for its sea trials and maiden voyage on the afternoon of March 31, 1912. The first crossings of the newest White Star liner would be Smith’s last, after forty-three years at sea. Smith was more than ready for retirement. All he really wanted to do, he told a reporter in Southampton when he left Olympic, was put an oar on his shoulder, walk inland until somebody asked him what it was, and there spend the rest of his life. A sailor’s best days at sea, he said, were his first and his last.
When Smith boarded, the ship was swarming with men on last-minute assignments to paint and polish it for departure the following morning at dawn. In his full-dress White Star uniform, he led a porter carrying his valise over the gangway into the first-class reception parlor, and up the staircase to the boat deck. Smith radiated command presence like a scent. Shipyard workers stopped what they were doing and tipped their hats or touched their foreheads as he passed. Some of them gawked. The white-bearded, barrel-chested captain looked enough like Lord Pirrie to give them pause.
Titanic’s master’s suite was slightly larger than the one he had aboard Olympic. It was the most luxurious officer’s stateroom afloat, with a parlor the size of three ordinary cabins, a separate bedroom, and a private bath with a copper-plumbed ceramic tub. The rooms were furnished in oak, mahogany, and brass. Nosegays were set out to mask the aromas of fresh paint and carpet glue. Smith was more familiar with the smell of a new ship than any other White Star captain, because he had commanded all of the company’s maiden voyages since Baltic’s in 1904.
Smith’s spacious suite on Titanic was a long way from the cabin boy’s hammock on a square rigger where he’d begun his life as a mariner when he was thirteen years old. The son of a potter, he’d given up a dull tradesmen’s village near Newcastle for the hope of the sea in 1869. The routines of shipboard life soon became second nature to him. A week after his eighteenth birthday, Smith sat for his officer’s papers. He sailed as a relief man out of Liverpool for six years, finally landing a permanent berth as fourth officer on White Star’s Celtic in 1880. Thomas Ismay gave him command of the 565-foot Majestic in 1895.
Since then, Smith had developed a following among first-class passengers, some of whom would travel only on liners under his command. He was charming at dinner, inspired confidence during tours of his navigation bridge, and White Star’s executives thought enough of him to trust him with their best ships. In 1901, when he brought Majestic into New York with a particularly brilliant passenger list of the rich and famous, a newspaper reporter dubbed him “the Millionaire’s Captain.”
When Southampton replaced Liverpool as the port of choice for transatlantic passenger service, Smith moved his wife, Sarah, and their daughter, Helen, into a twin-gabled, red-brick house a few blocks from the harbor. He went home for a night or two between voyages, tinkered with his collection of naval artifacts, and spent an hour each afternoon sequestered in his study smoking a cigar. Smith loved the aroma of the smoke and kept his door closed so as not to disturb the cloud that formed around his chair. At sea, he smoked with passengers in the salon after dinner.
During Smith’s rise to the top of White Star officers’ roster, he weathered the consequences of occasional poor judgment. Most recently, the Admiralty had blamed him for Olympic’s collision with HMS Hawke. Before that, Olympic’s rudder had nicked a tugboat in New York Harbor, tearing a hole in its deckhouse. Smith admitted no error, but White Star paid a $10,000 settlement to the tug’s owner.
Smith also had a reputation for high-speed, flamboyant arrivals and departures in the tight confines of harbors. He grounded Coptic in Rio de Janeiro in 1891, ran Republic aground off Sandy Hook in 1899, and put Adriatic on a sandbar in Ambrose Channel, near New York, in 1909.
None of those incidents killed anybody or cost the company too much money, so Smith’s upward progression within White Star never slowed. For a decade, he had been the subject of newspaper stories celebrating him as the highest-paid sailor in the world. After commanding Adriatic’s maiden voyage in 1907, he had given an impromptu speech to reporters on the pier.
“When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experiences in nearly forty years at sea, I merely say, uneventful,” Smith told them. “Of course, there have been winter gales, and storms and fog and the like, but in all my experience I have never been in any accident of any sort worth speaking about. I never saw a wreck and have never been wrecked, nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort. You see, I am not very good material for a story. As for Adriatic, I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.”
Once Smith took command of a ship, he had absolute authority to make every decision about when it moved or didn’t. Everything about Titanic—from the conduct of a bedroom steward to navigation through dense fog off an uncertain coast—was his personal responsibility. He had lines of command that reached deep into the recesses of every department on the ship, and his subordinates made decisions about which he would never know. But they were all his decisions.
Smith’s first order as master of Titanic was to cancel the sea trials scheduled for the next day, April 1. Before he turned in at midnight on March 31st, it was obvious that the wind howling off Belfast Lough was not going to die down anytime that morning. Smith knew the ship was behind schedule, but he was not going to challenge a gale to find out if Titanic was seaworthy.
His second bit of business as master was to cable White Star to request the immediate transfer of Olympic’s chief officer, Henry Wilde, to Titanic. Smith had every confidence in William Murdoch, who had been assigned by the company to be chief officer, but he wanted the only man who had ever served in that position on so large a ship. Smith didn’t think he’d made any grave mistakes in the incidents with Hawke and the New York tugboat, but he knew there was more to handling a 900-foot-long ship than he completely understood. When maneuvering in close quarters, he wanted Wilde as his second-in-command.
Ismay replied that Wilde would join Titanic in Southampton.
Olympic had performed so well that Pirrie, Ismay, and Andrews scheduled Titanic for only a single day of sea trials. On April 2, Belfast Lough was almost flat calm, with the sun on the eastern horizon beginning to banish the light fog that had settled between the headlands. At dawn, Smith gave the command to hoist the gangways and throw off the mooring lines.
Eight hours earlier, the firemen had ignited twenty of the twenty-nine boilers, so Titanic had a full head of steam. Smith walked to the wing of the bridge to be sure the tugs were in position to ease the ship away from the pier and keep it in the middle of the river. Titanic could not maneuver at slow speed without help from the tugs.
Smith ordered ahead slow on the port and starboard main engines, leaving the center turbine on standby. He stood squared up at the center wheelhouse window with his hands clasped behind his back and gave instructions over his shoulder. His voice was soft and calm, as if he were ordering a meal from a waiter.
Thomas Andrews stood off to the side of the bridge with Board of Trade surveyor Francis Carruthers and White Star’s Harold Sanderson. Ismay would make Titanic’s maiden voyage, but he would not join the ship until Southampton. Sanderson was representing White Star to formally accept delivery of Titanic after the sea trials.
Even at that early hour, crowds had gathered on the riverbanks to send off Harland and Wolff’s masterpiece. Against the chill of early spring, some of them had built fires, which sparkled in the last of the night like little salutes to the ship as it sailed into the Irish Sea.
Smith rounded Copeland Island, entering open water, and rang down all ahead half. For an hour, he zigged and zagged, settling on each new heading for several minutes, feeling the motion
of the ship to determine if its props, rudder, and hull were enduring the pressures of turning. Like Olympic, Titanic took plenty of lead time to change course. After Smith threw the helm hard in either direction, at least thirty seconds passed before the bow began to tick through the points of the compass. Once into the turn, the ship was rock solid.
Smith slowed Titanic to a dead stop. He shut down the center engine and ran the port engine full ahead and the starboard engine full astern, pivoting the ship clockwise in a complete circle. He performed the same maneuver counterclockwise. Then he rang all ahead half. Titanic reached 12 knots running in a straight line. Smith held that for ten minutes. He felt nothing out of the ordinary.
For the first time, Smith rang all ahead full. Ten minutes later, Titanic was making 21 knots. The newly enclosed promenade and the extra steel in the bow seemed to have stiffened the ship. Titanic’s hull was panting, but well within normal limits.
That afternoon, Smith brought the ship up to 20 knots. Without warning, he rang down all astern full, sounding the emergency-stop alarm in the engine room. Instantly, the engineers vented steam, which shrieked out of vents at the tops of the funnels. The propellers stopped, then growled into full speed in reverse. Titanic came to a dead stop 850 yards after Smith had sounded the alarm.
Finally, Smith set Titanic on a south-southeast course and rang all ahead full. He ran for an hour toward the Isle of Man, turned the ship in a wide circle at full cruising speed, and ran for an hour back toward Belfast. At 21 knots for two hours, the ship looked fine.
Andrews went to the Marconi wireless room and sent telegrams to Pirrie aboard his yacht, Valiant, and to Ismay in Southampton. Titanic was ready to go to work.
At sunset, Titanic was back at the dock in Belfast. In the sitting room of the master’s suite, Board of Trade inspector Francis Carruthers signed the certificate of seaworthiness, effective for one year from April 2, 1912. Immediately afterward, Thomas Andrews and White Star vice president Harold Sanderson transferred ownership of Titanic from Harland and Wolff to the White Star Line.
Andrews went to his first-class stateroom on A Deck and wrote a note to his wife: “Just a line to let you know that we got away this morning in fine style and have had a very satisfactory trial. We are getting more ship-shape every hour, but there is still a great deal to be done.” He sealed the note in an envelope embossed with the red-and-white pennant of the White Star Line and gave it to a steward for the last Belfast dispatch pouch. Titanic sailed for Southampton an hour later.
A new White Star ship always called first at Liverpool for ceremonial inspection by the people of its home port, but Ismay ordered Smith to take Titanic straight to Southampton. Coaling, provisioning, and loading would take five days. Easter Sunday, April 7, was a holiday. Olympic would sail westbound on April 3, and eastbound on April 11. Titanic had to leave Southampton on April 10, synchronized on opposite schedules with its sister to make the most of two-ship express service.
Smith told Ismay that he had a couple of problems that had to be ironed out or Titanic might not get out of Southampton at all. Chief Engineer Joseph Bell had just told him that the forward starboard coal bunker was on fire. Smith and Bell had dealt with bunker fires aboard steamships, which were not uncommon. Because wet coal is more combustible than dry coal, water would make the fire worse. The only way to extinguish it was to feed the smoldering coal into the furnaces. When the bunker was empty, the fire would be out. They would then repair the damage to the surrounding steel bulkheads. Smith ordered Bell to keep a gang of men spraying the bulkhead behind the fire twenty-four hours a day to prevent it from warping as much as possible.
The bunker fire didn’t worry Smith enough to delay Titanic’s departure from Belfast. He had consulted Andrews, who’d told him there was no danger to the safety of the ship as long as they kept the bulkheads around the bunker wet. After the fire was out, Smith should make sure the scorched steel was scrubbed and painted before they reached New York. The American immigration inspectors had to certify the ship as safe for the return voyage, and a burned-out coal bunker wouldn’t look good.
Smith’s second problem was far more of a threat to delay his departure from Southampton. Ordinarily, coaling a ship was routine, but two months earlier, miners had walked off the job in Wales, Scotland, and England. The White Star storage bins at the harbor were empty. Smith needed 6,500 tons of coal when he got to Southampton or Titanic wasn’t going anywhere.
Ismay said he was working on it.
At midnight on April 4, tugs eased Titanic alongside the White Star docks in Southampton. None of the officers or crew had gotten much sleep, but the ship had performed beautifully on the 570-mile run through a night and a day from Belfast. The Irish Sea remained calm. There was very little vibration or sense of movement. It was like being in a good hotel onshore.
Andrews wrote to Helen from Southampton. “I wired you this morning of our safe arrival after a very satisfactory trip,” he told her. “The weather was good and everyone most pleasant. I think the ship will clean up all right before sailing on Wednesday.”
On Friday, April 5, Smith left enough officers aboard Titanic for round-the-clock watches on the bridge and went home to his wife and daughter for a final few nights ashore. He ordered his ship dressed with all flags flying between its masts in honor of Good Friday, and turned Titanic over to the battalions of stevedores and stewards preparing the ship to receive passengers at first light on Wednesday morning.
Southampton is a perfect harbor. The city occupies a promontory formed by the confluence of two rivers, the Test and the Itchen, which empty into the English Channel. The first lucky sailors to find shelter there were Romans, two thousand years earlier, and Southampton has been an active port ever since. Shortly after Ismay and Pirrie had sketched out their dream ships in the summer of 1907, they persuaded the owners of the Southampton wharves to build a dock big enough to hold them. They’d finished in time for Olympic’s first voyage in the spring of 1911. The dock was a concrete parallelogram, with one end open to the river and 1,700-foot-long piers on either side, each of which could hold two of the new giants at the same time.
At the head of the dock, White Star had built new warehouses and chandleries for provisioning its ships. Except for the few supplies for feeding crew and workers on the trip from Belfast, Titanic’s larders and pantries were empty when it arrived. Gangs of day laborers and stevedores worked around the clock to load one hundred tons of provisions, everything needed to serve three meals a day to 2,200 people on the five-day voyage to New York. The first of the stewards and stewardesses went aboard to make up the passenger staterooms, taking delivery of fifteen thousand sheets, twenty-five thousand towels, and seventy-five hundred blankets.
On the afternoon of Friday, April 5, Ismay told Smith that he had solved the coal problem. He’d canceled the voyages of White Star’s Adriatic and Oceanic, and of the IMM liners New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. Titanic would get 4,425 tons of coal from those five ships. Added to the 1,400 tons he already had left over from sea trials and the run from Belfast, it would be enough.
With the promise of enough coal for his voyage, Smith gave permission to load Titanic’s six cargo holds. Freighters and slower ships handled bulk shipments of ore, grain, dry goods, and the other staples of ocean commerce. The fast liners hauled the more exotic, urgent, refrigerated, and perishable cargo, for which their owners charged double or triple the price for express service.
On its first trip across the North Atlantic, Titanic would carry twelve cases of ostrich plumes, three hundred cases of shelled walnuts, twenty-five cases of sardines, four cases of straw hats, three cases of tennis balls, two barrels of mercury, a new Renault automobile, fifteen cases of rabbit hair, one case of Edison gramophones, three cases of hairnets, two cases of shoes, and seventy-six cases of dragon’s blood (the sap from a palm tree found in the Canary Islands that was used to color varnish and women’s makeup). The cargo manifest listed cases of anchovies,
mussels, liquor, wine, linoleum, raw leather, hats, books, soap, cameras, canvas, cheese, hosiery, speedometers, straw hats, candles, rubber, olive oil, lace collars, boots, brushes, sponges, flowers, magazines, cheese, velvet, linen, tea, stationery, silk, pens, butter, potatoes, and seven million pieces of mail.
Titanic had the most powerful Marconi wireless afloat. The sinking of RMS Republic had transformed shipboard radio telegraph from a novel convenience for wealthy passengers to an essential part of the safety equipment of a transoceanic ship. Jack Binns, who had stayed at Republic’s telegraph key until help arrived, had become a national hero. He’d left the sea and taken a job as a reporter for the New York American. Marconi had won a Nobel Prize. Titanic’s wireless had a range of 350 miles, depending on atmospheric conditions. On the heavily traveled North Atlantic route, a half dozen or more ships and shore stations should be within range if it sent out a distress call.
Jack Phillips, Titanic’s senior wireless officer, was a twenty-five-year-old Englishman who had never wanted to be anything but a telegrapher. As a schoolboy in Surrey, he’d read about Guglielmo Marconi’s experiments with invisible waves that traveled through the air carrying messages; he’d later taken a job at the post office to learn telegraphy. Marconi had hired him in 1906, assigning him to White Star’s Teutonic.
The junior wireless officer, Harold Bride, was twenty-two. Like Phillips, he had been enchanted by the combination of science that bordered on magic and the chance to go to sea. He had idolized Jack Binns and had signed on with Marconi as soon as he’d finished school. Bride had a knack for sending Samuel Morse’s code of dots and dashes, with a fast, accurate hand on the telegraph key. On his first assignment in 1911 aboard the IMM liner Haverford, Bride had become a rising star because of what other telegraphers called his “fist.” The following year, he’d been assigned to the biggest, most luxurious White Star liner.