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

by Brad Matsen

  Titanic’s officers spent the last night before sailing on board. First Officer William Murdoch, the son of a sea captain, had gone to sea aboard square riggers sailing between Liverpool and South America. He was so natural a mariner that he’d sat for the second mate’s exam after four years instead of five. His last assignment had been as first officer aboard Olympic. Murdoch had no hard feelings about Smith replacing him with Wilde. It was only a matter of time before he would become not only chief officer but master of one of White Star’s biggest ships.

  Second Officer Charles Lightoller’s last assignment had been as first officer on Oceanic. The son of a mill owner, he’d gone to sea as a teenager, quit after three shipwrecks and a near-fatal bout with malaria, prospected for gold in the Yukon, failed at that, became a cowboy in Alberta, didn’t care for that life either, and had returned to the White Star Line twelve years before that night in Southampton. He was a devoted Christian Scientist. Delighted to be rescued from idle days or weeks at the dock waiting for coal, at dinner aboard Titanic, he told the other officers that he was a very contented chap to have the chance to sail on so wonderful a ship.

  Henry Wilde had also begun his career aboard sailing ships. He’d arrived in Southampton a week earlier as chief officer on Olympic, expecting to become the captain on Oceanic. When Oceanic’s voyage fell victim to the coal strike and Smith asked Ismay to transfer him to Titanic, Wilde believed he was making his last trip as chief officer. On his next, he would be a master.

  Wilde was pleased to be sailing with his friend E. J. Smith, but he had different feelings about Titanic than Lightoller. After dinner, he wrote a farewell note to his sister. “I still don’t like this ship,” Wilde said in closing. “I have a queer feeling about it.”

  At sunrise on Wednesday, April 10, Smith returned to Titanic to oversee the arrival of the rest of the crew. Eight hundred and sixty-one men signed ship’s papers as seamen, firemen, engineers, saloon stewards, bedroom stewards, chefs, and waiters; also signing were a squash professional, a gymnasium instructor, two lifeguards for the swimming pool, and four Turkish bath attendants. Twenty-three women signed on: eighteen stewardesses, two cashiers, a masseuse, a Turkish bath attendant, and a matron to serve as a chaperone for single women traveling in third class.

  Stewardess Violet Jessop came over from Olympic to add experience to Titanic’s female crew. After her childhood in Argentina, she had gone to sea at twenty-one as a stewardess aboard the steamship Orinoco. Except for a few brief spells between voyages, she had not lived ashore since. When Jessop sailed on Olympic’s first crossing in June 1911, the crew chose her to present Thomas Andrews with a walking stick, to thank him for designing a ship with better accommodations for the men on the crew.

  When Andrews was designing the new ships, he had asked crew members what improvements would make their lives at sea better. As a result, Olympic was the first White Star ship to have bathrooms for seamen and stewards. On other ships, women crew members took baths behind closed doors but men used deck buckets for washing. Andrews had further improved the crew’s quarters on Titanic, with more bathrooms, more lavatories, and better mattresses.

  The members of the ship’s string band were among the first people to come aboard. Band leader Wallace Hartley, three cellists, a pianist, two violinists, and two violists stowed their personal gear in their second-class staterooms, then set up their stands off the reception hall to play for arriving passengers. They were masters of the White Star music book of 352 tunes, including Scott Joplin rags, selections from Carmen, the “Emperor Waltz,” “Rule, Britannia!” “God Save the King,” “Yankee Doodle,” “The Star Spangled Banner,” and a selection of Episcopal hymns. The band played in two ensembles, one in first class, one in second, coming together for occasional galas.

  The newspapers in New York and London touted the maiden voyage of Titanic as an even more glamorous high-society event than that of Olympic or any of the new Cunarders. William Randolph Hearst’s New York American reported that Titanic’s 329 first-class passengers were worth a total of $500 million. Other papers celebrated the size of the ship. If Titanic were stood on its stern, its bow would top the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building in New York, at seven hundred feet the tallest building in the world. Headline writers on both sides of the Atlantic gushed over “The Wonder Ship,” “The Last Word in Luxury,” “The Unsinkable Ship,” and “The Biggest Ship in the World.” The Wall Street Journal dubbed it “The Millionaire’s Special.”

  The London Standard declared White Star the victor over Cunard: “In the fight during the coming season, there will be a scent of battle all the way from New York to the shores of this country—a contest of sea giants in which the Titanic will doubtless take highest honors.”

  There were also detractors. The editors of the Economist snarled at shipbuilders attempting to “lick creation with monster ships that involved too great a concentration of life and wealth in a single bottom.”

  In America, Engineering News bashed the trend toward bigger and more luxurious ships, saying, “These latest marine monsters are built primarily to furnish the acme of luxury to passenger travel. Instead of representing an advance in economic transportation, they probably represent an actual increase in cost.”

  J. P. Morgan followed the news about Titanic, but he was going to miss its maiden voyage. The United States had relaxed the import duties on old works of art, and he was preoccupied with shipping his treasures home. In late March 1912, the delicate arrangements with customs and the museums that Morgan had put in place to spirit his collections out of Europe fell apart. One of his key agents abruptly resigned. Morgan, who was in Aix-en-Provence, called a meeting in France for the middle of April; he cabled Ismay with his regrets.

  Pirrie, too, was unable to make the trip. In the middle of February, in constant pain and crippled by fever, he’d been ready to try anything. A surgeon had released his bladder in an agonizing procedure using a probe into his urethra, but the blockage had returned within a week. In early March, Pirrie had risked an operation to reduce the size of his swollen prostate, for which the odds were against survival. When Titanic was ready to sail from Southampton, Pirrie was recovering from surgery aboard his yacht, Valiant, in the Baltic Sea, battling the sepsis that had invaded his guts.

  Recuperating on the yacht had been Margaret Pirrie’s idea. Valiant was 307 feet long, with a crew of fifty, the largest private ship in the world. Pirrie would want for nothing, and his wife knew that he would have loathed the steady stream of well-wishers if he were at home in London or Belfast. On Valiant, only she, a doctor, four nurses, and the crew would witness the suffering and weakness of a man who had been near death for weeks.

  At eleven-fifteen, Chief Engineer Bell came to the bridge and told Smith that the bunker fire was still burning but that it should be out by the next day. His men were shoveling the smoldering coal into the furnaces. The steel bulkhead behind the bunker was warping a bit, but not too badly. Bell told Smith there was no reason to delay their departure.

  At eleven-thirty, Smith finished the last of a bale of paperwork that had occupied him for most of the morning, the Master’s Report to the Company. I herewith report this ship loaded and ready for sea, Smith wrote. The engines and boilers are in good order for the voyage, and all charts and sailing directions are up-to-date. Your obedient servant, Edward J. Smith.

  The Board of Trade surveyor Francis Carruthers completed his last official act before leaving Titanic, approving its departure in the Report of Survey of an Emigrant Ship. I am satisfied that the hull, boilers and machinery are in good condition and fit for the voyage, Carruthers said. There is enough coal on board to take the ship to her next coaling port. There is enough water on board, certified to be 206,800 gallons, contained in seven tanks.

  The chief purser reported to Smith that 329 passengers, 5 of them children, had embarked in first class; 285, including 22 children, in second class; and 710, of which 76 were children, in third class. It wa
s not a full load, but the voyage would still be profitable.

  At eleven forty-five, Smith sounded the ship’s whistle to order visitors ashore. The crew swung the gangways and sealed the boarding hatches. The last boat train back to London left, and the crowd on the dock thinned to stevedores, line handlers, and a few well-wishers who were staying for the day in Southampton. Several hundred locals lined the strand in front of the White Star building. When the whistle blared they broke into cheers and applause.

  From the bridge, Smith directed his officers by telephone as they threw the mooring lines to the dock. He had taken hundreds of ships to sea, but the exhilaration of breaking free of land had never left him.

  The thumping chorus of the tugboat engines rose several octaves as Titanic moved away from the pier and out into the river Test. Over the noise of the tugs, Smith heard what sounded like a volley of rifle shots on the port side. He ran to the bridge wing and saw the 560-foot SS New York heading straight for his ship.

  It was the HMS Hawke accident all over again. Titanic’s propellers had created a maelstrom of suction, snapping New York’s mooring lines to set the liner adrift. It was helpless, fifty feet away, and moving fast toward Titanic’s stern. Black smoke belched from one of the tugboats as it accelerated around New York’s bow, its crew scrambling to throw a line to men on the deck of the drifting ship.

  The passengers lining the rails were oblivious to what was about to happen to Titanic. The band was playing a medley from Oscar Straus’s Chocolate Soldier. Sailors were coiling the mooring lines. On the mooring bridge over the stern, Smith saw Henry Wilde looking on helplessly as New York bore down on his ship.

  Smith’s celebrated career was about to end in ignominy. Clutching at one last straw, he bellowed to the helmsman inside the bridge: Port engine ahead full! He had never heard of a captain fending off another ship with his own propeller wash, but it might work. The engine room took an interminable thirty seconds to respond to his command from the navigation bridge. New York was forty feet away. Twenty. At last, a foaming brown hump erupted from Titanic’s port propeller. Churning mud from the bottom of the river, the wave surged toward the drifting ship, slammed into its flank, and stopped New York four feet from Titanic’s stern.

  Smith walked back to the center of his navigation bridge. In a voice that betrayed nothing of the dire moment that had just passed, he ordered all ahead slow and set a course across the English Channel for the five-hour run to Cherbourg. After a stop there for passengers and another the following day in Queenstown, on the southern tip of Ireland (now called Cobh), he could settle into the placid routines of the five-day crossing to New York.

  Eleven

  41° 46' NORTH, 50° 14' WEST

  Four nights after leaving Queenstown, Bruce Ismay was drifting off to sleep in the best stateroom on Titanic. The parlor suite had two bedrooms, a sitting room, a private promenade, book-matched walnut paneling, and a fireplace. Its tooled mahogany furniture, fluted columns, and rule-straight moldings evoked the ruins of Pompeii that had inspired Louis XVI.

  It had taken Ismay a while to wind down. He’d just turned fifty, and sleep had become increasingly elusive, even though he felt better than he had in months. The voyage had been nothing but pleasure so far. Titanic was a good-humored ship, with a genial feeling among the passengers and crew wherever he went. Mechanically, it was performing perfectly. Andrews told him that Britannic would be even better. With a third Olympic class sister—even a fourth was not out of the question—he would be competing with Cunard on even terms for the first time since his father had died.

  White Star was having its best year financially since his brother, James, had quit after the sale to Morgan. From time to time, Bruce had envied his brother’s bucolic life raising show cattle in Dorset, but not that night on Titanic. International Mercantile Marine had never made a penny, but as its president Ismay had brought the combine around so at least it wasn’t costing White Star or Harland and Wolff any money. The shipyard was more profitable than ever. Pirrie had almost died, but Ismay had heard he would be up and around in July. Before his illness, Pirrie had been obsessed with the notion of ships that ran on oil instead of coal. The recent miners’ strike had ended just before Titanic left Southampton, but the next one could start anytime. With Pirrie’s oil-fired diesel engines, White Star could lead the world into a new age of transatlantic shipping.

  Before turning in at eleven o’clock, Ismay had said good night to his valet, Richard Fry, who had his own cabin across the corridor. Fry had been with him for ten years, serving also as his bridge partner and dependable traveling companion. Ismay kept to himself aboard ship, preferring quiet dinners and a card game in his cabin to the soirees with first-class passengers. That evening, he had gone down to the salon alone, run into the ship’s surgeon, Dr. William O’Loughlin, and taken a table for two. Ismay greeted passengers who recognized him as he made his way through the enormous dining room, but he didn’t stop to chat. Those who knew he was Titanic’s owner offered congratulations. Several said that their bonds with the White Star Line were stronger because of the magnificent new ship. Ismay knew that loyalty and word of mouth among them and their friends was priceless publicity. Just the list of their names would make news when Titanic arrived in New York.

  Isidor Straus, who co-owned Macy’s department store, and his wife, Ida, had been on vacation in Europe. The English journalist and political rascal William T. Stead was on his way to a peace congress organized by President William Howard Taft. Taft’s friend and most trusted military adviser, Major Archibald Butt, was aboard, as were London fashion designer Lucy, who was Lady Duff-Gordon, and her husband, Cosmo. Benjamin Guggenheim, the mining tycoon, was on his way back from a business trip that had been shrouded in the mystery that followed the man around like a fog. John Jacob Astor IV, who had shocked New York society by divorcing his wife, marrying eighteen-year-old Madeleine Force, and fleeing with her to Europe, was bringing his new wife home so their first child would be born in the United States.

  Ismay had crossed the Atlantic countless times, but this was only his third trip on a maiden voyage of one of his ships. His first had been on Adriatic, his second on Olympic. Both had been with E. J. Smith in command. Ismay loathed dealing with the press, which was always part of the first voyage of a new ocean liner, especially one that had drawn so much hoopla. He had Sanderson to take care of publicity in England, and Phillip Franklin in America, but there would be no avoiding the reporters when Titanic arrived on Wednesday morning. Ismay had endured the press in Southampton, and he supposed he’d have to do the same in New York.

  Ismay was finally surrendering to sleep when something changed. His bed shuddered, only for an instant, but enough to fully wake him. Instinct pulled him to his feet, into his slippers, and out to the corridor. He asked a passing steward what had happened. The steward said he had no idea. Ismay stood there, sensing the heartbeats of his ship. Nothing. Probably nothing. No. The engines slowed down. Then they stopped completely. Ismay went back into his sitting room, put on an overcoat, and started for the bridge. Something had definitely happened. Maybe a propeller blade. Damn. It had been going so well. Ismay went forward to the grand staircase in the reception hall, up to the boat deck, and forward to the bridge.

  After tucking in her first-class passengers, stewardess Violet Jessop had returned to her stateroom on E Deck. She was in her nightgown, reading, happy about her new home and grateful for the electric lights, when, for an instant, she thought she felt something different about the engines. Jessop had learned to be alert to the rhythms of a ship. Every change meant something. She dropped her magazine to the coverlet at her side and listened more carefully. She distinctly heard a low, growling sound. She leaned over the side of her top bunk. Her roommate, Elizabeth Leather, who had been at sea longer than she had, was staring up at her over the side of her berth.

  As calmly as if she were commenting on eggs and bacon, Elizabeth said, “It sounds as if something has
happened.”

  Anna Turja, an eighteen-year-old Finnish émigré on her way to a job in Ohio, was in her berth near the stern on the starboard side of D Deck. She was traveling with her brother, Matt, who was in the single men’s quarters, far away in the bow. To Anna, Titanic was bliss. She was one of twenty-one children, and her cabin was more comfortable than any room in which she had ever slept. She was sharing the cabin with another Finnish woman, Maria Panula, on her way, with five sons, to Coal Center, Pennsylvania, to join her husband, Emil, who had been in America for a year.

  As the first tendrils of sleep took hold, Anna heard a rumbling deep in the ship below her. Having been informed that Titanic had three propellers as big as Dutch windmills, she assumed that the shuddering had something to do with them. Anna called across the room to Maria Panula, who was sleeping soundly after a day of wrangling her five boys, ages one to sixteen. Maria didn’t wake up. The rumbling stopped. The boys didn’t stir. Anna climbed out of her lower berth and eased into the passageway. A dozen men and women were leaning out of their doors, clutching their nightclothes to their necks.

  In a two-berth cabin in the men’s compartment at the bow on F Deck, Olaus Abelseth had been asleep for two hours. He was returning to his homestead farm in South Dakota from a visit to Norway, traveling with two cousins who were in another part of the ship. As a favor to a friend from his town in Norway, he was looking after sixteen-year-old Karen Abelseth. Karen was not a close relative, but Ole had known her all her life. Directly beneath Ole Abelseth, the ship trembled violently. His roommate, Adolph Humblen, woke at the same time. Humblen was also escorting a young woman, Anna Saltkjelsvik, to America.