by Brad Matsen
“What was that?” Humblen said. “I don’t know,” Abelseth replied. “But we’d better get out of here and find the girls.” They dressed, put on their overcoats, and started back to the women’s compartments at the stern of the ship.
On every deck, passengers felt the break in the steady, reassuring pulse of the ship. In his stateroom on C Deck, Canadian army major Arthur Peuchen was dressing for bed. He thought the shock was a heavy wave, then remembered how calm the sea had been that night when he’d left the smoking room and taken a turn around the deck. Henry Stengel, a leather manufacturer from New Jersey, was moaning so loudly in his sleep that his wife shook him. Just as he woke, he heard a crash. Then the engines stopped. This is serious, he told her. We have to get up on deck. George Harder and his wife, Dorothy, on their honeymoon, were in bed on the starboard side of E Deck. George heard a rumble and a sharp scraping noise. He jumped up and went to the closed porthole. Through the glass, he saw a mass of white as high as the ship. Then it was gone. His first thought: We have to get out of here.
Thomas Andrews felt his desk move. He paused for a second, then continued doing what he always did in the evening aboard a new ship: making lists in his notebook, and crossing items off old lists. The Harland and Wolff electricians, ship fitters, carpenters, and plumbers were doing a good job of working the wrinkles out of Titanic. The doors of some of the third-class cabins and crew dormitories had been tight in their jambs; they’d shaved and rehung them. Some of the windows in the engineers’ smoking room on the boat deck had been painted shut; they’d opened them. Only half the burners on one of the stoves in the third-class galley worked.
Andrews had written hundreds of notes, most of them about minor flaws that his men had easily fixed. He had spent part of the day in the engine room, where Chief Engineer Bell had told him that Titanic’s power plants were running beautifully. With only twenty-one of twenty-nine boilers lit, the ship loped along at 20 knots, consuming much less coal than expected. That day, the captain had ordered three more boilers lit, and the ship was making a shade over 21 knots.
Bell told Andrews that the port engine had handled the sudden jolt of power when Smith maneuvered to avoid hitting New York back in Southampton. No damage at all to the prop, shaft, or bearings. And now that the men knew their way around, they were telling him that working in the enormous engine room was a lot easier than they’d thought it would be. The only real problem Bell had was the heating system for the second-class staterooms. It worked, then it didn’t work, then it did. Bell thought the problem might be in the ducting. He had a crew on it. With the help of the Harland and Wolff men, he would have it solved for the return trip to England.
While Andrews was shaking out Titanic, he was also planning the changes he would make for Britannic, which was already framed to its double bottom. He would redesign B Deck to make space for two more private promenades, and turn the writing room—which no one ever used on Olympic and Titanic—into first-class staterooms. The extra steel he had put into the superstructure and the bow seemed to have stiffened Titanic. He’d definitely do the same to Britannic before launching, and Olympic as soon as possible. When he dry-docked Titanic in six months, he’d check carefully for the loose rivets above the turn of the bilge that he had found on Olympic.
A few seconds after Andrews felt his desk move, the engines stopped. He stood, took his suit coat from its peg near the door, tucked his notebook under his arm, and went to take a look around.
Fred Barrett was in Boiler Room 6, ticking off the minutes until the end of his watch. He was a tall, beefy, twenty-eight-year-old sailor from Liverpool who had gone into the coal pits when he was thirteen, survived five years in the mines, shipped out as a trimmer, and never worked ashore again. He became a fireman, then a leading fireman aboard New York. Barrett knew how to rake a good, hot fire, and when he was put in charge of a boiler-room gang, he wasn’t afraid to use his fists to keep his men moving.
When Ismay canceled New York’s voyage because of the coal strike, Barrett sprinted to the hiring hall and got himself a berth on the only ship leaving Southampton. He boarded Titanic three hours before it sailed.
Barrett was struck stupid the first time he climbed down the ladder into the enormous stokehold. Each boiler room was fifty feet long, spanned the ninety-two-foot beam of the ship, and rose thirty feet up into the hull. He had never in his life been in so large an enclosed space.
Barrett worked four hours on, eight hours off; he took his turn stoking the furnaces and, as leading fireman, kept tabs on the eight men on his watch in Boiler Room 6. For the extra responsibility, he got 10 shillings more per voyage than a fireman’s wage of £6.
On Barrett’s other ships, firemen stoked their furnaces when they decided the fire needed coal. Titanic had a maddening new system that rang bells in each boiler room every few minutes to tell the firemen when to recharge. Since Queens-town, the bells had been coming every ten minutes as the ship cruised at around 20 knots.
Barrett understood that the heat from his fires flowed up through steel tubes and turned freshwater into steam that flowed through more tubes. The steam ran the engines, and the engines turned the propellers. Knowing that he was moving the ship with his fires gave him enough pride to endure the hundred-degree temperature, the bad-tempered men, and the bells that never stopped ringing.
Barrett had been at sea long enough to understand that the maiden voyage on any ship was never easy, but the first three days on Titanic had been hell. Nobody knew his way around. The thing was a maze. It took him a half hour to find his messroom and bunk, another half hour to figure out the way to his boiler room through the firemen’s tunnel. He had to climb seventy feet up spiral staircases from the engine room to get to the fresh air of the engineers’ promenade on the boat deck.
The worst part of the voyage so far had been the bunker fire. It had been burning when he’d come aboard in Southampton, and he’d had the bad luck of being assigned to the boilers right next to it. The chief engineer had ordered extra trimmers to haul the burning coal to the furnaces, putting a lot of extra traffic in front of Barrett’s boilers. Barrett had also had to put up with the hose gang spraying the bulkhead to keep the fire from spreading or warping the walls of the bunker. The water turned the air into a soggy mist and made the dust stickier. Everybody in his boiler room had had to work with neckerchiefs over their noses and mouths.
The trimmers had gotten the last of the burning coal out of the starboard forward bunker on the evening of April 13. Barrett wasn’t on watch when Thomas Andrews himself had come down with Captain Smith to check the damage. He’d heard they didn’t seem too worried about it. The chief engineer had put a gang to work around the clock to wire-brush and oil the steel walls of the bunker, inside and out.
Just before Barrett’s watch ended on the night of April 14, the bunker that had been on fire was finally cleaned up. At eleven thirty-five, second engineer James Hesketh came around to inspect it. The aft bulkhead of the bunker looked fine—maybe not good as new, but fit for sea. To check the bunker’s forward bulkhead, Hesketh and Barrett went through the watertight door to an empty reserve coal bin in the compartment between Boiler Room 6 and Cargo Hold 2. The steel there looked okay, too. Hesketh bent to look at the seam where the bulkhead met the deck. There was a little bit of warping, but nothing serious. Barrett felt the shudder of the engines changing speed, looked at Hesketh, and held his eyes.
The sound in the boiler rooms was always a deafening cacophony of clanging shovels, slamming furnace doors, and the roar of the fires themselves. Barrett missed the sharp, grinding sound coming from the cargo hold just forward of where he stood with Hesketh. By the time the noise registered, the watertight door alarm was blaring, and he heard the door squealing in its steel tracks. He and Hesketh broke for the closing door. Just before they reached it, a flat stream of green, cold water took their legs out from under them.
After a dinner party hosted by banker George Widener, Captain Smith w
as in the chartroom on the starboard side. The bridge was open to the weather, but the chartroom was heated, a much better place to finish his cigar. The temperature had dropped ten degrees since he’d gone down for dinner. Smith took off his coat and started checking his ship’s position.
On the bridge, Murdoch was in command of the watch, with two junior officers, a quartermaster on the helm, and two seamen. Lookouts Fredrick Fleet and Reginald Lee were in the crow’s nest on the forward mast, connected to the bridge by telephone.
Ordinarily, Smith would have been in his cabin getting ready to turn in, but he had felt the temperature drop after dinner and was worried about ice. A relatively warm winter had littered the shipping lanes off Newfoundland with far more than the usual number of bergs. On spring crossings, Smith and every other captain on the North Atlantic plotted their courses a few degrees to the south to avoid the ice drifting down from Greenland. Earlier in the evening, Smith had ordered a course change to take Titanic even farther south of the reported ice, because the Marconi operators had been handing him ice reports from other ships all day.
Just after eight A.M. from Caronia:
WESTBOUND STEAMERS REPORT BERGS, GROWLERS, AND FIELD ICE IN 42° N FROM 49° TO 51° W, 12 APRIL. COMPLIMENTS, BARR.
Shortly after noon, from Baltic:
HAVE HAD MODERATE, VARIABLE WINDS AND CLEAR, FINE WEATHER SINCE LEAVING. GREEK STEAMER ATHENAI REPORTS PASSING ICEBERGS AND LARGE QUANTITIES OF FIELD ICE TODAY AT LAT. 41° 51' N, LONG. 49° 52' W.
An overheard transmission from Amerika right after Baltic:
AMERIKA PASSED TWO LARGE ICEBERGS, 41° 27' N, 50° 8' W, ON 14 APRIL.
In the chartroom, Smith felt Titanic shiver under his feet. In five strides, he was on the bridge.
What is it, Murdoch? he asked.
“An iceberg, Sir,” Murdoch answered. “I hard-a-starboarded and reversed the engines. I was going to hard-a-port round it but she was too close. I could not do any more. I have closed the watertight doors.”
Five minutes after Ismay’s shuddering bed woke him, he walked quickly along the corridor in the officers’ quarters, past the Marconi room, and out into the chilly air of the navigation bridge. There were many more men than usual on watch, which alone told him that something was very wrong.
Ismay pulled Smith out of earshot of the others. They stood face-to-face for a few long seconds; then Ismay pivoted and rushed out the open door onto the bridge wing. Ismay was still in his pajamas, slippers, and overcoat, and even with the ship sitting still, the frigid air knifed into him as he ran aft on the boat deck. In a minute, he was in the engineers’ smoking hut, then clacking down the metal staircase through six decks. At the bottom, he emerged on the catwalk in the hideously silent cavern of the engine room. Just then, the engines came to life.
After Ismay left the bridge, Smith had ordered all ahead half. Whatever had happened to his ship was not going to sink it, but there was little doubt that he had to make landfall as quickly as possible. He sent a seaman to wake up Wilde and Lightoller, and went to the Marconi room. Smith told Harold Bride to try to get a message through to Cape Race, Newfoundland. Bride said he was barely in range but he would try. Have Cape Race relay a message by transatlantic cable to White Star in London, Smith said. Tell them that Titanic is damaged and heading for Halifax. Repairs at Harland and Wolff might be necessary.
The carpenter arrived on the bridge and told Smith that the ship had water in the three forward compartments but he wasn’t sure how fast it was coming in. Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall, who had also been inspecting the damage, told him the mailroom on the starboard side, ten feet above the bottom, was knee-deep in water. Chief Engineer Bell reported that the firemen were working in waist-deep water, damping their furnaces in Boiler Room 6 to prevent a boiler explosion.
Smith ordered all stop. A minute later the engines were still. Two minutes after that, slowed more quickly than usual by the wounds in its bow, Titanic was dead in the water. To Smith, the picture of what had happened to his ship was getting murkier instead of clearer. He ordered Wilde to uncover the lifeboats.
Andrews rushed onto the bridge, pulled Smith aside, and the two men left together. Passing the Marconi room, Smith told Jack Phillips to send a distress signal to all ships and stations. He handed him a slip of paper with a rough estimate of Titanic’s position and said that Boxhall would get him a more accurate fix on it in a few minutes.
Smith and Andrews used crew passageways and staircases to avoid alarming passengers. On F Deck, three decks up from the bottom, they saw water in the squash court. They saw water in Cargo Holds 1 and 2. That meant that the first three watertight compartments were flooding and the water was already three decks up.
They climbed up to E Deck to skirt the closed watertight doors and went aft until they reached the engineers’ staircase. In the engine room, Bell told them that at the last report, the water in Boiler Room 6 was above the six-foot-high stokers’ catwalks. He had ordered Fred Barrett and his men to evacuate the compartment by climbing the emergency ladder over the bulkhead.
Smith, Andrews, and Bell went forward to inspect the boiler rooms. Nos. 1 through 4 looked dry. The faces of the firemen and trimmers were smudged masks of bewilderment as the three most important men on their ship rushed past them without a nod. A rumor had spread that the ship had run aground off Newfoundland. Boiler Room 5 had some water in it, but not much. Andrews climbed the ladder and looked over the top of the bulkhead into No. 6. Through a fog of acrid steam, he saw that water had reached the middle of the still-hot boilers. They hissed and crackled as the ocean flowed around them.
Ismay was on the bridge when Smith and Andrews got back. He could not remember ever having seen fear in either man, and he recognized it instantly in their dull, wide eyes and the tension in their shoulders. Both of them had always radiated confidence like lanterns giving light; seeing them without it was terrifying.
Smith led Ismay and Andrews into the chartroom. Even the warmth did nothing to ease the grimness in their faces. It’s not good, Smith told Ismay. The ship is sinking. If we’re lucky, it will last until help gets here. He looked at Andrews. How long do you reckon? Andrews shook his head. The laws of strength and buoyancy that had inspired him for his entire life doomed Titanic. Thousands of tons of seawater would quickly outweigh the ability of the ship’s hull to support it. Soon, Andrews said. Soon.
Smith bolted from the chartroom. In his dependable, calm voice, he ordered his officers to their emergency stations. Launch the lifeboats, he told them. Now.
Murdoch was in charge of the eight boats on the starboard side; Lightoller, the eight on the port side. Wilde would oversee all of them and lend a hand where he was needed. Nobody mentioned that there was room for fewer than half of the ship’s passengers and crew in the lifeboats. Smith had not told them what he, Ismay, and Andrews knew: The ship was sinking fast. Wilde, Murdoch, and Lightoller had no reason to doubt that Titanic would stay afloat at least long enough for another ship to reach it.
In the Marconi room, Jack Phillips tapped out the Morse code letters CQD—a call for help—followed by MGY—Titanic’s call sign—and the corrected position Boxhall had given him, 41° 46' north, 50° 14' west. It was precisely for that moment that Phillips had become a telegrapher; he was now fulfilling a heroic vision that had fixed itself in his mind since the seagoing wireless operator on Republic had saved hundreds of lives. Without Phillips and his Marconi key, the people on Titanic would have had no hope. No rescue ship would come to save them from its flooding decks. Survivors in lifeboats would freeze to death before another ship came upon them by accident.
Phillips’s fist was a blur over his sparking key, his plea for help flying through the night to headphones on ships and at the shore station at Cape Race, Newfoundland. During the day, the signals from Titanic’s powerful transmitter traveled 350 miles. At night, in the absence of interference from solar radiation, they reached more than 1,000 miles. Titanic was not alone on the North
Atlantic. The steamships La Provence and Mount Temple heard Titanic’s first CQD, but their replies, from less powerful transmitters, were too faint for Phillips to understand. Hearing the dots and dashes crackling on his headphones was also difficult because the engineers were releasing highpressure steam from the boilers through pipes on the funnel just outside the Marconi room. The noise was so loud that the men on deck uncovering the lifeboats had to yell to be heard.
Finally, Phillips heard the Cunard liner Carpathia loud and clear. Carpathia’s telegrapher, Harold Cottam, had picked up Titanic’s CQD. He asked if Phillips knew that the Cape Cod shore station was trying to relay a batch of telegrams for Titanic passengers. Phillips ignored that message. COME AT ONCE, he tapped. WE HAVE STRUCK A BERG. IT’S A CQD, OLD MAN. POSITION 41.46 N, 50.14 W.
Carpathia replied, SHALL I TELL MY CAPTAIN? DO YOU REQUIRE ASSISTANCE?
Phillips tapped out, YES. COME QUICK.
Carpathia was eastbound out of New York, fifty-eight miles from Titanic’s position. Its captain, Arthur Rostron, immediately changed course, sent Cottam back to the Marconi shack to listen for updates on Titanic’s position, and ordered his chief engineer to put extra stokers in the boiler room. Carpathia’s single engine was built to drive the 541-foot ship at a top speed of 14½ knots. Rostron knew he could stretch that to 17 knots for a sprint and reach the sinking ship in three and a half hours. Titanic would easily stay afloat until Carpathia arrived.
While Phillips was telling as much of the world as possible that Titanic was in distress, the scene a few feet away on the boat deck was more typical of a crowd of after-dinner strollers. No one had told the passengers that their ship was sinking, and few of them were interested in climbing into a creaky wooden boat and being lowered seventy feet down to the freezing Atlantic on a cold, moonless night.