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

by Brad Matsen

  “I wish you would describe a life belt,” Smith said, after two questions on the same topic that Lightoller slipped like a boxer ducking punches.

  “It consists of a series of pieces of cork. A hole is cut in there,” he said, pointing to an illustration on an easel, “for the head to go through and this falls over front and back, and there are tapes from the back then tied around the front. It is a new idea and very effective, because no one can make a mistake in putting it on—”

  Smith interrupted. “Have you ever been into the sea with one of them?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where?”

  “From the Titanic.”

  “How long were you in the sea with a life belt on?”

  “Between half an hour and an hour.”

  “What time did you leave the ship?”

  “I didn’t leave it.”

  “Did the ship leave you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I wish you would tell us whether the suction incidental to the sinking of this vessel was a great deterrent in making progress away from the boat.”

  “It was hardly noticeable.”

  Smith left Lightoller at the moment he was swept into the sea to ask him whether third-class passengers were allowed on the boat deck. Of course, Lightoller told him. There was no restraint at all. Everyone was calm. And orderly. Lightoller said neither he nor any of the passengers believed Titanic was in danger of sinking, even after they started launching lifeboats. He had heard and felt the impact of the iceberg from his cabin but thought it was nothing serious.

  When Lightoller described the events that followed the impact, he closed his eyes, as though visualizing himself walking to the bridge, learning that the ship had struck something, and receiving Captain Smith’s order to launch the lifeboats. His brows pinched in a clearly sorrowful expression.

  He had shown no emotion until then. Smith set off on a long line of questioning about the process for measuring the temperature of the sea, Marconi messages warning of ice in the vicinity, the speed of the ship, the changing of the watch shortly before impact, and Captain Smith’s order to launch the lifeboats. Smith’s interrogation of Lightoller was making those of Ismay and Rostron seem like parlor chats.

  After a break, Lightoller’s responses were still terse and evasive but colored by impatience. Smith detected weakness, and brought him back to the moment when he’d abandoned ship.

  “Where did you last see the captain?”

  “On the boat deck, sir.”

  “Was the vessel broken in two or intact?”

  “Absolutely intact.”

  “On the decks?”

  “Intact, sir.”

  Smith asked Lightoller why he launched his first lifeboats half empty. Lightoller shocked Smith by replying that he believed the situation was not serious enough to risk lowering inexperienced passengers seventy feet down into the water in fully loaded boats.

  Silence filled the East Room as everyone thought the same thing: How could the fourth-highest-ranking officer on the ship not have known that the situation was urgent?

  Smith finally spoke: “Supposing you had known it was urgent, what would you have done?”

  “I would have acted to the best of my judgment then.”

  “Tell me what you would have thought wise,” Smith shot back at him.

  “I would have taken more risks.”

  Smith pounded away on the loading of the lifeboats for fifteen more minutes, but Lightoller seemed to have hit his weakest moment and gained renewed strength. It took Smith a half hour to extract a second-by-second description of Titanic sinking, the absence of crying and lamentation among the dying crew and passengers, the explosion Lightoller felt when he was in the water under the overturned lifeboat.

  Smith gauged the mood of the crowd. It was generally unsympathetic to Lightoller’s diffidence, but he didn’t want to risk pushing it any further. If Smith continued, it might look like he was badgering the poor officer who had his ship leave him. He excused Lightoller but told him he would definitely be recalled.

  Smith was exhausted. After a ten-minute recess, he was not in a mood to engage in another battle of wits. He called Carpathia’s Marconi operator, Harold Cottam, who spent a congenial thirty minutes describing Titanic’s distress call and the exchanges of messages with other ships and shore stations over the next seventy-two hours.

  Smith ended the session with first-class steward Alfred Crawford, who brought the room to tears for the second time that day.

  “Did you know Mr. and Mrs. Straus?” Smith asked.

  “I stood at the boat where they refused to get in,” Crawford replied. He had the calm, mannered voice of an English butler.

  “Did Mrs. Straus get into the boat?”

  “She attempted to get into the boat first and she got back out again. Her maid got into the boat.”

  “What do you mean by ‘she attempted’ to get in?”

  “She went to get over from the deck to the boat, but then went back to her husband.”

  “What followed?”

  “She said, ‘We have been living together for many years. Where you go I go.’ ”

  The first session was over, but the long day was not. While Smith and his committee were taking testimony at the Waldorf-Astoria, hundreds of newspapers were interviewing their own witnesses and printing whatever they said. There was no such thing as a bad Titanic story, or one that was not taken for the truth.

  Ismay told Smith the ship never went over 75 revolutions and 21.5 knots. The evening edition of the New York Times, and dozens of its corresponding papers around the world, ran an interview with Titanic fireman John Thompson. He said, “From the time we left Queenstown until the moment of the shock it never went below 74. During that whole Sunday we had been keeping up to 77. Surely she was going full speed then.”

  Smith announced that he was not reading newspapers, and that the only legally binding conclusions would come from the inquiry. Courts in the United States would consider only sworn testimony in deciding whether or not White Star and International Mercantile Marine were concealing negligence aboard Titanic. If they were, they would be liable for damages under American shipping laws because the ship was owned by a trust chartered in the United States. The critical question was, Was Ismay, as president of IMM and chairman of White Star, aware of any negligence in the building of the ship or its operation? If the answer to that question was yes, then hundreds of American citizens could sue Morgan’s trust. In all likelihood, they would win.

  Late Friday evening, Smith and his committee agreed that Lightoller was concealing something, but they weren’t sure what. The main thing they derived from his testimony was that Titanic’s surviving crew members would probably say as little as possible to avoid negligence charges.

  After the hearing, Ismay had pleaded with Smith to let him return with the crew on the steamer Lapland, scheduled to leave the following morning. Smith had refused. While he believed Ismay to be innocent of the worst suspicions bandied about in the press, he did not think it would be fair to citizens of the United States to let him and his crew return to England, where American law could not reach them.

  Minutes after Smith told Ismay he could not leave the country, an IMM lawyer repeated the plea. The company simply could not be responsible for the bed and board of more than two hundred British citizens in New York for the duration of the hearings. Fine, Smith told him. I want Ismay, the four surviving officers, and a dozen or two crewmen. Which crewmen? the lawyer asked. Smith said he’d get a list to him first thing in the morning.

  At midnight, an old friend of Smith’s from Michigan, Sheriff Joe Bayliss, arrived. Bayliss had taken a night train to New York and spent the day at the Institute of the Seamen’s Friend eavesdropping on members of Titanic’s crew. He handed Smith a list of twenty-nine crewmen who had either been in charge of a lifeboat or who were freely telling horror stories about the ship’s navigation and management. Smith asked Bayliss to c
ome back at first light, saying he would give him subpoenas for all of them. Then Smith and one of his Senate aides stayed up for another two hours preparing the documents.

  The following morning, Bayliss served the subpoenas while Smith grappled with the implications of a report that had reached him at breakfast. The British consul in New York was at that moment on a train to Washington to protest the Senate’s treatment of the crew of Titanic and White Star officials. The IMM lawyers had spent the better part of the night on the phone with senators and congressmen friendly to J. P. Morgan, arguing that a federal committee could not legally subpoena foreigners in the sovereign state of New York. Smith sized it up as a states rights versus the federal government debate that would go nowhere. Still, he wasn’t going to take any chances. He had already heard enough to know that White Star was going to lean heavily on the men on its payroll to keep any hint of negligence out of the committee record. He hoped he was a good enough interrogator to penetrate the wall of half-truths they would erect, but he couldn’t do it if they left the country.

  Smith didn’t want to risk letting Morgan swing enough weight to quash his subpoenas in New York, so he decided to go back to Washington and continue his hearings on federal territory. He would hear testimony from one more witness in New York, a man who was too ill to travel, then leave town immediately.

  Marconi operator Harold Bride appeared in the East Room of the Waldorf in a wheelchair, looking like a sick, frightened teenage boy. He testified for a little over an hour, his voice weakening by the minute as he described sending the distress calls, Carpathia’s response, and the confusion in the radiosphere over the Atlantic until Captain Smith relieved him. Bride’s voice was almost a whisper when he told how he was swept into the water and clambered atop the overturned boat. Bride said he was the last man invited on board. Everyone on the overturned boat was a member of the crew.

  Smith asked Bride what he saw in the water around the overturned lifeboat.

  Dozens and dozens of men, women, and children, Bride said. Struggling to get on.

  To Smith, it was obvious that Bride was telling the truth. Lightoller, who had said the people in the water were some distance away, was a liar. Was Lightoller also lying about the ship being intact until it sank? About the loading of the lifeboats? Who else from Titanic’s crew was going to lie to him?

  Smith called a recess until three in the afternoon.

  Before he left the room, Joe Bayliss took him aside. Lapland had sailed that morning with five of the men Smith had subpoenaed aboard. The others had agreed to testify. Smith pulled Bayliss into the lobby, went to a phone, and called the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Send a cable to Lapland, now leaving New York Harbor, he told the duty officer who answered the call. Order Lapland to await a federal boarding party. Two hours later, Bayliss arrived off Sandy Hook on the navy tug Barrett, boarded the idling Lapland, and took the final five men on the witness list into custody.

  At three o’clock, Smith read a statement canceling the next hearing. The committee would resume taking testimony on Monday in Washington to hear from the rest of the crew who had been subpoenaed, and also from many of the passengers.

  On his way out of the hotel, surrounded by a clutch of reporters, Smith said, “The surface has barely been scratched. The real investigation is yet to come.”

  On the day Senator Smith was fleeing New York, Margaret Pirrie prepared to tell her husband that Titanic was gone and Thomas Andrews was dead. Edward Wilding’s cable about the disaster had reached her two days earlier, when Valiant was inbound for the Thames with the Danish coast well behind. They would be in London the next day. Pirrie had been taking a few painful steps on the deck every morning and evening, but he still spent most of his time in bed.

  On Friday, April 20, Margaret knew she had to tell him. Once they were in London, every paper in the country would be filled front to back with stories on the lost ship. It would be impossible to keep the secret. Better that he hear it from her than from strangers. It was not a moment for mincing words. Titanic had sunk, Margaret said from the chair next to his berth where she had spent countless hours. It hit an iceberg and was gone in just over two hours. Tommy Andrews died a hero helping others to survive. All nine Harland and Wolff men who were with him were lost. She gave him what other details she had: Hundreds were dead; the Americans were holding Ismay and the crew to interrogate them.

  Pirrie bucked against his pillows as though he had been shot. He lay without speaking in his dimly lit stateroom for what seemed like an hour, finally asking Margaret for his lap desk.

  To his sister, Thomas Andrews’s mother, Pirrie wrote in longhand on a piece of plain, deckled stationery, telling her, “A finer fellow than Tommy never lived.” Pirrie told her that Andrews had been brave and unselfish to the end.

  Pirrie told Margaret to be sure his note went to Belfast by special courier as soon as Valiant reached London, then asked her for a telegraph pad. Sick, sore, and saddened beyond anything he’d ever thought he would have to endure, Pirrie went to work. Valiant had a low-voltage wireless transmitter, but it was powerful enough to reach the Ramsgate shore station, at the mouth of the Thames.

  His first cable went to Edward Wilding at Harland and Wolff.

  FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT SHIP PIRRIE

  SECRETS

  Fourteen

  ROGER WRONG, ROGER RIGHT

  Ninety-three years later, Roger Long stared at a television monitor in his office in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, trying to make sense of the newly found pieces of Titanic. They were definitely part of the bottom of a ship. The bilge keels and red antifouling paint were unmistakable. But he had no idea where they fit into the hull. Unless he could orient them correctly, the patterns of bending and tearing left in the edges of the steel would tell him nothing.

  For a month after he’d gotten home from the expedition, Long had made up for lost sailing days and put out fires in his business that had started while he was away. He ran a one-man shop from a single room in his house, doing as much work there as he had when he’d employed two other engineers. Long had bought his first computer in the mid-1980s, and instantly understood the power of the new machine for calculations and record keeping. Fast graphics cards soon opened the floodgates for design software to analyze buoyancy, stability, and the other critical variables in building a ship. One man could do the work of three. Long missed the camaraderie of a drawing office, but he loved the freedom.

  Long’s proudest memory as a naval architect had come from solving the mystery of a ship that failed. On June 3, 1984, the 120-foot bark Marques, en route from Bermuda to Halifax, rolled over and sank in less than a minute. Nineteen of its crew of twenty-nine died. The ship was owned by one of Queen Elizabeth’s cousins, who had somehow secured exemptions from periodic inspections required by the nation that invented shipping regulation. The British government convened a Wreck Commission, hiring Long as a friend of the court to develop an independent analysis of the ship’s stability.

  The government was anxious to show that even if it had insisted on the inspections, the vessel would have been found to be safe. Long analyzed the same plans, records of modifications, and rigging notes as the other experts who had concluded that the ship was sufficiently stable. He proved, however, that after haphazard refits over the years, Marques had had far too much sail area for the ballast it was carrying. A slight increase in wind speed under full sail had capsized the ship. A lawyer representing the family of one of the dead crewmen demanded that the commission find the owner guilty of murder.

  The Wreck Commission agreed that the ship was unstable but maintained that nobody had known it until Long told them. The owner, therefore, was not negligent. The Wreck Commission’s clever twist offended Long’s sense of justice, reinforcing his belief that whitewashing a tragedy was always an exercise in power. With Titanic, he might be able to challenge the official conclusions about the most notorious shipwreck in history.

  After Long’s first pass through
the video footage of the pieces of Titanic’s bottom, his hopes for another shipwreck coup dimmed. He had to know two things. First, where did the pieces come from? They were obviously part of the middle section of the ship, because that’s where the bilge keels were and he could clearly see parts of the bilge keels. But exactly where did they fit in the puzzle of tortured steel? Second, he had to figure out what the hull had done as it came apart. Bend up? Bend down? Twist? The narrow views from the video cameras made it impossible to answer those questions.

  Long asked Chatterton and Kohler to hire Titanic artist Ken Marschall to look at the video, then draw three-dimensional images of the pieces of the bottom and their places on the ship. Marschall’s paintings, drawings, and books inform every modern visualization of Titanic, including those of James Cameron, who relied heavily on them in his movie. Marschall had viewed hundreds of hours of video footage and photographs to construct his supremely detailed images. He might be able to create realistic-looking pictures of the pieces so Long could see them in their entirety instead of through the tunnel of the video camera lens.

  Three weeks later, Marschall’s archeological-quality drawings arrived at Long’s office. They showed the pieces interlocking to fill a huge gap in the bottom directly under the third funnel, where Long believed Titanic had broken in two. Marschall also sent detailed representations of each piece, showing them from the top, ends, and sides, where the bilge keels were visible.

  Using Marschall’s drawings to orient him, Long went back to his video monitor. He focused on the condition of the steel at the edges of the new bottom pieces, comparing it with the edges of the bow and stern sections of the main wreckage. He saw evidence of both compression and tension failure of the ship’s outer and inner bottoms. At some point, Titanic had bent down, like a shallow V, then up, like an inverted V. It would take a much more complex process than the high-angle break to explain what the steel from the ship’s bottom was telling him.