Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic

by Daniel Allen Butler

  Just on 8:30 the Californian hove to alongside the Carpathia, and in an exchange of flag signals it was decided that the Carpathia would head for New York, while the Californian continued to search for survivors.

  There was little enough to see—large pieces of reddish cork from the ruptured bulkheads, steamer chairs, cushions, lifebelts, rugs, the abandoned lifeboats, the Titanic’s red and white striped barber pole. Captain Lord would later claim that he didn’t find any bodies at all, but it is doubtful that he looked very hard. Third Officer Groves later maintained that the search was broken off by 10:30 A.M., though Captain Lord was to say that it was continued until 11:40. Lord’s version was the one that went down in the Californian’s log, of course, but then Captain Lord’s version of many things would find their way into the Californian’s log.10

  Nowhere did the ship’s log mention anything about her officers sighting white rockets in the early hours of the morning of April 15, 1912.11

  CHAPTER 11

  Homecoming

  But let him remember that the days of darkness will be many....

  —Ecclesiastes 11:8

  THE CARPATHLA’S RETURN PASSAGE TO NEW YORK WAS MARKED BY BRIGHT, sunny, and bitterly cold weather and calm seas. The little Cunard liner’s passengers were wonderful, digging into their luggage for extra clothing and toilet articles for the Titanic’s survivors, helping the stewards distribute blankets and hot drinks, sewing smocks and shifts for children and women out of steamer blankets, offering spare berths to relieve some of the crowding in the makeshift dormitories. They did their best to be cheerful and make the crowded little ship a little less tense. But an almost tangible pall hung over the ship that no amount of hard work, however cheerfully done, could dispel.

  Most of the survivors held themselves somewhat aloof from the passengers aboard the Carpathia, not from any sense of snobbery, but rather because most of them were in varying degrees of shock. The enormity of what they had experienced was such that no one aboard the Cunard ship, no matter how sympathetic, could ever understand. And so the Titanic’s survivors were polite and accepted the Carpathia’s passengers’ assistance with genuine gratitude, but the gulf remained throughout the trip.1

  Somehow Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon managed to commit yet another blunder. This one would have been almost comical had it not been so tasteless. Apparently Lady Duff Gordon had what to her seemed a smashing idea: why not have a group picture taken of herself, her husband, Miss Francatelli, the other two passengers, and the seven crewmen who had manned Boat 1 for them? So, the day after they were rescued, all twelve gathered on the Carpathia’s foredeck, the crewmen conspicuous in their lifebelts. Other survivors stared in disbelief as Dr. McGhee, the Carpathia’s surgeon, prepared to take the picture with the words, “Now, smile everyone!”2

  In the wireless shack Cottam began the laborious task of transmitting the names of the survivors, along with some brief personal messages from them, to the White Star Line’s New York office. Once Harold Bride had gotten medical attention for his badly frostbitten feet and a few hours’ rest, he began to periodically relieve Cottam at the key, but it was a long process.

  One of the first messages Cottam sent was to Philip A. S. Franklin, vice president of the White Star Line in New York:Most desirable Titanic crew should be returned home earliest moment possible. Suggest you hold Cedric, sailing her daylight Friday.... Propose returning in her myself. YAMSI.

  “YAMSI” was of course a transposition of Ismay, though why the chairman of the line chose to employ such a transparent subterfuge is anyone’s guess: he always signed his cables that way. What Ismay didn’t know was that the contrived signature coupled with the contents of the message would cause an influential member of the U.S. Senate to suspect Ismay of duplicity, setting into motion a series of events that would ruin Bruce Ismay.

  Philip A. S. Franklin had his hands full without worrying about the travel arrangements of the Line’s chairman. When Ismay’s message arrived, Franklin had an office full of reporters clamoring for news of the Titanic. A series of garbled wireless transmissions from ships in the vicinity of the Titanic had left the newspapers thoroughly confused. With the Carpathia refusing to answer any queries, there were few facts to go on, and the headlines the morning of April 15 were filled with speculation.

  The New York Herald was typical:

  THE NEW TITANIC STRIKES ICEBERG AND CALLS FOR AID VESSELS RUSH TO HER SIDE

  The New York Times was prepared to announce in the last edition that the ship had sunk, based on the prolonged silence of her wireless, but no other editor was willing to follow Carr Van Anda’s lead. Consequently Franklin was besieged by reporters when he arrived at work in the morning.

  At first, Franklin was confident, telling his questioners, “We place absolute confidence in the Titanic. We believe that the boat is unsinkable.” At the same time though, he was having messages sent addressed to Captain Smith, asking for information about the ship and its passengers.

  By midmorning the story of the ship’s collision with the iceberg had broken, and now frantic friends and family members of passengers began to gather at the White Star offices: J. P Morgan, Jr.; W H. Force, father of Mrs. Astor; Ben Guggenheim’s wife; hundreds of others with unknown faces and names. They received the same reassurances that Franklin had given the press earlier in the morning: all was well; everyone would be safe; there was no need for alarm.

  It all sounded so convincing. The myth of the Titanic’s unsinkability had been repeated so many times by so many different sources that it was inconceivable that any serious accident had happened to her. When the Evening Sun ran a banner-sized headline that declared “ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION,” the paper was merely giving voice to what the public—and White Star officials—believed to be true. The latest story had it that the Titanic’s passengers were being transferred to the Parisian and the Carpathia, while the Virginian took the wounded liner in tow, bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia.

  The White Star Line’s positive posture was maintained all day. True, Franklin admitted to reporters, there were rumors that the Titanic had been sunk and the loss of life was heavy, but these were rumors, not reliable news. Wireless operators—in some cases amateurs—were catching snippets of transmissions and relaying them on. The news they were hearing wasn’t good. But the ships involved, the Carpathia, the Virginian, the Parisian, and others, weren’t within wireless range yet, so for news as important as this, Franklin wasn’t willing to settle for second- or thirdhand information.

  When the official word came at 6:15 P M. that evening, it was like a body blow to Franklin: the Olympic, her transmission delayed for some hours, reported that the Titanic had sunk at 2:20 A.M. with more than 1,500 passengers still aboard; the survivors had been rescued by the Carpathia and were being brought to New York. Franklin waited three quarters of an hour before he was able to face the reporters. Visibly exerting every bit of self control he could muster, he told them, “Gentlemen, I regret to say that the Titanic sank at 2:20 this morning.”

  That was all he would—or could—say at the moment. It is remarkable that he was able to hold onto his composure for so long, but gradually he admitted that the report “neglected to say that all the crew had been saved,” then later that “probably a number of lives had been lost,” which eventually became “we very much fear there has been a great loss of life.” At 9:00 P.M. Franklin broke down completely—sobbing, he told the stunned reporters that there had been a “horrible loss of life”—it would be possible, he said, to replace the ship, but “never the human lives.”3

  Within hours every major American newspaper carried the story, and the country reeled from the shock. For the next three days, as the papers engaged in endless speculation about what had actually happened, the Titanic seemed to be the sole topic of conversation. Invariably the discussion would end with the question “How?” How could a ship declared by expert marine engineers to be unsinkable go to the bottom of the Atlantic two hours
after striking an iceberg? How could an iceberg sink a ship? How could a ship not avoid something that big and obvious? And most disturbing of all, how could 1,500 people die when the ship complied with or exceeded every safety regulation on the books? A few minds began thinking very seriously about these questions, and there was going to be hell to pay when they found out the answers.

  But those answers would not be forthcoming until the Carpathia arrived in New York, and Cottam and Bride were concentrating exclusively on sending the names of the survivors and their personal messages to New York via Cape Race, refusing to answer any requests for information. This even included those of the cruiser USS Chester, dispatched by a worried President Taft. Distraught over the uncertainty of the fate of his friend and aide Archie Butt, Taft had sent out the Chester expressly to contact the Carpathia, whose wireless didn’t have the range to reach New York directly. But despite her repeated attempts, all in the name of the President, the Chester’s queries went unanswered, as did those of the various newspapers and wire services hungrily waiting for news.

  Predictably, the New York press reacted with calculated petulance. The World, for example, proclaimed with an almost audible sniff, “CARPATHIA LETS NO SECRETS OF THE TITANIC’S LOSS ESCAPE BY WIRELESS.” The Evening Mail’s frustration was even more obvious: “WATCHERS ANGERED BY CARPATHIA’S SILENCE.” The Herald was miffed, while the Evening Sun pouted.

  In reality, both Cottam and Bride had been advised by the Marconi office in New York that Guglielmo Marconi himself had concluded a deal with the New York Times on behalf of the two young operators that would reward them handsomely for providing an exclusive for the Times. For a couple of young men earning the equivalent of $20 a month, the promise of several thousand dollars in exchange for a few hours spent talking to a reporter was irresistible, so sending only survivors’ names and messages provided a convenient excuse for turning aside any other inquiries. Neither Bride nor Cottam, or Marconi himself for that matter, were aware that Marconi’s apparently benevolent action could appear to be a deliberate attempt to withhold information from an anxious public solely for the Times’ benefit. In any case, it soon became quite clear that nothing more would be learned from the little Cunarder until her arrival in New York, which was scheduled for Thursday night, April 18.4

  That Thursday night was cold and rain-filled in New York, the whole of New York Harbor shrouded in a thunderstorm. People began gathering on the Cunard pier around 6:00 P.M.—not many;at first, only a few hundred, but slowly the crowd began to grow until by 9:00, more than 30,000 were standing in the cold April rain, another 10,000 lining the battery. Peering through the gloom and mist, a few minutes past 9:00 they spotted a ship in the Ambrose Channel. It was the Carpathia. She was greeted by a fleet of steam launches, tugboats, ferry boats, and yachts, led by a large tug containing an official party of the mayor and several city commissioners. As the Carpathia hove into sight, the mayor’s tug let loose a shrill blast from its steam whistle. Every other boat in the harbor followed by sounding their bells, whistles, and sirens. Captain Rostron stood on the bridge, staring out at the flotilla of boats surrounding his ship and dimly making out the throng gathered at the Cunard pier awaiting the Carpathia. Until this moment he had no idea, as he put it later, of “the suspense and excitement in the world.”

  As we were going up Ambrose Channel, the weather changed completely, and a more dramatic ending to tragic occurrence it would be hard to conceive. It began to blow hard, rain came down in torrents, and, to complete the finale, we had continuous vivid lightning and heavy rolling thunder.... What with the wind and rain, a pitch-dark night, lightning and thunder, and the photographers taking flashlight pictures of the ship, and the explosion of the lights, it was a scene never to be effaced from one’s memory.5

  At pierside, people began weeping quietly, but there was no hysteria. The most frenzied behavior was exhibited by the huge numbers of reporters who had gathered along with the crowd on the pier, or had gotten aboard one of the boats that had sailed into the channel to meet the Carpathia. When the liner stopped to pick up the pilot, five reporters clambered from their boat over the railing onto the pilot boat, then attempted to force their way past the pilot, up the boarding ladder, and onto the Carpathia.

  Captain Rostron, once he saw the reception awaiting his ship, anticipated such an eventuality, and had stationed Third Officer Rees at the foot of the boarding ladder. Rees watched in bemused fascination as the small craft gathered around the pilot boat, the reporters shouting questions up to the decks of the Carpathia through megaphones, the photographers setting off their magnesium flashes as they took picture after picture. But when one of the newsmen tried to shove the pilot aside and rush up the boarding ladder himself, Rees sprang into action. Grabbing the pilot by the arm, Rees hauled him onto the boarding ladder, then turned and punched the reporter in the mouth, sending him sprawling.

  “Pilot only!” he said, in case the other newsmen hadn’t got the message. Apparently one missed it, for he immediately started raving about his sister, crying about how he had to see her; when Rees didn’t believe his story, he tried to bribe the third officer, offering him $200 to be allowed on board. Rees refused, the pilot was taken up to the bridge, and the journey up the channel resumed.

  Somehow one reporter did slip aboard, but he was quickly cornered and brought to the bridge. Rostron, who had no time for such nonsense, informed the man that under no circumstances could he speak with any survivors before the Carpathia docked. The man was left on the bridge, after giving his word he would abide by the captain’s instructions. “I must say,” Rostron later admitted, somewhat astonished, “he was a gentleman.”

  The crowd gasped with surprise when the Carpathia steamed past the Cunard pier toward the White Star dock and stopped. In the nearly continuous lightning and photographers’ flashes, the crew of the Carpathia could be seen manning several lifeboats and putting them into the water. After a moment the apprehensive crowd realized what was happening: they were the Titanic’s lifeboats, being duly returned to their rightful owners. It was a heartbreaking sight.

  After a painfully slow turn, the Carpathia made her way back to the Cunard pier, and was carefully warped alongside and made fast. The canopied gangways were hauled into place, and a procession of passengers began to make their way down from the ship to the dock. After a few seconds, the stunned crowd realized that these neatly dressed people weren’t from the Titanic: Captain Rostron had decided that it would be unfair to his passengers to make them wait and wade through the tumult that would inevitably greet the survivors, so the Carpathia’s passengers disembarked first.

  Then there appeared a young woman, hatless, eyes wide as she stared at the waiting crowd, the first of the Titanic’s survivors. At the foot of the gangway stood a solid phalanx of reporters, each one hungry for a story. Standing unrecognized among them was one man who was after the biggest story of them all: a diminutive figure flanked by two U.S. Marshals, he was Senator William Alden Smith.6

  Senator Smith would have his moment soon enough, and when he did it would be an unforgettable experience, but there was another homecoming besides the arrival of the Carpathia in New York, which would take place over and over again in the days to come, a homecoming of a kind that Senator Smith could know nothing of—and would have been helpless to affect even if he had. Even while the ship was docking at Pier 54, Cottam and Bride were still busy sending personal messages from survivors, and transmitting a list of passengers-and crew who were lost in the disaster. One of the great tragedies of the Titanic’s sinking that often gets lost is the heavy price paid by the crew—and ultimately by their families. So many statistics and so many numbers would be introduced and paraded before the world in the two great pending investigations that one more recitation of who was lost on the Titanic would begin to lose meaning. But within the lists of those missing were the names of the crewmen who lost their lives on board the White Star liner. This was the saddest homecoming of all:
the certain news that husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, would not be coming home at all.

  Out of 892 crewmen, only 214 survived. Three-quarters of the crew had gone down with the ship, in proportion a far heavier toll than any of the three passenger classes. But what those numbers didn’t tell—couldn’t tell—was the overwhelming burden of grief that they brought to a single city in England.

  Southampton was a city devastated by the Titanic disaster. Four of every five crewmen aboard her had come from this proud old seafaring town, whose ties to ships and the sea dated back to Roman times. Entire streets were hung with black crepe, whole rows of houses bereaved. The crowd anxiously awaiting the news was comprised almost entirely of women: young women with bright-eyed babies in their arms; middle-aged women with hands red and worn from work; old women, wrinkled and gray. They gathered outside the White Star Line’s Southampton office on April 17. Names were posted as quickly as they came in, but all too often when one of the women would leave to go home, she would be sobbing, sometimes leaning on the arm of a friend, a daughter, or mother-in-law. Sometimes, saddest of all, she left alone. In the April 23 issue of the London Daily Mail an unsigned article described how the day closed:Later in the afternoon hope died out. The waiting crowds thinned, and silent men and women sought their homes. In the humbler homes of Southampton there is scarcely a family who has not lost a relative or friend. Children returning from school appreciated something of tragedy, and woeful little faces were turned to the darkened, fatherless homes.7

  The story went on to tell of the working-class streets in Southampton and the loss they had suffered. It told of Mrs. Allen, whose husband George was a trimmer on the Titanic; of a woman on Union Street with three small children; of Mrs. Barnes who lost a brother; of Mr. Saunders, whose two boys were firemen; of an old man on Cable Street who had four sons aboard the Titanic; of a young girl, nearly mad with grief, whose husband had been a steward—they had been married only a month; of Mrs. Gosling, who lost her son; and of Mrs. Preston, a widow, who lost her son as well. But the most heartbreaking may have been Mrs. May, whose husband Arthur and eldest son, Arthur, Jr., had both gone down with the ship. There were ten more children left behind, as well as Arthur Jr.’s young wife and six-week-old baby. The father had signed on board the Titanic because a leg injury had kept him from sailing on his usual ship, the Cunard Line’s Britannia. Arthur Jr. had only signed on because the coal strike had put him out of work and he had a family to support. Now Mrs. May had ten children to care for: the oldest was nineteen and brought home a few shillings a week—her youngest was six months old.