Sullivan stared aft, where teams of firemen were singing a ditty while shoveling ton after ton of coal into the fireboxes. At each of the seven scotch boilers, a pair of men with loaded shovels would approach the open doors and heave their fuel into the flames. After stepping to the side to refill their shovels at a bunker port, another pair with loaded shovels would step forward and fling their contents into the inferno, only to be followed by another pair of men. There were three pairs of shovelers per boiler, forty-two men in all. The chanting men were stripped to the waist, covered with sweat and coal dust and constantly in motion.
* * *
Cold and fear. A stabbing cold from frozen water and frigid air. A palpable fear from witnessing death. The screams of the dying surrounded the few lifeboats that had been launched. To mark Titanic’s grave, the sea was littered with chunks of cork, floating deck chairs, and lifeless bodies bound in life belts. High overhead, a hoar frost framed the moon. Down at sea level, puffs of steam from the lungs of the survivors marked the presence of those who were lucky.
* * *
On Carpathia, Captain Rostron never wavered, never faltered.
He kept his command running at full speed through a field of ice floes that could spell the same doom for him that Titanic had met. On April 11, Carpathia had left New York bound for Gibraltar, Genoa, Trieste, and Fiume. She carried a total of 725 passengers in first and second class. The passengers were seeking warmth and sun, so it came as a surprise when the few that began awaking that night did so from the chill. As soon as Carpathia had turned north, the temperature began falling. It was cold — bitterly cold.
* * *
Ten miles from Titanic’s last position, Second Officer Stone had watched the rockets light the night sky. He alerted Captain Lord, who was sleeping on the couch in the chart room. Lord inquired as to whether the rockets had all been white. After receiving a yes from Stone, Lord had gone back to sleep.
Then the lights of the liner had sunk lower in the water, as if she were steaming away.
The time was 2:45 A.M.
At 4 A.M., Stone was relieved by Chief Officer Frederick Stewart. He related the strange events to Stewart, then went belowdecks to sleep.
* * *
Smoke trailing from her towering stack and rockets blasting from her decks, Carpathia arrived at the reported coordinates at 4 A.M. Captain Rostron expected to see the Titanic still afloat.
After ordering the engines stopped, he ordered the lookouts to scan the surrounding area.
There was nothing.
Eight hundred and eighty-two feet of the finest ship yet constructed had vanished.
To the north, Rostron could see an unbroken line of ice. At the spot where Carpathia was stopped, the sea was littered with chunks of ice and several large bergs. Minute by minute, the sky began to lighten. The flickering stars overhead began to disappear as the coming light fought the darkness. Slowly, the scene came into focus.
At that instant, a green flare streaked skyward.
“Starboard a quarter,” Rostron ordered.
Carefully maneuvering through the chunks of ice, Carpathia pulled abreast of a lifeboat.
Mrs. Walter Douglas in Lifeboat 2 was hysterical. “Titanic has gone down with all hands,” she screamed up at those on the deck of Carpathia.
As deckhands secured Lifeboat 2 and began to unload the passengers, Rostron scanned the sea in the growing light. He could make out lifeboats on all sides now, along with the flotsam from a ship now dead.
A thick fur coat rolled on the light waves. A swamped steamer trunk was just barely above water. Wooden deck chairs, planks, and empty life vests. To add to the chaotic scene were chunks of ice and a pair of nearby bergs, which towered nearly two hundred feet over Carpathia’s highest point. Seat cushions and ornate rugs floated past. Hundreds of sheets of paper formed a floating parquet of a story never to be read. A case of champagne, another filled with tins of snails. Bottles and casks and wooden slats ripped from Titanic on her plunge to the depths.
A Bible, a hatbox, several pair of shoes. A single body dead for hours.
“Get the survivors off the boats and into the salon,” Rostron ordered.
One by one, the lifeboats rowed closer.
* * *
The nagging doubts that had plagued Chief Officer Stewart finally proved too much.
At 5:40 A.M., he woke the Californian’s wireless operator, Cyril Evans, and related what Stone had told him. Evans struggled to awake, then warmed up his wireless set and adjusted the dial. Seconds later, he heard the news.
“Titanic has sunk,” he shouted to Stewart.
Stewart immediately raced back to the bridge with the news and woke Captain Lord.
Within minutes, Lord began to steer a course for Titanic’s last position.
* * *
The sun was above the horizon, and the temperature had warmed some.
Carpathia was a blur of activity, as more lifeboats arrived and the passengers were off-loaded. The passengers stumbled onto the deck in a daze. Most were dressed in a haphazard fashion — some in formal attire, others in everything from silk kimonos to velvet smoking jackets. Most were wearing hats, as was the fashion: the men in fedoras and bowlers with a sprinkling of tall top hats and a few snap-brim tweed caps; the women in a variety of headgear, from Russian fur caps to formal black boaters. The survivors’ shoes were a study in contrasts as well-an eclectic collection from silk opera slippers to rubber boots to polished black evening shoes to high-heeled pumps.
All the passengers were wet, and all were cold.
The passengers on Carpathia raided their trunks for dry clothes that were passed out by the crew. The kitchen kept vats of soup, coffee, and cocoa filled, along with large silver platters piled with sandwiches of ham, turkey, and roast beef, but few of the survivors could muster an appetite.
The shock, cold, and horror they had witnessed rendered many mute, their senses numb.
At 8:30 A.M., Lifeboat 12, the last still afloat, was secured and the survivors unloaded. Harold Bride, the brave wireless operator from Titanic, had stayed on his station until the last possible instant, radioing the distress calls to sea. Ordered into a lifeboat, he had survived the ordeal.
Crewmen from Carpathia pulled him from the last lifeboat as much dead as alive. As soon as he reached the deck, Bride collapsed. The surgeon on Carpathia would need to administer stimulants to revive him enough to tell his story.
Captain Rostron had the 705 survivors safely on board — now what would he do with them? The Olympic, Titanic’s sister ship, was drawing nearer. She radioed Carpathia and offered to take survivors on board.
“Absolutely not,” Rostron told Second Officer Dean. “Can you imagine the shock to the survivors if they saw a near mirror image of their sunken vessel come alongside and ask them to come aboard? These people have suffered enough.”
“What, then, Captain?” Dean asked.
“New York,” Rostron said quietly. “We turn around and take them home.”
“Very good, sir,” Dean said.
“But first have the clergy aboard come to the bridge,” Rostron said.
* * *
The sun was burning brightly over the scene of the disaster at 8:50 A.M.
After a brief multidenominational ceremony to honor the dead, there was nothing more Carpathia could do. Captain Rostron ordered a course set for New York City.
At full steam, Carpathia was four days away.
* * *
A crowd numbering ten thousand milled around the Battery in New York City as Carpathia steamed past the Statue of Liberty, carrying the Titanic survivors. Captain Rostron had no way of knowing how much the story of the sinking of the great liner had captivated the public’s attention.
“Look at the crowds,” Rostron said to Dean, who stood alongside him on the bridge.
“That’s the last thing the survivors need,” Dean said quietly. Rostron nodded. The last few days had given him an opportunity to obser
ve some of the survivors firsthand. Most were still suffering from a deep shock. Captain Rostron had noted two distinct feelings. The first was surprise. Surprise at how quickly they had been thrown from a floating palace into a freezing hell. The second was grief, tinged with remorse. Grief that others had died; remorse that they had somehow survived.
“I want you to take charge of boarding at quarantine,” Rostron said to Dean, “and keep the reporters from boarding.”
“Yes, sir,” Dean said.
Rostron knew this was but a stopgap. Once Carpathia was moored along the White Star Pier on the East River and the survivors had disembarked, there was nothing he would be able to do to protect them from the hordes. Still, he wanted to give them as much time as possible to collect their thoughts.
UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN had fared better than most. Her hardscrabble existence in the mining camps of Colorado had given her an inner strength on which she could call in times of trouble. Even so, as Carpathia left quarantine and steamed up the East River, surrounded by tugboats and pleasure craft, she realized she was party to an event that defined an era. The great industrial age of which she was a part had shown its rotting underbelly. The ship that “God himself could not sink” lay far below the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, and people would no longer place their faith blindly in the creations of man.
Spitting into the water alongside, she turned to a crewman nearby.
“From this day forward,” she said, “I shall always be defined by what happened.”
“What do you mean, Mrs. Brown?” the crewman asked.
“Whatever I do in the future will pale,” Brown said, “and when I die, the first sentence they write will be that I was a survivor of Titanic.”
“You and the others,” the crewman agreed.
“I wonder why I lived when others died?” Brown said.
“I think,” the crewman said quietly, “that that is a question only God can answer.”
* * *
At 8:37, Carpathia began unloading the Titanic’s lifeboats so she could moor. At 9:35 Thursday evening, she was finally tied fast, and the journey was at an end. Captain Rostron had done all he could. He and the entire crew of Carpathia had performed their jobs with honor.
“Lower the gangplank,” Rostron ordered.
Three minutes later, the first survivors struggled onto land. Not one of the survivors imagined their savior would meet a similar fate.
SIX YEARS LATER
A pair of tugs began pushing Carpathia from the pier in Liverpool. July 15, 1918, was a typical summer day in Great Britain — it was raining. But it was not the type of rain that plagued the island in the North Sea in winter, spring, and fall. This sprinkle was a halfhearted affair, lacking purpose and strength. At first it came from the north, then switched directions from east to west. It ebbed and flowed like a dying tide, at times opening to pockets of sunlight and dry air.
Captain William Prothero stood on the bridge as the tugs pushed his ship from port.
The Great War that now enveloped Europe had begun nearly four years before, yet it was only some fifteen months since the United States had entered the conflict. The prowling German submarines had finally wrested the country from neutrality. The Lusitania had been sunk in 1915, scores of other ships since. At first the German submarines were an annoyance, now they were threatening the very concept of open seas. Losses of 100,000 tons a month had now grown to nearly a million, with no end in sight. Cargo ships, passenger carriers, warships — all were fair game for the fleet of German U-boats.
Captain Prothero was a stout man with a black mustache that perched on his upper lip like a bristle brush. Those who served under him found him to be a consummate professional, firm but fair. While Prothero believed in protocol, he was not without a sense of humor.
“I hear there’s a chance of rain later,” he said to his second officer, John Smyth.
“In England?” Smyth said, smiling. “In summer? I find that hard to believe.”
Prothero thanked a steward who entered the bridge with a silver pot of tea, then poured himself a cup and added milk and sugar. “Would you check with the wireless shack,” he said to Smyth, “and see if they have received the latest warnings?”
“Very good, sir,” Smyth said.
Prothero sipped the tea and stared at his chart. The thought of German submarines was never far from his mind. They hid in wait off the ports until the ships had cleared and were in deep enough water to make salvage impossible. To reduce their losses, the Allies had taken to traveling in convoys with gunboat escorts, zigzagging through the water like snakes and running their vessels at the fastest possible speed so they might outrun any torpedoes that were fired. Even so, hardly a day went by when a ship was not sunk or fired at. The battle in the North Atlantic was a watery war of attrition.
* * *
A beam of light pierced the clouds and lit a patch of water directly ahead of U-55. Commander Gerhart Werner stared at the patch of sea through his binoculars. U-Boat 55, like most in the German fleet, spent a great deal of time above water— in fact, as much as was safely possible. Batteries could be recharged while it surfaced, fresh air allowed into the always foul-smelling hull.
No matter what Werner and his crew tried, there was no way to wash away the smell of diesel fuel, sweaty bodies, and fear that permeated every square inch of the inside of U-55. The smell was part of the duty, and the duty was hazardous at best.
Werner turned his binoculars from the spot of light and scanned the horizon. Five days before, U-55 had managed to board a small cargo ship at sea off Cork, and he was hoping for another. Before scuttling the vessel, the Germans had raided the stores for fresh food. Ham and bacon, potatoes, and some dairy. The confiscated food was a welcome change for his crew. For the most part, they survived off tins of meat and cans of vegetables from their pantry. At times the cook could make fresh bread, but it was not often — flour soon went bad in the galley, and yeast grew a strange fungus that looked like fur.
Submarine duty was not for a budding gourmet.
Swiveling in the conning tower, he turned to the stem. There a seaman was reeling in a perforated barrel they had been dragging behind on a line. The crew’s clothes were inside, along with a measure of powdered soap. After being agitated by the current and rinsed by the seawater, the barrel was being brought back on deck so the clothes could be unloaded and hung from a line running from the conning tower to a stern support.
Wemer stared to the west, where the sky was clearing. Hopefully, the weather would hold and no ships would approach. Then the clothes would have a chance to dry some before they needed to dive once again. Just then, Second Officer Franz Dieter climbed through the hatch in the conning tower with a folded slip of paper in his hands. Saluting Werner, he handed him the paper.
“There is a convoy assembling off Liverpool,” Werner said.
“Yes, sir,” Dieter said.
“That means they are still several hours away,” Werner noted. “Have the men check the torpedoes and the batteries, and mop the inner deck. Then allow them to rotate topside four at a time. Provided no ships pass by, each group will be allowed to spend ten minutes in the fresh air.”
“Yes, sir,” Dieter said, climbing below.
* * *
Carpathia steamed through the Irish Sea approaching Carmel Head. In the next few hours, she would enter St. George’s Channel, then follow the curve of Ireland along her southern shore. Once past Fastnet Rock on the southeast tip, the convoy would set a course west for Boston.
Captain Prothero stepped from the bridge and glanced back at the stern. Now that they had reached cruising speed, the powerful twin-screws of his command whipped the water into a foamy froth that trailed behind the vessel for nearly a mile. Far to the rear, past six other ships of the convoy, was a trailing British destroyer. Far to the front, nearly a half-mile distant, was the leading destroyer. The destroyers would stay with them through St. George’s before turning back.
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br /> After that, the convoy of seven needed to rely on themselves. Carpathia had been selected as commodore ship for the trip across the Atlantic Ocean, and with good reason — Prothero was a skilled captain who had made the crossing many times before. Last year, while captain of Carpathia, he’d had the honor of transporting the first American troops to Great Britain to join the Great War. After safely dropping off the soldiers, Carpathia had been on her way to London to replenish her stores when a torpedo had fired off Star Point. Prothero had ordered an evasive action and the torpedo had run past Carpathia, instead striking a U.S. oil tanker running nearby.
Another incident bears noting. Not long after the near miss by the torpedo, Prothero saw what he thought was a lifeboat on the water. Watching through his glasses, he was surprised to see a German U-boat surface nearby to retrieve the object. Prothero reported that the Germans were using decoys, thus saving a few more ships.
In short, there were few captains with the breadth of experience possessed by Prothero.
* * *
Commander Werner had yet to leave the conning tower. His people were farmers, and his ancestral genes were used to open spaces. The cramped inner hull of a U-boat was as foreign to him as Chinese fireworks, so he spent as much time abovedecks as possible. Even with his dislike of confined spaces, Werner was a competent leader.
He and the crew of U-55 had more than a handful of kills under their belt.
“That’s the last of the rotation,” Dieter said. “The men are now being fed in shifts.”
“What’s our location?” Werner inquired. “Still approximately a hundred miles off Fastnet Rock,” Dieter noted.
“It will be night soon,” Werner said, “so we might as well remain above water. Why don’t you take the first watch?”
“Yes, sir,” Dieter said.
“Unless we see something that makes me change my mind,” Werner said, “we’ll just wait for the next convoy to happen along.”
The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks Page 28