by David Dyer
I thought he might cry. ‘Mr Marconi is very proud of you,’ I said. This seemed to lift his spirits and there was the hint of a smile. I leaned closer. ‘Did you try to warn the Titanic?’
This idea – of monumental significance – seemed uninteresting to Evans. ‘Yes,’ he said, looking at the ceiling. ‘At eleven o’clock that night. Just before the accident. I called the operator up and said, “Say, old man, we’re stopped and surrounded by ice.” He came straight back so loud I had to lift my headphones off. “Shut up, shut up,” he said, and “Keep out.” He was working Cape Race. You know – sending passenger messages.’
‘He told you to shut up?’
‘Yes. But it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a little way we operators have with each other. We don’t take it as an insult or anything like that. I met Jack Phillips once in the Marconi London office. He was very nice to me.’
We sat in respectful silence for a moment. Then the boy began to look around, as if searching for someone more interesting to talk to. ‘What did you do,’ I gently pressed, ‘after he told you to keep out?’
‘I took off my ’phones and got into bed, didn’t I? I read a magazine and fell asleep. Then Charlie came in – Mr Groves, that is, the third officer – and he tried to have a listen, but he didn’t know the detector had wound down. It’s a little box,’ he said, anticipating my question and using his hands to shape a rectangle in the air, ‘with wires spinning around –’ here he gave a twirling motion with his forefinger – ‘which pick up the signal. So, he heard nothing. If he’d wound it up he would have heard the Titanic sending SOS and CQD over and over.’
I paused to think of it. The Titanic frantically sending. The Californian peacefully stopped, near enough to have precedence, but no longer listening. A girl brought me a drink. A fly buzzed. Through an open door I saw that the afternoon had become clear and blue.
Cyril Evans, his head bowed, was wiping his spectacles with his shirt. ‘If somebody had woken me up, I would have heard Phillips, on the Titanic. He was kind to me, in London. I would have heard him, and we would have gone down to help him.’ He put his spectacles back on – great, thick chunks of glass – and looked up at me. ‘But instead,’ he added with touching simplicity, ‘he drowned.’
The boy’s eyes, so large, so round, gave his face a sudden clarity. I saw pain and sorrow: the anguish of a hero denied, a slow-burning indignation that such a tragedy could have happened so close without him being allowed to help. Thin, awkward boys like Cyril Evans, I supposed, did not get many opportunities to prove themselves men; he seemed acutely aware that his chance had slipped away forever.
‘So,’ I prompted, ‘you slept until…?’
‘The next morning, just before dawn, when the chief officer shook me awake and said there was a ship in trouble, and asked me to find out what was the matter.’
‘So you went to your instrument?’
‘At once. Within a minute I had the news. We went through the ice to the other side and headed down to her position, but all we saw was the Mount Temple searching about. Then we saw the Carpathia so we came back through the ice again, but it was too late. She had already taken up all the boats. She steamed off and we stayed behind to look for bodies.’
‘Did you see any?’
‘None. We steamed around for a while, but all we saw was loose wreckage. A half-sunk boat. Some clothes and lifejackets. That sort of thing.’
Evans paused for a moment, fidgeting nervously. ‘Do you think,’ he asked, moistening his lips with little darts of his tongue, ‘that Mr Marconi would allow me to talk to the newspapers about what happened? About me having precedence and trying to help?’
Something about this boy’s open-faced trust, his naïve aspirations and his visceral disappointment, made me regret – just for a moment – my subterfuge. ‘You would like to talk to a newspaper?’
‘Jack Binns did, and Harry Bride from the Titanic, and Cottam from the Carpathia, so it seems only fair that I should get to say something, me being the operator who —’
‘Had precedence?’
‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘The captain says we’re not to talk to anyone, but I thought, if Mr Marconi said so…’
The boy stopped speaking. He was looking over my shoulder, so I turned in my seat and saw a short, thin man framed by the doorway of the saloon. He wore a great square blazer with golden rings on its cuffs. His mouth was hidden by a large moustache and his eyes by the rim of an officer’s cap, but when he stepped further into the room I recognised him as the man who’d stood closest to Captain Lord during the press meeting. He was, I assumed, the captain’s senior officer. He did not say anything but Evans stood up quickly and walked over to him. The two spoke quietly for a moment before Evans returned to the table.
‘You should have just told me,’ he said. ‘You didn’t have to lie.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said simply, taking off my spectacles.
‘Which newspaper?’ he asked.
‘The Boston American.’
‘You should have just told me.’
He picked up his cap, turned and walked with the officer out of the saloon.
It was late afternoon. I ordered another drink, and then another. I thought about what the wireless operator had told me. Was this my story then? A story of spectacular hubris? A story of a small ship trying desperately to warn a mighty liner and being ignored? A story of British overconfidence meeting its just deserts? American readers already had Cowardly Mr Ismay to blame, now I could give them Arrogant Jack Phillips as well.
It was a story, too, with unbearable dramatic irony. The agony! My readers would want to reach desperately into the page and wind up that magnetic detector themselves. How cruel it is, they would think, that fifteen hundred lives should depend on one tiny clockwork mechanism.
And yet still I did not file. There was something about what the wireless boy had said that did not make sense. I read my notes, ordered another bourbon, then read them again. I knew the answer was there somewhere but I could not see it. With a red pencil I circled phrases at random: ‘stopped and surrounded by ice’; ‘shut up, shut up. Keep out’; ‘I went to bed’; ‘the detector had wound down’; ‘chief woke me in the morning and said a ship was in trouble’; ‘in a minute I knew’; ‘we came back through the ice’… There was something wrong but by now my mind was so addled by drink I could not see what it was.
In the evening my bar-girl friend arrived and we shuffled off to her place. We walked along the harbour’s edge on soft grass. She slipped her arm through mine and her face glowed pale in the starlight. I let the red and green lights of channel buoys mesmerise me. I squinted so that the flashing white lights of the cardinal marks danced among my eyelashes. I could not tell how close or far away these lights were; I felt I could reach out and touch them.
It was later, as I lay in bed listening to my friend’s deepening breathing and thinking of those lights across the water, that the answer came to me. I thought about what Dan Byrne had told me, I saw again the senior officer in the door of the saloon, and I understood what was wrong with the wireless boy’s story. Suddenly and completely it all made perfect sense.
* * *
‘The Californian,’ I said, rather triumphantly the following day, ‘saw the Titanic sinking and did nothing to help her.’
Krupp pushed himself back in his chair and raised an eyebrow. It was midmorning. The curtains were open; his red hair flamed in the light.
‘That is my story,’ I continued. ‘It’s not one of my body stories but it will sell. It will create an outrage.’
Krupp leaned forward. ‘Nobody else knows about this?’
‘Nobody. It’s a scoop.’
My boss sat deep in thought for a moment. ‘How do you know that your ship saw the Titanic?’
‘Yesterday I spoke to the wireless operator. He didn’t mean to tell me, but he did – one little phrase gave it away. He’d been asleep all night, he said, with his equipment switc
hed off, but when the chief officer woke him the next morning he asked him to find out what was the matter, because there was a ship in trouble.’ I paused. My boss looked at me blankly. ‘Don’t you see?’ I continued. ‘If the wireless equipment was dead all night how could the chief have known there was a ship in trouble? There’s only one way he could have. Somebody on his ship must have seen it was in trouble.’
‘But how would they know it was in trouble?’
‘Rockets,’ I said. ‘I had thought that perhaps they could tell by a flashing light, or the angle of the lights, or something of that sort – but then this morning, on my way here, I saw this.’ I dropped onto his desk the morning edition of The Boston Herald. SHIP SIGHTED AS TITANIC SANK ran the headline, and I waited a moment for Krupp to read on. ‘You see? Mr Boxhall of the Titanic has been telling the senators in Washington that he saw a ship in the distance, and that he sent up rockets to call for help.’
Krupp skimmed the rest of the article, sweeping his forefinger from side to side across the page.
‘Lots of other Titanic survivors have been saying they saw the ship too,’ I continued, ‘and all America wants to know what ship it was. But I already know.’
Krupp rubbed his temples. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Everything fits. That’s why the captain wanted to keep his own ship’s position a secret; that’s why he tried to push the Titanic further away; that’s why he didn’t let anyone else talk. He was protecting someone – whoever it was who saw the rockets.’
‘And that was…?’
‘The second officer. He looked terrified during the press conference. It’s the second officer who keeps watch during the middle of the night on ships, and that’s when the rockets would have been fired.’
‘But why would this man – this second officer – see rockets and do nothing?’
‘Now, that I don’t know. Perhaps he’d been drinking, or fell asleep, or mistook them for something else. That’s what I need to find out.’
‘And could they have got there in time? I mean, if this officer had told the captain?’
‘I think so. Both ships were on the same side of the icefield. The Californian did push through the icefield the next morning – the captain was very keen to tell us all about the winding channels of ice – but I know from Dan Byrne that the CQD position given by the Titanic was too far west. So the Californian pushed through the field for nothing. The wireless boy told me that they then had to steam back through the icefield to get to the wreck site. But if she’d steamed for the rockets as they were being fired —’
‘Then she would not have been misled by the wrong position.’
‘Exactly.’ I leaned back a little in my chair. ‘She would have gone straight there. It all fits.’ As I say, I felt rather triumphant.
Krupp lit a cigarette. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Go back aboard. But I want the story to run tomorrow. And make sure it’s an exclusive. Stories like this always leak.’
I agreed. I had to move quickly. If I was right – and I knew I was – it would be a difficult secret to keep. And we needed an exclusive. While the New York papers told the same tired tales of brave millionaires shooting cravens and helping women into lifeboats, we would be the only newspaper in the nation telling a different tale: of a man who watched it all happen from across the sea and lifted not one finger to help.
But how to get aboard? Jack Thomas was, at least for the moment, no longer helping me. I wondered whether I might somehow use my daughter – ask her to play a prostitute, perhaps, or, safer, a suffragette collecting money for The Cause. If she could walk alone among Negroes she could certainly hold her own among sailors, creating just enough of a diversion for me to get aboard. I braced myself for another visit to Charles Street, but as things turned out it was unnecessary. An envelope was brought to me at my desk a short while later, dirty and torn, and oddly addressed: ‘To the Reporter Who Talked to the Wireless Operator of the Californian’. Inside was a short note:
Dear Sir,
Mr Cyril Evans, who you tricked, told me that you write for a newspaper and wanted to know what happened on our Ship. I will tell you what I Saw and All that Happened if you like but I will lose my Berth if I do tell. It is a well-paid Berth so perhaps you could help me with that. If you are interested I will be at the same place you met Mr Evans, at one o’clock this afternoon. This will be your only chance.
Yours truly,
Ernest Gill
Assistant Donkeyman
Half an hour later I was on the ferry, chugging across the harbour once again to the East Boston wharves. The saloon, when I arrived, had drawn its blinds against the afternoon sunshine: inside was dark and humid. Dogs barked and the air stank of horse manure.
I waited. I felt the story close and warm, like a woman’s body.
Just after one o’clock, a young man entered. I knew at once it was my informant. He was dressed in a neat brown suit, as if going to church, but there was a hint of coaldust about him. He wore his cloth cap at a jaunty angle; his moustache was thick and straight, his eyes clear and grey. I waved him over and stood to shake his hand. When I heard the strange lilt of his accent, I asked him where he was from. He said Sheffield, although he now lived in Liverpool.
‘It isn’t right,’ he said as we took our seats, ‘for the captain to try to hush up what happened.’
‘What did happen?’ I asked.
‘See, that there’s the whole point of the matter, isn’t it? It’s why I’m here, to see if you’re interested in knowing just that: what did happen.’
‘I am interested.’
‘I expect a whole lot of people are interested. But the moment the skipper gets wind of what I’ve done, I’ll lose my berth as sure as I’m sitting here – and it’s a good berth too, one of the best I’ve had – and I’ll be on the Boston streets with my dunnage quick as a shot with nowhere to go and no way of getting back home.’
I knew where this was heading, of course, and was prepared for it. I had discussed it with Krupp. We knew what labourers on ships earned: not much more than twenty-five dollars a month. So we would offer him thirty.
‘And me with no mother or father to my name, and my lady in Liverpool expecting to be married as soon as I clear the gangway inbound – she said if we aren’t getting married, don’t bother coming back.’
‘Then tell me, what would be a reasonable figure?’
‘Well, I hear all sorts of things about Mr Hearst and this and that, and The New York Times and Mr Bride of the Titanic being paid a thousand dollars for his story.’
I coughed up a little of my drink, then laughed. ‘We can’t give a thousand dollars. You weren’t on the Titanic, you know. We could perhaps go to fifty.’
‘And I could perhaps go to another newspaper, if I had a mind to.’
I eyed him carefully. ‘I am sure there are other men on your ship who could tell the story for a great deal less than a thousand dollars.’
The donkeyman met my comment with surprising speed. ‘But all they could tell you is what they’ve been told or what they’ve heard in the nature of gossip – so-and-so told me this, or so-and-so heard that – but I can tell you what I saw with my very own eyes.’
I stared hard at him – at the red flecks in his brown hair, at his focused grey eyes – and tried to read his face. ‘Come along, then,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you saw with your very own eyes and I’ll tell you what we can pay with our very own money.’
‘All right, then.’
And Ernest Gill, without further ado, told me that with his very own eyes he had seen the Titanic firing her rockets. He hadn’t known it was the Titanic at the time, of course – he’d thought the ship a ‘big German’ – but he had seen the rockets very plainly. They burst into stars that ‘spangled out and drifted down’. He saw them, and the officer on the bridge also saw them, but the Californian didn’t go to them.
Rockets! I was pleased. I’d been wrong about bodies being aboard, but I was right about
the rockets. Provided, of course, this man was telling the truth.
‘The men are angry,’ Gill went on, ‘but they’re scared of losing their jobs. We had a meeting and I said we should form a committee of protest and go up to the captain, but they were against it. The carpenter said it was a mutiny and we just best keep our mouths shut. Big tall man he is, the carpenter. Says he’s from Liverpool but his skin’s browner than a Spaniard’s and I don’t think he’s proper English at all. But I didn’t want to cause any trouble. It isn’t right, though, and something ought to be done about it.’
Gill paused and I sat for a moment, thinking. The saloon door drifted open. I heard a horse pulling against its reins outside and the distant clatter of freight cars.
‘You didn’t think to report the rockets to the bridge yourself?’
Again his answer was immediate, and perhaps a shade defensive. ‘That isn’t my job. Ships in the distance have nothing to do with me. They’re for the bridge, and I’d get no thanks for interfering.’
‘But you did see them?’
‘I did. I swear.’
I continued to watch Gill carefully as he spoke. The sinking of the Titanic was the story of the century so far, and this man was saying he had watched it happen. If he was speaking the truth, his story was worth hundreds of dollars. But was he?
I asked him about his own story – his life, his thoughts, his hopes. He spoke easily, telling me of his childhood amid the glowing forges of Sheffield, the death of his mother and father, and his work as a glassblower’s assistant. He opened his right hand as far as it would go, showing me striated pink scars – like the folded flesh of some exotic fruit – where hot glass had burned through to the bone. There were very few nerves in that hand, he said, pressing a fingernail deep into the scars. If he got burned again it would not hurt.
I asked him to stay where he was while I telephoned my office. In ten minutes I returned with a simple but bold plan. We would buy his story. I would, this very afternoon, take down verbatim his detailed statement, and overnight I would have it typed up as an affidavit. Gill would return to the ship, collect his possessions and report to my office tomorrow, Wednesday, 24th April, at noon sharp, where he would swear the affidavit before a notary public. I would then wire the affidavit to Senator Smith in Washington, and Gill would stand by to travel there by train if he were needed – as I expected he would be – to testify before the Senate committee. Gill’s affidavit would be published in full in the Boston American the following morning. It would cause a sensation.