by David Dyer
Most importantly of all, Gill must give his solemn promise not to speak to any other newspaper. For his troubles he would receive five hundred dollars: one hundred in banknotes and the remainder wired to an account of his choosing. With this much money, I thought but did not say, he could invite half of Liverpool to witness his nuptials and buy a gold plaque for the grave of his poor dead mama and papa.
The assistant donkeyman agreed and we shook hands. I had my scoop. This was better than a body story.
As we prepared to begin our work – Gill to dictate, I to transcribe – I asked him a question. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘the officer on the bridge you spoke of, who also saw the rockets, who was he?’
‘The second officer.’
As I had thought. ‘And his name?’
‘Stoney. Mr Stone, I mean.’ He gave a quick snigger. ‘Or sometimes we call him Old Mattress-back, on account of his close relations with his bunk.’
‘Had he fallen asleep, then, when the rockets were fired?’
‘Oh no. Stoney loves his bunk, but he’d never sleep on watch.’
‘Was he drunk, then?’
Gill shook his head. ‘He’s sober as they come – just a bit timid is all.’
‘Then why didn’t he do anything? About the rockets, I mean.’
Gill looked at me for a moment. He seemed puzzled by my question. He drew his eyebrows together in a frown and tilted his head, as might a schoolteacher unsettled by a pupil’s unexpected ignorance.
‘But he did do something. I heard from the apprentice, who stood with him.’
‘What did he do?’
Again Gill paused. He seemed to be thinking hard. I wondered whether he was recalibrating the value of his story, now that he knew what I didn’t know. But if he had thought about asking for more money, his honour must have reminded him that we already had a deal, because he offered his final piece of information for free. And it was an astounding piece.
‘He woke the skipper and told him.’
‘The captain was told?’
‘Three times. The second called down three times. Even sent the apprentice down.’
‘Wait just a minute: the captain knew about the rockets?’
‘Yes.’
‘As they were being fired?’
‘As they were being fired.’
‘Did he come up to the bridge?’
‘He stayed below.’
‘So he did nothing?’
‘Nothing!’
I did not understand. Only a few days I earlier I had seen this captain: a powerful British commander with golden epaulettes, as brave as a soldier, telling us how he had pushed his ship to the limits of safety and endurance, how he had twisted and turned through winding channels of ice in fear of ripping off his hull plates.
‘Well, then,’ I asked, ‘was he drunk?’
‘No, sir. The skipper’s sober too. He’s never taken a single drop on a ship, by all accounts. Real proud of it, too.’
‘Then … why?’
Ernest Gill shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe he was scared of the ice. Maybe he didn’t want to risk the bergs and such. It was a dark night, and freezing too.’
Was my story, then, not one of hubris after all, but dramatic cowardice? I’d been told that Liverpool men were tough, that they had a special sort of courage. Liverpool was, after all, the city from which England sent the ships to build her empire. So was what I had here a very remarkable and unique creature: the Liverpool craven? Had this man left fifteen hundred people to die because he was scared of the dark and cold? If so, how could he go on living? We all commit shameful acts at some time – my life as a drunken journalist had been one long sequence of moral lapses – but this was of a different magnitude altogether. This was worse than Mr Ismay getting into a lifeboat. This would disgrace a nation.
It was the biggest antihero story of all. My wife would be pleased.
* * *
All stories have a kernel that has to be cracked, a knot that has to be untied, a lock that has to be opened. Sometimes it’s the bodies of the dead that give me the clue I need to unravel a mystery, at other times it’s the faces of the living that offer an answer. My problem in this case was that the Californian had turned out to be a ship with no bodies, and her captain a man with a face that could not be read. It was a puzzle of the first order. But I intended to solve it, and tomorrow I would have my key: Gill’s affidavit. I had taken down his statement and delivered it to our typists. Now I needed to understand something. What – exactly – did rockets fired at sea mean?
It was a lovely afternoon. Women wore blossoms in their hats, and coloured bunting from the annual marathon still floated above the sidewalks. I wandered slowly across town to the pilot house at Lewis Wharf. As a boy I’d been brought here by my father, a keen yachtsman, to talk to the mariners and admire the paintings of pilot schooners. There were only two rooms: an anteroom where the men washed and changed, and a large room with writing tables of oak, and shelves and windowsills stacked with sextants, barometers, spyglasses, dividers, compasses, parallel rulers and harbour charts.
‘Everyone knows what rockets at sea mean,’ said the portly Boston Harbor pilot sitting opposite me on a large red sofa. ‘They mean distress.’
‘But just so that I understand completely,’ I gently pressed, ‘what is meant, precisely, by “distress”?’
The pilot raised an eyebrow. He evidently thought it a stupid question, but I wanted his answer. ‘Just so I get things exactly right,’ I added, pen poised above my notebook.
‘Young man, distress means distress. It means: please come to me because I am in trouble. Simple as that.’
‘But, you see, that’s just my problem. If it is that simple, I’m trying to understand why the ship that the Titanic saw did not come. There must have been a reason.’
The pilot flattened his great beard to his chest with the palms of both hands, thinking. ‘The watch officer on the ship may have been asleep. Or reading a book below decks, or something of that sort, and he just didn’t see the rockets.’
‘Yes, possibly,’ I said. This explanation didn’t really help me. Gill had told me the officer – Old Mattress-back – had not only seen the rockets but reported them to his captain. ‘But what if he did see them?’ I pressed. ‘Is there any reason why the captain would not go to the aid of the distressed ship?’
‘No. If he saw them, he must go. It is the oldest tradition of the sea.’
‘But could the officer perhaps have confused them with a celebration – a display for the passengers?’
The old man looked at me as if I were a deliberately mischievous child. ‘In the middle of the night? White rockets are white rockets. They’re very distinctive.’
‘There’s nothing else they could be taken for, then?’
‘Well, pyrotechnics are sometimes still used as private night signals – company signals – to show shore stations or passing ships what company a ship comes from.’
‘Could white rockets be confused with them?’
‘Not really. Company signals are coloured flares or balls or lights displayed in very particular patterns. Distress rockets are fired singly, one at a time. And maritime regulations tell ships not to use any company signal that could be confused with a distress signal.’
‘Let me put this to you: if you were a captain, sleeping below decks, and the watch officer called down to tell you rockets were being fired, what would you do?’
‘I’d go to the bridge. I’d wake the wireless man. Then raise steam and go for the source of the rockets.’
‘But what if there was danger to your own ship?’
‘What sort of danger?’
‘Ice, for example?’
‘No one would thank a captain for sinking his ship, but he must at least try to respond to the rockets. He must do what he can do within the limits of safety.’ The old mariner paused. ‘We have an example, of course, in this very case.’
I waited, uncertain of his me
aning.
‘Rostron,’ he explained, ‘of the Carpathia. When he got the message by wireless, he took his ship and his seven hundred passengers at full speed to the Titanic, knowing there were icebergs about. It’s the law – but more than that, it’s a point of honour. No captain would risk the shame of not trying.’
My expert mariner, during this discussion, had been polishing a small brass telescope. Suddenly he lifted it and peered through it at me. ‘In New York,’ he said, ‘everyone is hunting for this mysterious ship seen by the Titanic. But you already know, don’t you? That’s why you’re asking these questions. You’ve found out, haven’t you?’
‘I have not.’
‘Now you’re lying.’
I smiled at him.
‘Protect your story if you must,’ he said, putting down his telescope. ‘I expect I’ll read all about it soon enough.’
‘Perhaps you will. May I use what you’ve told me?’
‘Most certainly,’ said the old man as he rose from his sofa. ‘But you must let me give you a little word of warning. You really think a man has committed this crime – of not going to the Titanic?’
‘I do.’
‘An American?’
‘An Englishman.’
‘Then I need to tell you: I think you’ve made a mistake. You’ve set your dogs barking up the wrong tree. No English officer would ignore distress rockets. There’s something you’re missing, something you’ve got wrong. You must be careful what you publish.’
I thanked him for his warning and took my leave. As I made my way back to my office in the gathering darkness I thought about what the pilot had said: no Englishman would ignore distress rockets. Yet tomorrow Ernest Gill would swear in an affidavit to exactly that, on pain of prison. It was perplexing. It seemed that the more I knew about this story, the less I understood. Each fact pointed to the next in a logical sequence, but, like road signs leading to a cliff edge, their endpoint made no sense. Was Gill lying? I really did not think so. Enhancing the truth, perhaps, or exaggerating it a little. But the nub of what he said, that the officer on the bridge had seen the rockets and told the captain – that I believed.
This puzzle became my obsession. Every other aspect of the disaster was subsumed by it: the missing bodies, the lunacy of Major Butt, Astor’s chivalry and Ismay’s dishonour, my wife’s frustration with the suffragettes, Thomas’s need for a hero – even my own indignation about the unknown and unsung dead children. All of these things now seemed secondary. None of them would have happened if the rockets had been answered.
Why weren’t they? It was a riddle worthy of the sphinx. There was only one man who could answer it, and tomorrow, once I had my affidavit, I would ask that man quietly and directly: Why didn’t you go?
* * *
But as it happened, I did not have the luxury of waiting until tomorrow. I was back at my desk early Tuesday evening when I heard Krupp calling my name from his office. ‘Steadman! Steadman! STEAD-MAN!’ He did not, as my daughter would have put it, sound best pleased.
‘You have this story tied up?’ he demanded as soon as the door of his office closed behind me. His face was redder than usual; his eyes seemed to bulge outwards, like a toad’s.
‘Yes,’ I said. I already feared where this was heading.
‘So it’s an exclusive?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because we have agreed to pay – what was his name?’
‘Gill.’
‘Whoever – five hundred dollars?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which is a great deal of money?’
‘Yes.’ By now I was distinctly nervous.
‘Then why – please do tell me why – is some village newspaper out west running your story on its front page this very afternoon?’
I was stunned. ‘My story? The Californian?’
‘The one and the same. I quote,’ and here he read from his notes, ‘“Californian refuses aid. Foreman carpenter on board this boat says hundreds might have been saved from the Titanic.” Do you know anything about this foreman carpenter?’
I vaguely remembered Gill mentioning a carpenter: a big man who accused Gill of mutiny and told the crew to keep their mouths shut. ‘He’s got dark skin, I think.’
‘Dark skin and a big mouth, because he’s telling your story to anyone who will listen – for free. Listen.’ Krupp turned again to his notes. ‘“This story was told to John Frazer of this town by the foreman carpenter, who is a cousin of Mr Frazer.” Lucky Mr Frazer! “It was shortly after the Californian had gone by the icefield that the watch saw the rockets which were sent up by the Titanic as signals of distress … It is said that those on board the Californian could see the lights of the Titanic very plainly…”’ Krupp folded his arms across his chest and stared at me. His nose twitched. ‘Well?’
I tried to think. I was shocked. ‘Where did you get those notes?’ I asked.
‘The Clinton Daily Item. It was read to me over the long-distance line. I wrote down the main parts.’
‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Nobody has. But they have the story and we have nothing.’
‘But it’s a small paper, and we have Gill. Tomorrow he will swear his affidavit —’
‘Tomorrow is too late. You need to go to the ship now. The Herald in New York has got hold of this somehow, and the Post here, and they’re both sending men to the ship now. Damn them! So take my notes, throw them at the captain’s feet if you have to, and see what he says. But whatever happens, telephone the story back to me tonight.’
I left his office, collected my hat, coat and notebook from my desk, and set off into the night. I was angry at the world. It was a rotten piece of luck: a nobody carpenter spills the beans to a cousin in a nowhere town who chats to someone at a two-page rag that no one reads. And then somehow The New York Herald and The Boston Post find out. If only the carpenter had waited one more day. I’d lost my scoop, and no doubt my job with it.
But as I boarded the ferry once again and headed out into the harbour, I became strangely light-spirited. Boston seen at night from the water has a very special magic. Fine buildings are lit from base to top and the monumental State House stands tall on Beacon Hill, its gilt dome aflame with the electric light of American democracy. It’s a sight that always lifts the soul. This is where the East India tea chests were thrown overboard, and the water seems to sparkle with the thrill of it. There’s a sense of the new: the colonists, the revolutionaries, the suffragettes. Out here on the water, far from Watch and Ward and Mrs Baker Eddy, Boston seems to be a city of the future. I would make my way in it, somehow. I began to think it might be a good thing finally to be free of the Boston American and Krupp’s unrelenting quest for cir-cu-lation. Something new would come up. It always did.
As the ferry slowed and neared the East Boston wharves, I could see the Californian’s pier lit brilliantly by electric lights slung along iron frameworks. The silhouetted hulk of the ship loomed low and dark. Her derricks were swinging wildly, bringing cargo aboard in great canvas slings, and hard, angular shadows played about her upper decks.
Somewhere in all that activity, I knew, was Captain Stanley Lord, preparing to defend himself against the allegations of a disloyal carpenter.
CHAPTER 12
Herbert Stone knew as soon as he saw them that the two men walking down the wharf towards the gangway were reporters. He knew by the way they laughed and sauntered along, sniffing the air as if there might be news in the smell of the gas lamps. It was only a few hours since Stone had read of Mr Boxhall seeing a mystery ship and firing rockets, but the press were here already. Somehow they had found him out.
In a moment they were in the alleyway outside his cabin. He heard the chartroom door jerking open, the gangway watchman apologising to the captain, and the reporters announcing their newspapers. He slipped quietly along the alleyway, pressed himself flat against the bulkhead outside the partly open chartroom door, and listened. There were indistinct mu
rmurings – complaints from the captain, apologies from the reporters – and then this: ‘What do you say, Captain Lord, about this statement from your carpenter that it was your ship the Titanic saw?’
Stone leaned closer to the door. A statement from the ship’s carpenter? Mr McGregor? The good and loyal carpenter, who kept himself to himself and always took off his cap when Stone spoke to him? The captain, too, must have been surprised, because he asked the pressmen twice for confirmation that the carpenter was their source. The men confirmed that he was. Stone closed his eyes. He tried not to breathe.
The captain’s voice was at a higher pitch than usual and his words were stretched tight. His denials were driven by barely suppressed rage. Sailors would say anything when they were ashore; the whole thing was an outrage; the captain had known nothing whatsoever of the Titanic’s plight until the next morning. All of which was true enough, Stone thought, but what about the rockets? ‘You can tell lies by telling the truth,’ Stone’s mother had once told him.
He could, he thought, stride into the room – right now – and tell the real truth: that he had seen the rockets and he had told the captain. He could say he was sorry, that he’d had no idea it was the Titanic and that she was sinking, and that he should have done more. He could do it now; he could end this whole sorry business once and for all.
A reporter said, ‘If your wireless had been working, you may have heard the distress call?’
‘Indeed,’ Stone heard the captain say, as if it were nothing of consequence.
‘And you would have gone?’
‘Of course.’
‘And everyone might have been saved?’
‘Very possibly. I only wish that I had known the Titanic was in danger. I would have been glad of the opportunity to go to her assistance just as fast as I possibly could.’