Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  The freight laden into the Titanic’s holds resembled the twentieth-century equivalent of the luxuries pictured in John Masefield’s poem “Cargoes,” with its Spanish galleon carrying rare gems and tropical spices and its quinquireme from Nineveh rowing across the Mediterranean bearing its treasure of ivory and peacocks. Precious stones sent from Antwerp alone were insured for nearly £50,000. One diamond merchant lost stock insured for £18,000 when the ship went down: “a North Atlantic liner, freighted with millionaires and their wives, is a little diamond mine in itself.”8 A consignment of ostrich plumes valued at £10,000 was also carried. There was a red twenty-five-horsepower Renault motor car, and high-class package freight such as velvet, cognac and other liqueurs, cartons of books, as well as fine foods such as shelled walnuts, olive oil, anchovies, cheese, vinegar, jam, mushrooms, and goods like goatskins and jute bagging. Some 3,435 bags of mail were loaded at Southampton: business letters, of course, but equally precious to the recipients, letters going to migrants’ homes and boardinghouses, from Finland, Sweden, Italy, Greece, Lebanon, and the rest, bringing their treasures of memory and love from the old country. There were thousands of registered packets. Joseph Conrad had posted the manuscript of his story “Karain” to his New York admirer John Quinn, one of those American collectors who rifled Europe for rarities to hoard in their private troves. “Karain” was lost in the sinking, together with a seal ring belonging to the Irish dramatist Lady Gregory. Fortunately, Conrad had sent the manuscript of “The Secret Agent” to Quinn by an earlier ship. The Titanic was also carrying a rare copy of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in a unique jewel-studded binding by the English binders Sangorski & Sutcliffe. A Colorado mining millionairess, Margaret Brown, who made a late booking on the Titanic, traveled with three crates containing architectural models of the ruins of ancient Rome, which she intended to give to the Denver Art Museum.

  It was providential that there were not more grievous, irreplaceable losses. When the Titanic sailed, many European art rarities were in packing cases awaiting their final far migration to a New York millionaire’s showplace on Madison Avenue. The U.S. Customs Tariff Act of 1897 had imposed a 20 percent tariff on imported works of art destined for private homes. As a result, collectors like Pierpont Morgan had for fifteen years kept their acquisitions in London or Paris. But the balance of tax advantages had recently shifted. In the United States, partly at Quinn’s instigation, the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909 repealed the import duty on artworks, while in Britain, Lloyd George’s “People’s Budget” raised the level of death duties. Morgan’s aversion to paying tax spurred him to order the transfer of his London collection to New York—despite Lloyd George issuing an official statement in January 1912: “Mr. Pierpont Morgan’s art treasures would not be liable to death duties in England unless they were to be sold.”9 That January, to the consternation of English cognoscenti, Morgan’s paintings, furniture, miniatures, silver, sculpture, bronzes, ivories, majolica, enamels, porcelain, and jewelry began to be packed for transatlantic shipment. The princely house in Kensington that served as a showcase for his collection—“it looks like a pawnbroker’s shop for Croesuses,”10 the connoisseur Bernard Berenson observed—was given over to packers, hammerers, and carters. Pierpont Morgan felt that the ships of the White Star Line, which he owned, had an inviolable safety record, and insisted that his precious rarities be carried on its vessels. White Star liners conveyed Morgan’s first packing cases across the Atlantic in February, but in March shipments had to be suspended for lack of an official who was required by pettifogging U.S. Customs regulations to monitor the packing. By this chance not a particle of Morgan’s collection was shipped on the Titanic.

  On the morning of April 10, 1912, the Southampton boat train left Waterloo Station in London with a roar at 7:30, jolted over the Vauxhall points, and clanked toward the Southampton docks. Just as the carriages were divided by class, so were the houses and towns on the journey. At first the train rolled along the lines on which weary, resigned commuters paid their daily tax of time as they traveled to and from London. The tight terraced houses of inner London with cindery sunless backyards yielded to tidy redbrick suburban villas with ripening spring gardens. Then the boat train reached the countryside. At a prudent distance from the rattle and smoke of the railway, the country houses of Surrey stood in pleasances and parklands. One of them, Polesden Lacey, had been bought by Sir Clinton Dawkins, the financier who had clinched the deal whereby Pierpont Morgan’s Wall Street firm won control of the White Star Line. After Dawkins had been worked to death by Morgan, a new owner employed the architects of the Ritz Hotel, Charles-Frédéric Mewès and Arthur Davis, to refit the interior. Polesden Lacey became a sumptuous display of Edwardian opulence and the material expression of the Edwardian spirit. Mewès and Davis were specialists, too, in designing first-class accommodation for Atlantic liners.

  One can conjure the different walks of the embarking passengers at Southampton. The measured, steady treads; the hasty, bustling steps; the erect high stepping of the proud or confident; the mournful plod; the skipping gait; the insolent slouch; a whistling saunter; the ruffled and huffy; the furtive types who sidled, the men who walked like panthers, the others who shambled like defeated men. The hats, too: Colonel Astor’s immaculately balanced bowler, trilbies worn cavalierly askew, sporting ulsters with black-and-white checks, flat caps jammed down on poor men’s heads. Women’s headwear, too, was an always precise indication of their social status. There were gradations down from women with the latest Paris hats on their heads and the freshest New York scandal on their tongues, to peasant women in shawls whose knowledge of the world was hardly longer than the shadow of their village steeple.

  Four hundred and twenty-seven first- and second-class passengers boarded at Southampton with eager unclouded anticipation of the pleasures of White Star’s newest and finest equipage. They foresaw feasts, games, and indiscretions ahead; they had presentiments of shipboard friendships, but none of death. There were 495 third-class passengers—many of them creased and disheveled migrants with their bundles—boarding by a different walkway. Nikola Lulic, who boarded in Southampton, had crossed the Atlantic at least twice before. A Croat villager, he had deserted from the Austrian army in 1902, or else had absconded to avoid military conscription, and went to work as a miner in Chisholm, Minnesota. On the Titanic he acted as interpreter and chaperone to a dozen other Croats who boarded with him at Southampton and to others who embarked at Cherbourg: few had crossed the Atlantic before.

  On the morning of departure, many of the “black gang”—the Titanic’s stokers and trimmers—went ashore for a last crawl through the dock pubs in Canute Road and Platform Road. A fireman called John Podesta later described how he and William Nutbean started drinking in the Newcastle Hotel before proceeding to a pub called the Grapes, where they met three of their shipmates—brothers called Bertram, Tom, and Alfred Slade. At 11:50 they left the Grapes for the docks, and were walking toward the Titanic when a passenger train trundled along the lines toward them. Podesta and Nutbean darted in front of it and reached the vessel in good time by noon. But the Slades hung back, as did stokers Shaw and Holden and trimmer Brewer. It proved a long train, and though they sprinted toward the Titanic, the gangway was already being swung aside. They called to be let on board, gesticulated, and argued, but Sixth Officer Moody, in charge of the gangway, decided that they were unreliable and summoned a standby crew: Richard Hosgood, Alfred Geer, Harry Witt, Leonard Kinsella, and men called Lloyd and Black. The six stand-ins all died five days later. Podesta and Nutbean survived.

  2

  Speed

  God of Speed, who makes the fire—

  God of Peace, who lulls the same—

  God who gives the fierce desire,

  Lust for blood as fierce as flame—

  —JULIAN GRENFELL, “TO A BLACK GREYHOUND”

  The Titanic cast off at noon on Wednesday, April 10. Eager sightseers lined the vantage points and chee
red or waved handkerchiefs as in spring sunshine the stately vessel was guided seaward by six tugs.1 Because of a coal strike, a small armada lay in Southampton docks in enforced idleness—tied side by side as there were insufficient berths for them all. As tugs guided the Titanic through a narrow channel, the huge backwash of water churned by its starboard propeller sucked the American liner New York from its moorings. New York’s ropes tautened, then snapped one by one, making a noise like a series of gunshots, and the ship’s stern swung adrift toward the Titanic. By the quick action of a tug that threw a line to New York’s stern, a collision was averted.

  The Titanic continued at half speed down Southampton Water with its low, swampy western shore, edged into the Solent, the waterway separating Hampshire from the Isle of Wight, then increased speed and walloped its way through the waves eastward toward France. In the previous summer, when the Olympic left on its maiden voyage, a throng of holidaymakers had lined the rails of the Cowes promenade to watch it pass, but this was a blustery April morning better suited to flying kites than lazing in the sun, and there were scant bystanders as the great ship passed Cowes. The summer resort looked bedraggled and desolate in April: it was weeks before the summer season when Punch would thwack Judy on the beach, and cocky young clerks in blazers would strut along the front. As the Titanic passed the Isle of Wight, a second-class passenger, widower Lawrence Beesley, sat down to write a letter to his young son. “The ship is like a palace. There is an uninterrupted deck-run of 165 yards for exercise and a ripping swimming-bath, gymnasium and squash racket court & huge lounge & surrounding verandas. My cabin is ripping, hot & cold water and a very comfy looking bed & plenty of room.”2

  The Titanic steamed past Ryde, the Isle of Wight resort, with its half-mile-long pier where the military fort had been converted into a park for holidaymakers, with tennis lawns and bowling greens laid out among ramparts, bastions, and gun emplacements. At Ryde, white-walled houses rose in tiers up the steep hillside, embowered with lilacs and laburnums sporting their spring buds. Many of these squat semidetached boxes bore signs in their front windows announcing rooms to let for summer visitors. As Henry James noted when he visited nearby Ventnor, the boxes stood in serried rows with the resplendent surnames of noble families painted upon their gateposts: Plantagenet, Percival, Montgomery, and Montmorency made fine names for boardinghouses. Even on seaside holidays it was impossible to escape from class consciousness and pretension.

  As the Titanic passed along the Isle of Wight, a few hardy families playing on the sands interrupted their games and swiveled their eyes; cottagers craned their heads out of upstairs windows; coastguards trained their telescopes from cliff tops—and all of them, a few days later, and to the end of the lives, remembered that they had once, briefly, glimpsed the doomed leviathan. “The Titanic,” a county historian recorded, “was a palace of light and life and wonder. She was the greatest ship that ever sailed the seas. She was the greatest thing that was ever made by the hands of men. 60,000 tons moved away when the Titanic floated upon the sea . . . her engines had the power of 46,000 horses. Every two minutes her fires consumed a ton of coal. She was the last-made wonder of the world.”3

  It was about eighty miles—taking four hours—to the roadstead off Cherbourg where the Titanic dropped anchor around 6:30 P.M. As dusk fell, embarking passengers were ferried out to the Titanic on two tenders, the Traffic for steerage passengers and the Nomadic for the others. Thirteen first-class and seven second-class passengers left the Titanic on the Nomadic. Cargo went ashore, too, including two bicycles belonging to an army major, and a canary consigned by a Lincolnshire man named Meanwell, who had paid five shillings as its fare.

  At Cherbourg, 142 first-class, 30 second-class, and 102 third-class passengers came aboard—most of them having traveled on the special Train Transatlantique, which had left Paris earlier that morning. In Zola’s railway novel La bête humaine (1890) there is an American businessman whose job takes him from New York to Paris, via Le Havre, every three weeks, based no doubt on a real-life commuter whose journey was thought extreme but feasible,4 and there were businessmen who traversed the ocean several times a year. Some first-class passengers embarking at Cherbourg were returning from Egypt: the Jack Astors of New York, Margaret Brown, and Emil Brandeis, who ran the men’s goods department in the great store founded by his father in Omaha, Nebraska. Other first-class ticket holders came from Paris. The couturier Lady Duff Gordon had a shop there, and was hastening across the Atlantic because of a summons from her New York branch. Martin Rothschild, a New York clothes manufacturer (and uncle of the satirist Dorothy Parker), had been inspecting Paris fashion houses. Charlotte Drake Cardeza, a textile and insurance heiress from Germantown, Pennsylvania, came aboard with her adult son, his valet, her maid, fourteen trunks, four suitcases, and three crates, which suggests that she had splurged in the Paris dress shops.

  Third-class passengers embarking at Cherbourg doubtless recognized from each other’s bearing that they shared similar hopes and had survived similar deprivations. Many of them were economic migrants, aspiring to prosperity, who recognized the kinship of each other’s experiences and ambitions even if they had never met before. Boarding an Atlantic liner was only the middle phase of a longer journey. Vassilios Katavelas, for instance, had traveled from Áyos Sóstis in the Peloponnese to the port of Piraeus, and thence by ship across the Mediterranean to Marseille, and finally by train via Paris to Cherbourg. The Titanic, he expected, would carry him from Cherbourg toward New York and then Milwaukee. He and Panagiotis Lymperopoulus met two fellow Greeks on their journey. They had taken the first available transatlantic steerage berths, which turned out to be (doubtless to their agreeable surprise) on the Titanic. Katavelas’s Titanic ticket cost £7 4s 6d (half the price of Lawrence Beesley’s second-class ticket and a tiny fraction of the £512 that Charlotte Cardeza and her son had each paid for their tickets). None of the Greeks survived. Other voyagers were as much political or religious refugees as economic migrants. Eighty-one third-class passengers and two second-class passengers were listed as “Syrians” in the Titanic’s rosters. Almost all were Lebanese Christians who had embarked at Cherbourg. Syria had been an exploited province of the Ottoman Turkish Empire since 1516 but grew increasingly restive after the Turkish Revolution of 1908 overthrew the sultan. The ancient kingdom of Armenia had also been tyrannized for centuries by the Turkish sultans and its population intermittently massacred. Over a dozen Armenians, who like the Lebanese were seeking safe asylum as much as economic advantages, had also embarked at Cherbourg.

  The ship raised its great anchor around eight o’clock in the evening, but its outline remained clear to those on land, for lights gleamed from its portholes like a galaxy of stars, and lamps shone from its masthead. A first-class passenger recorded his first days at sea:

  This, indeed, is the one great impression I received on my first trip on the Titanic—and everyone with whom I spoke shared it—her wonderful steadiness. Were it not for the brisk breeze blowing along the decks, one would scarcely have imagined that every hour found us some 20 knots further upon our course . . . The lordly contempt of the Titanic for anything less than a hurricane seemed most marvellous and comforting. But other things besides her steadiness filled us with wonder. Deck over deck and apartment after apartment lent their deceitful aid to persuade us that instead of being on the sea we were still on terra firma. It is useless for me to attempt a description of the wonders of the saloon—the smoking-room with its inlaid mother-of-pearl—the lounge with its green velvet and dull polished oak—the reading room with its marble fireplace and deep soft chairs and rich carpet of old rose hue—all these things have been told over and over again, and lose in the telling. So vast was it all that, after several hours on board, some of us were still uncertain of our way about—though with commendable alacrity some 325 found their way to the great dining saloon at 7.30 when the bugle sounded the call to dinner. After dinner, as we sat in the beautiful lounge listening
to the White Star orchestra playing ‘The Tales of Hoffman’ and ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’ selections, more than once we heard the remark, ‘You would never imagine you were on board a ship.’ Still harder was it to believe that on the top deck it was blowing a gale, but we had to go to bed. Then the morning plunge in the great swimming bath, where the ceaseless ripple of the tepid sea-water was almost the only indication that somewhere in the distance 72,000 horses in the guise of steam engines fretted and strained under the skilled guidance of the engineers, and after the plunge, a half-hour in the gymnasium helped to send one’s blood coursing freely, and created a big appetite for the morning meal.5

  Big appetites were satisfied on the Titanic. Here is the first-class breakfast menu for the morning of Thursday, April 11:

  Baked Apples • Fresh fruit • Stewed Prunes

  Quaker Oats • Boiled Hominy • Puffed Rice

  Fresh Herrings • Finnan Haddock • Smoked Salmon

  Grilled Mutton, Kidneys and Bacon

  Grilled Ham • Grilled Sausage • Lamb Collops

  Vegetable Stew

  Fried, Shirred, Poached & Boiled Eggs

  Plain and Tomato Omelettes to Order

  Sirloin Steak & Mutton Chops to Order

  Mashed, Sauté and Jacket Potatoes

  Cold Meat

  Vienna & Graham Rolls

  Soda & Sultana Scones • Corn Bread • Buckwheat Cakes

  Blackcurrant Jam • Narbonne Honey • Oxford Marmalade

  Watercress

  The Titanic had been built in the most violent shipyard in the world. An MP in the House of Commons claimed months after the Titanic’s maiden voyage that a Catholic workman at Harland & Wolff had been stripped naked and roasted over a furnace until rescued by coreligionists brandishing sledgehammers and threatening to smash the skulls of his Protestant attackers. This story was denied, which did nothing to undermine its currency among those who wished to believe it. A few years earlier, when a Harland & Wolff worker was elected to the House of Commons, his supporters sang “Derry Walls,” a militant Protestant song celebrating the defeat of a Catholic king in a long, fearful siege of 1689: