Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From
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The Board of Trade’s lifeboat regulations, framed under the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894, had a scale requiring two lifeboats for ships up to 200 tons and ending with a minimum of sixteen lifeboats for ships exceeding 10,000 tons. The board’s scale was futile: there was no reason to stop at 10,000 tons, and superliners had nearly five times that displacement. Sir Alfred Chambers, nautical advisor to the Marine Department of the Board of Trade from 1896 to 1911, exemplified the school of government regulators that disbelieved in regulations. “It was the safest mode of travel in the world, and I thought it neither right nor the duty of a State Department to impose regulations . . . as long as the record was a clean one,” he testified. Asked after the Titanic sinking why lifeboat regulations had not been updated despite the increase in the size of vessels, he replied that he preferred the provision of lifeboats to depend on shipowners’ voluntary action rather than the imposition of inflexible rules. He even claimed that if there had been fewer lifeboats, more people would have been saved: passengers would have rushed the boats and filled them to capacity.8 There was also an official feeling that it would be “unfair” if older ships afloat were obliged to increase their lifeboat provision because of the Olympic and the Titanic.9
There were other unimaginative safety procedures. Captain Maurice Clarke, the inspector who approved the Titanic for sailing, oversaw a boat drill that comprised lowering and raising two lifeboats, manned by a special crew, while the ship was docked at Southampton. Questioned by Lord Mersey—who headed the Board of Trade inquiry into the loss of the Titanic—he conceded that this was a cursory, unexacting routine that he followed because it was “the custom.” Asked by Mersey if he followed “custom although it was bad,” Clarke replied, “Well, you will remember I am a civil servant. Custom guides us a good bit.”10
Why were White Star and Harland & Wolff content with a lifeboat provision that barely sufficed for a ship less than a quarter of the size of the Titanic? Ship designers and shipowners reckoned that lifeboat accommodation encroached on bedroom suites, promenade decks, public rooms, and other amenities; and that lifeboat seats for every passenger and crewman were superfluous. When Arthur Rostron, captain of the small liner Carpathia, which steamed to the rescue of the Titanic’s survivors, was subsequently interrogated in the U.S. Senate inquiry, he explained why his ship and the biggest superliners, carrying different numbers of passengers and crew, were required by Board of Trade regulations to carry the same number of lifeboats. “The ships are built nowadays to be practically unsinkable, and each ship is supposed to be a lifeboat in itself,” Rostron testified. He regarded actual lifeboats “merely . . . as a standby.”11
The Titanic’s first-class passenger accommodation was placed amidships and extended over five decks: the promenade deck (A), bridge deck (B), shelter deck (C), saloon deck (D), and upper deck (E). Two grand staircases, three electric elevators, and sundry stairways provided access to the different decks. The expanse of decks amidships ran for almost two-thirds of the total length of the ship. With the exception of the officers’ quarters on the boat deck, the second-class smoking room at the after end of B deck, and the second-class library and third-class lounge and smoking room on C deck, most of this superstructure was dedicated to the needs of first-class passengers. In first class everything seemed spacious: the public rooms were vast, the corridors were wide and high, the stairs and landings were broad; nothing was cramped or mean. “She has everything but taxi-cabs and theatres: Table d’Hôte, Restaurant à la Carte, Gymnasium, Turkish Baths, Squash Court, Palm Gardens, smoking-rooms for ‘Ladies and Gents’, intended I fancy to keep the women out of the men’s smoking-room which they infest in the German and French steamers”—so wrote Frank Millet, an American on the maiden voyage, who was reminded of the Jacobean interior of the Duke of Rutland’s seat, Haddon Hall. “As for the rooms they are larger than the ordinary hotel room, and much more luxurious with wooden bedsteads, dressing-tables, hot and cold water, etc., electric fans, electric heater. The suites with their damask hangings and mahogany oak furniture are really very sumptuous.”12
In addition to the first-class public rooms listed by Millet there were a dining saloon, lounge, reading and writing room, lending library, veranda café, barber shop, photographers’ dark room, and clothes-pressing room. There was a lounge for the first-class ladies’ maids and gentlemen’s valets. There were quarters for first-class dogs. The Titanic included the first swimming pool to be installed on board a ship. Instead of a crude sick bay, its medical facilities included an operating theater. White Star had been at the forefront since the 1890s in raising standards for second- and third-class transatlantic passengers. On the Titanic the public saloons on the lower decks were spacious, welcoming, and spic-and-span, creating a festive holiday mood, while the berths were as airy, hygienic, and agreeable as Andrews’ team of designers could devise. The ship’s power plant supplied electricity for evaporation and refrigeration, four passenger elevators, a telephone system, the Marconi wireless station, hundreds of heaters, eight electric cargo cranes, electric pumps, motors, and winches.
The interiors were a medley of styles that were intended to give an eclectic rather than bastardized effect. “You may sleep in a bed depicting one ruler’s fancy, breakfast under another dynasty altogether, lunch under a different flag and furniture scheme, play cards, smoke or indulge in music under three other monarchs, have your afternoon tea in a veranda which is modern and cosmopolitan, . . . [and dinner] in imperial style,” one publicist wrote approvingly.13 The first-class suites had beds rather than berths, telephones, and (instead of round portholes) panoramic windows that looked out over the blue sea like the windows of a cliff-top castle. Instead of stoves or radiators, there were open grates in which coal fires burned brightly. The suites had varied styles: Second Empire, Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI, Tudor, Early Dutch, Old Dutch, Adams, Hepplewhite, Regency, Italian Renaissance, Georgian, Colonial, Jacobean, and Queen Anne.
The sixty-foot-high main staircase was supposedly in William and Mary style, but Frenchified à la Louis XIV, with ironwork relieved by bronze flowers and foliage. Atop the staircase was a large dome of iron and glass, beneath which, on the uppermost landing, there was a carved panel containing a clock flanked by bronze female figures representing Honor and Glory crowning Time. The first-class dining saloon was the largest room afloat, seating 532 diners, running the full 92 feet of the ship’s width and 114 feet in length. Its style was Jacobean, but instead of the somber oak panels found in great English houses, the walls and ceilings were painted a shiny, hygienic white. Oak furniture was meant to heighten the Jacobean air, but the effect was marred by patterned linoleum floor tiles. The separate restaurant on B deck, measuring sixty by forty-five feet, was in a fake Louis XVI style, with fawn-colored walnut paneling, gilded moldings, brass and gilt light brackets, a long buffet table with a marble fleur de pêche top, and fawn silk curtains across the bay windows, with flowered borders and embroidered pelmets. The plaster ceiling was patterned with trellises and garlands, the Axminster carpet was of Louis XVI design, the walnut chairs upholstered in tapestry of a treillage of roses; and there was the inevitable bandstand.
The reception room extended the width of the ship. It, too, had white paneling in Jacobean style, hung with Aubusson tapestry work. The first-class lounge situated on promenade deck A was derived from the style of the Palace of Versailles. The reading and writing room was in the Georgian style of the 1780s. The smoking room, where convivial men foregathered in sprawling apathy, was mahogany paneled, supposedly in the Georgian style of the 1720s. There was a French café with little tables, cane settees, wicker easy chairs, and climbing plants trained on green trellises to create the illusion of being ashore. The Turkish baths were designed in seventeenth-century Moorish style, tiled in blue and green. It was “all very marvellous,” declared a Philadelphia journalist, “the luxurious hotel transferred to the ocean; the glittering lobster palace afloat.”14
5
Sailors
It is a blessing, no doubt, to be rid, at least for a time, of
All one’s friends and relations.
—ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH, “AMOURS DE VOYAGE”
The Titanic was the greatest steamship in the world, but its officers were called sailors for a reason: they were all men who had been trained at sea under sail. Herbert Pitman, its third officer, who had sixteen years’ experience as a mariner before joining the Titanic, had four years as an apprentice under sail followed by three years on sailing ships before serving on the Blue Anchor Line steamships running to Australia. The fifth officer, twenty-eight-year-old Harold Lowe, had been seafaring half his life, having run away from his apprentice master at the age of fourteen and served on seven schooners and several square-rigged vessels before graduating to West African steamships. William Murdoch, the Titanic’s first officer, had left school at fifteen to become an apprentice seaman on a barque plying between Liverpool and the Pacific Coast of America. Neither their pride nor their sentiment let White Star officers forget that they had learned seamanship in the days of rigging, not funnels. The components of the rigging, with such names as buntlines, gooseneck, halyard, parrel beads, and stay mouse, and the varieties of sail, including crab claw, laleen, moonsail, spanker, and topgallant, already seemed picturesque in the age of the Titanic. The dangers and hardships of sailing ships were extreme: the men who had served on them were not prone to idealize or prettify past conditions, but most regretted the obsolescence of sail and hankered for the old days. With little prompting, they shared hair-raising memories of typhoons, accidents, and privations, as incontrovertible proof of the masculine hardiness they had shown when young.
Arthur Rostron, born in 1869, apprenticed in 1887 to the full-rigged ship Cedric the Saxon, spent eight winters in the South Atlantic and ten years under sail. He recalled with pride, not loathing, being “up aloft for hours on end, very often all through the raging night; six or eight hours on a foreyard trying to furl the foresail, the canvas soaked with rain and sea spray, hard as sheet-iron, until the finger-nails were torn off, leaving raw bleeding wounds; drenched to the skin, oilskins blown to ribbons and sea-boots full of water.” It was a memory that no one could take from him, “the eternal rolling and pitching and the almost constant hurricanes . . . down below the Horn.”1 Charles Herbert Lightoller, second officer on the Titanic, recalled his first voyage on a steamship from New York in the 1890s: “Frankly, I didn’t like it. Good times; good food. Always sure of your watch below. Yet I loathed the smoke and the smell, and longed for the towering tiers of bellying canvas, the sound of water rushing past the scupper holes, in place of the monotonous clank and bang of machinery. I sadly missed the feel of something living under my feet.”2 It was consolation, though, that his steamer took only a fortnight to reach Glasgow.
James Bisset, a future Cunard captain, recalled that when he passed his exams as first mate in 1905, aged twenty-one, he had served as an apprentice and second mate on four round-the-world voyages (on a 1,098-ton barque and full-rigged ship of 1,323 tons carrying coal and guano) but never in a steamship. “My commonsense told me that windjammers were doomed to extinction by the competition of steam; yet, in 1905, there were still many hundreds of sailing vessels under the British flag, and hundreds more under the American, French, German, Scandinavian and other national flags. They were owned and manned by diehards, of an ageing generation, and were kept going, with increasing financial difficulties, by the force of habit inherited from centuries of tradition.”3 Officers of Bisset’s generation—he was born in 1883—recognized that steamers promised better pay and conditions, swifter voyages, and better chances of promotion, but he felt devalued when he moved over from sail to steam in 1905: “No more hounding men aloft, at risk of life and limb, to take in or make sail in a howling hurricane; no more tedious pully-hauly, sweltering in the doldrums; no more starvation on the bare whack of putrid pork and hard biscuits! But . . . no more of the peace and quiet of a sailing ship, snoring along in the trades with all sails set and everything drawing; no more exhilaration of running the easting down; no more thrills of gazing aloft at graceful curving sails . . . For the rest of my nautical life, I would be going to sea in oblong steel boxes with smoking funnels, thumping engines, vibrating propellers, rattling derricks and clattering winches; I would be dolled up like a gilded popinjay in my brassbound uniform, to impress the passengers; and perhaps there would be little real sailorizing to be done.”4
There was constant anxiety about a nighttime collision with an iceberg. The only way to detect them on a moonless night was by the white foam at their base: with moonlight it was easier to spot a glint of what is called “ice blink.” Lightoller recounted an occasion in the South Atlantic when the cold became piercing, the wind fell away, and suddenly the crew were confronted by the threatening, spectral outline of the monstrous berg that had been taking the wind out of their sails. With difficulty the ship drew off from the menacing ice walls—all the crew worrying whether there were protruding underwater ledges that might hole the ship beneath the waterline and sink it. “With the first streak of dawn it was easy to see what a narrow shave it had been,” Lightoller recalled. “With the full day there was revealed an impenetrable wall of ice for close on fifteen miles astern, and more than double that distance ahead.” The ship had to sail for two days before it left that mass of ice. “Pinnacles, bays, chasms and cathedral-like structures, huge ravines and bridges, bridges of ice, looking for all the world as if they had been built by some clever engineers, and would have done credit to them at that.”5
A worse danger than icebergs were the derelicts drifting about the seas: often dismasted, waterlogged Nova Scotia schooners carrying timber and hard to sink. The hull of a schooner might float for months, entombing a starving crew without control of its navigation or means of contact with other ships, and could hole an unwary liner. Infectious diseases were another common hazard. Lightoller was once on a sailing ship two weeks out of Rio de Janeiro when the crew began to fall sick. “The first chap we said was loafing, until he died. That’s nearly always the verdict on a sailing ship, anyway. A man is invariably ‘mouching’ until he dies, and then we say, ‘Oh, he must have been bad after all.’” In this case, it was smallpox; there was, of course, no ship’s doctor, and the only medicine on board, a half cup of castor oil, was drunk by a patient in mistake for water. “We just had to rely upon our cast-iron constitutions and stick it out,” Lightoller averred. “Twice I read the burial service, or such parts as I could find, in a gale of wind when the Mate couldn’t leave the poop. Sometimes we couldn’t get the body over the rail: then it was beastly.”6
On March 16, 1912, just a month before the Titanic sank, another liner built by Harland & Wolff, P&O’s Oceana, outward bound from the Port of London to Bombay, was lost in the English Channel after a collision with a German steel barque. The Oceana stayed afloat for six hours after the collision, and 241 passengers and crew were rescued. Nine, however, drowned when the first lifeboat capsized after its launch—a memory that surely contributed to the initial reluctance of the Titanic passengers to board their lifeboats. Another Oceana lifeboat was so leaky that, despite constant bailing of water, it was foundering by the time its scared occupants were finally saved by a lifeboat sent from the nearby town of Eastbourne. There were claims of panicking Asiatic seamen, whose reliability was questioned in Parliament. The Spectator felt that insufficient precautions were taken to “police” passengers and crew in a crisis. “The crew, as in the case of the P&O Company, may contain Asiatics and Africans, who may or may not behave well. In P&O ships the Lascars are generally to be trusted, but one cannot speak so certainly of the Hindu firemen.”7
After the Titanic calamity, there was a general feeling that liners had been steaming ahead too dangerously fast. Even so, there were those who mitigated the risks of speed. The shipping publicist who wrote Travelling Palaces in 1913 declared that for businessmen competing against k
een competitors, every wasted hour was money lost. “How, too,” it asked, “can the American tourist, taking a month’s holiday, cross the Atlantic twice and ‘do’ the United Kingdom and Ireland and most of Europe to his own satisfaction in the rest of the month if hours, minutes, and seconds be not saved?” The Pittsburgh banker Thomas Mellon, for example, took longer to cross the Atlantic both ways than he allowed for his entire European holiday. The hastening American divorcée in Edith Wharton’s story “Autres Temps” (1911) chafed because her liner, the Utopia, took eight days to cross from Cherbourg to New York. The steamship companies profited from rich passengers in a hurry. In the publicist’s words, “the hustler and rusher help fill the most expensive cabins, and to pay for the luxuries in speed and surroundings they require. If it were not for the comforts and luxuries, and the enforced rest, and the recuperative effect of a sea voyage . . . some American tourists would die of exhaustion, and many of the commercial men who rush from one side of the Atlantic to the other . . . would collapse under the strain.”8