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

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  Addergoole with its boggy fields, wide lake, and wet winds was very different from the terrain of ravines and echoing gorges where the luckless Bulgarians originated. Gumoshtnik was a small, huddled village reached by one road and several mountain tracks, five miles from Troyan, a small town standing on a mountain torrent, the Balabanska. It was different, too, from the boomtowns clanging with streetcars and earsplitting factory whistles, crowded with grim and angry industrial workers, where they were heading. A party of eight voyagers from Gumoshtnik boarded at Southampton. They were all laborers or potters: Marin Markov and Peju Colchev in their midthirties were the oldest; at nineteen, Nedialco Petrov and Ilia Stoytchev were the youngest. As backwoodsmen, some perhaps wore the kalpak, a lambskin cap; wide breeches (poturi); red sash (poyas); shoes with long laces (opinak). Revealingly, the Bulgarian word patilo, meaning “misfortune,” was also a synonym for “experience.” “All classes practice thrift bordering on parsimony and resent any display of wealth,” reported an English visitor. “The peasants are industrious, provident, peaceable, and orderly; they are high-spirited without being bad-tempered, the vendetta and the use of the knife in quarrels being unknown.”16

  The spaciousness of the Titanic may have seemed wondrous or disorientating to the party of Armenians who embarked at Cherbourg. Many of them, such as Ortin and Mapriedereder Zakarian, were hardy men in their early twenties from the Keghi district, with its soaring mountains and sweeping gorges, “a region of danger and violence,” where small farmers eked out a bare existence while fending off Kurdish brigands, avaricious semi-feudal Moslem landowners, and extortionate Turkish officials. Previously the voyagers from Keghi had known only traditional households (tuns) where father, mother, bachelor and married sons with their families, unmarried daughters, and single or elderly relations lived together. Each tun was attached to or above a stable. Its occupants lived in one room, in which they ate, sat, and slept, rolling out their mattresses at night around the fireplace. Fifteen people might live in a space that was twelve feet by twenty-five. Some households had a cubbyhole with a brick-lined, cone-shaped bread oven dug into the floor. Usually kin lived in labyrinthine warrens of buildings in which they could hide with their valuables during attacks (there was a history of extortion, pillage, rape and abduction, forced conversions to Islam, forced quartering of unruly troops, and land confiscation). For the Keghetsis, the Titanic, with its public corridors, communal rooms, private sleeping cabins, and invisible kitchens must have been eye-opening, seeming more opulent, even, than the houses of the beys (Turkish feudal chiefs) who extorted and oppressed them.17

  The influx of Armenians into America served as a thermometer measuring their misfortunes under Turkish rule. In 1909 thirty thousand Armenians had been massacred, and in 1911–1912 the ultranationalists among the Young Turks who had deposed the sultan were promulgating a ruthless campaign of Turkification of Armenians. Young men left in droves: the Keghetsi on the Titanic were all in their twenties; all but one were married, for parents customarily arranged for their sons to marry before departing abroad, as a way of ensuring that they would one day return. Few survived to leave accounts of their thoughts and activities, and the survivors have left only exiguous hints, but we know that for Armenians going to the United States (9,350 arrived in 1912 alone), New York, Illinois, and Michigan were the chief destination states.18 Some two thousand Armenians entered Canada in the quarter century before 1914, primarily settling in two industrial towns of southern Ontario, Brantford and Hamilton. The Keghetsis Neshan Krikorian, David Vartanian, and Orsen Sirayanian were all heading for Hamilton, and Sarkis Mardirosian for Brantford. Neshan Krikorian gave both Hamilton and Brantford as his destination and ended up in Saint Catherine’s, Ontario, working on a General Motors automobile assembly line. Several Armenians gave a Brantford factory address: the Cockshutt Plow Company or the Pratt & Letchworth malleable iron foundry—the “Mybil,” Armenians called it—rather than a private residence as their destination on their embarkation papers. Others gave the name and address in Hamilton of John Bertram, the demotic name of the Canada Tool Works.19 David Vartanian, aged twenty-two when he embarked at Cherbourg, had left his new bride behind—probably as a token to his parents that he would return. She survived the horrors of 1915, when 1.5 million Armenians were massacred in the first genocide of the twentieth century, but it was over a decade before (after frightening difficulties and formidable planning) the couple were reunited and had a grateful, fulfilled life together in Meadeville, Pennyslvania, and Detroit.

  Other third-class voyagers were on the Titanic for political reasons. August Wennerström, aged twenty-seven, a socialist and a typesetter from Malmö, had earlier been prosecuted for insulting King Oscar II of Sweden. After his acquittal, he decided to shift to the United States with a fellow socialist, Carl Jansson, aged twenty-one, a handsome, strapping blond carpenter from Örebo. Jansson and Wennerström evaded the formalities required by the Swedish government by going to Denmark, acquiring tickets and documentation in Copenhagen, and leaving from Esbjerg, Denmark’s new North Sea port on the coast of Jutland, on a Wilson Line steamship to Hull, proceeding by train to Southampton. (Jansson was destined to become a carpenter in Wahoo, Nebraska; Wennerström became a gardener in Culver, Indiana.) They shared their cabin with Gunnar Tenglin, aged twenty-five, who had left Stockholm for the United States around 1903, aged about sixteen, and settled in Burlington, Iowa, where he learned English while toiling as a laborer. He had promised his mother to return to Sweden after five years, and did so in 1908. He married in Sweden and fathered a son, but in 1912 he resolved to return to Burlington, bought tickets in Copenhagen, and made the journey from Esbjerg to Hull and thence to Southampton. His future jobs in Burlington were in the local gasworks and railway yard.

  Most Jewish third-class passengers who embarked on the Titanic at Southampton originated from the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe where conditions were hostile if not murderous. David Livshin was traveling under the name of Abraham Harmer, possibly the name of someone who had sold him an unwanted ticket. Livshin, who was twenty-five years old, had originated in an ill-destined seaport in Latvia that was variously known as Libau, Libava, and Liepaja. This ice-free Baltic harbor had fallen under Russian dominion after the last partition of Poland. A fortress and coastal defenses against German attack had been erected, a military base and naval installation had been built in the early twentieth century, and a port for seaplanes in 1912. The port was served by a good railway line: by 1906 an estimated forty thousand emigrants were leaving Russia for the United States each year with Liepaja as their port of embarkation. It was a place with a terrible past and a worse future. Stalin inflicted two mass deportations on the city, and in 1941 all but thirty of the seven thousand Jews remaining there were massacred in nearby sand dunes by German troops. We know a little of Livshin’s personal history: he had come to England in 1911, worked in Manchester as a jeweler, and married there a young woman from Lithuania who made sheitels (the Yiddish word for the wigs worn by Orthodox Jewish women to cover their hair according to religious law). She was now pregnant. We know nothing of Livshin’s life on board the Titanic: he did not have a future.

  Another Jewish passenger—they were all supplied with kosher food—was Eliezer (“Leslie”) Gilinski, a locksmith aged twenty-two from Ignalina, a town in Lithuania that had been expanding since a station on the Warsaw–Saint Petersburg railway line was built there. Doubtless he had left Lithuania to avoid military service under the Russians and racial prejudice. He had been staying with his brother, who was a shopkeeper at Abercynon, a mining village in the Rhondda Valley where there had been anti-Jewish riots during the previous summer, but moved on to try his luck in Chicago. He was remembered in the Rhondda as an amiable young man. Berk Trembisky had been born in Warsaw thirty-two years earlier; a leather worker and bag maker, he lived in France, where he assumed a Gallic surname, Picard, before briefly working in London. Leah Aks, who had been born in Warsaw in about
1894, had left Poland for East London; there she married a tailor, and was traveling to join him in Norfolk, Virginia, with their ten-month-old son, Frank Philip Aks (“Filly”). Beila Moor, aged twenty-seven, a widowed Russian garment maker, was traveling with her son, Meier, aged seven, who accosted passengers and with winning pertinacity asked for the cowboy and Indian picture cards that came with their cigarette packets.

  Lebanese and Armenian Christians, Russian Jews, Swedish socialists—all were refugees seeking safety, liberty, and prosperity in North America. They were, too, draft dodgers. Nikola Lulic, aged twenty-nine, had been born in a Croatian village but some ten years earlier had settled in Chisholm, Minnesota, a raw mining settlement in the Mesabi iron range—some years from being connected to the Duluth, Missabe & Northern Railway. Lulic worked in the Alpena Mine and lived in the so-called Balkan district of Chisholm. In the autumn of 1911, Lulic returned to Croatia for a long visit to his wife and children, who had remained behind. It was settled that when he retraversed the Atlantic he would act as unofficial companion to other emigrants who like him had got their tickets from the ubiquitous Swiss agent, Büchel (Lulic’s cost 170 Swiss francs, equivalent to £8 13s 3d). Lulic interpreted for fellow Croatians, acted as their courier to Southampton, advised them on shipboard customs, and doubtless coached his charges on their demeanor and replies when undergoing Ellis Island interrogation: if their hopes of work were too explicit they might be judged in violation of the ban on contract labor, but if they were too indefinite, seeming to have no contacts or idea where to get jobs, they might be excluded as likely to become public charges. Lulic was a lifelong sojourner: in the 1920s he farmed a plot in Croatia, while often visiting France as a seasonal worker.

  The destinations of the Croat farmworkers being shepherded by Lulic were as varied as their starting points. Peter and Jovo Calik, twins aged seventeen, from Brezik, embarked at Southampton on tickets supplied by Büchel for Sault Sainte Marie in Michigan; Ivan Stankovic, aged thirty-three, from Galgova, was going to New York City; Vagovina’s Milan Karajic and Bratma’s Stefan Turcin were docketed for Youngstown with its foundries and steelworks; Ludovic Cor from Kricina for Saint Louis, Missouri; Mirka Dika from Podgori for Vancouver; Jovan Dimic, from Ostrovca, was heading for the coal mines of Red Lodge, the county seat of Carbon County, Montana; Jeso Culumovic, aged seventeen, from Lipova Glavica, for Hammond, Indiana; Jakob Pasic, twenty-one, farmer, from Streklijevac, for the iron mines of Aurora, Minnesota, outside Duluth in the Mesabi Range; and both the laborer Ivan Jalševic and the hotelier Franz Karun were journeying to Galesburg, Illinois. Many of them began their journey with an entrenched fear of slipping back into the abyss of poverty. “My father,” wrote the son of another immigrant to Galesburg, “had a fear of want, a dread in his blood and brain, that the ‘rainy day’ might come and in fair weather he hadn’t prepared for it.”20 It was, on the Titanic, the wrong fear.

  9

  Officers and Crew

  Successive nights, like rolling waves,

  Convey them quickly, who are bound for death.

  —GEORGE HERBERT, “MORTIFICATION”

  Following trials in Belfast Lough, the Titanic had steamed to Southampton with everyone on board at a high pitch of proud expectation. It took Herbert Lightoller, the second officer, two weeks, and the sixth officer, James Moody, fresh from nautical school, a week to master the layout of decks and passages after joining at Belfast. Able Seaman William Lucas was still “groping about” trying to find his way about the ship’s stairwells and companionways on the night it sank.1 Lucas and other seamen slipped ashore in Southampton for last drinks in a pub while Captain Maurice Clarke, the Board of Trade surveyor, tested the lowering of two lifeboats and approved lifesaving equipment, distress rockets, and much else. The lowering of two lifeboats by trained seamen from a stationary ship in dock subsequently seemed inadequate; but Lightoller stressed that Clarke, confronted with a new ship that was the biggest in the world, was extra-conscientious, and reinforced his reputation as the strictest of the Board of Trade’s surveyors. “He must see everything, and himself check every item that concerned the survey. He would not accept anyone’s word as sufficient—and got heartily cursed in consequence.”2

  The Titanic surpassed the Olympic, officers and crew agreed. “She is an improvement on Olympic . . . and is a wonderful ship, the latest thing in shipbuilding,” Henry Wilde, who had been transferred from chief officer of the Olympic to the same post on the Titanic, told his nieces in Liverpool.3 “This ship is going to be a good deal better than the Olympic at least I think so, steadier and everything,” a bedroom steward named Richard Geddes wrote during the first night at sea.4 “Bai jove what a fine ship this is,” declared the captain’s steward, “much better than the Olympic as far as passengers are concerned, but my little room is nothing near so nice, no daylight, electric light on all day, but I suppose it’s no use grumbling.”5 A saloon steward carped about the serving of meals: “we have to scramble for [it] like a lot of mad men but that won’t last for long when things get straightened out,” he wrote after his first dinner at sea.6

  The crew was considered as top-notch as the ship’s amenities. “Having fitted out this magnificent vessel, the Titanic, we proceeded to man her with all that was best in the White Star organisation,” said Harold Sanderson, who had been general manager of Lord Nunburnholme’s Wilson Line in Hull until recruited by Bruce Ismay to be his company’s general manager in Liverpool.7 Because the Olympic was detained by the coal strike, Ismay and Sanderson determined that Wilde should serve on the Titanic’s maiden voyage. William Murdoch was consequently demoted from chief officer to first officer, and Lightoller from first officer to second on the day before sailing. This sudden reshuffling threw them both off their stride, and caused confusion. David Blair, who had been second officer on the Titanic’s delivery voyage from Belfast, was assigned to another ship, while subordinate officers remained in their posts. Blair’s departure had one inadvertent by-product. He took with him the key to the locker containing binoculars for the ship’s lookouts to use when they were perched high in the crow’s nest. Binoculars were therefore unavailable to the lookouts. Their utility in the conditions prevailing when the liner scraped the iceberg is arguable; but some commentators were indignant at their irretrievability.

  The ship was under the command of Captain Edward Smith. Beneath him, there were seven deck officers. Crews of Atlantic liners were divided into three departments: Deck, Engine, and Victualing (the latter was also called the Stewards’ Department). The deck crew amounted to seventy-three, including the seven ship’s officers, the surgeon for first-class passengers, an assistant surgeon for the rest, seven quartermasters, five lookouts, two mess stewards, two masters-of-arms, two carpenter-joiners, two window cleaners, a boatswain, a lamp trimmer, a storekeeper, plus twenty-nine able seamen.

  There were 494 in the Stewards’ Department, including one strong-minded, self-reliant matron, two Marconi operators, and five postal clerks. There were 290 stewards and stewardesses as well as a window cleaner, linen keeper, stenographer, masseuse, fish cook, assistant soup cook, iceman, bakers, plate washers, and nine “Boots” to polish shoes. All 120 of the catering crew from the delivery voyage from Belfast signed on again at Southampton. Over 300 were added to their number at Southampton, so that the full complement on sailing was 428—far more than the deck or engine crew: 231 individuals were classified as first-class victualing crew, 76 as second-class, and 121 as third-class. The ship’s musicians traveled as second-class passengers and were not part of the Stewards’ Department. Although the Marconi men, postal clerks, and 68 à la carte restaurant staff had signed the ship’s articles, they were not White Star employees but paid by the Marconi Company, the General Post Office, and the Italian Gaspare (“Luigi”) Gatti who held the catering contract.