Woolner perhaps missed seeing Ismay step into collapsible C after the Lebanese women: it was certainly an incident that did not fit with the purpose of his narrative. He and Björnström-Steffansson wished exceedingly to board collapsible D, but recognized that they had small hope of doing so under Lightoller’s scrutiny. They descended to deck A, now deserted after the launching of lifeboat 4 with its cargo of American millionairesses, but bathed in a weird light as its electric lights glowed red before they failed. “This is getting rather a tight corner,” Woolner said to Björnström-Steffansson as the ocean lapped their feet. They hopped onto the gunwale, preparing to jump into the water because they were in peril of being trapped under the ceiling. “As we looked out we saw this collapsible, the last boat on the port side, being lowered right in front of our faces . . . I said to Steffanson [sic]: ‘There is nobody in the bows. Let us make a jump for it. You go first.’ And he jumped out and tumbled in head over heels into the bow, and I jumped too, and hit the gunwale with my chest . . . and caught the gunwale with my fingers, and slipped off backwards.” Björnström-Steffansson caught hold of him and yanked him in. Then, he said, they pulled Frederick Hoyt from the sea. He sat next to Renée Harris, who had broken her elbow that afternoon after slipping on a cake. The elder Navrátil boy was crying for his doll, and Woolner fed the child biscuits.84
“As far as I know,” wrote Lightoller, who admitted nothing of Bernard McCoy, Joseph Duquemin, and Fahim Leeni, the jump of Woolner and Björnström-Steffansson into collapsible D “was the only instance of men getting away in boats from the port side. I don’t blame them, the boat wasn’t full, for the simple reason that we couldn’t find sufficient women, and there was no time to wait—the water was then actually lapping round their feet on A Deck, so they jumped for it and got away. Good luck to them.”85 This is a sensible judgment: wiser than the judgment that tried to exclude prepubescent boys like John Ryerson and William Carter from lifeboat 4 or had turned away Edith Evans and bullied “dagoes” from this same collapsible D minutes earlier.
Astor, Clinch Smith, John Thayer, and George Widener stayed together in the terrible scenes after the last lifeboat had been lowered. Archie Butt had been standing to one side on the boat deck: no one noticed whether Frank Millet was beside him, but it is unthinkable that he was not. With the final lifeboat gone, passengers and crew began jumping from the decks into the icy ocean. On the starboard deck, seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer and his shipboard friend Clyde Milton Long had watched the crowd “pushing and shoving wildly” around collapsible C: “We thought it best not to try to get in it, as we thought it would never reach the water right side up, but it did.” They stood by the davits of a boat that had left, decided that their best hope was to slide down the davit ropes into the ocean, shook hands, and wished each other luck. As Thayer described the scene in a tender letter to Long’s grieving parents, “We did not give each other any messages for home, because neither of us thought we would ever get back. Then we jumped upon the rail. Your son put his legs over the rail, while I straddled it. Hanging over the side, holding onto the rails with his hands, he looked up at me and said, ‘You’re coming, boy, aren’t you?’ I replied, ‘Go ahead, I’ll be with you in a minute.’ He let go and slid down the side and I never saw him again.” Having slithered down the liner’s side, Long was sucked away in the torrent of water rushing into the now-submerged A deck from which Woolner had recently escaped. Thayer was horrified, but leaped as far from the ship as he could. “I am sending you my picture, thinking you might like to see who was with him at the end,” he wrote to Long’s parents. “I would treasure it very much if you could spare me one of his.”86
Collapsibles A and B were fastened to the roof of the officers’ quarters above the boat deck. Each boat weighed over two tons, and Lightoller superintended crewmen and passengers who tried to slide them down on makeshift ramps made of oars and planking. Collapsible A reached the deck successfully and was fitted into davits, but the Titanic suddenly plunged. A steward called Edward Brown cut the lifeboat adrift so that it floated free of the ship, which might otherwise have smashed it. By doing so, he saved twenty lives, including his own; for after being washed into the ocean as the ship’s bridge went underwater, he got through a sea of people fighting one another in panic and clambered onto collapsible A.
Lightoller and another seaman freed the remaining collapsible B atop the officers’ quarters and threw it down onto the waterlogged boat deck, hoping that some of the crowd there might scramble aboard as it floated off. Collapsible B landed upside down and was washed off the deck by a great surge of water. “Just then the ship took a slight but definite plunge—probably a bulkhead went,” as Lightoller described it. “The sea came rolling up in a wave, over the steel-fronted bridge, along the deck below us, washing the people back in a dreadful, huddled mass. Those that didn’t disappear under the water right away, instinctively started to clamber up that part of the deck still out of water, and work their way toward the stern, which was rising steadily out of the water as the bow went down.”87 The frantic struggles of those trying to climb the sloping deck, fighting to keep out of the freezing ocean, made a horrible sight. Captain Smith, who had been busy and visible during the loading of the lifeboats, probably tried to return to his bridge: whether he reached it, and went down with his ship, or slithered overboard from the tilting liner before he reached his bridge, is unknowable. The alternative fancies about his death that journalists later concocted are sensational trumpery.
Two hours and twenty-five minutes after the collision, around two fifteen, the liner’s bridge dipped under the ocean, and the forward funnel—its wires unable to support its weight as the ship tilted ever more steeply—crashed downward, splintering the deck, hitting the sea with an enormous splash near lifeboat B, and crushing several swimmers, probably including Astor. Gravity overwhelmed all the loose fittings, which crashed downward toward the bow. Engines and machinery broke loose from their bolts and plunged through the compartments, smashing everything beneath them. For twenty seconds the noise—“partly a roar, partly a groan, partly a rattle, and partly a smash”—reverberated across the ocean to lifeboat 13. To Beesley it conjured heavy furniture being thrown downstairs from the top of a house, smashing the stairs and every obstacle to bits.88
Lights dimmed, flared up again, and then finally vanished at two twenty—two hours and forty minutes after lookout Fleet had glimpsed the shape of ice. Ismay did not wish to see his liner plunge and sat with his back to the spectacle. Lady Duff Gordon recalled the moment as seen from lifeboat 1: “I could see her dark hull towering like a giant hotel, with light streaming from every cabin porthole. As I looked, one row of these shining windows was suddenly extinguished. I guessed the reason, and turned shudderingly away. When I forced myself to look again, yet another row had disappeared.” She sat in a miserable stupor until her husband cried, “My God! She is going now!” There arose, she said, “an indescribable clamour . . . I felt my very reason tottering.”89
The story of Rhoda Abbott—the only woman aboard collapsible A—is heartbreaking. She was the seamstress separated from her abusive pugilist husband and traveling third class with her sons, Rossmore and Eugene Abbott, aged sixteen and thirteen. On deck they stayed by her side and went into the sea with her when the ship took its final plunge. They stayed with her, grateful to the mother whose loving warmth had always shone so copiously on each of them, and raised and shoved her into collapsible A, which was swamped with a foot of freezing water because its occupants had failed to raise the canvas gunwale. She had shaped their lives by the sound of her voice and the look in her eyes; now she was too cold to speak. Young men weaken and die quickly in freezing temperatures—faster than women, faster than older men, because they have a lower percentage of body fat to act as insulation, and perhaps because their overexcitement sends them faster into shock. With an ever-loosening grip, both boys held the edge of collapsible A with their helpless, dazed mother looking down on t
hem. First Eugene, then Rossmore slipped away in the water with her watching. It must have felt unbelievable. Few women can have suffered as she did.
In the Titanic’s last moments, August Wennerström was standing near Alma Pålsson with her five children and a couple named Edvard and Elin Lindell. As the ship sank the group scrabbled up the sloping deck to escape the rising waters. The incline became too steep, and, clasping hands, they slid down into the Atlantic. Wennerström gripped two Pålsson children, but lost hold. He and Edvard Lindell eventually clambered onto collapsible A. Elin Lindell was struggling in the water, and Wennerström took her hand but was too weak from shock and cold to pull her in. Uncertain if she was dead or alive, he relinquished his grip, and she drifted away. He turned apprehensively to Edvard Lindell only to find that he was already dead. Wennerström was frozen numb by the icy water lapping his legs. He only moved when someone died, whereupon he shoved the corpse overboard.
Olaus Abelseth provided further moving testimony. “I asked my brother-in-law if he could swim, and he said no. I asked my cousin if he could swim, and he said no.” They could see the water rising toward them and clung to ropes suspended from a davit, for the deck was so steep that people were sliding horribly into the ocean. “My brother-in-law said to me, ‘We had better jump off or the suction will take us down.’ I said, ‘No. We won’t jump yet. We ain’t got much show anyhow, so we might as well stay as long as we can.’” They were five feet above the ocean when the three men finally jumped. Abelseth’s brother-in-law held his hand as they leaped. “I got a rope tangled around me, and I let loose of my brother-in-law’s hand to get away from the rope. I thought then, ‘I am a goner’ . . . but I came on top again, and I was trying to swim, and there was a man—lots of them were floating around—and he got me on the neck . . . and pressed me under, trying to get on top of me.” Abelseth fought free of him, then paddled in his life jacket—it was impossible to swim on one’s stomach wearing a life jacket—until he saw a dark object, which proved to be collapsible A. “They did not try to push me off and they did not do anything for me to get on. All they said when I got on there was, ‘Don’t capsize the boat.’” Men (and Rhoda Abbott) stood, sat, or lay there. Abelseth kept warm by swinging his arms. “We did not talk very much, except that we would say, ‘One, two, three,’ and scream together for help.”90
Lightoller had dived overboard a few minutes before the liner sank. “Striking the water was like a thousand knives being driven into one’s body, and, for a few moments, I completely lost grip of myself.” He had no sooner mastered himself than suction caught him. A huge air shaft stood on the boat deck with wire grating to prevent rubbish being thrown down. Beneath it was a sheer drop to a stokehold at the bottom of the ship. Lightoller was caught by the rush of ocean pouring down this shaft, and held against this wire grating with the horrifying knowledge that he would plunge to the stokehold if the wire broke. “Although I struggled and kicked for all I was worth, it was impossible to get away, for as fast as I pushed myself off I was irresistibly dragged back, every instant expecting the wire to go, and to find myself shot down into the bowels of the ship.” He was drowning, of course, too, until a blast of hot air came up the shaft, and blew him to the ocean’s surface. Eventually he scrambled onto collapsible B.91
Collapsible B had floated off around two twenty. The suffering of the thirty-odd people who clambered aboard was worst of all, for it was upside down. Those whose names we know, because they survived, included Algernon Barkworth, Eugene Daly, Archibald Gracie, Charles Joughin, Lightoller, stoker Henry Senior, Victor Sunderland, and Jack Thayer. No women are known to have scrambled onto it.
The London teenager from third class, Victor Sunderland, seems to have been one of the few passengers without a life jacket. He had tried to fetch his, but found his cabin was submerged. Fearing that the companions he had left there were drowned, he returned to the boat deck—passing Byles, the Catholic priest, leading kneeling men and women in prayer. Back on the boat deck, a steward in a lifeboat clutching three life jackets refused to give him one. A crewman whom he accosted had no idea where they were to be found. As few starboard lifeboats remained, passengers turned to seek lifeboats on the port side, but were restrained by crewmen from going there as the liner was increasingly listing to port. When the ship began to plunge, Sunderland copied firemen who were jumping overboard. In the ocean he survived the fall of the forward funnel and reached collapsible B. Someone recited the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary, with the others following.92
Archibald Gracie had been knocked over by the surging wave described by Lightoller, and was sucked into a whirlpool, swirling down and down. Knowing that his life depended on it, he swam away with all his strength. His desperation was intensified by his fear of being scalded to death by the boiling water released by exploding boilers, for he recalled that after the British battleship Victoria sank in a collision off the Lebanese coast, the Mediterranean resembled a bubbling cauldron of boiling milk and inflicted a scorching death on sailors in the sea.93 Reaching the surface, Gracie clung to floating debris before striking out for collapsible B. The men there stood upright in two rows, back to back, holding one another’s shoulders. Exhausted men fell overboard; others died of exposure during their hours on the swamped boat.
Chevré, Marechal, and Omont recorded that from lifeboat 7, the Titanic resembled a picture of fairyland, glittering with lights from bow to stern, or a fantastic backdrop of stage scenery. Then the lights died, and the stern reared high in the air. A terrible clamor arose, and for an hour anguished death cries rang out with wild persistency. Sometimes the cries receded, but then the chorus of death resumed, with more piercing despair. The oarsmen on lifeboat 7 rowed hard to escape from the heartrending cries. “Those shrieks pursued us and haunted us as we pulled away in the night.” “Then one by one the cries ceased and only the noise of the sea remained.”94 The Cornish widow Agnes Davies with her young son in lifeboat 14 watched the lights of the lower decks vanish row by row underwater: “it was awful, terrible.” Her fellow passengers tried to protect her. “When the men in the boat learnt that one of my sons was on the steamer and would not be saved, they formed a line before me, so that I could not see the ship as she plunged beneath the waves.” She heard, though, “the screams, cries and moaning” of the dying.95 Frankie Goldsmith in collapsible C was aged nine: years later, as a young milk-cart driver, he lived near the Detroit Tigers baseball stadium. The roar of the crowd when a player hit a home run never ceased to remind him of the cries of the thousand people freezing to death in the Atlantic. His mother held his head in her hands so that he would not see the horror. In lifeboat 13 they tried to sing to keep the women from hearing the appalling cries.
A minority of the fifteen hundred people who had not reached the lifeboats sank with the ship. Almost all of them wore life jackets, and few drowned. But they were floating in an icy sea; the temperature was probably two degrees below freezing Celsius (28˚ Fahrenheit), cold enough to kill in thirty minutes. They cried for help as they froze to death. This was “the worst part of the disaster” for steward Samuel Rule on lifeboat 15: “the groans were awful, and of course we could do nothing. I shall never forget it.”96 Jack Thayer was traumatized by the memory of that “continuous wailing chant, from the fifteen hundred in the water all around us. It sounded like locusts on a mid-summer night, in the woods in Pennsylvania.” This terrible cry gradually died away, as over a thousand people, tight in their white life jackets, froze to death. People in lifeboats four hundred yards away heard the cries, but did not respond. It became a lifelong question for Thayer: “How could any human being fail to heed those cries? . . . If they had turned back several more hundred would have been saved.”97
Only lifeboat 14, commanded by Harold Lowe, tried to save people in the water. Lowe waited until the dying people had “thinned out” and their cries subsided. “It would not have been wise or safe to have gone there before, because the whole lot of us would have been swa
mped, and then nobody would have been saved.” Having transferred his passengers to another boat, he rowed back with some volunteers but found only four men alive among the corpses bobbing in their life jackets, and one of those died soon after being hauled aboard. “I made the attempt,” he insisted, “as soon as any man could do so, and I am not scared of saying it. I did not hang back.”98 The death cries distressed Third Officer Herbert Pitman, who ordered lifeboat 5 to row back to rescue frozen survivors. “I told my men to get their oars, and pull toward the wreck,” he testified. The passengers in his boat protested that this was “a mad idea” because their lifeboat “should be swamped with the crowd that was in the water, and it would add another forty to the list of drowned.” It lay heavily with him that his lifeboat “simply took our oars in and lay quiet . . . doing nothing.”99
Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From Page 24