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

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  Despite direct instructions from Captain Smith to row for the light of the ship presumed to be Lord’s Californian, Seaman Jones, in charge of lifeboat 8, wanted to return to the wreck site to rescue more people, “but the ladies were frightened.”100 One woman endorsed his initiative, but most of the rest, including some women who had taken up oars, routed his idea. “Ladies,” Jones said, “if any of us are saved, remember I wanted to go back, I would rather drown with them than leave them.” The exception in lifeboat 8 was Lady Rothes, wife of a penurious Scottish peer. “I saw the way she was carrying herself, and I heard the quiet determined way she spoke to the others, and I knew she was more of a man than any we had on board,” Jones later said. He installed Lady Rothes at the tiller, and her nineteen-year-old lady’s maid, Roberta Maioni, took an oar and helped every minute. The girl, garbed only in nightgown and kimono, with luxuriant hair streaming over her shoulders and down her back, suggested they should sing to maintain morale, starting with “Pull for the Shore.”101

  Emma Bucknell confirmed that Jones protested that they did not have enough people aboard and should wait near the liner to rescue others. She was exasperated to discover that his crew, bedroom steward Crawford and Seaman Pascoe, could not row. “It was tragic. I have known how to row for a great many years as the result of much time spent in the Adirondacks, and I slipped into the seat beside the man and showed him how to work the oar.” She found the three men muddle-headed: they told her that the liner would remain afloat until two o’clock on Monday afternoon, a full twelve hours distant, shortly before it sank. With eight women passengers helping to row, lifeboat 8 pushed toward the light to which they had been directed by Captain Smith. “The men soon learned to handle the oars,” said Bucknell, “but even though they were used to rough work, their hands were soon enflamed and blistered.” The women rowed until they collapsed from exhaustion, whereupon another woman would gently move her aside and work in her place.102

  The women rowers in several lifeboats were valiant in meeting a terrible challenge. George Hogg, the seaman in charge of the first lifeboat launched, 7, with its load of Americans from first class, made a point of saying, “the women ought to have a gold medal on their breasts, God bless them! I will always raise my hat to a woman, after what I saw.”103 Whether he was sincere or talking ingratiating cant, there is no doubt that in other lifeboats there was class tension between women from first class and low seamen. Marion Thayer found Walter Perkis, the quartermaster in charge of lifeboat 4, so inefficient, indecisive, and disagreeable that she doubted he was a quartermaster at all. Ella White reported that when Jones, in charge of lifeboat 8, gave an order, Crawford and Pascoe, “who knew nothing about the handling of a boat would say, ‘If you don’t stop talking through that hole in your face there will be one less in the boat.’ We were in the hands of men of that kind. I settled two or three fights between them, and quietened them down.” She resented their smoking tobacco while women rowed and doubted that they recognized their predicament. “They speak of the bravery of the men. I do not think there was any particular bravery, because none of the men thought it was going down. If they had thought the ship was going down, they would not have frivoled as they did.”104

  The class and gender skirmishes were worst on lifeboat 6. It contained two seamen, Quartermaster Hichens, and lookout Fleet, together with Arthur Peuchen, a Lebanese youth, and twenty-four women or children. Hichens (who had been steering when the ship hit the iceberg and was panic-stricken) took command and ordered Fleet and Peuchen to row hard to escape the liner’s suction when it foundered. Margaret Brown and a cashier from the à la carte restaurant, Margaret Martin, also took up oars. “Faster! Faster!” Hichens shouted. “If you don’t make better speed with your rowing, we’ll be pulled down to our deaths!” After the Titanic sank, Margaret Brown, Helen Candee, and Julia Cavendish (the Chicago-born wife of an Anglo-Irishman) urged Hichens to return to save those crying for help. He refused: “It is our lives now, not theirs. Row, damn you! Our boat will immediately be swamped if we go back . . . there’s no use going back, because there’s nothing in the water but a bunch of stiffs.”105 This was a foul remark, for Hélène Baxter, Julia Cavendish, Eloise Smith, and others had left sons and husbands behind. When, to keep warm, Brown elbowed her way to the stern, took the tiller from him, and threatened that if he resisted, she would knock him overboard, he lapsed into a sulky gloom: “We’re likely to drift for days. There is no water in the casks, and we have no bread, no compass and no chart. If a storm should come up, we are completely helpless! We will either drown or starve.” Brown told him to keep quiet: “By damn, I wish you’d keep your place!” Hichens swore at her at one juncture.106 “Hichens was cowardly and almost crazed with fear,” Helen Candee wrote afterward. “When asked if Carpathia would come and pick us up, he replied: ‘No, she is not going to pick us up; she is to pick up bodies.’” Again this was needlessly brutal with bereft women sitting hard by.107

  On collapsible A, Abelseth knew that his three friends Humblen, Moen, and Søholt were lost. With him, though, was a shipboard acquaintance from New Jersey who was freezing to death. By dawn this man was comatose, but Abelseth strove to keep him alive. The Dakota homesteader took him by the shoulder, raised him upright from the deck, and told him, “We can see a ship now. Brace up.” He held the dying man’s hand and shook him. “Who are you?” asked the man, “let me be.” Abelseth tried to support him, but got tired, took a piece of cork flotsam from the ocean, and laid it under his head to keep his head above water; but his companion died before rescue came.108

  The ship that Abelseth espied was a small Cunarder, the Carpathia. Its captain, Arthur Rostron, was the hero of the disaster—a crisp, efficient sea captain who was neither as foolhardy in the ice zone as Smith of the Titanic nor as feckless as Lord of the Californian. “I had the greatest respect for him as a seaman, a disciplinarian and as a man who could take a decision quickly,” wrote another Cunard officer, James Bisset. “He was not the burly type of jolly old sea dog. Far from it, he was of thin and wiry build, with sharp features, piercing blue eyes, and rapid, agile movements. His nickname in the Cunard service was ‘the Electric Spark.’”109 The Carpathia was carrying 743 passengers, three days out of New York, heading for the Mediterranean ports of Gibraltar, Genoa, Naples, Trieste, and Fiume. Its twenty-year-old wireless operator, Harold Cottam, worked and slept in the wireless shack atop the superstructure aft of the funnel. He was preparing for bed, stooping to unlace his boots, and wearing his earphones because he was waiting for acknowledgment of a message he had sent earlier; and it was thus that he heard transmissions from Cape Cod intended for the Titanic. He sent a Morse message to MGY, the Titanic call sign, checking to see if the liner had received its Cape Cod messages. MGY replied instantly, “Come at once. We have struck an iceberg.” Cottam erupted into Rostron’s cabin with the news.

  Rostron ordered the Carpathia to turn about and his engine room to get up steam. Arc lights were festooned in the gangways. Canvas bags to haul children from the lifeboats, chair slings for the injured, restraints in case anyone had gone mad, as well as blankets and warm drinks were prepared. Passengers woken by the shuddering overcharged engines were asked to keep to their cabins. Rostron and his men made the journey in three and a half hours, taking evasive action to avoid six icebergs on the way, posting an extra lookout, emitting a plume of black smoke, firing rockets from her bows to signal that rescue was approaching. When the Carpathia found the scattered lifeboats after dawn, bright sunlight was glistening on a battery of monster icebergs. “They were of different colors as the sun struck them,” said Woolner. “Some looked white and some looked blue, and some sort of mauve, and others were dark gray.” He specified “one double-toothed” iceberg, which was perhaps a hundred feet high and may have been the Titanic’s killer.110 Seaman Scarrott and Henry Stengel both likened this berg to the Rock of Gibraltar.111

  One quality dominated, Rostron recalled, as survivors came aboard, qu
ietness: “there was no noise, no hurry . . . the rescued came solemnly, dumbly, out of a shivering shadow.”112 The Carpathia’s English physician dealt with first-class survivors in the ship’s first-class dining room; the ship’s Italian physician did equivalent work in the second-class dining room; and its Hungarian physician worked in the third-class dining room. The widows Astor, Thayer, and Widener were assigned cabins. Ismay was taken to the ship’s doctor’s cabin, given a sedative, and stayed there until the Carpathia reached New York.

  On board, some men busied themselves collating experiences, compiling memoranda, and exchanging addresses. Resilient women consoled the broken and bereft and tried to improve their material comforts. Overall, the human cargo of this mourning boat were dazed by shock and sorrow—and angry, too, that their liner had been driven and equipped so heedlessly. It had steamed westward as if it were invulnerable, plunging too fast into an ice zone to stop when an iceberg hove in view. There had been a woeful inadequacy of lifeboats, there had been a shambles loading them, and the crewmen who were put in charge of them often proved blundering or weak nerved. The ship’s last hours had been a climax of deadly folly.

  11

  The Meaning Shows in the Defeated Thing

  Over the water came the lifted song—

  Blind pieces in a mighty game we swing;

  Life’s battle is a conquest for the strong;

  The meaning shows in the defeated thing.

  —JOHN MASEFIELD, “THE WANDERER”

  The steamship Kroonland—the first ship to send a wireless distress call at sea in 1903—had been plying the New York to Antwerp route for IMM’s Red Star subsidiary for ten years. The novelist Theodore Dreiser, who had flirted with the idea of returning to New York on the Titanic, preferred to save money by traveling on the Kroonland, which left Antwerp on April 13. Three days later, when the Kroonland’s wireless operator learned of the Titanic’s doom, the ship’s captain ordered the news to be kept secret. But a busybody on board, Herr Salz, had been bribing the wireless operator with cigars, and to him the calamity was confided. Salz bustled off to the smoking room where Dreiser was sitting and, looking portentous, gestured to the men to come on deck where he could tell some news that the women must not overhear. Someone jested that to judge by Salz’s manner, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company had gone bust. The men’s nonchalance collapsed when Salz told them his story. With one accord, they went to the rail and gazed into the blackness ahead. “The swish of the sea could be heard and the insistent moo of the fog-horn,” Dreiser recorded. “We all began to talk at once, but no one listened. The terror of the sea had come swiftly home to all of us . . . To think of a ship as immense as the Titanic, new and bright, sinking in endless fathoms of water. And the two thousand passengers routed like rats from their berths only to float helplessly in miles of water, praying and crying!” The Kroonland’s passengers faced several days at sea before reaching New York. Some men became austerely reticent, while others could not stop nervous chatter about the disaster. The women on board pretended not to know. Inwardly, wrote Dreiser, all passengers shrank at the thought of “the endless wastes of the sea” and “the terror of drowning in the dark and cold.” When the Kroonland reached New York Harbor, a pilot came on board with newspapers booming the news. Passengers crowded into the saloon to get every detail. “Some broke down and cried. Others clenched their fists and swore over the vivid and painful pen-pictures by eyewitnesses and survivors. For a while we all forgot we were nearly home.”1

  The earliest wireless messages indicating that a catastrophe had occurred in midocean reached the Marconi outpost at Cape Race in Newfoundland. A terse message was relayed to the Allan Steamship headquarters in Montreal from its cargo vessel Virginian, taking eighteen thousand barrels of apples to Liverpool, reporting that it had received a distress message from the Titanic. Allan gave the news to a Montreal newspaper that had a reciprocal news agreement with the New York Times. At 2 A.M. a journalist from the New York Times telephoned Philip Franklin, American vice president of IMM, at his Manhattan home seeking confirmation of reports that the liner was sinking. Franklin called IMM’s Montreal representative seeking Canadian confirmation of the wireless traffic messages. Further bulletins flashed from Cape Race with some accurate details, but garbled transmissions resulted in reports during Monday that passengers had been rescued by the Virginian and the Parisian as well as the Carpathia, and that the wounded leviathan was being towed to Halifax, Nova Scotia. “A great deal of pain was caused to the public by the improper use of wireless,” the British consul-general in New York deplored. “Amateurs with imperfect instruments picked up parts of messages, and piecing them together sent messages that were very far from true.”2 Aside from recklessly decrypted transmissions, there was at least one forgery, purporting to come from Phillips, the Marconi operator, assuring his parents that all was well and the Titanic was proceeding to Halifax.

  For much of Monday, April 15, Franklin seemed in a state of raving confidence. He declared his absolute trust in the Titanic, even affirmed that the liner was indestructible, despite the alarming messages that were arriving. “During the entire day we considered the ship unsinkable,” he later said, “and it never entered our minds that there had been anything like a serious loss of life.”3 He was quoted by reporters as saying that there were sufficient lifeboats to save all passengers, he but feared that there might have been fatalities while transferring voyagers to lifeboats. His messages to the family of Charles Hays in Canada raised false hopes that the railway man and his son-in-law, Thornton Davidson, had survived. Later, Franklin issued journalists with a further statement betraying class consciousness even in crisis: “it is customary in cases of this kind for the women to be saved first; even the women in the steerage would be taken off before the men passengers of the first and second cabin.”4 He trusted rumors that the Virginian was towing the wounded Titanic toward Halifax. He even chartered a fast train to bring its passengers south to New York. His messages to Captain Herbert Haddock on the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic, were initially guarded but became increasingly urgent in requesting news. It was not until six sixteen New York time on Monday evening that Franklin received confirmation from Haddock that the Titanic had foundered: “About 675 souls saved, crew and passengers, latter nearly all women and children.” Franklin was dumbfounded by the news, and for some time his office reeled under the blow.

  The news reached England by Atlantic telegraph cable and Marconi’s outpost at Poldhu—a country walk away from the Cornish villages of Constantine and Porthleven, where the dead men Jim Veale, James Drew, and Edgar and Fred Giles had begun their fatal journeys. The London evening newspapers caught the story for their Monday night editions. “TITANIC SINKING,” reported the Globe. It reported a message from Cape Race that “the liner was sinking by the head, and that the women were being taken off in lifeboats. The last signals came at 12.27 this morning, but these were blurred and ended abruptly.” The ship, it added, was “a floating palace” equipped to provide “the comforts of wealthy Americans.”5 Tuesday evening’s report in the Globe was less accurate. “When the Titanic struck the iceberg at 10.25 she was running at reduced speed. Most of the passengers had retired to bed, and were awakened and terrified by a thunderous impact which crushed and twisted the towering bows of the liner and broke them in like an eggshell.” The Globe had interviewed a man named Parton, manager of White Star’s Cockspur Street office. “What discipline must have been maintained!” Parton exclaimed. “The fact that nearly all of those who are saved are women and children is evidence of that.”6

  On Monday evening, encouraged by optimistic early reports, a thanksgiving service was held in St. Jude’s Church, Whitechapel, for the survival of the Reverend Ernest Carter and his wife, Lillian—a service that seemed pitifully sad in retrospect, for both had perished. The English could manage to accept that “the unsinkable has sunk,”7 but it remained unthinkable that over a thousand had died.

 
Belfast felt poleaxed by the news. A Harland & Wolff worker recalled that he was carrying buckets of water drawn from the well for his horses when he met an acquaintance at the orchard gate:

  “And he says, ‘Jack’, he says, ’there’s shocking bad news this morning’.

  “ ‘I says, ‘What’s wrong?’

  “ ‘He says, ‘This big ship’, he says, ‘the Titanic that sailed. She’s to the bottom this morning.’”

  A man whose father had worked as a joiner on the Titanic recalled this eery interlude when sectarian politics were abeyant and no one argued or fought about Home Rule. “For those of us in Belfast,” he recalled, “this news was beyond all comprehension. My father couldn’t believe it. Later he broke down and cried. He was a big shipyard man and he just cried like a child. You see, his pride was broken.”8 Dismay, horror, and grief fell on Belfast: it was a failure for Harland & Wolff, humiliation for Ulster Protestantism. “During those awful days in April, when hope of good news at last had gone, the Yard was shrouded in gloom and rough men cried like women.”9

  The news ricocheted round the world. Pierpont Morgan, the corsair of IMM, sent a telegram from the French spa town of Aix-les-Bains: “Have just heard fearful rumor about Titanic with iceberg without any particulars. Hope for God’s sake not true.” Absurd rumors sped about Aix as they did London and New York: that everyone had survived, that passengers might be saved by clinging to the wreckage or scrambling to safety atop icebergs. On Wednesday, by which time the extent of the disaster was clear, Morgan was to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday; but in response to subdued greetings from his New York partners, he cabled that he was “exceedingly grieved.”10 IMM had been a loss-maker since its inception, and now it was a life-loser, too, held up to obloquy. The news was kept from convalescent Lord Pirrie until late on Tuesday.