The radar antenna rotating around the mast, which was tilted toward the sea, scanned an elliptical horizon which included more sky than surface area. On the bridge, Captain Calamai could not be sure of what his radar was showing him. Second Officer Badano, nervously awaiting the arrival of rescue ships which had radioed they were on their way, began to doubt the accuracy of the position which he had calculated. The rescue ships seemed an awfully long time in coming. When the Doria lifeboats had left the ship, a dead stillness had descended upon the bridge. Except for a few seamen remaining as lookouts, the bridge was virtually deserted. Everyone was away carrying out orders of Captain Calamai which had been issued soon after the collision. Badano was disturbed by a recurring recollection of one small Italian freight ship that had sunk with all hands aboard only thirty miles west of Genoa because it had sent out a wrong position (through a simple error) that had sent rescue ships to a point thirty miles east of Genoa.
A mistake of one degree in the position of the Doria in that latitude meant sixty miles, enough for every rescue ship to miss the disaster location. Badano, knowing he would not be at ease until he rechecked the position for which he was responsible, returned to the chartroom, where the loran was still flashing its electronic waves on its small screen. He carefully laid off the position of his ship again and noting the position on a scrap of paper went into the Radio Room to make certain that the correct position had been sent. He compared his latest position with the one sent out and was reassured. He had made no mistake. It was only a matter of time and waiting for the rescue ships to arrive.
The Cape Ann was the first to arrive. Captain Boyd cautiously steered the freighter by radar between the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm. It was 12:45 and he knew he had arrived, but he could not determine in the fog which ship was which. Failla in the radio shack tried to contact both ships for information. The Stockholm gave its position and from that, Captain Boyd knew the Andrea Doria was to the left of his ship, engulfed in the thick fog. He gave the direction to his first lifeboat, which had been lowered to the water. Ten minutes later his second and last lifeboat was lowered to the sea and disappeared in the fog as its crew pulled on their sixteen-foot oars.
At 1:23 A.M. the Navy transport Thomas arrived on the scene and quickly sent off her two motorboats. One boat was equipped with radio by which Captain John O’Shea hoped to maintain a contact with the Andrea Doria, relaying all messages to the Coast Guard in Boston. Captain O’Shea, a heavy-set man with a florid face and a shock of white hair, kept six lifeboats aboard the Thomas—just in case.
At about the same time, the first lifeboat from the Stockholm reached the Doria. Second Officer Enestrom steered his craft around the spoon-shaped stern of the mammoth listing liner and “tied up” at a pair of heavy hemp mooring lines hanging from the low side of the ship’s stern. Actually, the lifeboat was secured in place only by two of its four crewmen hanging on to the ends of the hanging ropes.
“Send down a ladder,” the sinewy Swedish officer shouted to the ship above. A face appeared over the railing of the deck. “A ladder,” Enestrom yelled, “lower a ladder.” He was still calling for a ladder when the man above, in a moment, swung himself over the railing and expertly, hand-over-hand, came swiftly down the rope to the lifeboat. The man, wearing the white jacket of a steward or kitchen worker, scampered to a seat and without a word to anyone sat stolidly down, burying his face in his hands.
Enestrom’s boat was quickly filled as crewmen, men passengers and a few women came down the two rope lines leading to the boat. It was not difficult to tell them apart. The crewmen climbed down hand-over-hand; the men passengers descended more slowly; and the women slid down in apparent agony, allowing the rough rope to slide through their clenched hands. His boat was about half filled when Enestrom glanced overhead and saw a man, shouting in Italian, poised to drop a small child over the side of the ship. “No, no, no, wait,” he yelled up to the man and waved his arms as if to push the child back. “He’s out of his mind,” the Swedish officer exclaimed as he hastily told four men to spread a blanket. The child, dropped from a height of about twenty feet, emitted a long, shrill scream that sounded like the whistle of a bomb before he landed safely in the blanket. Four other children followed this aerial route. One, a small girl of about two years, missed the blanket. Luckily, she missed the boat, too. A crewman fished her from the water, wet and weeping, but safe.
The second lifeboat arriving from the Stockholm was spotted from the stern deck of the Andrea Doria before it reached the ship, and a drove of anxiety-ridden passengers, having waited for two hours for some sign of rescue, stampeded to the starboard railing and leaped overboard. The short and sudden human hailstorm from the heights of the listing ship had a nightmarish effect upon the five-man crew of the Stockholm’s lifeboat No. 8. But as those in the water swam and thrashed their way to the lifeboat, it proved to be a surprisingly easy and swift way for the lifeboat crew to take aboard survivors. The bright orange lifejackets pinpointed the swimmers in the dark sea. In short order, the 64-person-capacity lifeboat was filled, and headed back to its mother ship.
The second trip of lifeboat No. 8 to the Andrea Doria was not so easy. The fog had begun to lift somewhat but the list of the stricken ship had become even more ominous, and the swells of the sea had increased the danger of the small life boats smashing against the side of the rocking ship. So busy were the men of lifeboat No. 8 in handling the lines as survivors came down, they failed to notice the harried Italian father who dropped his four-year-old daughter from the deck some eighteen feet above. Fearing that if his only child fell into the sea she would drown, Tullio Di Sandro, a stocky, almost bald Milanese, aimed for the lifeboat below and let his daughter fall from his arms. She fell headlong, striking the railing edge of the lifeboat. Second Officer Abenius whirled around at the thudding sound behind him and saw at the bottom of his boat the inert form of a small, thin, dark-haired girl in a nightgown. The twenty-seven-year-old officer glanced upwards in time to stop others from dropping children over the side until he had set up a large double blanket as a rescue net. In the dim light of the lifeboat, a sailor sprinkled cold sea water upon the face of the unconscious child. A woman in the boat knelt by the seaman’s side to help. When they could not revive the little girl, she was wrapped in a blanket and carried to a sheltered part of the lifeboat.
Abenius assumed that the woman who stayed with the child was her mother, but he was wrong. For some reason, neither parent on the deck above followed the child into the lifeboat. They were not to see her again until two days later in the U.S. Public Health Service’s Brighton Marine Hospital in Boston, where she died of a fractured cranium without ever having regained consciousness.
News of the lifeboat with the large blanket must have spread on the stern decks of the Andrea Doria. Some twenty to twenty-five other children were caught successfully in the double blanket which had been stored in the lifeboat as an emergency sail.
The lifeboat almost capsized at one point when a stout woman, unable to support her weight on a rope, crashed into the boat. Throughout the early morning hours of the rescue, women continued to fall from the ropes, many suffering broken, sprained or wrenched limbs. And many of those who did not fall burned and ripped the skin from their hands and thighs as they slid down the coarse rescue lines. Not only was it psychologically terrifying, but it was physically next to impossible for the older passengers to climb down a rope from the height of a two-story building. But, short of jumping the distance, it was the only way off the ship for the passengers on the open stern decks of the Andrea Doria. One fifty-three-year-old Pennsylvania woman, Mrs. Julia Greco, broke her back when she struck a lifeboat. She lingered in agony in a hospital for six months before she became the fifty-first fatality of the disaster.
Other passengers, both men and women, were petrified with fright while on the ropes and, unable to go either up or down, hung there until their strength ebbed away and they fell. Trasbo, the assistant chief ste
ward of the Stockholm, in lifeboat No. 8, climbed up to help down one middle-aged woman who had frozen in terror midway on a rope. When he had eased her down on his shoulders safely into the lifeboat, the terrified woman, who had not uttered a sound, broke into racking sobs. She flung her heavy arms around the neck of the short, slight steward and smothered him with kisses and wet tears. He fought to free himself. The woman, thanking him in Italian which he did not understand, pressed upon him her rosary beads as a token of her appreciation. But just as firmly as she made the offer, Trasbo, a devout Lutheran, declined.
The night at this first stage of the rescue was filled with cries and screams and chaos. Among the hundreds of passengers and crewmen on the open fantail of the ship the rule was not “women and children first” but “survival of the fittest” and “the strongest go first.” Women were shoved aside in the dash for each of the first lifeboats reaching the ship. Men with children in their arms were brushed out of the way as the strongest stumbled, groped and crawled about the deck. Many crewmen did try to bring order to the scene, but they were hopelessly outnumbered and ineffectual in trying to round up terrified and hysterical passengers. The loudspeakers blared: “Stati calmi, stati calmi,” but people did not remain calm when a lifeboat was sighted in the water below.
A half-mile away on the bridge of the Cape Ann, Captain Boyd heard a wail of cries from the listing ship that rose and died away and rose again in repetitive crescendos which unnerved his stomach. Never in his thirty-three years at sea had he witnessed such a sight. Through his binoculars he saw people crawling madly about the decks of the ocean liner which blazed with lights. He expected to see the Andrea Doria keel over and go under at any minute. He feared for his lifeboats which had made one trip back and had returned to the Doria. At one point, the Cape Ann had drifted more than a mile away from the Italian ship and with one of his own lifeboats and one of the Doria’s boats hanging on, he had maneuvered the freighter closer to the Italian ship. But he dared not approach closer than a half-mile for fear of striking people in the water.
Captain O’Shea on the Thomas, gazing upon the evacuation of the ship, shared one thought with many of the other experienced men of the sea who witnessed the scene. If this had been the winter, or even four months later, it would have been total catastrophe. Few of those whom he could see leaping from the ship would survive if the sea were rough. In a rough sea, he thought, the Doria would have gone down long before the Thomas or any other ship had arrived. Luckily, the sea was calm, almost smooth, with long, modulating swells. In fact, never had any of the men viewing the Andrea Doria from the decks of their ships seen a vessel list at such an angle and long survive. The Andrea Doria was at that time listing about 30 degrees, although from afar it appeared to be more. The Lusitania, blasted open by a torpedo, listed 25 degrees before she sank. The Titanic, with five of her watertight compartments ripped open by an iceberg, hardly listed at all before she plunged, bow first, to her final grave.
Carstens took out lifeboat No. 1 as the last of the four hand-powered lifeboats left the Stockholm. His small motor-boat reached the Andrea Doria, of course, long before the other boats which had to be pumped by hand levers. He tied up at the extreme end of the starboard side of the listing ship. If either his engineer or the three sailors in the lifeboat realized he had been in command of the bridge at the time of the collision, they said nothing. Once his lifeboat was observed from the decks above, men and women passengers and Italian stewards in white jackets seemed to pounce upon the boat from everywhere. The small boat bobbed and drifted alongside the black hull of the Andrea Doria. Carstens noticed that the bottom of the overhanging hull was several feet out of the water, indicating the ship was down by the bow. He pushed his boat away from the large ship as it came dangerously close to smashing against its side.
The young officer, who had felt no fright at the time of the collision, was scared out of his wits when a woman passenger, hanging on to a swinging rope, smashed into his shoulder and knocked him toward the edge of his lifeboat. He grabbed on to the gunnel of the lifeboat to avoid being pitched overboard and he ducked as the woman swung back past him and fell into the water. She was picked up a moment later. While confusion reigned, the lifeboat was borne up on a wave beneath the overhanging stern of the Andrea Doria. Carstens whirled around at the sound of the crash and saw the unmanned tiller of his lifeboat smash against the Doria, break off and fall into the sea.
His small lifeboat was crowded with forty survivors when he pushed off from the Doria. An emergency oar was fitted into the empty tiller socket at the stern. The lifeboat was steered back to the Stockholm as two men handled the awkward makeshift tiller. After dispatching his passengers at a side port, Carstens brought his boat under the Stockholm bridge and reported his mishap. He was ordered to secure the boat and report to the bridge. His rescue efforts for the night were ended.
Far from the Andrea Doria a dissonant chorale of screams and wailing could be heard on the ships nearby, but on the decks of the Italian ship itself, though there were individual outbursts, there was no mass hysteria. Those weeping in fear were far outnumbered by Italian immigrants who, having climbed to the open deck, fell to their knees in prayers of thanksgiving for their deliverance. These prayers generally were followed by more prayers and beseeching of patron saints for personal safety and the safety of the listing ship. The more fervent the prayers, the more loudly did the Italian Catholics, as is their custom, literally cry out for their saints in heaven to hear them. Adding to the general bedlam were those calling at the tops of their voices not to their saints but to lost kin.
Crewmen distributed spare lifejackets from the reserve boxes on deck and tried to muster passengers on the port side of the ship. It proved impossible to keep people on one side of the deck while so much activity was going on on the opposite side. Some passengers joined the crewmen in helping other passengers climb over the rail to the hanging ropes. Some passengers worked by themselves doing crewmen’s work. Klaus Dorneich, a twenty-five-year-old German automobile salesman en route to Mexico, joined with four Austrian Fulbright students in lowering older passengers from the deck of the ship with a rope tied about their waists. The students had found several short lengths of rope and tied them together so that they had one line which reached the lifeboats below. A seventy-two-year-old blind shoemaker from Brooklyn, New York, Joseph Maggio, hysterically balked at the idea of trusting his life to a rope. So the young men forcibly bound the screaming old man in a net and lowered him away. Mrs. Lilian Dooner, who climbed topside from C-Deck with her two-year-old daughter Maria on her back, fended for herself leaving the ship. She found a rope, tied it about her little girl and lowered away. But the rope broke. The twenty-four-year-old mother hesitated not a moment. Following her daughter over the side, she plunged into the ocean and came up with Maria. A few minutes later mother and daughter were hauled into a lifeboat.
John Vali, a twenty-seven-year-old former New York waiter returning from an extended vacation in Italy, leaped overboard to save a pretty nineteen-year-old girl he had had his eye on throughout the voyage. Melanie Ansuini, emigrating to the United States with her family from the lovely Italian town of Perugia, had lost her grip on a stern rope and had been knocked unconscious in her fall into the water. Vali leaped in after her, saved her life and eight months later was rewarded with her hand in marriage.
Giuseppe Pomilio, an Italian bridegroom emigrating to join his seventeen-year-old wife in the United States, stripped off his shirt for a woman he found shivering on deck in only her pajama bottoms. Giovanni D’Elia, his wife and their three sons all leaped from the deck in preference to chancing a rope descent.
The chaos during the first two hours following the collision was confined almost exclusively to the stern decks of the ship where the tourist-class passengers gathered. The other two-thirds of the ship was relatively calm and quiet. In the cabin and first-class quarters of the Promenade and Boat Decks, passengers did not even know the ship was bein
g abandoned. Once having reached the muster stations and the port side of the ship, people settled down to wait for word of what to do and what to expect. The waiting was agony, for no word came. Speculation and rumors were rampant: there had been an explosion … a collision … a submerged wreck had been struck … the ship was sinking … the ship could not possibly sink … rescue ships were on the way … the Doria would soon continue on its way to New York.…
People clung to the handrails, stanchions and to other people; they sat on the floor of the lounges and on the deck chairs along the port Promenade Deck and on the deck of Boat Deck, leaning against the wall of the superstructure. Some complained bitterly that they were told nothing. Others went about comforting those who were weeping and those in fear. In the first- and cabin-class lounges, children were stretched out on the floor everywhere, asleep, their heads cushioned in the lap of a parent. Italian immigrants who had come to the first- and cabin-class quarters from the decks below, covered with black oil, were in most need of comfort. There was a pattern to the fears of the immigrants. Firstly, they feared they would be drowned; they feared rescue by a ship which would return them to Italy, and then, if they were taken to their new chosen land, they feared the United States Government would not admit them without their passports which they had lost. Many priests, nuns and seminarians returning from summer visits to Rome helped to comfort passengers. Monsignor Sebastian Natta, the ship’s chaplain, had taken the Holy Eucharist from the altar of the chapel after the collision. Breaking the sacramental wafers into the smallest bits possible, he went about the ship giving consolation and communion to those who knelt before him. “Corpus domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam.” (May the body of our Lord, Jesus Christ, preserve your soul into life everlasting.) But he refused to give general absolution. For that there was no need, he insisted—there was no imminent danger of death.
Collision Course Page 16