The Master's Tale--A Novel of the Titanic

by Ann Victoria Roberts

  Usually, coffee was followed at 10:30 by a general inspection of the ship – but, with Cork Harbour and Queenstown on the horizon, the Chief returned to his engine room, while I went through to the chartroom to check our course and speed. The Daunt Light Vessel ahead, we slowed to pick up the pilot and, an hour later, anchored in the harbour, the vast rumble of the iron chain like an army of convicts on the march.

  As though waiting for that signal, the two paddle-steamers, already loaded with passengers and mails, left Queenstown quay. Carrying journalists too, no doubt, ready to ask the same old questions, this time with an Irish lilt. I spotted Mr Ismay on the Boat Deck and glanced again at the clock. An hour to load, and then the pilot would be back on the bridge to see us out.

  Just a handful of First Class guests arrived to be shown to their staterooms by senior stewards. The majority of the hundred or so who joined us at Queenstown were young Irish emigrants heading for a better life across the water. Families with children of varying ages; quite a number of young men travelling in groups, and several young women in their twenties. From past experience I knew there could be trouble, generally fuelled by drink and the licentious behaviour a sea-voyage seems to release in certain people. As though moral responsibility becomes suspended in the strange gap between one life and another.

  It was by no means confined to the lower classes, although the young men in steerage were less restrained, more inclined to react with their fists. And young Irishmen, for some reason, appeared to enjoy a good fight more than most. I hoped there might be a priest or two aboard to keep order.

  For the benefit of Irish officials we had another lowering of lifeboats and an examination of lifejackets; then, as the final papers were signed, and the tenders left with the mails from France and England, a piper began to play.

  From aft, the haunting lament drifted over the gathered crowd. More than a few were dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs they’d brought for waving. Out on the bridge I caught the wave of sentiment, aware that this was my last trip, and soon I would be saying goodbye to old friends, as well as to a way of life that had sustained me since boyhood…

  Whether it was a trick of the light, I don’t know, but suddenly I thought I saw Dorothea just a few yards away – slender, dark-haired – amongst a group of ladies on the boat deck. It couldn’t be – and yet the profile was hers exactly.

  Even as I stood, transfixed, to a screech of gulls some fool of a fireman appeared at the top of the after funnel like a sweep’s boy popping out of a chimney. He scared half the company to death. The other half were doubled up with mirth. The ladies, hands to lips, were starting to laugh, but I was not amused. ‘Find that man,’ I said to Mr Lowe, ‘and take his name.’

  When I looked again, Dorothea was gone.

  5

  Leaving the huge natural harbour at Queenstown in the early afternoon, we headed into a fresh south-westerly breeze. An hour later we were passing the Old Head of Kinsale – a strange feature on the chart, like a man’s head extended on a skinny neck. I checked the course laid down, and, as hills and pastures gave way to the mountains of the west, handed over the watch to Mr Wilde.

  Leaving the bridge, I rang for my steward and ordered some tea to be brought to my office. Sighing, I reached for the deck log in which orders and conditions pertaining to navigation were recorded. Having entered the relevant details for Queenstown, it was now time to write up the additional notes regarding our leaving of Southampton.

  Pen in hand, I found myself wishing that Joe were still around – the Joe of my youth, full of wisdom and good advice. Once in a while, he would talk about loneliness, the fact that as Master you had colleagues aplenty but could never have friends. He was right. There was no one else to make decisions; no one to share responsibility. In command, you were alone.

  Since the Hawke incident, I’d been acutely aware of it. And yet I was the company’s senior master, the one supposed to know it all. I didn’t. There were times when I worried that progress was increasing beyond my ability to keep up.

  With the brief log entries before me, I began an account of Wednesday’s departure from Southampton on a separate sheet of foolscap. Once the incident with the New York was written up – to be verified by each of my deck officers – it would be attached to the ship’s Official Log Book, to be forwarded to the Registrar General of Shipping and used in any subsequent enquiry. By the time it was done my eyes were stinging and I needed to stretch my legs.

  The wind howled against the heavy outer door, pushing it shut as I stepped over the threshold. Outside, the familiar rush of cold air buffeting the bridge-front muffled my footsteps. Between the masts, aerials were strung out like laundry lines, whistling and rattling in the wind. Although a rarity on cargo ships, wireless was increasing in coverage and in the last decade Marconi’s men had become fixtures on all the Atlantic liners. I had become accustomed to the facility – as I’d also become familiar with the telephone. But whenever I stopped to think of those young lads tapping out their messages across the ether, it seemed extraordinary to me – miraculous, even. In my young day the only form of communication between one ship and another was by Morse light or semaphore – and then only if you were close enough to be seen. All we could do in fog was ring the ship’s bell and pray.

  Nowadays though, these boys could send messages over hundreds of miles; thousands at night when the atmospheric conditions were good. The day’s financial news, received from Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange, would be printed aboard for the following day’s Atlantic Bulletin. Once upon a time you left port and that was it for news until you got back; now, from this ship, they could make and transmit decisions which kept the wires humming and the financial world turning.

  Such refinements kept the businessmen happy. For this maiden voyage we were carrying about half the usual number of First Class passengers, but even so we had Benjamin Guggenheim, the iron and steel magnate, as well as the American railroad kings, Charles Hays and John B Thayer. The bankers George Widener and Washington Dodge were aboard, and the head of Roebling’s civil engineering, builders of the Brooklyn Bridge. Men upon whose empires millions of people depended, and these men were below, dressing for dinner, about to enjoy a relaxed and convivial evening aboard this opulent new liner.

  Where else would you find men like these together, in one place and at one time? It was the kind of rhetorical question my wife was given to uttering when I was feeling down. But if I sometimes felt a burst of pride – and love – at her reminder, I had only to be aboard like this to know the reality.

  I glanced at the funnels and thought of the brave souls below, working every hour on that bunker fire. Those up top had no inkling of what it was like, what effort it took to get them safely, time after time, across the Atlantic.

  Low down in the west, the dying day was painting spectacular colours across sea and sky. I paused, letting its beauty calm me, cleansing my mind of worry. Suddenly I was caught, almost unbearably, by memories of our old house by the sea, Ellie and me walking along the dunes with the dogs, watching the sunset together. How I missed that: how I missed her. It seemed an age since I’d been at home for any length of time. I closed my eyes for a moment before turning my back on the sunset and resuming my walk. Astern of us, Ireland’s mountains had become grey, forbidding cliffs – somehow they were easier to contemplate.

  Earlier, there had been quite a crowd lingering at the taffrail – a last sight of home for many who had joined at noon. Now there were only two watching the ship’s silvery wake and that blue-black silhouette disappearing into night.

  In her light-coloured dress the girl looked fragile, wraithlike, as though the wind might sweep her away at any moment. The man, some little distance away, seemed unaware. I studied her, wondering why she seemed so sad, and why so familiar. Hoping to get a better view, I moved in their direction; but by force of habit, I turned to check the navigation lights were lit. Seconds later, when I looked again, the man was alone, stand
ing motionless as before.

  I blinked hard and shook my head, keeping my eyes on him as I strode aft. Where was the girl? Easy to be mesmerised by the curling of the foam, to be drawn in by the wake. The man would have noticed, surely? But before I could reach the afterdeck he turned, unhurriedly, to go indoors. I couldn’t see his face but something about his build and the way he moved made me think it was my half-brother Joe.

  I stopped, my head spinning. Leaning heavily against the rail, I could not have said if I was awake or dreaming. Certainly, I was more fatigued than I’d realized.

  6

  I often thought that if I’d never walked along Liverpool’s quays, never caught that wonderful smell of hemp and tar and canvas, I might have spent my life in Hanley. Without Joe – without his salty tales to sharpen my senses – I might not have noticed the pall of ash and smoke hanging over the Five Towns. Or maybe it would just have taken longer to realize that I was not cut out for a potter like my father, nor even a white-collar clerk as my mother would have had me be.

  Joe Hancock opened my eyes to what was possible. He was Mother’s eldest by her first marriage and already at sea before I was born. I first set foot aboard his ship in Liverpool when I was barely seven years old; by the time he was given his first command I was impatient to follow him. Mother was set against it, of course. Worrying about her first son away at sea was bad enough: imagining us both wrecked and drowned was not to be borne. As it turned out, Joe survived to become a ship-chandler; but that’s by-the-by. Mother was not to know and her plans for me were more prosaic. With my talent for figures, she said, I could have a clean job and a secure future – as though the idea of spending fifty years confined indoors would appeal to a thirteen-year-old boy.

  There was little point in argument. I knew what Mother was like when she had her heart set on something. By unrelenting effort she’d got us out of our two-up, two down terrace house, and persuaded my father, always a stranger to risk, to take on the corner shop at the end of the street. Mind, he kept to his trade well past the day she was making a profit.

  Ironically, it was Dad, quiet and undeviating, who made the first chink in Mother’s armour. I imagine he was already suffering the lung disease that killed him a year or so later – but I, in schoolboy ignorance, presented a long face because what was planned was not what I wanted. There was a strong possibility I might be employed in the offices just down the road, and Mother kept saying what an opportunity, and how fortunate I was. I didn’t think so, but dare not complain after all the manipulating she’d done.

  Then Joe came home unexpectedly, suntanned as ever, filling the house with his presence. Our sister’s children gazed in awe while I begged silently for him to work some magic so I didn’t have to labour in the potteries or sit hunched over a desk for the rest of my life.

  I remember the sun glaring through a dirty yellow sky, all the doors and windows standing open and Mother sweating over the Sunday roast. Kicking my heels by the kitchen door, I was frustrated because Joe had gone off that morning without me. Usually I knew to keep quiet when Mother was busy, but on this occasion I persisted in complaining that it wasn’t fair, Joe had been giving me some lessons in navigation, and I wanted him to look at what I’d done.

  Her patience snapped. She waved the basting spoon at me, and I was splashed with hot fat which made me yelp. ‘You can forget navigation, my lad, forget ships and the sea, and just put your mind to that job down the road. You’ve got a good home and a good family – why d’you have to be such an ungrateful creature? Wanting to be somewhere else all the time – what’s wrong with here?’

  While I struggled to reply, she clicked her tongue and banged the oven door shut. ‘I shall be having words with Joe. He’s no business filling your head with daft ideas.’

  ‘They’re not daft ideas!’ I retorted, stung. ‘Anyway, why is it always me? You never say he’s ungrateful, when he goes off to sea!’ At that I had to dodge the back of her hand as I hared down the yard and into the lane.

  That afternoon I trudged along by the canal for an hour or more. Pondering miserably on the unfairness of my mother’s judgements, it seemed to me that I was always in the wrong, forever punished for my wandering adventures in the local countryside – running off, she called it – while Joe, who’d run off to sea when he wasn’t much older than me, was the one she missed, the one she welcomed with open arms.

  That day I was planning to do the same: she’d miss me then, I reasoned, and be glad when I came home. If I could be like Joe, with a Master’s ticket and the title of Captain – then she’d be proud of me too.

  When I dared return my dinner was keeping warm, but for once Mother seemed less cross about that and more concerned with something else. She just sat quiet, elbows on the table, chin resting on clasped hands, looking down at her empty plate, while Dad was holding forth instead. He’d been for his usual Sunday pint and was more talkative than usual. Maybe he’d been looking back while talking to Joe, seeing missed opportunities, adventures he’d foregone in favour of steadiness and security. While I ate my dinner and tried not to be noticed, he was drawing Mother’s attention to her elder son, comparing his bright eyes and burly frame to various young men of their acquaintance, all of whom were puny by comparison.

  ‘I don’t believe anybody’s life is easy,’ Dad said, ‘but I’d like to think of my own flesh and blood doing well and enjoying life, not labouring in misery at something they hate. If the lad wants to go to sea, well, maybe he should. For all its dangers,’ he went on, ‘I’d be happier for him doing that than wheezing his life out, here.’

  It was a speech I never expected to hear, a speech that fairly bowled me over. It didn’t happen at once, of course; mother stuck out and said thirteen was too young by far. So with that promise to spur me on I forgot about running away and made the most of another year at school. I applied myself to Joe’s study books at night, and at 14 went to work at the local forge – to build up some muscle, as my father suggested. Although I was tall for my age, with strong bones, labouring in such an environment was tough, and two years seemed an eternity. The more so since my father’s health deteriorated during that time, and our lives, which had seemed dull but secure, changed irrevocably. He died four months before I went to sea.

  Mother didn’t seem to grieve, she just became silent. My father, upon whom she’d focused all her attention for the best part of a year, was no longer there. The house was quiet as a morgue, only the shop seemed to have any kind of life about it. And that was sluggish, as though our usual customers were afraid to disturb her. Not even my half-sister’s children could rouse her, and as for me, well, I didn’t know what to say or do. Although I missed my father, I was glad his suffering was over. I tried once or twice to say so, but you’d have thought I’d committed some unpardonable sin. The silence of our evenings became unbearable. When the time came, I was glad to get away.

  ~~~

  Dad’s advice to build up strength and sinew turned out to be wise. Within days of my first trip to sea I knew he’d been right to insist on time at the forge. Even so, I often thought that if he had spent a week or so as a young apprentice he might have been less easy about my signing on. Life under sail was hard. And dangerous. Knowing the ropes? I’ll say. There were well over 200 on a full-rigged ship, and before we left my half-brother made sure I knew the name and function of every one.

  Despite his usual breezy good humour, Cap’n Joe had his serious side. He said you couldn’t ignore the Almighty when you were alone on deck, faced with the power of wind and waves, or dazzled by all the stars in the firmament. It was as well, he said, to remember how small and puny a man was, how terrifying the elements could be.

  It was a moment of caution, I felt; maybe intended to put me off, if put off I was going to be. But words are one thing, reality another. In my ignorance I thought I knew what he meant and couldn’t wait to experience it for myself.

  Finally I did so, heading off to Liverpool in the early s
pring of 1867 to be employed by Andrew Gibson & Co, and to join Joe’s new command, the Senator Weber. Built in Boston, Massachusetts, she was a three-masted, full-rigged sailing ship of well over 1,000 tons, a fine looking vessel with an elegant prow. Spying her from the dockside, my heart leapt with joy. I was suddenly and irrevocably in love.

  As my pulse raced and steps quickened, Joe laid a cautionary hand on my arm. ‘Looks are one thing, lad – performance another. And since she’s new to the company we’ll just have to see how she fares…’

  Despite her fifteen years she proved to be a good sea-boat. Fortunate, given that we were bound for Hong Kong with machine parts and materials for the expansion of that distant port: bricks, cast iron window-frames and glass in special boxes. We even carried a master builder and half a dozen bricklayers as passengers.

  If they seemed apprehensive at the thought of their first sea-voyage, I’d have done well to feel the same. But with Cap’n Joe by my side I was confident and excited, even though I knew Hong Kong to be a great way off. Not even Joe could say how long we’d take to get there, but he was reckoning the time in months rather than weeks.

  The evening before we sailed, just after we’d eaten in a nearby pub, Joe took me into the Sailors’ Church at Pier Head. While my brother knelt to pray for a good voyage and a safe return, my eyes remained open, taking in the great windows, soaring columns and flickering candles. But what impressed itself upon me was the shape of the roof, like the ribs of a great boat turned upside down, sheltering the folk below. Something in me was stirred. I remembered the story of the storm on Galillee, and was suddenly aware that the stones beneath my feet were the last solid ground I would feel for a long time. I wasn’t much used to praying, but in my unformed way I prayed then for the Lord’s protection.