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

by Ann Victoria Roberts

  Every seaman has his moments of terror, the near-misses that make your heart pound and your bowels turn to water. I’ve had them in my time. Never imagined a collision on a clear night, with the sea as still as glass.

  Never imagined one off the Isle of Wight, either – other than with a small, unwary yacht, perhaps – yet there we were last autumn, on our own front doorstep, rammed by a gunboat. Then, to have a propeller sheer in the midst of the ocean – that was bad luck too. Couldn’t blame Stead for that one, though.

  Driven by time, keeping the schedules, threading my way through ice, I’d dreaded collisions for 25 years. Somehow I’d come through unscathed. And enjoyed it, enjoyed the winning, enjoyed the accolades. Good man. Always on time. Until now.

  A mild winter, winds to cut the bergs to bits. And a stray growler, unpredictable as a rogue bull, way out ahead of the rest of the field. Who would believe it?

  If only I’d had that last ice warning…

  If we’d altered course earlier…

  Or had more boats…

  And more time…

  It could have worked. We had the wireless, we had perfect conditions. It could have been a textbook rescue. We could still have got everyone away. If only that ship had answered…

  Reaching into my pocket for a smoke, I found the crumpled paper. But in the light I saw it was Stead’s message, badly scrawled, hard to make out. Something about endings and beginnings and the celestial wash of time …

  The celestial wash of time… With those words it came to me – the mistake I’d made. That hasty calculation! It was my fault. My fault – nothing to do with Stead. It was all a matter of time. Dear God, forgive me! I’d had the earlier warnings. But in changing course those few degrees, I hadn’t allowed for the drift of current carrying the ice-field…

  Even now, close behind that stray growler, the ice-field was moving steadily south at something like a mile an hour. The boats would soon be in it. Would anyone survive the night?

  Lucinda… Praying for her, praying harder than I’d ever prayed in my life before, I thought of Dorothea, struggling through time to warn her beloved daughter of what was to come. For a while I seemed to see her imploring figure like a reflection in the glass. She was calling me, but how could I go to her, how could I abandon my responsibility? How could I leave the myriad souls remaining aboard my ship? I shook my head, backed away. ‘Forgive me,’ I whispered. And then she was gone, leaving only sadness, a long, aching sadness, in her wake.

  ~~~

  The musicians had stopped playing, the lights were going out, one by one. The sea was glassy and still, a reflection of night sky, with boats and lights bobbing here and there, just like a midnight fishing trip. Ellie and I had done that once. We’d planned to do it again one day. Now we never would. I thought of her and Mel, my brave little girl… the news they would soon receive… my eyes burned with sorrow.

  Ellie, I’m sorry. My dearest, darling wife, I was wrong about so much, an arrogant fool. I made so many mistakes. Forgive me.

  Titanic – mighty name, mighty ship. Built to defy the seas at their worst. How shameful that she should be defeated by this, my one small error of navigation.

  Her name and mine have been linked together for all of a hundred years, always on someone’s lips, always with a question attached. Whose fault was it? Was she badly built, poorly equipped – was she running a speed test? Biggest question of all – was the Captain competent? The only thing that matters is that people died – 685 of my brave lads, my chosen crew, and a thousand passengers who trusted me to get them safely across the Atlantic Ocean. There were mistakes, yes. One upon another, adding up slowly to the final error. I paid for every one of them with my life.

  Only right, I know, but notoriety is a wearisome thing. With every question I make the journey again. I wish they’d let me rest.

  Those who went down with me have long since been released. And apart from me, who remembers Mr Stead? But I’m still here, still commanding the ship whose Articles I signed way back in April, 1912.

  As Master, you see, I am responsible. It matters not who else fell short, who cut corners, who contributed to the disaster. I made the fatal mistake. I was in command. The blame will always rest with me.

  I have time now – in this dark place where Time has no meaning – to repent, to atone, to build the ship of truth in which my soul may sail at last.

  Afterword

  The ship that had shown its lights just a few miles away from the stricken Titanic has never been absolutely identified. It is thought to have been the Leyland Line’s cargo ship, Californian, commanded by Captain Stanley Lord. At 11:00 p.m., on instruction from Capt Lord, the wireless operator tried to send a warning to Titanic, to say they were stopped in ice. Since they were close and the signal was no doubt powerful, he’d had short shrift from Mr Phillips, who was trying to send messages via Cape Race. So, having been on watch since early morning, Californian’s wireless operator, Cyril Evans, retired to bed.

  An hour or so later, over a period of time, eight white rockets were seen by various crew members on the Californian, but not positively identified as distress signals. A vessel had been sighted before Captain Lord quit the bridge, presumed by him to be a small cargo steamer of about Californian’s own size. He decided, subsequently, that the rockets were coming from there. From his cabin, Lord directed the officer of the watch to signal the ship by Morse lamp. No reply was received. 2nd Officer Stone, on watch after midnight, also reported what he judged to be a small steamer about five miles distant – but he too received no confirmation from his Captain, or response to his attempts to communicate by Morse lamp.

  3rd Officer Groves did go to the wireless cabin to listen for a distress signal, but the operator was asleep and did not tell him that the mechanical signal detector needed winding…

  Failing to respond to a distress call is the most heinous crime there is in the maritime world. Captain Lord was censured by the American and British enquiries for his neglect – indeed, for failing to view the situation for himself. Despite the ice around them, Captain Lord’s defence was that both he and his officers failed to recognize the white rockets as a distress call, since coloured rockets were generally the norm. And anyway, he did not believe, nor ever would believe, that the lights of the steamer they saw could have been Titanic.

  There were many inconsistencies in the evidence given and questions remain unanswered. An additional point concerns the lights seen from Titanic’s bridge. If the Californian was stopped in ice, between 10 and 20 miles away from Titanic at the time of the disaster, could she have been the vessel in question?

  In 1962, the Mate of a Norwegian sailing ship, the Samson of Trondheim, made a sworn statement on his deathbed. Henrik Naess said he saw the rockets fired by Titanic, and that he and his ship were within sight of the stricken liner. His vessel was part of a sealing expedition in forbidden waters off the North American coast. With a hold full of illegal seal-pelts, they dared not stop to render assistance.

  While others slept, doubted or simply feared to respond, Titanic sank deeper. The bridge went under just as the canvas-sided emergency boats were freed from their lashings. 2nd Officer Charles Lightoller and Colonel Archibald Gracie were just two of the men who had been struggling to free them – both were sucked down as the ship began her dive to the sea-bed many fathoms below. Extraordinarily, both were blown back up to the surface by a release of air, and separately managed to reach one of the canvas-sided boats – the upturned Boat B. They clung to it with about 30 other men.

  They survived to write accounts of their experience. Young Lightoller wrote his story much later in life, but the 59-year-old Colonel Gracie began his book almost at once. Having interviewed and written to as many survivors as he could find, Colonel Gracie obtained details from the American Senate Committee hearing and put together an account of what happened that night. He did it in a little over six months – the book was not yet published when he died on the 4th of Dec
ember, 1912. His former family home – the Gracie Mansion in New York – is now the official residence of the Mayor of New York.

  The two Marconi men Bride and Phillips, were also sucked down but came back to the surface. They also reached one of the boats but Phillips died shortly afterwards. Bride was injured but survived.

  The two infants, seen latterly, were travelling in 2nd Class with their father under the name of Hoffman. Rescued, but having lost their father, they were thought to be orphans – until their mother, in southern France, recognized their photographs in a newspaper. Their real names were Edmond and Michel Navratil – and they had been abducted by their father.

  The young couple spied talking over the gate by Captain Smith (and Lawrence Beesley, a young science master travelling in 2nd Class) remain unidentified, but may have reached safety.

  Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff-Gordon – like Charlotte and Thomas Cardeza – got away safely from the starboard side, in boats 1 and 3 respectively, the former containing 12 people, the latter about 40.

  Mrs Margaret Brown not only survived – after being lifted bodily into Boat 6 – she became an eminent fund-raiser on behalf of families left destitute by the tragedy.

  Madeleine Astor, Eleanor Widener, and Mrs Thayer were amongst the 36 women and children in Boat 4, the last big boat to leave ship, and one of the last to reach safety.

  The Countess of Rothes, with her cousin and a maid, boarded Boat 8 with 35 women, 3 male stewards and a seaman. Since the women had more boating experience than the stewards, Seaman Jones put the women to the oars and the Countess to the tiller. They were the last to reach the Cunard liner Carpathia, about 8:00 in the morning.

  Bruce Ismay climbed into the canvas-sided boat C, the last boat to leave from the starboard side. It contained about 40 people, mainly women and children. Mr Ismay testified on oath that there were no more in the vicinity – by then most people had retreated to the stern. Shattered by his experience and the loss of the Titanic, he retired from public life to live in Ireland, and died in 1937.

  JP Morgan, delayed in Europe on business, was a broken man. He died in 1913.

  Thomas Andrews was last seen in the Smoke Room by the fireplace, gazing at the magnificent painting of Plymouth Harbour.

  Presidential aide, Major Archie Butt, and his friend, the artist Frank Millet, helped women and children into the boats before retiring to the familiarity of their favourite table in the Smoke Room. Over a final nightcap, they no doubt met Charles Hays, and George Widener with his son Harry. Benjamin Guggenheim, having discarded his lifejacket and donned his evening clothes, was, with his valet, preparing to die like a gentleman. The author Jacques Futrelle, having persuaded his wife into Boat 9 also took refuge amongst the friends he’d made. And, at the last, so did Mr William Stead.

  John Jacob Astor was still on deck when the first funnel collapsed. His body was recovered by the Mackay-Bennett on 22nd April, and identified by the initials sewn into his jacket and the gold watch in his pocket. The Mackay-Bennett, a cable-laying steamer, was assigned the task of recovering the dead from the sea. 328 were recovered in all, 150 buried in the cemetery at Halifax, Nova Scotia, the rest at sea.

  3rd Officer Herbert Pitman, 4th Officer Joseph Boxhall, and 5th Officer Harold Lowe, were each assigned to lifeboats as practical seamen and navigators, to lead groups of boats towards the ships speeding to their rescue. 6th Officer James Moody could have gone with Boat 14 on the port side, but said he would go in the next one, and insisted Lowe take his place. With 1st Officer William Murdoch and Chief Officer Henry Wilde, Moody remained aboard, launching boats right to the last.

  Chief Engineer Joseph Bell’s team below decks consisted of 35 engineering officers and almost 300 men, all of whom worked heroically to keep the generators going and the pumps working. 72 of the men reached safety, but not one of the engineering officers survived.

  The ship’s orchestra, eight men led by Wallace Hartley, played on until the lights went out.

  Dr William O’Loughlin, Chief Purser McElroy and Chief Steward Latimer, after directing help and assisting passengers into the boats, stayed with the ship.

  Some stewards and stewardesses survived, largely because they were ordered into the boats by their superiors.

  Aboard the Cunard liner Carpathia, Captain Rostron urged all speed. The ship normally operated at something like 14 knots, but with every minute vital on that 70 mile dash, the engineers managed to squeeze more than 16 knots out of her, arriving at the last known position of Titanic around 4:00, just an hour and a half after the sinking. There were bergs and field ice all around. Small boats – and small distress flares – were difficult to spot in the darkness, but with the dawn all the boats were rounded up, the survivors taken aboard.

  So few – a mere 711 out of the 2,210 souls aboard.

  On both sides of the Atlantic, nations were plunged into mourning. The port of Southampton was devastated. Every family lost someone to the tragedy.

  Mrs Eleanor Smith moved to Cheshire with her daughter, and later, after Mel was married, to London. Captain Smith’s widow died in 1931, his daughter Mel in 1973.

  ~~~

  In 1914, in response to the sinking of Titanic, the United States Coastguard formed the International Ice Patrol, to monitor the waters of the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans and advise shipping of the movement of ice into the shipping lanes between Europe and North America.

  Author’s Note

  The tragedy of RMS TITANIC has exerted an extraordinary fascination for over a century, and doubtless will do so for generations to come. This novel would not have been thought of had it not been for Ron Hancock, manager of the Southampton Pilots’ Office, who very kindly showed me the DockMaster’s Log Book for 1912.

  That large, leather-bound book logged ships inward on the left-hand page and outward on the right, under columns headed Date, Time, Ship, Captain, etc

  The entries for March and April were quite extraordinary. My husband and I were shown the entry for April 10th, noon – the time Titanic sailed from Southampton – the destination New York, and the Captain’s name, Smith. That entry alone was enough to cause a shiver, knowing what was to come.

  But then the pages were turned back, and the elegant copperplate handwriting recorded Captain Smith as having arrived in Southampton on March 30th at 06:00 from New York, aboard the White Star ship Olympic.

  Five days later, Captain Smith’s name appeared again. This time the log recorded him coming into Southampton at 01:15 on April 4th, from Belfast – aboard Titanic. Six days after that he was sailing for New York.

  My husband and I stared at the book, checked times and dates again. We worked out the journey he must have made. Arriving from New York aboard Olympic, he docked in the early hours in Southampton, no doubt took a train to London, another to Liverpool, and then an overnight ferry to Belfast – with a new ship to take out on sea-trials and then bring back to Southampton. And this after a winter spent crossing the North Atlantic.

  Those brief entries were like alarm beacons. Personal experience is part of any response, and I had enough experience of life at sea to appreciate at once just how hard that must have been. As my husband – another sea-captain – shook his head, appalled by the pressure those entries conveyed, I wondered how many other people would understand.

  Needing to express it, I wrote a short story. But the amount of research necessary for that, resulted in other aspects surfacing. Once I’d taken the Hawke/Olympic incident into account, events aboard Titanic began to loom very large indeed.

  I had been about to start work on a novel set in a completely different era, but it had to take a back seat. My family wanted to know more about Captain Smith – and so did I.

  The Master’s Tale is based upon Captain Edward John Smith’s life and career. But it is also a novel, containing all the imagined dramas that novels require. The newspaperman William T Stead was an intriguing man, with interests in spiritualism and thought transference, although whether he
conducted a séance aboard Titanic is purely my speculation. Those interested in facts will appreciate that Harry Jones and Thomas Jones were both known to Edward Smith, although whether they were related, again is speculation on my part. With regard to other liberties taken, I hope both the Captain’s devotees and detractors will forgive me, and appreciate that for the novelist, all the characters become real.

  I would like to think that Mrs Lucinda Carver was rescued along with all the other ladies in Boat 4. Her name, however, together with that of the Enderby sisters and Mrs Adelaide Burgoyne, was not found on Titanic’s passenger list.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks first of all to Ron Hancock, who started the story…

  A friend in York, Nigel Mitchell, was the first person to trust me with his books on the Titanic, including his edition of Colonel Gracie’s account of the sinking. Dorothy Palmer gave me an original 1912 newspaper featuring the tragedy, while Bill and Maureen Schofield lent their books on Hong Kong, and Tom Lunn his book on collisions.

  Graham Mackenzie, Managing Director of Solent Steam Packet (Services) Ltd, and Norman Tulip, Chief Engineer of the SS Shieldhall, were similarly generous with their books and their time, explaining much about steam engines that I did not understand. (Any errors are mine.)

  My wonderful husband, Captain Peter Roberts, Master Mariner and Marine Pilot, acted as technical advisor, putting me straight each time my steering went off-course.

  ‘EJ’ – Gary Cooper’s biography, proved an excellent reference for detail about Captain EJ Smith’s life and career.

  Hannah Cunliffe, historian and maritime researcher, obtained transcripts of the Hawke enquiry and relevant newspaper articles.

  My family read the short story and persuaded me into writing the novel. My agent, Caradoc King, was as insightful as ever in giving creative advice, and my dear friends Maureen and Victor Morgan, with Anne Hodges, kept up their enthusiasm for the early drafts.