How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  Contemplation and reflection played no part in Ismay’s daily routine. Described by a friend as ‘austere, uncompromising and intolerant to the weaknesses of human nature’, Ismay resisted the effects of even minor daily disorder and shielded himself from what events he could not control. The loss he now suffered was beyond anything that could be measured. Incapable of articulating, or even comprehending, his response to the wreck, he said nothing on board the Carpathia. He detached himself from the experience of Sunday night, he froze himself into the present tense. The disaster, Ismay decided, had nothing to do with him; it happened around him, not to him and certainly not because of him. ‘Has it occurred to you,’ he was asked at the British inquiry, ‘that, except perhaps apart from the Captain, you, as the responsible managing director, deciding the number of boats, owed your life to every other person on that ship?’

  ‘It has not,’ Ismay replied, in all honesty. And yet the same friend who had described Ismay’s intolerance of human weakness also noted that ‘no one could be kinder or more sympathetic or enter more fully into the troubles of others… Had I to sum up his character in one word — it would be that of Integrity.’18

  The only crew member from the Titanic to see Ismay on the Carpathia was Second Officer Charles Lightoller, the most senior of the four surviving officers. Lightoller, another Christian Scientist, described in an article for the Christian Science Journal the following October how ‘all fear left me and I… realised the truth of being’.

  Swept off the ship, Lightoller spent the night, along with twenty-eight other frozen men, straddling a capsized lifeboat. Aged thirty-eight in 1912, he had been at sea since he was thirteen and experienced two shipwrecks before he was twenty-one. An employee of the White Star Line for fourteen years, before joining the crew of the Titanic he had been an officer on the Oceanic. In a longer account of the disaster, written twenty-three years later, Lightoller describes how, as the ship was sinking, he was standing ‘partly’ in a lifeboat helping to load the women and children when Captain Smith suggested that, as there were no other seamen available to man the boat, Lightoller should ‘go with her’. ‘Praises be’, Lightoller remembers in horror, ‘I had just sufficient sense to say “Not damn likely” and jump back on board.’ Ismay’s opposite, Lightoller is distinguished for having jumped off a lifeboat and onto a sinking ship. He acted, he said, on ‘pure impulse… an impulse for which I was to thank my lucky stars a thousand times over in the days to come’.19

  Lightoller later explained to those who were bewildered by Ismay’s behaviour on the Carpathia, that the chairman of the White Star Line was ‘obsessed’ by guilt; as he lay on his bed, a wretched figure, he ‘kept repeating that he ought to have gone down with the ship, because he found that women had gone down’.20 But according to Ismay’s account, he did not know that women had gone down on the Titanic. Asked at the US inquiry what proportion of women and children were saved, he replied, I have no idea, I have not asked.

  On the Thursday, 18 April, Dr McGhee suggested that Jack Thayer visit Ismay before the Carpathia docked in New York, to ‘help relieve the terribly nervous condition he was in’. The seventeen-year-old, who had jumped from the ship and been saved by the same capsized lifeboat as Lightoller, went down to the doctor’s cabin immediately and later described how, ‘as there was no answer to my knock, I went right in. [Ismay] was seated, in his pyjamas, on his bunk, staring straight ahead, shaking all over like a leaf. My entrance apparently did not dawn on his consciousness. Even when I spoke to him and tried to engage him in conversation, telling him he had a perfect right to take the last boat, he paid absolutely no attention and continued to look ahead with his fixed stare. I am almost certain that on the Titanic his hair had been black with slight tinges of grey, but now his hair was virtually snow white.’21

  Ismay may have been less concerned that he had failed his passengers than that he had failed his father, a legendary man in the shipping world. But what dominated his thoughts was the idea that his ship had failed him. Whatever the size and splendour of your ark, he now realised, the sea is the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men and optimism. This is what Joseph Conrad, who spent half his life at sea, understood: ‘When your ship fails you,’ he wrote in Lord Jim, ‘your whole world seems to fail you.’ The Titanic had been Ismay’s pride, his passion, his palace. She was indestructible, the culmination of his father’s ambition. She had promised to garland the family name in laurels, to bestow on Ismay honour, glory, and unchallenged dominion of the waves. ‘The love that is given to ships,’ says Conrad in The Mirror of the Sea, ‘is profoundly different from the love men feel for every other work of their hands.’ It is ‘untainted by the pride of possession’. Conrad was describing the love that is given to ships by the crew rather than by the owner. In his memoirs, Lightoller also talked about ‘the loyalty between a ship and her crew’: ‘It is not always a feeling of affection either. A man can hate his ship worse than he can hate a human being… Likewise a ship can hate her men.’22 To the crew, the owner was as distinct from a seaman as a duck from a dolphin; shipowners were not romantic wanderers, they were men of order and control, fastidious pen-pushers ill-suited to the unruliness of the oceans. Men like Lightoller assumed that the owner would see his ship as no more than a description of profit and loss. But Ismay was not typical; he loved the Titanic like ‘a living thing’, as his wife put it. Perhaps, he later wrote to Marian Thayer, he had loved this ship ‘too much’, had been ‘too proud’ and such was his punishment. Ismay had grown in stature with his ships. Three years earlier Winston Churchill announced in The Times the arrival of ‘a new time. Let us realise it. And with that new time strange methods, huge forces, larger combinations — a Titanic world — have sprung up around us.’ This was Ismay’s world. And now, like a Titan, he had angered the gods.

  ‘All fates’, wrote Evelyn Waugh, ‘are “worse than death”’, and for Ismay the awareness of lost honour was the worst fate of all. There was a difference, he now understood, between surviving and being alive. Lawrence Beesley felt the euphoria of having narrowly escaped death and Lightoller considered his continued life a miracle; but Ismay’s attitude suggests that he took for granted that he was living while others were not. He was on the Carpathia, he accepted, not because an impulse had caused him to jump, but because his drive to survive had been greater than that of many other men on the Titanic. Ismay was profoundly shocked by the mortality of his ship, but unsurprised at his own durability. Comments he later made in correspondence suggest that he was wearied by his continued consciousness as though it were his curse to escape unscathed from every cut-throat situation, his burden to vary from the happy race of men who die when their allotted time is up.

  As Ismay lay on his bed in the Carpathia on the morning of Monday 15 April, contemplating as best he could the events of the last twelve hours, the Olympic was heading towards them. Built alongside one another in the Harland & Wolff dockyards, the Olympic was the Titanic’s twin. ‘Everything was taken to be doubled,’ the chief designer said of their construction. ‘Anything which was taken up for one applied to the second ship the same.’23 The interiors of the two liners were mirror images of one another; passengers on the Titanic were provided with maps of her layout which belonged to the Olympic. Captain Haddock of the Olympic now telegraphed the Carpathia: perhaps, he suggested, the Olympic might relieve Captain Rostron of his White Star passengers? Rostron’s response to Haddock’s request was cautious: ‘Do you think it advisable the Titanic’s passengers see Olympic? Personally, I say not.’ After a brief exchange with Ismay, he then sent another, more urgent, message to Haddock:

  It was ‘very undesirable’ Ismay later explained to the inquiry, ‘that the unfortunate passengers from the Titanic should see her sister ship so soon afterwards’.

  The liner on which Captain Edward John Smith had died was an age away from the rigged ships in which, aged sixteen, he began his life at sea. A working-class boy from Stoke-on-Trent, Smith’s older
stepbrother, Joseph, was a sea captain who had been captured by pirates; the young Edward longed for similar adventures. To prevent the lad from running away to Liverpool and signing up on the first available barque, Joseph had taken Edward with him on his next voyage. But after years of transporting ossified bird dung and sleeping eight to a cabin with his trunk lashed to the floor by iron rings, Smith fixed his eye on the glamour of the White Star Line. No more oilskins, weevil-infested biscuits and cussing sea dogs; here was romance of a higher order. He was thirty when he joined White Star in 1880, and seven years later he attained the rank of Captain. His first command, the Republic, was a hybrid of steam and sail; one lonely smokestack nestled inside a forest of masts. In 1888, Captain Smith was transferred to the Republic’s twin sister, the Baltic: the White Star Line always built ships in pairs. ‘My love of the ocean that took me to sea as a boy has never left me,’ he later said. ‘In a way, a certain amount of wonder never leaves me… There is wild grandeur too, that appeals to me in the sea.’24

  By 1892, Smith was the most highly respected skipper in the British merchant service and he was rewarded with the honour of taking each new White Star liner on her maiden voyage. Known as the ‘millionaire’s Captain’, he was now a celebrity seaman — travelling under Captain E. J. Smith was as thrilling as being on the Titanic itself — and his salary, twice what Rostron was earning with the Cunard Line, reflected his status. Smith was described by Lightoller as ‘a great favourite’ of any crew, a man everyone wanted to work under: ‘Tall, whiskered and broad, at first sight you would think to yourself, “here’s a typical Western Ocean Captain. Bluff, hearty and I’ll bet he’s got a voice like a foghorn”. As a matter of fact, he had a pleasant, quiet voice and invariable smile. A voice he hardly raised above a conversational tone — not to say couldn’t, in fact.’25 J. E. Hodder Williams, of the publishers Hodder and Stoughton, who crossed the Atlantic with Captain Smith on many occasions, thought him ‘the perfect sea captain’. He ‘had an infinite respect for the sea. Absolutely fearless, he had no illusions as to man’s power in the face of the infinite.’ The American writer Kate Douglas-Wiggin gave an account in her autobiography of how she crossed the Atlantic with Smith over twenty times.

  There were no electric lights then, nor ‘Georgian’ or ‘Louis XIV’ suites, no gymnasiums or Turkish baths, no gorgeous dining salons and meals at all hours, but there were, perhaps, a few minor compensations, and I can remember certain voyages when great inventors and scientists, earls and countesses, authors and musicians and statesmen made a ‘Captain’s table’ as notable and distinguished as that of any London or New York dinner. At such times Captain Smith was an admirable host; modest, dignified, appreciative; his own contributions to the conversation showing not only the quality of his information but the high quality of his mind.

  Captain Smith offered an uneventful but glamorous voyage; it is part of the strangeness of the sea that a captain who on shore lives a quiet suburban life, becomes an object of fascination when on board his own ship.

  On the Titanic, the Marconi operators received or intercepted eighteen separate ice warnings; some of these Captain Smith saw, one of them he passed on to Ismay, one he showed to Lightoller, while several never made their way onto the bridge. On the evening of 14 April, while the Captain was at a dinner party given in his honour by a party of American millionaires, the iceberg, whose position he was aware of, was only fifty miles ahead. Captain Smith was losing his fear of the sea: it was the grandeur of the ships rather than that of the water which now gave him cause for wonder. ‘When I observe from the bridge’, he told a reporter, ‘a vessel plunging up and down in the trough of the seas, fighting her way through and over great waves, tumbling, and yet keeping on her keel, and going on and on — I wonder how she does it, how she can keep afloat in such seas, and how she can go on and on safely to port.’26 When he brought the Adriatic to New York on her maiden voyage in 1907, Smith told journalists that ‘shipbuilding is such a perfect art nowadays that absolute disaster involving passengers is inconceivable. Whatever happens, there will be time enough before the vessel sinks to save the life of every person on board. I will go a bit further. I will say that I cannot imagine any condition that would cause the vessel to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.’

  The most enigmatic member of his crew, it is impossible to account for the final moments of Captain Smith. After informing Ismay that the ship was sinking, he seemed to melt away. Some said that he took up his megaphone and ordered the international population of men and women to ‘Be British, my lads’, while other witnesses have him variously firing a gun into a crowd, turning the gun on himself, and jumping overboard with a baby swaddled in his arms. In another version, he is last seen in the water swimming alongside a lifeboat; when an oar is held out to him, he says, ‘Goodbye boys, I’m going to follow the ship.’ There are the inevitable rumours of his survival, including a sighting of him alive and well in Baltimore, but it seems most likely that Captain Smith died on the bridge, where he was standing alone. As he was not wearing a lifejacket, he was at least spared the slow death from hypothermia suffered by most of the others. Mrs Thayer said she saw the Captain after midnight, on the port side of the bridge, and Lightoller, who was working on the port side all night, says that Smith ordered him to start loading women and children into lifeboats from the promenade deck, one level below the boat deck, forgetting that, unlike the Olympic, the promenade deck on the Titanic was fully glazed with what were known as ‘Ismay’ screens, a sheltering wall which Ismay suggested at planning stage would protect the promenading passengers from sea-spray. The Ismay screens on the Titanic were the only visible difference between the two sisters. The passengers, once they had been herded down to the lower deck, had to be pushed headfirst though the opened windows and into the boats. Captain Smith’s confusion about which ship he was on reveals something of his frame of mind.

  ‘It is the great Captain’, Smith said, ‘who doesn’t let things happen’, and for forty-three years nothing much had happened on any of his crossings. But latterly, over a period of eight months, he was responsible for two accidents and one near miss. The previous September the Olympic, while under his command, had rammed into the British cruiser, HMS Hawke; then in February he drove the Olympic over a submerged wreck and lost a propeller blade. Then leaving Southampton on 10 April, the Titanic narrowly missed crashing into the American liner, New York. ‘Had he been saved,’ the Washington Times commented on 17 April, ‘Captain Smith’s career was over. He had twice escaped the rule that the victim of an accident to a vessel must give up his post,’ and his preferential treatment by the White Star Line violated ‘a deep sea tradition to dispense with the services of officers in command of vessels that met with disaster’.27

  Captain Smith was sixty-two when he took command of the Titanic. It is often said that this was to be his last voyage before retirement, but he is unlikely to have stepped down at the point in his career where he was at his most assured, and the White Star Line would have been unwilling to let go of such an asset. If anything, Smith’s retirement began when the Olympic and Titanic were launched, at which point he relaxed on the job. ‘Either of these vessels could be cut in halves,’ he told a young officer, ‘and each half would remain afloat indefinitely.’28 Like his first-class passengers, Smith was pampered, celebrated and over-confident — the very opposite of the stoical Captain Rostron, who at forty-two was beginning his career as a commander. Having trained as a cadet on the Mersey ship, the Conway, Rostron joined the Cunard company in 1895 and had been in command of the Carpathia, whose plain interior was described in a trade magazine as being ‘suggestive of good taste and solid comfort’, for three months. Slim, balding and religious, Rostron was praised after the rescue for his ‘unaffected valour’, his ‘own indifference to peril, his promptness and his knightly sympathy’.29

  As the ship’s chaplain held a service of thanksgiving and remembrance, Rostron ensured that the orders he
had dispensed earlier that morning were being followed. While the second-class dining room was turned into a hospital for the injured and his own cabin prepared for the most elite of the first-class widows, including Mrs Thayer, the floors and tables of the first- and third-class dining rooms were cleared for further women to bed down and the smoking rooms converted into dormitories for the men. Meanwhile the Carpathia’s women formed a relief committee to provide clothing for those who had arrived in their dressing gowns or evening wear, ship’s blankets were cut up to make warm coats for the children, and the first-class Titanic passengers formed a team of seven to care for those in steerage. Another committee of survivors raised $15,000 to help those who were too destitute to continue with their journeys. Not one of the Carpathia’s passengers complained about the inconvenience caused to their cruise. One Titanic survivor said that she ‘had never seen or felt the benefits of such royal treatment’. In a letter to Walter Lord in 1954, Bertha Watt, who was a child when she was rescued, said that on the Carpathia ‘I learned a great deal of the fundamentals I have built a happy life on, such as faith, hope, and charity.’30 Marie Young, a first-class survivor, described how the experience of ‘those who mingled freely in the ship’s company’ was ‘richer, by far’, than that of Ismay, alone on his bunk. Meanwhile, the Titanic crew, whose pay had stopped the minute the ship sank, waited for word from their employer, who had not yet emerged from his private cabin.