How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  Smith responded immediately. ‘I can see that your absence from England at a time so momentous in the affairs of your company would be most embarrassing, but the horror of the Titanic catastrophe and its importance to the people of the world call for scrupulous investigation into the causes leading up to the disaster… I am working night and day to achieve this result, and you should continue to help me instead of annoying me and delaying my work by your personal importunities.’ In London, an editorial in the Saturday Review asked: ‘Why should British subjects be detained against their will… in order that a blustering ignoramus may tease them with questions about the difference between the “bow” and the “head” of a ship, the origin of icebergs and the use of watertight compartments?’ Senator Smith afterwards declared that ‘energy was more desirable than learning’, and ‘If I asked questions that seemed absurd to sailors, it did no harm. Everybody isn’t a sailor, and lots of people who have never been to sea want to know all about the loss of the Titanic, even down to the inconsequential details that the marine experts scoff at. And I know we got the truth.’

  During the week, Ismay had listened as the inquiry span itself away. He seemed like a spider trapped in an enormous web; his simple story now had sidetracks which led nowhere, cross tracks which started back and began anew. He was entangled, but he could also see more clearly. He gained a fuller sense than ever before of the world inside his ships; he got to know his employees, his passengers and the names of the crew who had died; he heard how the firemen, engineers and Marconi operators had never left their posts; he learned how wireless worked, how on the port side Lightoller was operating a ‘women and children only’ policy while on starboard they were loading women and children first, and he was forced to imagine what the ship had looked like when she went down. He heard that the Californian, a fellow ship in the IMM combine, had been eight miles away all night with her wireless turned off. He heard accounts of miraculous survivals, and he re-imagined his own death again and again. Did the hundreds who died see, as drowning figures are meant to do, their lives pass before them? Would that not have been a better fate than a survival with no future? Had he gone down with the ship, what would the papers be saying about him now? Who then would be their scapegoat? Ismay understood that every person saved was seen to be taking the place of someone else who had more right to a life. He learned that no one, not even women and children, was allowed to survive the Titanic.

  What constituted a child anyway? Lightoller had ordered Emily Ryerson’s son, a boy of thirteen, to stay on board with the men; the child only joined his mother in the lifeboat when his father, a powerful steel magnate, intervened. ‘No more boys’, a frustrated Lightoller was heard to mutter. Some men felt that the women who owed their lives to male gallantry were hypocrites, and witness after witness described how wives and mothers in the lifeboats had refused to return to their dying husbands and sons. Real wives were those like Ida Straus, who remained on board with her husband of fifty years, the owner of Macy’s department store. ‘Where you go, I go,’ Mrs Straus reportedly said. But Mrs Stuart White, a first-class passenger who lived at the Waldorf-Astoria, believed the women in the lifeboats had been braver than the ‘heroes’ who only stayed on the ship because they thought it was the safer option. ‘I do not think that there was any particular bravery,’ Mrs White told the inquiry, ‘because none of the men thought it was going down.’

  By the end of the inquiry, Ismay knew more about those final hours than anyone else who had been unlucky enough to survive the Titanic.

  The crewmen were finally released on 29 April, but Ismay was not. The next day the Mackay Bennett, contracted by the White Star Line to search for bodies, returned to Halifax. They had found 306 of the 1,500 dead. In the opinion of the surgeon who accompanied the ‘funeral ship’, most had lived for four hours in the water before freezing to death. Those who could not be identified were buried at sea, and 190 others, including the body of John Jacob Astor, were brought home.

  When Ismay was finally called to the stand for the second time on 30 April, Senator Smith found himself addressing an apparently contrite and more responsive man. Perhaps Ismay was relieved: no one else from Collapsible C had been cross-examined, not even William Carter, who had left the ship with him, or Quartermaster Rowe, who had taken charge of the boat and knew whether or not Ismay had been rowing; nor had Dr McGhee been called to answer questions about Ismay’s state of mind while on the Carpathia. The inquiry was drawing to a close and apart from the claims that Emily Ryerson had made in the press, which she was due to swear in an affidavit the following day, Senator Smith had not been able to pin a thing on Ismay. He understood that speed was of less importance to the White Star Line than luxury, that Ismay did what he could to lower and load the boats on the starboard side, and that whether he jumped into Collapsible C or was pushed, he was in one of the last boats to leave. It was tacitly agreed by the Senate Committee that Ismay had done his duty, without anyone’s knowing quite what that duty was.

  Most of what Smith now asked him mirrored what he had asked before. Having questioned Ismay about the structure of the IMM, the relationship of the White Star Line with the Morgan combine and Harland & Wolff, and their arrangement with the British government to deliver the mail, Smith asked Ismay to explain once again his role on the Titanic. Was he there officially for the purpose of inspecting? Ismay replied that he had not yet made any inspection of the ship at all, that during the voyage, he was never outside the first-class passenger accommodation on the ship. Ismay repeated that he had not dined with the Captain on Sunday night, that the Captain had been at a dinner for the ship’s most prominent figures organised by the Wideners (to which Ismay, despite knowing George Widener, was not invited). He explained that the ship was insured for $5 million and expressed horror at the suggestion that an attempt might have been made by him to reinsure the vessel on Monday 15 April. It was a horrible accusation and Ismay would have considered any such action entirely dishonourable. He was asked to read aloud the same Yamsi messages read by Franklin the week before, and to give the time and context of each. He was asked to confirm the speed of the ship, and to say whether ‘anyone had urged the Captain to greater speed’ than seventy revolutions. It is really impossible, said Ismay with disgust, to imagine such a thing on board ship. He replied, when asked if he did not ‘regard it as an exercise of proper precaution and care to lessen the speed of a ship crossing the Atlantic when she had been warned of the presence of ice ahead’ that it was a question I cannot give any opinion on. We employ the very best men we possibly can to take command of these ships, and it is a matter entirely in their discretion.

  Ismay told the inquiry that following the collision Captain Smith gave no report as to the extent of the damage and, as far as he was aware, raised no alarm. The information Ismay received — that the ship had thirty-five or forty minutes to live — came from Joseph Bell, the Chief Engineer, after he had seen the Captain on the bridge. However, Ismay stressed that Captain Smith was a man with a very very clear record. I should think very few commanders crossing the Atlantic have as good a record as Captain Smith had, until he had the unfortunate incident with the Hawke. Had the Olympic’s earlier collision with HMS Hawke shaken Ismay’s confidence in the Captain? He replied that it had not and that he had no reason to doubt that Captain Smith had quite got over the mishap. As to when the Captain gave Ismay the Marconigram from the Baltic, he stated I do not know whether it was in the afternoon or immediately before lunch; I am not certain. I did not pay any particular attention. How did it happen that the Titanic had only twenty lifeboats? That was a matter for the builders, sir, and I presume that they were fulfilling all the requirements of the Board of Trade. Ismay agreed that the Board of Trade requirements were out of date, but when asked to confirm whether ‘the davits they had on the Titanic were capable of handling three boats instead of one and that there was no question about those davits being able to handle twice the number of boats they did handle
’, Ismay refused to answer. I could not express an opinion in regard to that. I do not know anything about it. As to whether the lesson of the Titanic showed that it was ‘impossible to construct a non-sinkable ship’, he said that he would not like to say that, because I have not sufficient knowledge. This time when Ismay was asked whether his lifeboat was filled to its capacity, he replied that it was not, that the full capacity of one of those boats is about sixty to sixty-five. Who told him to enter that lifeboat? No one, sir. Why did he enter it? Because there was room in the boat. She was being lowered away. I felt the ship was going down, and I got into the boat.

  Ismay was released and there were expressions of courtesy all around. Should he be needed by Senator Smith in the near future, he would be quite glad to come back from the other side. In the audience that day had been John Galsworthy. ‘A queer, jumbled business,’ Galsworthy wrote in his diary. ‘We heard the unfortunate Ismay give his evidence very quietly and well. The system and public is to blame for the miserable calamity; and of course the same public is all agog to fix the blame on some unhappy shoulders.’ Now that the inquiry was drawing to a close, the life of the city was resuming. ‘To the Trovatore at the Opera,’ Galsworthy continued. ‘Phew! What a rococo!’ Unable to return on the Titanic as planned, Galsworthy sailed to England five days later on the White Star liner the Baltic, whose ice warning Ismay had carried around in his pocket all day. ‘Reading; Talking; Eating; Sleeping,’ he wrote of the voyage back. ‘Nothing eventful happened.’ 24

  Ismay caught the train to New York, ignoring summonses issued by the District Supreme Court to testify in an action brought by Mrs Louise Robins, the widow of John Jacob Astor’s valet. When Ismay did not appear, the hearing was abandoned.

  Senator Smith too returned to New York where, at the Waldorf-Astoria, he took affidavits from various survivors including August Weikman, the Titanic’s barber, who was probably the source of Lightoller’s story that Ismay had been ‘ordered’ by the officer in charge into ‘the last boat to leave’. Ismay’s actions were justified, Weikman swore, because ‘there were no women in the vicinity’. Mrs Malaha Douglas, travelling first-class, claimed that on the afternoon of the accident she and her now-deceased husband had seen a seaman take the temperature of the water not by lowering a pail down the side of the ship, but by filling the pail with water from a tap and then placing his thermometer inside. Mrs Douglas also claimed that Ismay had been at the Wideners’ dinner party that night, and repeated the story told by Emily Ryerson of his showing an ice warning to Mrs Ryerson and Mrs Thayer that afternoon, before announcing that they would deal with the problem by lighting more boilers.

  Emily Ryerson then arrived to give her affidavit. Smith’s key witness described her last hours on the ship but said nothing about the now famous encounter with Ismay. Why she held back would be clearer to Ismay than it was to Smith, but she doubtless said that it was to avoid additional stress. Mrs Ryerson, who had been returning on the Titanic for the funeral of her eldest son, was now also burying her husband. If Lightoller, who tried to prevent her thirteen-year-old boy from boarding the lifeboat, had had his way, both her sons would now be dead. Getting tangled up in what Ismay did or didn’t say about speed was more than she could bear this week. Marian Thayer, who had been with Mrs Ryerson during the encounter, had said nothing whatever about it. She was caught between loyalty to an old friend and a new one.

  On 2 May, Ismay left for England on board the Adriatic. He was, he told a British journalist, ‘worn out. I am feeling very tired and wish to retire.’ The previous day, the funeral of John Jacob Astor had been knocked off the front pages by the appearance of 15,000 suffragettes parading through New York.

  The Senate’s report of its findings was published on 28 May. It seemed that for all his support of the ‘little man’, Smith was uninterested in the part played by class on the Titanic. He saw the conflict as between good men and bad, rather than rich men and poor. Smith duly noted that 60 per cent of first-class, 42 per cent of second-class and 25 per cent of third-class passengers were saved, but he questioned only three steerage passengers, each of whom assured him that those in third-class had not been trapped in the ship’s bowels.

  William Alden Smith’s aim, ‘plain and simple’, had been ‘to gather facts relating to this disaster while they were still vivid realities’. The facts he gathered were these: that the Titanic was fitted with davits that could hold forty-eight lifeboats but which were carrying only sixteen (the number approved by the British Board of Trade); that the lads in the crow’s nest were not provided with binoculars; that while the Captain was at a private dinner party made up of East Coast millionaires the ship was steaming at 22 knots — her maximum speed of the voyage — into an ice field which he had been warned about by Marconigram on many separate occasions; that after the collision the Titanic continued to go forward for thirty-five minutes; that the Captain failed to inform his passengers and crew that the ship was sinking; that he gave no instructions as to the handling and manning of the lifeboats, and there was no order to abandon ship. The single fact that Senator Smith had not been able to ascertain, despite repeatedly asking him, was one that his star witness himself was hardly able to understand: why had Ismay jumped?

  The language William Alden Smith used in his report to describe these facts was neither ‘plain’ nor ‘simple’; he was writing a florid page of history. Six weeks after its loss, with the mariners still wet, the Titanic had become an historical document. Senator Smith had gathered together myriad witness accounts, all of them partial, some false, and allowed them to interface, interlace and interfere. He had thus given the chaos of the night a start, a middle and an end. There was a beauty to the process of reconstruction, and the romance of his role was not lost on him. The Senator concluded that ‘the willingness’ of Captain Smith ‘to die was the expiating evidence of his fitness to live… In his horrible dismay, when his brain was afire with honest retribution, we can still see, in his manly bearing and his tender solicitude for the safety of women and little children, some traces of his lofty spirit when dark clouds lowered all about him and angry elements stripped him of his command.’ He spoke of the ‘bosom’ of the ocean, the ‘glamour of the sea’, and ‘the daring spirit of the explorer and the trader’ whose noble ‘calling’ was ‘already demoralised and decadent’.

  And so it rolled on, page after page of high oration, until he came to the part played by Ismay. Here William Alden Smith showed himself to be a man of hidden dimensions. Ismay’s personal conduct, on which the inquiry had expended so much energy, was not discussed, and nor did Senator Smith comment on the chairman’s survival. Instead, he shifted the debate onto an entirely different level. While it could not be proven that Ismay had ordered the Captain to keep up the ship’s speed, Senator Smith concluded that the ‘presence of the owner unconsciously stimulates endeavour’. Did he mean that Captain Smith was unconsciously stimulated by Ismay or that Ismay had unconsciously stimulated the Captain? Whose unconscious was Senator Smith referring to? Was the Captain acting as Ismay’s unconscious, or Ismay acting as the Captain’s?

  Smith had chosen a word the impact of which was only quietly beginning to make itself felt in America. In Vienna, Freud was conducting his own inquiries into the unconscious which, he discovered, ruled everything. What distinguished the hysteric, Freud believed, was the ‘inability to give an ordered history of their life’, a narrative he compared to ‘an unnavigable river whose bed is now obstructed by masses of rock, now broken and made shallow by sandbanks’. Moments of clarity and coherence are followed by the drying-up of information, ‘leaving gaps and mysteries’. Connections are fragmented, the sequence of events becomes uncertain, the speaker will correct a fact or a date and then, ‘after a lengthy vacillation’, return to the original statement. The reasons behind such a disordered narrative, Freud suggested, could either be ‘deliberate dishonesty’ — ‘the patient is consciously and deliberately holding back a part of something that is
very well known to her’ — or ’unconscious dishonesty’, the innocent result of amnesia or repression.25

  The concept of the unconscious was not Freud’s alone. It was he who distinguished it as a place separate from consciousness as opposed to a state into which you fall, but Freud always said that the unconscious had been ‘discovered’ by ‘the poets and philosophers before me’.

  Joseph Conrad, like Senator Smith, had no knowledge of psychoanalysis but knew there was a link between the psyche and the sea. When Senator Smith spoke of Ismay’s pressure on the Captain as ‘unconscious’ he was drawing, as Conrad often did, on the early twentieth-century interest in doubleness: the conscious self we think we know is controlled by a powerful stranger who inhabits us unawares, who entangles himself in our speech, who pushes us forward and holds us back. Duality runs like a fever through an astonishing number of novels and stories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly those of Henry James, who left his native Albany to live in England: in ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908), Spencer Brydon leaves New York for Europe and returns to the family home thirty years later to discover it haunted by the self he might have been had he stayed in the city of his birth. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) dealt with the ‘terrible pleasure of the double life’, and in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Hyde ‘drew steadily nearer the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two’. In 1913, the poet T. E. Hulme described, in ‘Speculations’, the self as being composed of two parts, a ‘superficial self’ and a ‘fundamental self’: it is the fundamental self, he said, that ‘leaps into action’.