How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  Did you understand from that telegram that the ice which was reported was in your track? I did not. Did you attribute any importance at all to the ice report? I did not. No special importance at all. Then why, asked Isaacs, do you think the Captain handed you the message? As a matter of information, I take it, Ismay said, as though information was generally understood to be a thing of no importance. Information, countered Isaacs, of what? About, replied Ismay, the contents of the message. Isaacs was exasperated. When it came to Marconigrams, Ismay was Yamsi again, back through the looking-glass. The Marconigram, he suggested, referred to nothing but itself; the message contained information about the contents of the message.

  The question of the Marconigram was returned to during the afternoon by other interrogators. Did you before that particular Sunday, asked Thomas Scanlan, who was determined to catch Ismay in his own trap, know what was the practice with regard to Marconigrams received by the officers on the ship relating to the navigation of the ship? I believe, replied Ismay, the practice was to put them up in the chart room for the officers. Was not the Marconigram from the Baltic essentially a message affecting navigation? Yes. Then will you say why, under those circumstances, with that knowledge, you put that Marconigram into your pocket? Because, Ismay responded patiently, it was given to me, as I believe now, just before lunchtime, and I went down and had it in my pocket. According to Ismay, the reason he had put the Marconigram in his pocket was because he had it in my pocket. And you suggest that you put it in your pocket simply in a fit of absent-mindedness? Yes, entirely. And you still retained it in your pocket until it was asked for by Captain Smith late in the evening? Ten minutes past seven, I think it was, he asked me for it. That is to say, it had been in your possession for something like five hours? Yes, I should think so. (Ismay will have dressed for dinner, in which case he would have removed the message from the jacket he was wearing during the day in order to put it into the pocket of his black evening jacket.) Did you not ask the Captain, wondered Scanlan, when you returned the message whether the ship would come within the latitude and longitude indicated? I did not, said Ismay. And the Captain said nothing to you about it? He did not. As far as Ismay was concerned, the Captain had handed him the message for no reason, and it said nothing.

  On a voyage, wrote Filson Young in Titanic, two lives are lived side by side, ‘the life of the passengers and the life of the ship’. Ismay insisted that he lived the life of the passenger, but he also secretly lived the life of the ship. The question of his status on the Titanic, of whether or not he was an ordinary passenger, rested on the message from the Baltic. Why had Captain Smith given him the Marconigram if not to raise with him the issue of speed? Why had Ismay then treated it as a private letter rather than a public document? Why did he keep it back from the officers’ chart room but reveal its contents to two female passengers, as though the life of the ship had been any concern of theirs? Ismay claimed later that day, as he had claimed during the US inquiry, that he did not understand latitude and longitude and therefore had no idea what the message signified. Then the Marconigram, Isaacs put it to him, was unintelligible to you, was it not? It was unintelligible to me, Ismay conceded, as far as latitude and longitude were concerned. Ismay had read the message, he said, but not its meaning; he did not speak the language of ships and the sea: the Marconi message did not convey any meaning to me as to the exact position of ice. When he looked at the ocean, Ismay saw nothing but a waste of water while the Captain and officers saw the ship’s position on the globe as clearly as if it had been a star in the galaxy. But you understood, Isaacs pressed, that you would be in the ice region reported during the night? Yes, I understood that we would get up to the ice that night. So how, Isaacs wondered, did Ismay know that they were approaching a region of ice if not from the Marconigram? Because, Ismay quietly explained, Dr O’Loughlin had told him so over dinner. This is what the two men had been discussing during that last supper in the dining room. But Ismay also told the inquiry that he knew we were approaching the region of ice because of this Marconi message. So was it not, Lord Mersey then asked Ismay to confirm, because of the Marconigram that you expected to come into the region of ice that night? Oh yes, replied Ismay, it was because of the Marconigram. But, reasoned Mersey, if latitude and longitude are the things which tell you where the ice is and you do not understand latitude and longitude, I am quite at a loss to understand why it is you say you came to the conclusion that you would be in the ice region because of the Marconigram?

  Ismay’s story came down, as ever, to a problem of meaning or even to the meaning of meaning. ‘He might have meant something else,’ explained Sir Rufus Isaacs to the baffled Lord Mersey, ‘but he does mean on account of the Marconigram.’ What he meant, Ismay explained, was that he knew they were reaching the ice region on account of the Marconigram and the doctor’s comment: it was the combination, he said, of the two together. ‘Then what you mean is this, concluded Isaacs, that you presumed the Baltic had sent you a message, without knowing whether it was right or wrong, apprising you of ice in your track? That is what you mean to say? Yes. That is what Ismay meant to say.

  To the British inquiry, the meaning of the Marconigram lay not simply in its contents but in its being passed from Captain Smith to Ismay. Its meaning lay in its being inside Ismay’s pocket rather than on the board of the officers’ chart room. But the meaning of the Marconigram could also be found in the peculiar status of the message itself. The Titanic was not a lonely boat upon a lonely ocean; the sea was an invisible network of countless tracks and crossroads, and so too was the air above her masts. The transatlantic cable, laid along the ocean floor by Brunel’s Great Eastern, had allowed telegraph messages to be sent across the Empire, but Guglielmo Marconi’s recent invention of wireless messaging allowed ships for the first time to communicate with one another without using flags and flames. It was this, above all else, that interested Filson Young in the story of the Titanic; Young, who would later be influential in the development of BBC radio broadcasts, was quick to see the potential of new media technologies. Marconi had called into being a previously unknown universe of waves and currents; he turned a great silence into a thousand twangling instruments which carried, as Young put it, ‘whispers, questions, summonses, narratives’. The dots and dashes of Morse code dancing with the speed of light along threads of aerial wire allowed every ship within a thousand miles to spend their days in idle gossip. Through the headphones of Marconi’s operators, steamers swapped their stories, describing where they were, the weather around them, and the strange sights they had seen.

  The scientific community had remained sceptical about the claims Marconi initially made for his invention — Thomas Edison believed that Marconi’s ambition to send wireless over water using electromagnetic charge was impossible — but in 1906 he set up a large transmitting station at Clifden in Connemara and a regular wireless telegraphy service began. By 1908 the messages sent from his apparatus were known as Marconigrams; in 1909 he received the Nobel Prize; in 1911 he launched the journal The Marconigraph, and in March 1912 the official offices of the Marconi International Marine Communication Company opened in London. Marconi was regarded as a hero, someone who had made the sea as solid and stable as a suburban street. Should anything go wrong on a voyage, the wireless system would come to the rescue. The year Marconi became a Nobel laureate, White Star’s Republic collided with another ship, was ripped to the water line and plunged into total darkness. Her Marconi operator succeeded in alerting a number of rescue vessels before directing the Baltic — the same ship whose ice warning the Titanic later received — to the wreck through thick fog. This was the first instance of wireless saving lives: Ismay had no reason to doubt that this could happen again.

  But there was something unnerving as well as reassuring about Marconi’s invention. He had turned the solidity of the word into a fluttering, flying, melting thing which entered the material world as if through a rent in the mist. Marconigrams were born
in transition, they belonged nowhere, they moved between realms. They were really no more stable than a butterfly being buffeted about on the current of a breeze. ‘When it has anything to say to you,’ wrote Filson Young, it ‘whispers in your ear in whining, insinuating confidence. And you must listen attentively and with a mind concentrated on your own business if you are to receive from it what concerns you, and reject what does not; for it is not always the loudest whisper that is the most important.’ The Burma, one of the ships to be contacted by the Titanic, did not hear her whisper until one hour and twenty-eight minutes after she had sunk. The Titanic’s last words, it seemed, had simply hung about the atmosphere before finally, posthumously, making themselves heard.

  Incidents such as this led Marconi to become increasingly convinced that sounds never die but remain suspended on their threads, growing weaker by the minute until we can no longer hear them. With the right apparatus, he believed, it would be possible to catch in his net the sound of Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount. In Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, written four centuries earlier, the giant Pantagruel realises that the air above their ship is filled with frozen words and ‘some of us… cupped our palms behind our ears’ to hear them, before plucking them in fistfuls and throwing them onto the deck where, ‘like sweets of many colours’, they melted away into sounds which no longer had a meaning: Hing, hing, hing, hing, hisse’, said the words as they dissolved; ’hickory, dickory, dock; brededing, bededac, frr, frrr, frrr, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou bou. Ong, ong, ong, ong, ououououong; Gog, magog.’ The sailors were hearing the clashing, clanging, neighing and wailing of a battle long since fought; there must be an ‘inquiry’, Pantagruel suggests, ‘into whether this may be the very place where Words unfreeze’. Rabelais’s characters try to preserve these sounds in oil, to wrap them in straw and pickle them in jars, but when Marconi’s telegraph operators snatched their sounds from space and stamped them onto paper they were no more able than Pantagruel to ensure their readability.6

  Ismay’s story buzzes with new technology: he receives telephone calls from Mrs Thayer, he communicates by telegraph with the White Star Line in New York, and Marconigrams flit across the sea, continually going astray. ‘Every message so far’, reported the Northern Echo thirty-six hours after the Titanic disaster, ‘has been by wireless, and has come from some steamship officer or land station officer who has picked up others emitted from the keyboard of the Carpathia, the Olympic, the Parisian, the Virginian, the Baltic, or the Californian, and intercepted in their mysterious passage through the air.’ Marconigrams were harbingers of information — ‘bald statements offact’, as Lightoller put it–but also carriers ofmisinformation; they seldom arrived on time, no one knew who sent them or to whom they were addressed, they could be intercepted by anyone or not read at all, and they seemed never to be in the right place. The origin of the Marconigrams which claimed that the Titanic was being towed to Halifax with all her passengers on board was never found, but they were probably the result of Chinese whispers, words in the ether gone awry. It was pure chance that the Carpathia had picked up the Titanic’s distress signal at all; the first message Ismay sent following the rescue, in which Franklin was told that the Titanic had sunk and that more information was on its way, did not arrive for two days and the further information promised would never be sent. Ismay’s later ‘Yamsi’ messages failed to answer Franklin’s urgent questions, and it was unclear anyway whether they had come from Ismay or from Lightoller, who told the US inquiry that while he should be held ‘responsible’ for their contents he had neither written nor delivered them. Four days after the sinking, New York’s White Star Line office reported, ‘Many messages have been sent to the Carpathia, but we could get no response to our inquiries. I have received absolutely no details of the actual loss of the vessel, and we know nothing about what has happened, except such scrappy information as has been contained in the few authentic wireless messages received and already made in public. I have had a code message from Mr Bruce Ismay, but it relates to business and throws no light whatever on the tragedy.’

  The Titanic had either received, or intercepted, eighteen ice warnings during her final weekend, several of which never made their way out of the Operators’ Room. The Marconi operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, were employed by the Marconi Company and not the White Star Line; neither members of the crew nor under the command of Captain Smith, they were unknown figures on the ship, housed as they were in their own quarters where they divided their time between dispatching lucrative private messages (such as ‘Hello Boy. Dining with you tonight in spirit, heart with you always. Best love, Girl’, sent three hours before the Titanic foundered) and receiving navigational reports whose levels of importance they decided upon themselves. Ismay had said that the practice was to put them up in the chart room for the officers, but Marconigrams were lawless missives which carried the risk of never being read even if they did reach their destination. Asked by Senator Smith whether he had seen the ice reports on the board of the chart room, Lightoller said that he had not, ‘because I did not look’. As far as Captain Smith was concerned, he had been commanding ships for decades without the use of wireless technology; it was experience that counted, not Marconigrams. The trouble with Marconigrams, as Ismay learned to his cost, is that it was impossible to tell whether they were important or unimportant.

  The message from the Baltic whispered to Ismay from a fork in the air, it had been hammered into solid form like the voice of a dead man being rapped out on a table-top. Marconi operators were spirit mediums and the words they transcribed were always already dissolving. The Marconigram was evidence of communication without presence; it proved the possibility of connecting with other worlds. It was a pure example of the kind of ‘contact’ that fascinated Mrs Thayer, and when Ismay saw her on the deck it was not the message but the medium he was showing her. He was flashing around his toy, as a man one hundred years later might demonstrate his new phone. What struck Ismay now, as that final afternoon was frozen for examination by the British inquiry, is that he had held the future in the palm of his hand; the Marconigram had been a psychic forewarning of the ship’s fate.

  Sir Rufus Isaacs put the issue of the Marconigram aside for the moment to question Ismay on the speed of the ship. How fast was the Titanic going on her final day? I really have no absolute knowledge myself, replied Ismay, as to the number of revolutions. I believe she was going seventy-five on the Sunday. But really Mr Ismay, responded Isaacs with evident exasperation, if you will just search your recollection a little. Remember that this question of speed interested you very materially. You, as Managing Director of the Company, were interested in the speed of the vessel? Naturally, Ismay conceded. Our intention, he then said, had been if the weather was suitable on the Monday or Tuesday, to run the ship at her full speed of seventy-eight revolutions. With whom, wondered Isaacs, would you discuss this question of driving her at full speed on the Monday or Tuesday? Presumably, the court assumed, this decision would have been made in conversation with the Captain, but Ismay had insisted that he had not talked to the Captain at all during the voyage. The only man I spoke to in regard to it, he said, was the Chief Engineer in my room when the ship was in (Queenstown. Will you explain that? asked Isaacs. It is not quite clear why you should discuss the question in Queenstown? The Titanic had stopped for passengers first at Cherbourg and then at Queenstown in Ireland, before beginning her journey to New York. The reason why we discussed it at Queenstown was this, explained Ismay at length. Mr Bell came into my room; I wanted to know how much coal we had on board the ship, because the ship left after the coal strike was on, and he told me. I then spoke to him about the ship and I said it is not possible for the ship to arrive in New York on Tuesday. Therefore there is no object in pushing her. We will arrive there at 5 o’clock on Wednesday morning, and it will be good landing for the passengers in New York, and we shall also be able to economise our coal. We did not want to burn any more coal
than we needed.

  ‘Never mind about that,’ said Isaacs, brushing aside the issue of the ship’s coal supply, ‘that does not answer the question I was putting to you… the question I am putting to you is this, when was it that you discussed putting her at full speed on the Monday or the Tuesday?’ The discussion about the ship’s speed had been at the same time as the discussion about coal, said Ismay, and had taken place in his cabin on the Thursday afternoon. ‘You have not told us about that,’ Isaacs noted, as Ismay fell further down the well. Ismay’s only other mention of Joseph Bell, the Chief Engineer who died that night, had been in the account of his actions following the collision, when the two men had met on the main staircase and Ismay had asked him the extent of the damage to the ship. This earlier scene, in which Ismay and Bell sat whispering head to head in his cabin at Queenstown, had fortunately escaped the notice of Senator Smith and its revelation now was damning evidence of Ismay’s role as, in Conrad’s words, a ‘double captain’. Bell, one year older than Ismay, was from Maryport, the home town of Thomas Ismay and the place to which Ismay Senior would remain loyal throughout his life, making a point of employing Maryport residents on the White Star liners. Joseph Bell and Bruce Ismay had the same roots; of all the people on board the Titanic, Bell was the man with whom Ismay shared the most.