Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters

by Logan Marshall

  “I want every man to act like a man for manhood’s sake,” he said, “and if they don’t, a bullet awaits the coward.”

  With the revolver in his hand—a fact that undoubtedly gave rise to the suicide theory—the captain moved up and down the deck. He gave the order for each life-boat to make off and he remained until every boat was gone. Standing on the bridge he finally called out the order: “Each man save himself.” At that moment all discipline fled. It was the last call of death. If there had been any hope among those on board before, the hope now had fled.

  The bearded admiral of the White Star Line fleet, with every life-saving device launched from the decks, was returning to the deck to perform the sacred office of going down with his ship when a wave dashed over the side and tore him from the ladder.

  The Titanic was sinking rapidly by the head, with the twisting sidelong motion that was soon to aim her on her course two miles down. Murdock saw the skipper swept out; but did not move. Captain Smith was but one of a multitude of lost at that moment. Murdock may have known that the last desperate thought of the gray mariner was to get upon his bridge and die in command. That the old man could not have done this may have had something to do with Murdock’s suicidal inspiration. Of that no man may say or safely guess.

  The wave that swept the skipper out bore him almost to the thwart of a crowded life-boat. Hands reached out, but he wrenched himself away, turned and swam back toward the ship.

  Some say that he said, “Good-bye, I’m going back to the ship.”

  He disappeared for a moment, then reappeared where a rail was slipping under water. Cool and courageous to the end, loyal to his duty under the most difficult circumstances, he showed himself a noble captain, and he died a noble death.

  SAW BOTH OFFICERS PERISH

  Quartermaster Moody saw all this, watched the skipper scramble aboard again onto the submerged decks, and then vanish altogether in a great billow.

  As Moody’s eye lost sight of the skipper in this confusion of waters it again shifted to the bridge, and just in time to see Murdock take his life. The man’s face was turned toward him, Moody said, and he could not mistake it. There were still many gleaming lights on the ship, flickering out like little groups of vanishing stars, and with the clear starshine on the waters there was nothing to cloud or break the quartermaster’s vision.

  “I saw Murdock die by his own hand,” said Moody, “saw the flash from his gun, heard the crack that followed the flash and then saw him plunge over on his face.”

  Others report hearing several pistol shots on the decks below the bridge, but amid the groans and shrieks and cries, shouted orders and all that vast orchestra of sounds that broke upon the air they must have been faint periods of punctuation

  BAND PLAYED ITS OWN DIRGE

  The band had broken out in the strains of “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” some minutes before Murdock lifted the revolver to his head, fired and toppled over on his face. Moody saw all this in a vision that filled his brain, while his ears drank in the tragic strain of the beautiful hymn that the band played as their own dirge, even to the moment when the waters sucked them down.

  Wherever Murdock’s eye swept the water in that instant, before he drew his revolver, it looked upon veritable seas of drowning men and women. From the decks there came to him the shrieks and groans of the caged and drowning, for whom all hope of escape was utterly vanished. He evidently never gave a thought to the possibility of saving himself, his mind freezing with the horrors he beheld and having room for just one central idea—swift extinction.

  The strains of the hymn and the frantic cries of the dying blended in a symphony of sorrow.

  Led by the green light, under the light of stars, the boats drew away, and the bow, then the quarter, then the stacks and last the stern of the marvel ship of a few days before passed beneath the waters. The great force of the ship’s sinking was unaided by any violence of the elements, and the suction, not so great as had been feared, rocked but mildly the group of boats now a quarter of a mile distant from it.

  Just before the Titanic disappeared from view men and women leaped from the stern. More than a hundred men, according to Colonel Gracie, jumped at the last. Gracie was among the number and he and the second officer were of the very few who were saved.

  {illust. caption = DEPTH OF OCEAN WHERE THE TITANIC WENT DOWN

  The above etching shows a diagram of the ocean depths between the shore of Newfoundland (shown at the top to the left, by the heavily shaded part) to 800 miles out, where the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank. Over the Great Bank of Newfoundland the greatest depth is about 35 fathoms, or 210 feet. Then there is a sudden drop to 105 fathoms, or 630 feet, and then there is a falling away to 1650 fathoms or 9900 feet, then 2000 fathoms or 12,000 feet, and about where the Titanic sank 2760 fathoms or 16,560 feet.}

  As the vessel disappeared, the waves drowned the majestic hymn which the musicians played as they went to their watery grave. The most authentic accounts agree that this hymn was not “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which it seems had been played shortly before, but “Autumn,” which is found in the Episcopal hymnal and which fits appropriately the situation on the Titanic in the last moments of pain and darkness there. One line, “Hold me up in mighty waters,” particularly may have suggested the hymn to some minister aboard the doomed vessel, who, it has been thought, thereupon asked the remaining passengers to join in singing the hymn, in a last service aboard the sinking ship, soon to be ended by death itself.

  {illust. caption = CARPATHIA

  The Cunard liner which brought the survivors of the Titanic to New York.}

  {illust. caption = THE HERO WIRELESS OPERATOR OF THE TITANIC

  Photograph of Harold…}

  Following is the hymn:

  God of mercy and compassion!

  Look with pity on my pain:

  Hear a mournful, broken spirit

  Prostrate at Thy feet complain;

  Many are my foes, and mighty;

  Strength to conquer I have none;

  Nothing can uphold my goings

  But Thy blessed Self alone.

  Saviour, look on Thy beloved;

  Triumph over all my foes;

  Turn to heavenly joy my mourning,

  Turn to gladness all my woes;

  Live or die, or work or suffer,

  Let my weary soul abide,

  In all changes whatsoever

  Sure and steadfast by Thy side.

  When temptations fierce assault me,

  When my enemies I find,

  Sin and guilt, and death and Satan,

  All against my soul combined,

  Hold me up in mighty waters,

  Keep my eyes on things above,

  Righteousness, divine Atonement,

  Peace, and everlasting Love.

  It was a little lame schoolmaster, Tyrtaeus, who aroused the Spartans by his poetry and led them to victory against the foe.

  It was the musicians of the band of the Titanic—poor men, paid a few dollars a week—who played the music to keep up the courage of the souls aboard the sinking ship.

  “The way the band kept playing was a noble thing,” says the wireless operator. “I heard it first while we were working the wireless, when there was a rag-time tune for us, and the last I saw of the band, when I was floating, struggling in the icy water, it was still on deck, playing ‘Autumn.’ How those brave fellows ever did it I cannot imagine.”

  Perhaps that music, made in the face of death, would not have satisfied the exacting critical sense. It may be that the chilled fingers faltered on the pistons of the cornet or at the valves of the French horn, that the time was irregular and that by an organ in a church, with a decorous congregation, the hymns they chose would have been better played and sung. But surely that music went up to God from the souls of drowning men, and was not less acceptable than the song of songs no mortal ear may hear, the harps of the seraphs and the choiring cherubim. Under the sea the music-mak
ers lie, still in their fingers clutching the broken and battered means of melody; but over the strident voice of warring winds and the sound of many waters there rises their chant eternally; and though the musicians lie hushed and cold at the sea’s heart, their music is heard forevermore.

  LAST MOMENTS

  That great ship, which started out as proudly, went down to her death like some grime silent juggernaut, drunk with carnage and anxious to stop the throbbing of her own heart at the bottom of the sea. Charles H. Lightoller, second officer of the Titanic, tells the story this way:

  “I stuck to the ship until the water came up to my ankles. There had been no lamentations, no demonstrations either from the men passengers as they saw the last life-boat go, and there was no wailing or crying, no outburst from the men who lined the ship’s rail as the Titanic disappeared from sight.

  “The men stood quietly as if they were in church. They knew that they were in the sight of God; that in a moment judgment would be passed upon them. Finally, the ship took a dive, reeling for a moment, then plunging. I was sucked to the side of the ship against the grating over the blower for the exhaust. There was an explosion. It blew me to the surface again, only to be sucked back again by the water rushing into the ship

  “This time I landed against the grating over the pipes, which furnish a draught for the funnels, and stuck there. There was another explosion, and I came to the surface. The ship seemed to be heaving tremendous sighs as she went down. I found myself not many feet from the ship, but on the other side of it. The ship had turned around while I was under the water.

  “I came up near a collapsible life-boat and grabbed it. Many men were in the water near me. They had jumped at the last minute. A funnel fell within four inches of me and killed one of the swimmers. Thirty clung to the capsized boat, and a life-boat, with forty survivors in it already, finally took them off.

  “George D. Widener and Harry Elkins Widener were among those who jumped at the last minute. So did Robert Williams Daniel. The three of them went down together. Daniel struck out, lashing the water with his arms until he had made a point far distant from the sinking monster of the sea. Later he was picked up by one of the passing life-boats.

  “The Wideners were not seen again, nor was John B. Thayer, who went down on the boat. ‘Jack’ Thayer, who was literally thrown off the Titanic by an explosion, after he had refused to leave the men to go with his mother, floated around on a raft for an hour before he was picked up.”

  AFLOAT WITH JACK THAYER

  Graphic accounts of the final plunge of the Titanic were related by two Englishmen, survivors by the merest chance. One of them struggled for hours to hold himself afloat on an overturned collapsible life-boat, to one end of which John B. Thayer, Jr., of Philadelphia, whose father perished, hung until rescued.

  The men gave their names as A. H. Barkworth, justice of the peace of East Riding, Yorkshire, England, and W. J. Mellers, of Christ Church Terrace, Chelsea, London. The latter, a young man, had started for this country with his savings to seek his fortune, and lost all but his life.

  Mellers, like Quartermaster Moody, said Captain Smith did not commit suicide. The captain jumped from the bridge, Mellers declares, and he heard him say to his officers and crew: “You have done your duty, boys. Now every man for himself.” Mellers and Barkworth, who say their names have been spelled incorrectly in most of the lists of survivors, both declare there were three distinct explosions before the Titanic broke in two, and bow section first, and stern part last, settled with her human cargo into the sea.

  Her four whistles kept up a deafening blast until the explosions, declare the men. The death cries from the shrill throats of the blatant steam screechers beside the smokestacks so rent the air that conversation among the passengers was possible only when one yelled into the ear of a fellow-unfortunate.

  “I did not know the Thayer family well,” declared Mr. Barkworth, “but I had met young Thayer, a clear-cut chap, and his father on the trip. The lad and I struggled in the water for several hours endeavoring to hold afloat by grabbing to the sides and end of an overturned life-boat. Now and again we lost our grip and fell back into the water. I did not recognize young Thayer in the darkness, as we struggled for our lives, but I did recall having met him before when we were picked up by a life-boat. We were saved by the merest chance, because the survivors on a life-boat that rescued us hesitated in doing so, it seemed, fearing perhaps that additional burdens would swamp the frail craft.

  “I considered my fur overcoat helped to keep me afloat. I had a life preserver over it, under my arms, but it would not have held me up so well out of the water but for the coat. The fur of the coat seemed not to get wet through, and retained a certain amount of air that added to buoyance. I shall never part with it.

  “The testimony of J. Bruce Ismay, managing director of the White Star Line, that he had not heard explosions before the Titanic settled, indicates that he must have gotten some distance from her in his life-boat. There were three distinct explosions and the ship broke in the center. The bow settled headlong first, and the stern last. I was looking toward her from the raft to which young Thayer and I had clung.”

  HOW CAPTAIN SMITH DIED

  Barkworth jumped, just before the Titanic went down. He said there were enough life-preservers for all the passengers, but in the confusion many may not have known where to look for them. Mellers, who had donned a life-preserver, was hurled into the air, from the bow of the ship by the force of the explosion, which he believed caused the Titanic to part in the center.

  “I was not far from where Captain Smith stood on the bridge, giving full orders to his men,” said Mellers. “The brave old seaman was crying, but he had stuck heroically to the last. He did not shoot himself. He jumped from the bridge when he had done all he could. I heard his final instructions to his crew, and recall that his last words were: ‘You have done your duty, boys. Now every man for himself.’

  “I thought I was doomed to go down with the rest. I stood on the deck, awaiting my fate, fearing to jump from the ship. Then came a grinding noise, followed by two others, and I was hurled into the deep. Great waves engulfed me, but I was not drawn toward the ship, so that I believe there was little suction. I swam about for more than one hour before I was picked up by a boat.”

  A FAITHFUL OFFICER

  Charles Herbert Lightoller, previously mentioned, stood by the ship until the last, working to get the passengers away, and when it appeared that he had made his last trip he went up high on the officers’ quarters and made the best dive he knew how to make just as the ship plunged down to the depths. This is an excerpt from his testimony before the Senate investigating committee:

  “What time did you leave the ship?”

  “I didn’t leave it.”

  “Did it leave you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Children shall hear that episode sung in after years and his own descendants shall recite it to their bairns. Mr. Lightoller acted as an officer and gentleman should, and he was not the only one.

  A MESSAGE FROM A NOTORIOUS GAMBLER

  That Jay Yates, gambler, confidence man and fugitive from justice, known to the police and in sporting circles as J. H. Rogers, went down with the Titanic after assisting many women aboard life-boats, became known when a note, written on a blank page torn from a diary: was delivered to his sister. Here is a facsimile of the note:

  {illust.}

  This note was given by Rogers to a woman he was helping into a life-boat. The woman, who signed herself “Survivor,” inclosed the note with the following letter.

  “You will find note that was handed to me as I was leaving the Titanic. Am stranger to this man, but think he was a card player. He helped me aboard a life-boat and I saw him help others. Before we were lowered I saw him jump into the sea. If picked up I did not recognize him on the Carpathia. I don’t think he was registered on the ship under his right name.”

  Rogers’ mother, Mrs. Mary A. Yates,
an old woman, broke down when she learned son had perished.

  “Thank God I know where he is now,” she sobbed. “I have not heard from him for two years. The last news I had from him he was in London.”

  FIFTY LADS MET DEATH

  Among the many hundreds of heroic souls who went bravely and quietly to their end were fifty happy-go-lucky youngsters shipped as bell boys or messengers to serve the first cabin passengers. James Humphreys, a quartermaster, who commanded life-boat No. 11, told a li{t}tle story that shows how these fifty lads met death.

  Humphreys said the boys were called to their regular posts in the main cabin entry and taken in charge by their captain, a steward. They were ordered to remain in the cabin and not get in the way. Throughout the first hour of confusion and terror these lads sat quietly on their benches in various parts of the first cabin.

  Then, just toward the end when the order was passed around that the ship was going down and every man was free to save himself, if he kept away from the life-boats in which the women were being taken, the bell boys scattered to all parts of the ship.

  {illust. caption = “WHO HATH MEASURED THE WATERS IN THE HOLLOW OF HIS HAND."—Isaiah XL:xii}

  Humphreys said he saw numbers of them smoking cigarettes and joking with the passengers. They seemed to think that their violation of the rule against smoking while on duty was a sufficient breach of discipline.

  Not one of them attempted to enter a life-boat. Not one of them was saved.

  THE HEROES WHO REMAINED

  The women who left the ship; the men who remained—there is little to choose between them for heroism. Many of the women compelled to take to the boats would have stayed, had it been possible, to share the fate of their nearest and dearest, without whom their lives are crippled, broken and disconsolate.