The Night Lives On

by Walter Lord

  “No, they were all white.”

  Lord then asked the time. Gibson replied that it was 2:05 “by the wheelhouse clock.”

  The Captain later said that he had been sleeping heavily and didn’t remember any of this conversation— just a vague recollection of Gibson opening the door, saying something, and then leaving. Gibson was certain that Lord was awake the whole time.

  On the bridge again, Stone and Gibson resumed studying the night. Later, there was some dispute as to exactly when the stranger disappeared. Gibson felt she was already gone by 2:05, when he reported to the Captain; Stone said she was still faintly in sight until 2:20; then her lights faded away completely.

  Around 2:40 he again whistled down the speaking tube. Once more Captain Lord got up from the chart room settee, crossed to his own room, and answered the call. Stone told him that there were no more rockets, that the other ship had disappeared into the southwest and was completely out of sight. One final time, Lord asked if Stone was sure there were no colors in the rockets; one final time, the Second Officer said they were all white, “just white rockets.”

  At the British Inquiry the question arose as to what Stone really meant when he instructed Gibson to tell the Captain that the strange ship had “disappeared.” Did he mean “gone to the bottom” or “steamed away”? Stone maintained that he meant “steamed away,” but Gibson wouldn’t say how he interpreted it. Pressed for an answer, he remained silent.

  In any case, the stranger was gone. Stone and Gibson resumed their watch, and nothing happened for the next 40 minutes—just the stars, the flat, icy sea, the empty night. Then at 3:30 A.M. Gibson suddenly saw a new rocket—more to the south and much farther away than the earlier ones. He reported it to Stone, and the two men watched as a second, and then a third rocket burst in the sky. The ship firing them was out of sight, below the horizon, but it’s worth noting that at this time the Carpathia was racing up from the south firing rockets, trying to reassure the Titanic that help was coming. Strangely, Stone did not report these new rockets to Captain Lord at all.

  At 4 A.M. Chief Officer George F. Stewart arrived on the upper bridge to take over the watch. Stone filled him in on the original eight rockets…described how the ship firing them began to steam away after the first rocket went up…pointed out that he had informed Captain Lord three different times.

  Stewart raised his binoculars and spotted to the south a four-masted steamer with one funnel and “a lot of lights amidship.” He asked Stone if that was the vessel that had been firing the rockets. No, said Stone, adding that this was a brand-new steamer he hadn’t seen before.

  Stone now went below, leaving the Chief Officer to sort things out. To every sailor, rockets at sea normally mean distress, and Stewart was no exception. He had an uneasy feeling that “something had happened.” Yet he did nothing until 4:30 A.M., when Captain Lord had asked to be awakened. Stewart did this personally, and standing by the chart room door, he remarked that Stone had seen rockets during his watch.

  “Yes, I know; he’s been telling me,” replied Lord.

  The Captain now went on the bridge and began explaining his plans for getting through the ice and proceeding on to Boston. Stewart asked if he wasn’t going to go south first and try to learn something about the ship that had been firing rockets. Lord raised his binoculars and looked at the four-masted steamer. “No,” he said, “she looks all right; she’s not making any signals now.”

  But this, of course, was not the ship that Stone had watched. This was the newcomer that he hadn’t even seen, until pointed out by Stewart. Her condition— good or bad—was irrelevant. Nevertheless, Stewart did not tell the Captain that he was looking at the wrong ship. Asked at the British Inquiry why he failed to do so, he said he didn’t know.

  Little is known of Stewart’s and Lord’s conversation over the next 50 minutes. At the Inquiry, Stewart said nothing about it; Lord said only that he learned for the first time that there was more than one rocket—something impossible to reconcile with the accounts of Stone, Gibson, and Stewart himself.

  In any event, at 5:20 life on the Californian suddenly took on a much faster pace. Stewart burst into the radio room and shook awake the operator, Cyril Evans: “Wireless, there’s a ship been firing rockets in the night. Will you see if you can find out what is wrong—what is the matter?”

  Evans needed no further prodding. Normally he arose at 7:00, but now he bolted out of bed and flicked on the set. One after another, the Mount Temple, the Frankfurt, and the Virginian told him about the Titanic, and at 5:45 he had an official message from the Virginian, giving him the Titanic’s position, 41°46’ N, 50°14’W. The Californian’s position was 42°5’N, 50°7’W—about 19 miles away.

  By 6:00-6:15 Captain Lord had the Californian under way, but at the start it was very slow going. For the first three or four miles she crept westward and southward through heavy field ice, often studded with bergs. By 7:00 she was in open water again and steaming south at 13 knots, her full speed. Around 7:30 Captain Lord calculated he was at the Titanic’s position, but found only the Mount Temple. She, too, had found nothing, but both ships could see the Carpathia stopped five or six miles to the east.

  Wireless traffic indicated that the Carpathia was picking up the Titanic’s boats; so Captain Lord headed for her. There was too much ice to steer a direct course; therefore, the Californian continued south until she found a channel in the ice, then wriggled through it, and finally approached the Carpathia from the southwest or almost the opposite direction from the way she had started out. When he first noticed her, Captain Rostron estimated that the Californian was five or six miles to the west-southwest.

  By now everyone on the Californian had been alerted. Extra lookouts were posted at the bow and in a coal basket hoisted above the crow’s nest. Seamen were swinging her boats out for rescue work. Awakened by Chief Officer Stewart, Third Officer Groves paused long enough to ask Second Officer Stone if it was really true about the Titanic. “Yes, old chap,” Stone replied, “I saw rockets in my watch.”

  By 8:30 the Californian was alongside the Carpathia, just in time to watch Rostron pick up Boat 12, the last of the Titanic’s lifeboats. The two ships exchanged signals by wigwag, with the Californian agreeing to continue the search, while the Carpathia headed back for New York.

  It was a disheartening search—no more survivors, not even any victims in sight, just seven abandoned lifeboats, some planks, deck chairs, a few pilasters, and a number of green cushions floating around.

  The Californian finally gave up the search and once more headed for Boston. Like everything else on this most disputatious of voyages, there was disagreement over when she resumed her journey. Captain Lord thought it was at 11:20 A.M., after a thorough check of the whole area; Third Officer Groves thought it was around 10:40, after the most cursory of investigations. The log backed up Captain Lord, but it was hardly a reliable document. It contained not one word about any of the rockets seen during the night.

  Yet that seemed to be the party line when the Californian arrived in Boston on the morning of April 19. No one had seen anything—no rockets, no lights, nothing unusual on the night of the 14th-15th.

  And for a while the strategy worked. The Boston press virtually ignored the Californian on April 21, 22, and 23. She lay quietly at her Clyde Street pier, discharging and taking on cargo without the benefit of reporters or other nosy people.

  Yet behind the scenes the waterfront seethed with excitement. It turned out that besides Stone and Gibson, at least one other member of the crew had seen those rockets. In particular, Ernest Gill, assistant on one of the ship’s “donkey engines,” had watched them go up while out on deck taking a midnight smoke. Then Evans, Stone, and Gibson, though silent now, had talked a lot during the days just before the ship reached Boston. Secondhand versions of their experiences spread through the dockside bars.

  On April 21 the ship’s carpenter, W. F. McGregor, visited his cousin John H. G. Frazer in Cl
inton, Massachusetts, and could contain himself no longer. A reporter from the Clinton Daily Item was present, and on the 23rd the paper broke the story. It told how the watch on the Californian saw the rockets sent up by the Titanic….

  The officer on watch, it is said, reported this to the captain of the boat, but he failed to pay any attention to the signals, excepting to tell the watch to keep his eye on the boat. At this time the two boats were about ten miles apart. It being in the night, the wireless operator on the Californian was asleep at the time.

  It is said that those on board the Californian could see the lights of the Titanic very plainly, and it is also reported that those on the Titanic saw the Californian. Finally the first mate on the Californian, who with several of the officers had been watching the Titanic, decided that he would take a hand in the situation and so roused the wireless operator, and an attempt was made to communicate with the Titanic. It was then too late….

  Curiously, two days passed before the Boston papers picked up the Daily Item’s scoop, but rumors continued to spread. On the 24th the Post finally caught a whiff, and published an interview with Captain Lord, who denied that the Californian had seen anything unusual. She was only 20 miles away, he said, but sighted “no rockets or other signals of distress.”

  On the 25th the Morning Globe carried Carpenter McGregor’s account, as it had appeared in the Daily Item. This brought another rash of denials from the embattled Californian. “The story is perfectly absurd,” declared J. H. Thomas, agent of the Leyland Line in Boston. Captain Lord and his officers stuck to their guns: “None of the crew yesterday would say they had seen any signals of distress or any lights on the night of Sunday, April 14. One of them said he did not believe anyone else did.”

  Later that morning the Boston American exploded a bombshell that went far beyond mere gossip. The paper carried a sworn affidavit, signed by the assistant donkeyman, Ernest Gill, relating what he had seen on the night of April 14-15. Boiled down, Gill’s affidavit declared that shortly before midnight he had noticed the lights of a very large steamer about ten miles away going along at full steam. He then went below but couldn’t get to sleep. Coming back on deck for a smoke, he saw no sign of the big steamer, but on the horizon in the same general direction he watched two white rockets burst in the sky. He did not report this to the bridge because “they could not have helped but see them.”

  Once again the press descended on Captain Lord. What did he have to say now?

  “A lie.”… “Bosh.”…“Poppycock,” the Captain told various interviewers, noting that Gill had been paid $500 for his account. Chief Officer Stewart, Second Officer Stone, and an unnamed quartermaster all backed the skipper up. Questioned by the Herald’s man, “Stone emphatically denied that he had notified Captain Lord of any rockets, as he had seen none, nor had any been reported to him.”

  But by now nobody was really listening—the show had moved to Washington. On the 25th, Captain Lord, Wireless Operator Evans, and Gill himself were all summoned to testify at the Senate hearings. Queried before he caught the train, Lord assured the Boston Journal, “If I go to Washington, it will not be because of this story in the paper, but to tell the Committee why my ship was drifting without power, while the Titanic was rushing under full speed. It will take about ten minutes to do this.”

  It would take far longer than ten minutes—and more than a gratuitous slap at Captain Smith—to get the Californian off the hook. On the afternoon of April 26, the Senate Committee heard in turn Gill, Lord, and Evans…and ultimately rejected the Captain’s version of events. Putting all the evidence together, the Committee found that the Californian was less than 19 miles away, saw the Titanic’s rockets, and “failed to respond to them in accordance with the dictates of humanity, international usage, and the requirements of law.”

  Meanwhile, the Californian’s conscience-stricken carpenter, McGregor, had not been idle. It was his interview in the Daily Item—not Gill’s affidavit, as generally supposed—that raised the first serious charges against Captain Lord and his officers. Now he added fuel to the fire with a letter to a friend in England making pretty much the same points. The letter soon came to the attention of a London civil engineer named Gerard Jensen, who decided it was his “public duty” to pass on the contents at once to the Board of Trade. In this way McGregor’s charges also became the basis for the British Inquiry’s interest in the Californian.

  Ultimately the Court heard not only the now-familiar stories of Captain Lord, Donkeyman Gill, and Wireless Operator Evans, but the accounts of the other characters in the drama as well: Third Officer Groves, who first saw the strange ship; Stone and Gibson, who watched the rockets go up; and Chief Officer Stewart, who was the prime mover in finally waking up Evans.

  “There are inconsistencies and contradictions in the story as told by the different witnesses,” concluded Lord Mersey, “but the truth of the matter is plain….When she first saw the rockets, the Californian could have pushed through the ice to the open water without any serious risk and so have come to the assistance of the Titanic. Had she done so, she might have saved many if not all of the lives that were lost.”

  To the end of his days Captain Lord insisted that the Californian wasn’t “there.” From time to time he asked that the case be reopened, but the Board of Trade failed to find new grounds for any appeal, and there the matter stood. Gradually Lord came to be regarded by many as a sort of gallant loner fighting a huge bureaucracy— “Under the Wheels of the Juggernaut” was the title of one series of articles defending him.

  Actually, Captain Lord’s battle was far from lonely. He enjoyed the support of the Mercantile Marine Services Association, which looked after the interests of British ship officers; he had well-placed sympathizers in Parliament; he could count on highly professional access to the press; he was backed by a small but articulate band of marine writers.

  They come across as energetic, resourceful—and highly selective in presenting their evidence. They play up the testimony that the ship seen from the Californian looked like a freighter, but brush off Third Officer Groves, who always thought she was a passenger liner. Since the Californian was stopped for the night, they parade the witnesses who said the light seen from the Titanic was moving, but ignore the witnesses who always thought the light was stationary. As for the devastating conversation between Stone and Gibson while the rockets were going up, it is seldom mentioned.

  Arguing that the Titanic gave the wrong position—that she was really much farther away—the Californian’s defenders offer a map, full of authoritative-looking squiggles, showing that the position given by the Titanic lay on the far side of an impenetrable ice field. They rarely mention another map with a much better pedigree. Plotted at the time by the U.S. Navy’s Hydrographic Office, it is based on the ice reports of nine different ships, including the Californian herself. It depicts the ice field as lying more from the northeast to the southwest, hence putting the Titanic’s reported position on the near side of the field, where of course she belongs. The exact lay of the ice field is, in fact, a subject for endless speculation.

  In support of the “wrong-position” theory, the Californian’s defenders produce endless mathematical calculations, but her own reported position is always accepted as gospel. The finders of the Titanic have not seen fit to reveal her exact location, but they stress that she was definitely on course. As for the Californian, we will never know for certain her position that night.

  Estimates of distances at sea, the timing of incidents, the position and bearings of ships to one another are by their very nature imprecise—and never more so than the night the Titanic went down. There wasn’t even a clock on the upper bridge of the Californian, and the startling clarity of the atmosphere made it, as Captain Lord himself later said, “a very deceiving night.” Arguments about such variables can go on endlessly, reducing the search for the truth to a sort of Titanic version of “Trivial Pursuit.”

  The one element that lifts
the night of April 14-15 out of the realm of the imponderable is the hard, incontrovertible fact of the rockets—what they were like, what they meant, and what people did about them. And it is here, I think, where the arguments of the Californian’s defenders really break down. They can say what they like, but they can’t get away from those rockets.

  Distress signals at night, as defined by regulations at the time, were “rockets or shells, throwing stars of any color or description, fired one at a time, at short intervals.” The Californian saw eight such rockets at approximately the same time the Titanic was firing a similar number. Over the years the Californian’s defenders have often sought to defuse these rockets by calling them “flares.” But nobody called them flares that night. They were called “rockets”—projectiles that shot up into the sky, and burst, sending down a shower of white stars. Once, when Gibson happened to raise his binoculars at the right moment, he even saw the thin trail of the rocket as it soared upward.

  Every officer on the Californian, including Captain Lord, agreed that these rockets—as seen or as described—resembled distress signals. Later it was generously suggested that the watch thought they might be company signals of some sort, but nobody thought so that night.

  The two men on the bridge both suspected something was wrong. Second Officer Stone conceded he said, “A ship is not going to fire rockets at sea for nothing.” Apprentice Gibson said both he and Stone felt the ship was in “trouble of some sort”; and again, “There must be something the matter with her.” Gibson himself decided it was a case of “some kind of distress.”

  Chief Officer Stewart thought the rockets “might be distress signals” when he relieved Stone at 4 A.M. and Stone told him what he had seen. At the British Inquiry, Stewart admitted he thought “something had happened.”

  The Californian saw and ignored still more rockets fired from yet another ship that night. These rockets were seen at the very time the Carpathia was firing rockets as she neared the scene, and also came from her direction.