The Night Lives On

by Walter Lord

  Both Stone and Gibson immediately connected the rockets with the Titanic while the Californian was en route to the scene the following morning—before there was any time for second-guessing or wishful thinking.

  Captain Lord was informed. Later he said he was told of only one rocket, but he is contradicted by all three of the other men on the bridge that night.

  Feeling as he did, the Captain claimed there was no need to worry. But he and Stewart were worried enough to wake up the wireless operator at 5:20 A.M. and ask him then to check. The tragedy is that this wasn’t done sooner.

  Some apologists argue that it would have made no difference anyhow: the Californian was, they say, too far away to help. They point out that neither Stone nor Gibson heard the rockets, which (we are assured) went off with a tremendous bang, easily audible for upward of ten miles. Actually, nobody knows how far the Titanic’s rockets could be heard. A professional ballistics expert I have consulted says maybe two or three miles. In any case, the signals were seen and ignored.

  In the face of all this, the Californian’s defenders offer two distinct theories. The first is that there were two separate pairs of ships out there: the Titanic and an unknown stranger, and the Californian and an unknown stranger. Neither pair was in sight of the other. In each pair, one of the ships came up from the east, stopped some time between 11:30 and midnight, and later began firing rockets. In each pair, about eight rockets were fired. In each pair, the rocket-firing ship gradually disappeared, finally vanishing about 2½ hours after she first stopped. In the case of each pair, another hour passed, and then a third ship appeared firing rockets on the southern horizon. Even on this incredible night, such a string of coincidences seems too far-fetched to accept.

  The second theory concedes that the rockets probably came from the Titanic, but contends that there was a third, unknown ship lying between the sinking liner and the Californian. This was the ship Stone and Gibson were watching, the theory runs, and they mistakenly believed the rockets were coming from her. Since she looked all right, they had no need to worry.

  But the ship they were watching did not look all right, and both Stone and Gibson were very worried indeed. Whatever was said later, that night both men suspected that she was in trouble. “We were talking about it all the time,” Gibson testified.

  Moreover, the “ship in between” theory collides head on with Stone’s explanation of why the stranger’s lights “disappeared.” Stone said they disappeared not because the ship he was watching sank, but because she steamed away. If that was the case, the British Court asked, why didn’t the mysterious ship steam out from in front of the rockets, revealing where they were really coming from? Stone had no answer to that.

  Nor has the “ship in between” ever been found. A perennial candidate is the Norwegian sealer Samson, based on the typescript of a journal supposedly kept by one of her crew. According to the typescript (the original has vanished) the Samson lay near the Titanic, saw the rockets, but was engaged in illegal sealing operations and was afraid to show herself.

  Unfortunately, the same document puts the Samson south of Cape Hatteras the previous afternoon. Not even the Mauretania’s mighty turbines could have propelled her to the icy waters off Newfoundland in time for the big show.

  Further doubt is cast on the Samson by some remarkable research undertaken by Leslie Reade, a little-known British Titanic scholar who enjoys almost guru status among students of the disaster. Mr. Reade has developed information from official sources in Iceland placing the Samson in the fishing port of Isafjördhur on April 6 and again on April 20. This meant that the Samson had just 14 days to make the 3,000-mile journey down to the Titanic and back—absolutely impossible for a six-knot ship.

  In any event, what difference does it make even if there was a third ship lying between the Californian and the Titanic? Rockets are rockets. These clearly resembled distress signals, and both Stone and Gibson suspected some ship was in trouble.

  As an ameliorating factor, it has been suggested that they mistook the rockets for company signals—or signals between fishermen operating off the Banks of Newfoundland. Ships did occasionally use night signals to identify themselves in those days, but they were usually some combination of colored flares and Roman candles. They did not remotely resemble the white rockets seen by Stone and Gibson…or the white rockets being fired at about that time by the Titanic. It didn’t occur to either man that the ship they were watching was merely trying to identify herself. Again, they suspected that she was trying to get help.

  Finally, it has been suggested that the two men on the bridge thought the rockets were just a celebration of some sort. This theory grew out of a caustic remark made at the British Inquiry by Butler Aspinall, counsel for the Board of Trade, while he was examining Stone on the meaning of the rockets. Stone proved so evasive that finally, in exasperation, Aspinall remarked, “You knew they were not being sent up for fun?” Somehow this got twisted around in the retelling and has come down to us as an explanation by Stone, rather than a bit of sarcasm by Aspinall.

  It’s a waste of time to linger any longer over the question of what Stone and Gibson thought the rockets meant. The real question is why, when they were reported to Captain Lord, he did nothing about them.

  Certainly the Captain was not drunk—he was a teetotaler.

  Nor does it seem likely that he was too deeply asleep to grasp the reports sent down to him. He was not tucked away in bed; he was resting fully clothed on the chart room settee. His rest was interrupted three different times between 12:40 and 2:40. Twice he had to get up and go to his own quarters to talk with Stone on the speaking tube; the other time he was visited by Gibson in person. All three times he seemed awake and perfectly rational. It had not been an especially difficult day; there was no reason to be exhausted.

  In the end it’s hard not to be impressed by the reasoning of Sir Rufus Isaacs, the Attorney General at the British Inquiry:

  … I am unable to find any possible explanation of what happened, except it may be the Captain of the vessel was in ice for the first time, and would not take the risk of going to the rescue of another vessel which might have got into trouble, as he thought, from proceeding through the ice when he himself had stopped.

  It must always be remembered that the Titanic hadn’t happened yet. When he made up his mind to stay put, Captain Lord had no inkling that the world’s most famous sea disaster was about to occur. He only knew there was a lot of ice out there, and the safe thing to do was to stop for the night. This was the right decision—provided nothing happened. But something did happen, and Captain Lord’s failure was his inability or unwillingness to adjust to an entirely new situation. True, be had his own ship and crew to think about, but that was no excuse for doing nothing. He didn’t even wake up his wireless operator, only a few feet away, while the rockets were going up. What was good seamanship before the rockets became a woeful lack of enterprise afterward.

  Even when summoned to Washington, Captain Lord seemed to feel that the real issue was his prudence, rather than his failure to answer the rockets. Hence his curious remark that his purpose was “to tell the Committee why my ship was drifting without power, while the Titanic was rushing under full speed.”

  Given that mind-set, it required a forceful man to be on watch that night—an officer not afraid to take on a reluctant captain. There’s some question as to whether Herbert Stone was the ideal person to be in this position. While there was always a gulf between the master and his officers in those days, it seems to have been especially deep between Captain Lord and Second Officer Stone. Lord was an austere autocrat; Stone was an easygoing type. Later he reportedly told friends that he and Gibson did indeed think that the rockets were distress signals, but they “couldn’t get the old man out of the chart room.”

  How hard did they try? While Stone twice reported the rockets to the Captain, carefully describing them each time, he never mentioned his and Gibson’s misgivings about them,
or ventured any opinion as to what they might mean. “I just took them as white rockets,” he later told the British Inquiry, “and informed the master, and let him judge.”

  Chief Officer Stewart, who took over the watch at 4 A.M., was a bit of an improvement. When Captain Lord came on the bridge at 4:30 and began talking about proceeding to Boston, Stewart at least asked him if he was going to steam south first and check on the ship that had been firing rockets during the night. “No, I do not think so,” Captain Lord replied, studying the ship that had recently appeared to the south. “She looks all right; she is not making any signals now.”

  He was, of course, looking at the wrong ship, the new arrival that Stone had specifically said was not the one firing the rockets. Stewart knew this but did not correct the Captain. Why, is anybody’s guess. Was he, too, cowed by the remote presence of the shipmaster? Was he so concerned about the rockets that he was willing to let the new arrival be a stand-in for the real ship, so that at least some action might be taken? We’ll never know. Even when pressed he never gave the Court any explanation at all.

  So, at 4:30 A.M. the situation remained essentially as it had been all night. The rockets were still ignored, and now Captain Lord was thinking only of getting on to Boston. Yet 50 minutes later, at 5:20, Stewart was shaking the wireless operator awake: “There’s a ship been firing rockets. Will you see if you can find out if anything is the matter?”

  What happened that turned everything around during those 50 minutes? Sometimes I wish that some magical time machine could transport me back and let me spend an hour any place I wanted on the night of April 14-15, 1912. I would not spend that hour on the Titanic. I’d spend it on the bridge of the Californian, from 4:30 to 5:30 A.M., sharing the watch with Captain Lord and Chief Officer Stewart. What was said? What ideas were exchanged? What advice was politely rendered? What suggestions were made? What thoughts were passed—or not passed—between them?

  We have very little to go on. As shown by their performance in Boston, the officers of the Californian were anything but candid about that night. Stewart even maintained that his purpose in waking up the wireless operator was simply to check the identity of the ship to the south—an explanation emphatically rejected by the British Inquiry.

  In both his interview with the Clinton Daily Item and his letter to London, Carpenter McGregor declared that Stewart was so exasperated at the Californian’s inaction that he finally woke up Evans on his own, apparently without any clearance from the Captain. This seems going too far; Captain Lord must have given at least tacit approval.

  What changed his mind? My hunch is that it was not Stewart’s logic or eloquence, but a complete change of circumstances. An entirely new and reassuring element had entered the picture: daylight.

  By 5:20 the night was rapidly fading, and the coral tint of dawn was spreading over the sea, showing the great ice field in all its detail—the bergs, the growlers, the loose, flat cakes of the floe. It was now possible to see the channels that wound through the ice…and the densely packed areas where it was too thick to go. It was at last safe for a prudent man to act.

  It did not have to be that way. Captain Rostron, “The Electric Spark,” proved that. But the Californian was different—a plodding cargo liner presided over by a cautious captain and an uninspired watch. Six months later, before attitudes had hopelessly hardened, Captain Lord wrote a letter to his “M.P.” In it he admitted there was “a certain amount of ‘slackness’ aboard the Californian the night in question.” He was probably thinking of Stone, but it’s a word that could well serve as an epitaph for the performance of the whole ship that night—including her captain.

  CHAPTER XV

  Second-guessing

  THE BRONZED MEN OF the sea were soon gone from the stage, their place taken by a pallid cast of lawyers, bureaucrats, technical experts, and (eventually) historians. Even before the Carpathia reached New York, voices were rising in Washington, demanding to know how such a catastrophe could happen.

  The chorus was led by Senator William Alden Smith, a man whose constituency had nothing to do with the sea; he was from Grand Rapids, Michigan, 720 miles from the Atlantic Coast. Nor was he an expert on nautical matters; he was a railroad lawyer. But Senator Smith knew a hot political issue when he saw one, and here was an event that couldn’t help but give him instant national exposure.

  Nominally a Republican, Smith was at heart a maverick, fitting into neither the stand-pat nor progressive wings of the party. He did have populist leanings—liked to battle the trusts—and this penchant may have influenced him now. After all, the White Star Line was an integral part of Pierpont Morgan’s shipping combine. Smith also liked playing the role of a rough, unpolished country boy taking on the city slickers, and White Star’s combination of British merchants and Wall Street financiers may have been too good a target to resist.

  First step was to check the White House and the congressional leadership, but they had no plans of their own. Satisfied, Smith now rammed through the Senate a resolution directing the Committee on Commerce to name a subcommittee to investigate the disaster. Then a quick meeting with Senator Knute Nelson, chairman of the Commerce Committee, and by noon on April 17th the subcommittee was in existence. To no one’s surprise, Smith headed it up.

  Characteristically, he saw to it that the six other members of the subcommittee were chosen without regard to any nautical knowledge. All he wanted was political balance. Hence there were three Republicans and three Democrats, with each party supplying a conservative, a liberal, and a moderate.

  The most daring feature was the subpoena powers granted the subcommittee. After all, many of the key witnesses would be British. No one was sure whether the subcommittee’s subpoena powers extended to foreigners or not, and assuming they did, no one knew how the proud, sensitive British seafaring men would respond.

  Smith took his chances, for there was no time to lose. The Carpathia might not answer President Taft’s queries, but there was evidence that her wireless room was doing more than the forlorn business of tapping out the list of survivors. On April 17 the U.S. cruiser Chester intercepted an interesting message from the little Cunarder to the White Star offices in New York:

  Most desirable Titanic crew should be returned home earliest moment possible. Suggest you hold Cedric, sailing her daylight Friday….Propose returning in her myself, (signed) YAMSI

  It did not take a team of crack cryptanalysts to figure out that “YAMSI” was Ismay spelled backward. Apparently the White Star chairman was planning to get himself and the lost liner’s crew out of U.S. jurisdiction before any investigation could be started.

  Smith and the subcommittee members immediately headed for New York with a small army of marshals. They arrived on the evening of April 18—just as the Carpathia reached Quarantine. They hurried by taxi to the Cunard pier, arriving as the rescue ship crept in amid the blaze of photo-flash explosions. As the gangplank fell in place—before even the first survivors could step ashore—the Senator and his marshals rushed aboard.

  They found Ismay in the Chief Surgeon’s cabin, where he had been secluded ever since his rescue Monday morning. The ship’s rumor factory had him out of his mind with grief and shock, but the figure that awaited them was thoroughly composed.

  No, said “YAMSI,” he wouldn’t dream of skipping any American inquiry. He wanted to cooperate in every way. He would certainly appear at 10 A.M. tomorrow in the Waldorf-Astoria’s East Room, which had been converted into a hearing room for the subcommittee in New York.

  True to his word, Ismay was already seated at the conference table when Senator Smith and his party entered the East Room the following morning. At 10:30 Smith opened the proceedings, calling on Ismay as the first witness. Would he kindly give the Committee any information he thought might be helpful, telling the story “as succinctly as possible.”

  Ismay quickly showed how succinct he could be. After giving the Titanic’s engine revolutions for each day of the voyage—a
nd the day’s run that resulted—he came to Sunday night. “I was in bed myself, asleep, when the accident happened,” he explained. “The ship sank, I am told, at two-twenty. That, sir, I think is all I can tell you.”

  Unfazed, Smith asked what Ismay did after the impact, and perhaps for the first time the White Star Chairman realized that he was in for a grilling that would eventually add up to 58 pages of testimony.

  Across the Atlantic, the British viewed the Senate investigation first with disbelief, and then with dismay. What were those cheeky Americans doing investigating a British family matter anyhow? As Joseph Conrad put it in the May 1912 issue of the English Review:

  …Why an officer of the British merchant service should answer the questions of any king, emperor, autocrat, or senator of any foreign power (as to an event in which a British ship alone was concerned, and which did not even take place in the territorial waters of that power) passes my understanding.

  The fact that the Titanic was, after all, serving American ports and soliciting American passengers seemed to make little difference and the fact that, after piercing the corporate veil, the White Star Line was basically an American-owned company was never even mentioned. All in all, Conrad sniffed, the Senate’s intrusion was a “very provincial display of authority.”

  Nor did Senator Smith help his cause as the investigation unfolded. He showed almost total ignorance of ships and the sea, once asking a witness, “Did the Titanic go down by the head or the bow?”

  His most famous gaffe occurred when he asked Fifth Officer Lowe, “Do you know what an iceberg is composed of?”

  “Ice, I suppose, sir,” replied Lowe, going in for the kill.

  Yet Smith’s question was not all that bad, considering the general lack of knowledge on both sides of the Atlantic about icebergs and what they could do. It was hard to believe that a mere piece of ice, however big, could rip apart a steel hull. Smith was wondering whether icebergs might also contain more familiar lethal material like rocks and stones. Earlier he had put the same question to Fourth Officer Boxhall, and got a straight answer: “Some people tell me that they have seen sand and gravel and rocks and things of that kind in them.” That time nobody laughed. It took Lowe to see the opening and drive home the thrust.