Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  The lights of the Californian did indeed seem tantalizingly close. But the steamer was not responding to the Titanic’s CQD calls because its Marconi operator had turned off his equipment and gone to bed over an hour before, after being told to “Shut up” by Jack Phillips. Fourth Officer Boxhall had tried signaling the ship with a Morse lamp but had received no response. He was relieved when Quartermaster Rowe arrived carrying more distress rockets. Surely the ship would see these and come over. “Fire one, and then fire one every five or six minutes,” Captain Smith ordered. Boxhall continued flashing with his lamp between rocket bursts.

  Meanwhile, Frank Millet, Archie Butt, Clarence Moore, and an unknown fourth man continued their card game in the smoking room, seemingly oblivious to all that was going on. At twelve-thirty the smoking room steward had announced, “Gentleman, the accident looks serious. They are lowering away the boats for women and children.” After that, even the professional gamblers had evacuated the room, but when Archibald Gracie looked in about ten minutes later, he saw Archie’s table still at cards. To Gracie it seemed as if they “desired to show their entire indifference to the danger and that if I advised them as to how seriously I regarded it, they would laugh at me.” At approximately twelve-forty-five, however, the four men were seen exiting the smoking room by their dining room steward, Fred Ray. It was perhaps then, when they saw passengers standing gathered in lifebelts and noticed the list in the floor, that Archie and Frank fully grasped how serious things had become. In the A-deck staircase foyer Marian Thayer noticed Archie walking toward the stairs with what she called “a strange unseeing look on his face.” She caught hold of his coat and said, “Major Butt, Major Butt, where are you going? Come with me.”

  “I have something to do first but will come then,” Archie replied distractedly, heading down to his stateroom.

  “He has gone for his letters,” Marian Thayer thought to herself.

  At dinner Archie had spoken to her about how much he valued his letters, yet it was most likely the official communications for President Taft that were preoccupying him now. In his cabin he either destroyed these letters from the pope and several U.S. ambassadors or decided to tuck them into his tunic. At this time, Archie may have exchanged the dress uniform he had likely worn at dinner for his everyday army uniform. Frank Millet chose not to change out of his evening clothes but added a gray woolen vest that Lily had knitted for him, donned an overcoat, and then took down his lifebelt from the top of his cupboard.

  Archie Butt was next seen standing calmly on the starboard boat deck while Lifeboat 3 was being lowered. In this boat were Daisy and Frederic Spedden; their young son, Douglas; his nurse, Elizabeth Burns; and Daisy’s maid. Douglas lay asleep in Miss Burns’s lap clutching his stuffed toy polar bear. “Miss B” had awakened him earlier and told him they were taking a trip “to see the stars.” Nearby sat Henry Sleeper Harper cradling the little brown Pekingese, Sun Yat-sen. Harper had actually seen the iceberg scrape by his porthole and, over his wife Myra’s objections, had insisted that they both dress and go on deck right away. The long wait to get into a lifeboat seemed endless for Harper, who had been in bed with tonsillitis for most of the voyage. He later described the delay as “rather like a stupid picnic where you don’t know anybody and wonder how soon you can get away from such a boresome place.” Yet the “boresome” wait saved Harper’s life and that of his handsome Egyptian servant, Hammad Hassab, as well. Thomas Cardeza also got into the boat with his manservant, after his mother, Charlotte, had boarded with her maid. Clearly believing this to be a temporary measure, Mrs. Cardeza had left behind her jewel case and its fabulous contents.

  Charles Hays (photo credit 1.13)

  Lifeboat 3 began its descent at twelve-fifty-five, carrying thirty-two people, seventeen of them men. The railroad president Charles Hays stood by with a cigar butt clenched in his teeth as his wife Clara, married daughter Orian Davidson, and his wife’s French-Canadian maid disappeared from view. He had told Orian, “You and mother go ahead, the rest of us will wait here till morning.” Orian was so reassured by her father’s confidence that she didn’t even think of kissing him or her husband, Thornton, good-bye. The boat began to descend very jerkily since the two crewmen at the ropes were having trouble coordinating the lowering. At one point Daisy Spedden was sure they would be tipped into the sea. “At last the ropes worked together, and we drew nearer and nearer the oily black water,” recalled another passenger, Elizabeth Shutes. “The first wish on the part of all,” she continued, “was to stay near the Titanic. We all felt so much safer near the ship. Surely such a vessel could not sink.”

  (photo credit 1.7)

  The lifeboats had to be lowered 60 feet down to the water. Second Officer Lightoller supervised the lowering on the port side. (photo credit 1.86)

  As 1:00 a.m. approached, Second Officer Lightoller was feeling frustrated. None of the lifeboats on the port side had yet been launched, despite his best efforts. He had managed to get Lifeboat 4 swung out and lowered half an hour ago, even though Chief Officer Wilde had twice told him to wait. Both times Lightoller had jumped rank and gone directly to Captain Smith to get the go-ahead to proceed. The captain had also suggested that Lifeboat 4 be lowered to A deck since he thought it would be easier for the passengers to board from there. But a crewman had just shouted up that the A-deck windows were locked. (Smith may have forgotten that, unlike the Olympic, the Titanic had a glassed-in forward promenade.) Lightoller sent someone to unlock the windows and to recall the passengers who had been sent down there.

  Meanwhile, he moved aft to prepare Lifeboats 6 and 8, ordering that the masts and sails be lifted out of them. Just then the roaring steam was silenced and Lightoller was slightly startled by the sound of his own voice. Arthur Peuchen overheard the order and, ever handy around boats, jumped in to help cut the lashings and lift the masts out onto the deck. After that the call went out for women and children to come forward. The “women and children only” order would be more strictly enforced here than on the starboard side where men were being allowed into boats. When a crowd of grimy stokers and firemen suddenly appeared carrying their dunnage bags, Chief Officer Wilde was spurred into action. “Down below, you men! Every one of you, down below!” he bellowed in a stern, Liverpool-accented voice. Major Peuchen was very impressed with Wilde’s commanding manner as he drove the men right off the deck, and thought it “a splendid act.”

  Helen Candee, however, felt sympathy for the stokers whom she later described as a band of unknown heroes who had accepted their fate without protest. She was waiting by Lifeboat 6 with Hugh Woolner, who had been by her side ever since he had gone down to her cabin from the smoking room after the collision. “The Two” had then walked together on the boat deck, amid the roar of venting steam, and had noticed that the ship was listing to starboard. They went into the lounge to escape the cold and the noise, and there a young man came over to them with something in his hand. “Have some iceberg!” he said with a smile as he dropped a piece of ice into Helen’s palm. The ice soon chilled Helen’s fingers, so Woolner dashed it from her and rubbed her hand and then kept it clasped in his.

  “Why are we so calm?” she asked him.

  “We are Anglo-Saxons,” he replied.

  When the order for lifebelts was given, “the Two” returned to their rooms before proceeding together up to the boat deck accompanied by Woolner’s young Swedish friend, Mauritz Björnström-Steffansson. On the staircase they met another member of their coterie, Edward Kent, who told Helen that he was on his way to find her. Mrs. Candee was touched by this and gave the architect two family mementos for safekeeping—a little silver flask engraved with the Churchill crest and an ivory cameo of her mother.

  As she waited by Boat 6, Helen felt nervous about having to climb into the lifeboat. When she finally clambered down into it, one of her expensively shod feet became wedged between two oars stowed along the gunwales. She lost her balance and twisted her ankle, fracturing it. Helen grim
aced in pain but refused to let it show as she stoically covered herself with the steamer rug that Woolner passed down to her.

  The young Montrealer Quigg Baxter soon appeared by Lifeboat 6 carrying his mother, Hélène, in his arms. He placed her in the boat and helped his sister ’Zette to a seat beside her. Then he fetched his girlfriend Berthe Mayné, who appeared in a long woolen motorcoat she had put on over her nightgown and slippers. On discovering that Quigg would not be going with her, the Belgian chanteuse became very agitated and refused to get into the boat. Margaret Brown intervened and tried to reassure her but Berthe kept insisting she had to go back to her cabin for her money and jewelry. Mrs. Brown persuaded her that boarding the boats was just a precaution and that passengers would soon be able to return to the ship. Quigg then assisted a pacified Berthe into the boat and introduced her to his puzzled mother and sister. He also pulled out a silver brandy flask, took a swig from it, and passed it to his mother who promptly scolded him about his drinking.

  Margaret Brown soon spotted her friend Emma Bucknell sitting in the next boat aft, Lifeboat 8, and went over to speak to her. Mrs. Bucknell was accompanied by her Italian maid, Albina Bazzani. Ida Straus’s English maid, Ellen Bird, was also in the boat, though her employer was not. Mrs. Straus had followed her maid toward the lifeboat but with one foot on the gunwales had suddenly stopped. She then turned and went back to her husband, saying, “We have been living together for many years, and where you go, I go.”

  “I am sure nobody would object to an old gentleman like you getting in,” Hugh Woolner said to Isidor Straus. “There seems to be room in this boat.”

  “I will not go before the other men,” Straus replied firmly. The elderly couple then walked down the deck together arm in arm.

  The doughty Ella White had been helped into Boat 8 along with her maid and her companion, Marie Young. While waiting in the boat, Mrs. White gestured frequently with her “opera cane,” a walking stick with an electric light in its handle. The bobbing light was causing Lightoller to see spots before his eyes, and he told someone to have her switch it off or he would “throw the damn thing overboard.”

  “Any more ladies?” Captain Smith called out for Boat 8. When none came forward, he instructed Thomas Jones, the seaman in charge, to row toward the light of the nearby ship, land the passengers, and come back for more. The boat began its descent at 1:00 a.m, with twenty-two women and three crewmen on board. Lightoller was relieved that it wasn’t loaded to its capacity of sixty-five, because he feared the davits might not be able to stand the weight. He thought that more women could be boarded from the lower gangway doors and had sent two crewmen down to open them, but the men had never returned.

  With Lifeboat 8 gone, Lightoller was keen to lower Lifeboat 6. When it began to be lowered at approximately one-ten, Margaret Brown claimed that a man took hold of her, saying “You are going, too!” and dropped her into the boat. As it descended, Hugh Woolner and Björnström-Steffansson waved to Mrs. Candee, calling out that they would help her back on board after the ship had steadied itself. When the boat had gone down a few decks, Quartermaster Hichens shouted up from the stern, “I can’t manage this boat with only one seaman!”

  Lightoller called out for another crewman but no one responded. Arthur Peuchen then stepped forward.

  “May I be of assistance?” he asked.

  “Are you a seaman?” Lightoller asked.

  “I am a yachtsman and can handle a boat with an average man,” replied the major.

  Lightoller responded that if Peuchen was enough of a sailor to climb out on the davit and lower himself into the boat then he was welcome to do so. Captain Smith suggested to Peuchen that he go below, break a window, and climb in from there. The major did not think this was feasible and shouted to the crewmen in the boat to throw him the end of a loose rope that was hanging from the davit arm. As he later described it, “One hundred and ninety pounds is a good weight to come suddenly on the end of a slack rope, but my grip held.” To swing out over a sixty-foot drop and then shinny down thirty feet into a boat in the dark is a considerable feat of derring-do—particularly for a man a few days shy of his fifty-third birthday. But it was to be Peuchen’s finest moment of the night.

  When the lifeboat arrived at the water, Quartermaster Hichens began to unhitch the pulleys from the boat and Peuchen asked if he could help. “Get down and put that plug in,” Hichens ordered curtly. The plug was for a hole that allowed water to drain from the lifeboat when stored on deck. Peuchen scrabbled on his knees for the plug but could not find it in the dark. In frustration as water seeped in, he stood up and suggested that Hichens find it while he undid the pulleys. A furious Hichens came rushing back, saying “Hurry! This boat is going to founder!” Peuchen thought he meant the lifeboat but Hichens was referring to the Titanic.

  Once the boat had been made ready, the quartermaster brusquely ordered Peuchen to sit and row beside the other crewman, who, as it happened, was lookout Frederick Fleet. Hichens had been the man at the ship’s wheel when Fleet called in his fateful “iceberg right ahead” message. As he stood at the tiller of the lifeboat, a nervous and shivering Hichens urged Fleet and Peuchen to row away quickly from the liner, muttering dire predictions about the suction that would occur when it sank.

  Fear of suction was also a concern in another lifeboat that was just then pulling away from the opposite side of the ship. Lady Duff Gordon heard one of the men in her boat say that the Titanic was so enormous that “none of us know what the suction may be if she’s a goner.” Later, Lucile couldn’t swear that this was exactly what was said since the motion of the boat was making her feel nauseated. The couturiere lay against the starboard gunwale of Lifeboat 1 wrapped in her squirrel coat with a turquoise crepe scarf tied around her head. Yet she still felt chilled through since under her fur coat was only a lavender silk kimono she had put on over her nightdress. But at least her feet were snug in a pair of pink-velvet mules with pom-pom toes and ermine lining, custom-designed for her by the legendary Paris shoemaker Pietro Yantorny. Cosmo sat in front of Lucy in his Norfolk jacket while her secretary, Mabel Francatelli, was seated behind wearing a long woolen coat and sweater she had hastily put on over her nightgown.

  Franks had come to Lucy’s stateroom after midnight in a panic, claiming that she had seen water creeping along the corridor as she left her room on E deck. Cosmo had then arrived and taken them both up the staircase to the boat deck foyer. On hearing the call for ladies to board, the three of them had stepped out onto the starboard deck where crewmen soon tried to pull the two women toward the boats. But they had loudly protested—Lucy would not leave without Cosmo and Franks clung to her. After Lifeboat 3 departed, the crowd on the forward deck dispersed and Lucy suddenly noticed that a smaller emergency boat was being prepared for lowering.

  “Shouldn’t we try to get into that?” she asked Cosmo.

  “We must wait for orders,” he replied. But a few minutes later Cosmo went forward and asked First Officer Murdoch if they could get in.

  “Yes, I wish you would,” he responded.

  The emergency boat was a cutter that was kept permanently swung out over the railing. This meant that the two women had to be hoisted over the railing and then, as Lucy put it, “plopped” into the boat. Soon Henry Stengel approached, having seen his wife, Annie, depart in Lifeboat 5. Murdoch suggested that he jump in as well, so the New Jersey leather manufacturer climbed the rail and rolled himself into the boat—causing Murdoch to break out laughing. “That is the funniest sight I’ve seen tonight,” he chortled, making Stengel think that perhaps the situation wasn’t as grave as he’d thought. Yet when another rocket shot up from the nearby starboard wing bridge, Lucy Duff Gordon became even more certain that the ship was in dire trouble.

  Soon a New York businessman named Abraham Salomon came forward and Murdoch allowed him to join the small group in the boat. The first officer then put two seamen in to handle the oars and, seeing no more passengers on the deck,
told five stokers and firemen who were standing nearby that they could jump in too. He put one of the Titanic’s lookouts, twenty-four-year-old George Symons, in charge and ordered him to row away from the ship and then to stand by in case they needed to be called back.

  As the lifeboat was lowered past A deck it became snagged on a guy wire and Franks recalled how the boat shook while they were being cut free. On reaching the sea, Lookout Symons was surprised to see that the portholes on D deck were awash and that water was creeping toward the name Titanic painted on the bow. He then stood at the tiller as the crewmen rowed away from the ship. In a lifeboat that could have carried forty people there were only twelve, only five of whom were passengers, and only two of them women.

  So far, none of the six lifeboats that had left the Titanic had been filled to capacity, and none had carried any second- or third-class passengers. Second-class passengers had been told to board from their own promenade area farther aft on the boat deck. Crowds of steerage passengers, meanwhile, were waiting patiently in the well decks, while others sat in the third-class general and smoking rooms, chatting and playing cards. The gates leading up from the aft well deck had been locked to prevent men from third class from going up to the boats. But a number of them had climbed onto the large round bases of the two cargo cranes and were clambering along the arms of the cranes into second class.

  As the boats at the aft end of the boat deck began to be swung out, a group of passengers rattled at the locked gates on the stairs that led up from the well deck. A crewman came to the barrier, where Mary Murphy, twenty-five, her teenaged sister, Kate, and their two roommates, Katie Gilnagh, seventeen, and Kate Mullen, twenty-one, peered through.