Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  “For God’s sake man, let the girls past to the boats, at least!” shouted Jim Farrell, a farmworker from County Longford. The crewman opened the gate for the four Irish girls and then quickly shut it behind them. On reaching the boat deck, Mary Murphy and the three Kates got into Lifeboat 16, the farthest boat aft on the port side. At one-twenty they were lowered down the side with forty-three other women, all from second or third class, along with five crewmen and one baby. Five minutes later, the neighboring portside boat, number 14, began its descent with approximately forty on board. In charge was Fifth Officer Lowe, the volatile young Welsh officer who had bawled out Bruce Ismay by Boat 5 about forty minutes ago. Lowe was now worried that anyone jumping into the heavily loaded boat might cause it to buckle. As the lifeboat descended with Lowe in the stern, he spotted what he later described as “a lot of Italians, Latin people, all along the ship’s rails … and they were all glaring, more or less like wild beasts, ready to spring.” Lowe took out his revolver and fired several shots along the side of the ship and the “wild beasts” instantly backed off.

  Lowe had to act quickly once again when a twist in the lowering ropes caused the stern of the boat to hit the water first while the bow was still pointed five feet upward. He clambered forward and quickly hacked through the ropes until the bow splashed down. Several women screamed but Lowe promptly told them to “shut up” as he hastened aft to put down the rudder. While Lifeboat 14 pulled away, the next starboard boat, number 12, reached the water with approximately forty on board. On the port side, Boat 9 was also making its descent, carrying another forty people, among them Ben Guggenheim’s mistress, Ninette Aubart, and her maid, and Elizabeth Lines, the woman who had overheard Ismay predicting the Titanic’s early arrival, and her daughter, Mary.

  It was now just after 1:30 a.m. Ten of the Titanic’s sixteen regular lifeboats had departed, carrying approximately 330 people—only a fraction of the 2,209 on board. To the passengers still on deck, the downward slope toward the bow was now very apparent. Yet many of them, the first-class men in particular, still believed that the ship would last till morning and that help would arrive before then. The lights of the nearby ship were still visible—Norris Williams was sure that he could even see the top of its mast above the glowing mast light. And a rumor had been circulating that the sister ship Olympic was on its way. In the Marconi Room, Jack Phillips had indeed heard from the Olympic, but her position was 500 miles to the east, which meant that she couldn’t arrive till the following night. The German steamer Frankfurt had been the first to respond to the CQD call, but she was more than 170 miles, and many hours, away. The Cunard liner Carpathia was roughly 58 miles from the Titanic and had sent a message saying they were coming as quickly as possible and expected to be there within four hours.

  Jaunty tunes continued to be played by the ship’s musicians and the music was heard by those in the lifeboats as well as those on deck. Arthur Peuchen heard “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” coming across the water during an awkward silence in Boat 6. The Canadian major had suggested that Quartermaster Hichens let one of the women steer so that he could join them at the oars. The quartermaster erupted at this: “I am in charge of this boat! It’s your job to keep quiet and row!” A little later Captain Smith’s voice was heard through a megaphone summoning Boat 6 to return for more passengers. Hichens ignored this, saying, “It’s our lives now, not theirs.” Many of the women protested, but a humiliated Peuchen remained silent. “I knew I was perfectly powerless,” he later recounted. “He had been swearing a good deal and was very disagreeable.”

  René Harris, too, heard the musicians playing “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” on deck and no doubt thought of how it had been her Harry who had first introduced the tune to New York. She and her “boy” had gone toward various lifeboats as they were being loaded but when told that her husband couldn’t accompany her, René had refused to board. Under her lifebelt she wore her fur coat with one arm dangling and beneath it a flannel blouse from which Harry had cut a sleeve to accommodate her broken arm. The Harrises had gone up on deck with the Futrelles at about twelve-thirty but had then become separated from them.

  At one-thirty, Edith Rosenbaum found herself on the boat deck feeling a little perplexed. She had at first waited in the lounge for about forty-five minutes and had then gone up to the boat deck with some other women who were later ordered down to A deck. She had just returned to the upper deck and was wondering if she should get into a lifeboat when a man seized her arm. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “All women should be off the ship!”

  As he pulled her toward a narrow stairway down to A deck, Edith recognized him as Bruce Ismay. At the bottom of the stairs, she was picked up by two crewmen who carried her to the rail of the open promenade and began to thrust her headfirst into Lifeboat 11. When both her velvet slippers fell off she insisted on being put down so she could retrieve them. One of the sailors then grabbed a toy pig she had been carrying under her arm and tossed it into the boat. Edith was very attached to the pig which played a Latin dance tune called “The Maxixe” when its tail was turned; her mother had bought it for her as a good-luck mascot after her car accident. She was eager to retrieve it but climbing into the boat in a silk dress that had a narrow skirt draped to one side was going to be awkward. Seeing her dilemma, a shipboard acquaintance named Philipp Mock stepped forward and gallantly got down on one knee. “Put one foot on my knee, and your arm around my neck,” he instructed, “and from there you can jump in.” Once Edith was safely on board, Mock joined her and took a seat near his married sister Emma Schabert. Edith found her toy pig lying on the floor; it had two broken legs but could still play “The Maxixe.”

  Edith’s boat reached the water at one-forty, just as the two boats from the neighboring davits, Lifeboats 13 and 15, began to come down the side. The London schoolteacher Lawrence Beesley had been allowed into Boat 13, and the crewman in charge was Leading Stoker Fred Barrett, who had twice escaped from flooding boiler rooms that evening—once after the collision and a second time while working the pumps. As his boatload of fifty people made its descent, Barrett was once again faced with gushing water—this time from the condenser exhaust that was spouting from the hull just above the waterline. He shouted up for the lowering to stop while Washington Dodge, a doctor from San Francisco, and two crewmen hunted for the oars, which turned out to be lashed to the seats, with passengers sitting on them. Once the oars were retrieved, Dodge and a few others were able to maneuver the boat out and away from the surging exhaust stream. But the force of it pushed the lifeboat backward until the lowering lines drew taut. The crewmen struggled to free the pulleys at the bow and stern of the boat but the tightened ropes made this difficult. Suddenly, Lifeboat 15 was seen coming down directly on top of them. Cries of “Stop! Stop!” went unheard and soon the keel of Boat 15 was so close that Lawrence Beesley and a stoker in the bow of Boat 13 stood up and tried to push it away with their hands. Fred Barrett jumped toward the ropes at the stern with a knife while another crewman did the same in the bow. To shouts of “One! Two!” they hacked through the lines and freed the boat just as Lifeboat 15 splashed down beside them.

  While Boat 13 rowed away, Fred Barrett looked back at the sinking liner with its shining portholes reflected on the calm, black sea and thought that the ship looked like a “great lighted theatre.” Yet the water lapping at the bow railing made it very clear that this maritime drama was now entering its final act. On the boat deck all but three of the sixteen davits stood empty. The second emergency cutter, Lifeboat 2, was ready for loading on the portside bow but a crowd of stokers had already crawled over the railing into it.

  An illustration of Boat 15 coming down on top of Boat 13 (photo credit 1.8)

  “How many of the crew are in that boat?” shouted Captain Smith through a megaphone. “Get out of there, every man of you!”

  Mahala Douglas then saw a solid row of men sheepishly crawl out of the boat while Chief Officer Wilde bellowed th
at they were all “damned cowards” who should be thrown overboard.

  As the call went up for women and children to enter, Mrs. Douglas asked her husband, Walter, to come with her but he refused, pointing to the women who were still on the deck. When the crewmen began gesturing for Mahala to board, she turned to her husband and begged him to come with her but he replied, “No, I must be a gentleman,” and turned away. Seeing Archie Butt and Clarence Moore standing nearby, she called out, “Walter, when you come, come with Major Butt and Mr. Moore because they are big strong fellows. They will surely make it.” Mahala also spotted Edgar Meyer and Arthur Ryerson in the crowd, and Frank Millet was almost certainly there, too, helping usher women toward the boats as he and his friends had done for most of the last hour. As the last boats were filled, Thomas Andrews was also busy urging women to board: “Ladies, you must get in at once,” he was overheard saying. “There is not a minute to lose. You cannot pick and choose your boat. Don’t hesitate, get in, get in!”

  When no more women came forward for Lifeboat 2, the “Lower Away” order was given at one-forty-five. Austrian steerage passenger Anton Kink watched as his weeping wife and four-year-old daughter cried out for him to come with them. As the boat began its descent the black-bearded Kink made a sudden dash and jumped in. Mahala Douglas felt the boat shake as Kink settled down next to his wife and child. She was sitting on the floor in front of Fourth Officer Boxhall, who was at the stern. An officer called down for Boxhall to row over to the starboard side to pick up more passengers since there was room for up to fifteen more in the boat. As they pulled around past the liner’s nearly submerged bow, the fourth officer put Mahala Douglas at the tiller while he helped out with an oar. On arriving on the starboard side, Boxhall thought he sensed the lifeboat being pulled toward the ship, and, fearing the dreaded suction, ordered it to be rowed away.

  Mahala Douglas (photo credit 1.60)

  On the slanting deck, crewmen then began lifting two of the Engelhardt collapsible lifeboats, numbered C and D, into the two forward-most davits, which had held Boats 1 and 2. The wooden-hulled collapsible boats had canvas sides that could be raised and clipped into place. In the Marconi Room, meanwhile, Jack Phillips had been steadily working the key on his wireless transmitter while Harold Bride wrote up the log and took messages to the captain. Other ships, including the Baltic and the Virginian, had responded to the distress call but the Carpathia remained the nearest ship of those that had responded. Phillips could already feel the wireless signal growing weaker when Captain Smith came in to say that the engine rooms were filling with water and that the electricity might not last much longer. At one-forty-five, Phillips sent his final message to the Carpathia: Come as quickly as possible. Engine rooms filling up to the boilers.

  Shortly after this, the last of the Titanic’s rockets shot into the air and descended, emitting loud reports that sounded like cannon fire. It seemed astonishing to the Titanic’s senior officers that the nearby mystery ship would not both see and hear these rockets over a calm sea on such a clear night. “She cannot help but see those signals and must steam over and pick everyone up,” Lightoller had said time and again to reassure anxious passengers. Now he had stopped saying it. On the steamer Californian, which is estimated to have been anywhere from eleven to twenty miles away, eight rockets were sighted but none were heard. A recent study has revealed that the unusually flat sea that night would have acted like a mirror that reflected and thus deadened the sound, making it inaudible beyond five to six nautical miles. Yet the rockets were definitely seen if not heard by the Californian, and the fact that its captain, Stanley Lord, did not wake the ship’s wireless operator to find out why a ship was firing rockets in the middle of the night remains one of the most haunting “if only’s” of the Titanic story.

  At approximately one-forty, Lightoller heard that Lifeboat 4, the boat he had lowered to A deck more than an hour before, was, at last, ready for boarding. A key had been found to unlock the promenade windows but a wooden spar protruded just below the windows and had to be chopped away. While this was being done, a contingent of the Titanic’s most prominent passengers—Astors, Wideners, Thayers, Carters, and Ryersons—had been kept waiting, first on A deck, then in the staircase foyer, and now on the boat deck. Emily Ryerson described them as “quite a group of people we knew” and noted that “all were very quiet and self-possessed.” Yet when the order came that they were to return to A deck, an exasperated Marian Thayer snapped, “Just tell us where to go and we will follow! You ordered us up here and now you’re sending us back!”

  The Astor party joined the Thayers and the other Main Liners as they trooped down the narrow iron steps to A deck. John Jacob Astor had taken Madeleine into the gymnasium earlier to keep her warm and they had sat together on the exercise machines. He was feeling particularly protective of her since she had been feeling ill all afternoon. When they had first gone up to A deck together after midnight, Astor had sent his valet back to fetch a warmer dress and a fur coat for her, and she was seen being dressed by her maid while sitting in a steamer chair. Astor had also made sure that Madeleine’s pearls, engagement ring, and a few other valuable baubles were retrieved from her jewel case.

  Madeleine Astor (photo credit 1.78)

  On A deck Lightoller stood on a ramp made of steamer chairs that led up to the opened windows beside Lifeboat 4. Colonel Gracie, who had been helping shepherd women into boats from the promenade, gently assisted Madeleine Astor toward Lightoller. After the second officer had placed her in the boat, Astor leaned through a nearby open window and asked Lightoller if he could accompany his wife on account of her “delicate condition.” When the second officer refused, Astor asked for the number of the boat and then tossed his gloves to Madeleine. As Emily Ryerson approached the boat with her two daughters and son Jack, Lightoller said, “That boy can’t go!”

  “Of course, that boy goes with his mother,” Arthur Ryerson insisted. “He is only thirteen!”

  “Very well,” Lightoller was heard to mutter, “but no more boys.” On hearing this, Lucile Carter put her large hat on her eleven-year-old son’s head and there was no protest as he entered Boat 4 with his mother and sister. Meanwhile, up on the boat deck, Lifeboat 10 was also being loaded. Winnipeg real-estate mogul Mark Fortune stood by it with his nineteen-year-old son, Charles, saying good-bye to his wife, Mary, and their three daughters. He was wearing his massive buffalo coat, having finally found a use for what had been a family joke during their Mediterranean holiday. Alice and Mabel Fortune pulled jewelry out of their pockets and gave it to their brother for safekeeping. “Look after Father, Charles,” they called out, still smiling over the sight of Papa in his ungainly prairie coat.

  Also seeing his family off in Boat 10 was Bertram Dean, a London pub owner who was emigrating to Wichita, Kansas, to open a tobacconist’s shop. His wife, Eva, held their nine-week-old daughter, Millvina, in her arms, while two-year-old Bertram sat beside her. Other children were being grabbed and tossed into the boat with particular gusto by the Titanic’s chief baker, Charles Joughin, who was breathing whiskey-scented exhalations into the night air. Earlier, when he heard that the lifeboats were being uncovered, Joughin had mustered his thirteen assistants and filled their arms with loaves of bread to provision the boats. As the white-clad bakers processed up to the boat deck, it reminded Edith Rosenbaum of a festive parade she had once seen in Nice.

  Once the bread was piled on the deck, Joughin thought that the occasion called for a drink, and so he had repaired to his cabin for a warming tipple. As the night went on, he had periodically stopped by for another nip or three. As he stood by Lifeboat 10 at one-forty-five, feeling well fortified from the cold, Joughin saw a woman in a black dress approach hesitantly, clearly nervous about having to jump across a gap of several feet, caused by the ship having developed a list to port. When at last she decided to jump, the woman screamed and fell headfirst between the ship and the boat. Instantly, Steward William Burke caught her by the
ankles, saving her from a fifty-foot plunge into the sea. Several men on A deck then grabbed her shoulders and pulled the panicked woman down to the promenade as the boat began its descent. Whether she then got into another boat is unknown.

  As he watched what seemed to be the last boat departing, the Titanic’s only Japanese passenger, Masabumi Hosono, a forty-two-year-old civil servant from Tokyo, thought of his wife and children and felt a strong urge to survive, though he did not want to do anything that would bring him disgrace. But when he saw a man jump from A deck into the lowering boat, Hosono leapt as well. Soon he and the other jumper, an Armenian named Neshan Krekorian, lay huddled together on the floor under the bow of Lifeboat 10, which now held fifty-seven people.

  Boat 4 had also reached the water by this time, and Madeleine Astor could hear their Airedale, Kitty, barking from above. When she looked up as the boat pulled away, she saw the tall, stooping figure of her husband standing by the rail on the boat deck with Kitty beside him. It had taken the boat only a few minutes to reach the water since the sea was now only twenty feet below A deck. Boat 4 was then rowed aft since they had been ordered to pick up more men from an open gangway door near the stern. Emily Ryerson was shocked when she looked into the brightly lit windows and saw water washing around the legs of carved wooden bedsteads in the B-deck staterooms. From inside the ship came cracking noises that sounded like breaking china. They rowed past barrels, steamer chairs, and even doors that were being thrown down from above. There was no open gangway door to be found by the stern, but a group of stokers on the aft boat deck were watching the lifeboat’s approach with interest. Two of them grabbed the lines hanging from an empty davit and slid down, the ropes burning their hands as they went. One made it into the boat; the other fell in the water and was quickly picked up.