Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  Charles Lightoller scrambled toward the wheelhouse roof and dived into the sea. The icy water felt as if a thousand knives were being driven into his body. On surfacing, he saw the crow’s nest on the foremast standing straight ahead of him. His first instinct was to swim toward it, but he quickly realized the folly of clinging to any part of the ship. As he started to swim away to starboard he was suddenly thrown against a ventilator shaft by a rush of water pouring down into it. He knew that the shaft went straight down to a stokehold and that the flimsy wire grating over it was all that stood between him and a hundred-foot drop. Yet each time he tried to struggle free he was pulled back against the grating. He began to feel himself drowning and sensed he had only minutes to live. Suddenly, a blast of hot air shot up the shaft and blew him free. He came to the surface gasping for air but was soon pulled down again by another inrush of water. When he finally managed to struggle away he found himself alongside overturned Collapsible B. A number of men were clinging to its back but the exhausted Lightoller could only grasp a piece of rope and float alongside it. Around him, many others floundered in the water, some swimming, others drowning, in what he called “an utter nightmare of both sight and sound.”

  As the Titanic’s bow sank lower, Lightoller could see the stern rising out of the water, “piling the people into helpless heaps around the steep decks, and by the score into the icy water.” He saw the mooring cables to the first funnel strain and then snap, sending the giant funnel crashing down in a shower of sparks and soot. The cable held on slightly longer on the starboard side, which pulled the funnel in that direction, causing it to come down among scores of swimmers, missing Lightoller only by inches. Norris Williams was sure that his father had been killed by it. The funnel’s fall also caused a wave that pushed overturned Collapsible B away from the ship, with Lightoller still holding on to its rope.

  Jack Thayer (photo credit 1.88)

  Only moments after he came to the surface, Jack Thayer saw the forward funnel crash down about fifteen feet away from him. There was no sign of Milton Long, who had jumped from the rail about five seconds before him. Long had slid down the side of the hull while Thayer had jumped clear, saving his life by so doing. Jack looked back at the ship and saw it surrounded by a red glare. The stern was now standing at about a thirty-degree angle with light still blazing from its portholes. To Harold Bride, who was also in the water, it looked like a duck going down for a dive. The lights then blinked once and went out. Jack Thayer could hear the rumble and roar of what he thought must be the engines and boilers being torn from their beds. For Hugh Woolner in Collapsible D, the sound was like a thousand tons of rocks tumbling down a metal chute. To others in the lifeboats it sounded like explosions and many assumed that the boilers were blowing up.

  But what they heard was actually the ship being wrenched apart. Unable to bear the strain, the ship broke in two just aft of the third funnel. An unnamed passenger later told a newspaper that he felt the ship shudder beneath his feet. “It was as though someone had shouted ‘The ship is sinking!’ ” he recalled. Then he claimed that he, Archie Butt, and Clarence Moore jumped together into the sea. When the severed bow section began its plunge, Archibald Gracie found himself swirling downward within a whirlpool. He grabbed hold of the railing at the edge of the roof and held on, even as it pulled him down farther. Then it occurred to Gracie that he might be boiled alive by scalding water pouring up from the boilers. This notion caused him to let go of the railing and to kick upward as hard as he could. As he approached the surface, broken pieces of wood were ascending around him and he grabbed hold of a small plank. When his head broke the water Gracie saw a gray vapor over the sea and a mass of tangled wreckage. The Titanic was nowhere to be seen. He spied a wooden crate floating in some debris and paddled toward it. Just beyond it there was a capsized boat with men on its back and he swam over and pulled himself aboard.

  The boat was overturned Collapsible B, and Jack Thayer was one of those already standing on it. A wave from the sinking bow section had washed him up against it, and from its back he had had a clear view of the Titanic’s last moments. “The stern then seemed to rise in the air,” he recalled, “and stopped at about an angle of sixty degrees. It seemed to hold there for a time and then with a hissing sound it shot right down out of sight with people jumping from the stern.” Norris Williams looked up from the water and saw the three propellers and rudder outlined against the sky over his head. He then watched as the stern pivoted before it went down with seemingly no suction and very little noise. Chief Baker Joughin also claimed there was no suction. Standing right at the stern railing by the flagpole, he said, he rode it down like an elevator and then paddled away without getting his hair wet.

  “She’s gone,” Charles Lightoller heard those around him on the overturned boat murmur like a benediction. “She’s gone, lads,” a crewman in Boat 3 echoed. “Row like hell or we’ll get the devil of a swell.” In the same boat an English businessman remembered that “we raised our hats, bowed our heads and nobody spoke for some minutes.” In Boat 5, Third Officer Pitman looked at his watch and noted that it was 2:20 a.m. May Futrelle heard a Frenchwoman in her boat begin to wail but May herself didn’t cry, she just felt dead. In Collapsible C, Bruce Ismay couldn’t bear to watch and sat with his back turned to the sinking liner. Lucy Duff Gordon raised herself from a seasick stupor to see the black silhouette disappear in one downward rush.

  Then, from across the water there came what Archibald Gracie called “the most horrible sounds ever heard by mortal man.” To Hugh Woolner, it was “the most fearful and bloodcurdling wail,” to René Harris it was “a sound … as will haunt one all one’s life and into eternity.” Henry Harper called it “a wild maniacal chorus” and concluded that many of the people must have gone mad as they felt the ship go down. To Edith Rosenbaum it sounded like cheering, and she recalled that a crewman in her boat encouraged them to cheer as well since it meant that all on board had gotten into lifeboats.

  William Sloper was under no illusion as to the meaning of the wailing chorus. He remembered that whenever a light was lit in one of the lifeboats, it would be seen by the hundreds in the water and “immediately their massed voices would rise and fall in a tremendous wailing crescendo which reverberated off into the starlit darkness of the silent night.” Lawrence Beesley thought that the cries carried with them “every possible emotion of human fear, despair, agony, fierce resentment and blind anger, mingled—I am certain of this—with notes of infinite surprise, as though each one were saying, ‘How is it possible that this awful thing is happening to me? That I should be caught in this death trap?’ ” These “notes of infinite surprise” may have emanated most profoundly from the Gilded Age masters of the universe—Astor, Widener, Thayer, Guggenheim, Douglas, Moore, Hays, and others—who suddenly found themselves immersed in the freezing water. People used to die in shipwrecks, but this was the twentieth century. This sort of thing didn’t happen any longer, particularly not to people such as them.

  Vigorous activity in cold water, it is now known, only intensifies the effects of hypothermia. Those who tried to swim without lifejackets out to boats were therefore likely among the first to perish. Archie Butt may have been one of them. An unnamed stoker who made it to Collapsible B later told a newspaper reporter that after he was helped aboard the overturned boat, “a man in the uniform of an army officer crawled onto the raft, but he stiffened out at once and died. We threw him overboard to make room for a living man.” If this indeed is how Archie Butt died, then for him the end came fairly quickly. It seems sadly appropriate that a man who led such a “rushing life” ended it in one final burst of frenzied exertion. His body then disappeared beneath the black surface of the water, to descend in a slow drift to the ocean floor over two miles below.

  For Frank Millet, death took its time, perhaps up to half an hour or longer, as he shivered under a brilliant canopy of stars, more beautiful than any he had seen in Byzantine mosaics or Venetian fresco
es, impossible to ever capture in paint. For him, there may have moments for regret, reflection, or even insight before mental confusion fogged his consciousness and cardiac and respiratory failure set in. His body was recovered ten days later, standing upright in a cork lifejacket, his white tie visible beneath the collar of his black overcoat. His face was peaceful and there were no signs of struggle on his body.

  To those in the lifeboats, it seemed as if the wails of the dying would never end. As time passed it became a monotone chant, what Helen Candee called a “a heavy moan as of one being, from whom final agony forces a single sound.” It reminded Jack Thayer of the high-pitched hum of insects on a summer’s evening. René Harris thought of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Slowly, slowly the sound grew weaker, until it finally died away into the deathly stillness of the north Atlantic night.

  (photo credit 1.56)

  Appeal to the officer not to go back,” a woman in Boat 5 implored Steward Henry Etches. “Why should we lose all of our lives in a useless attempt to save those from the ship?” Others voiced their agreement, and as the protests mounted, Third Officer Pitman gave in and ordered that Boat 5 be turned away from the cries in the water. Similar scenes were enacted in many of the other lifeboats. Seaman Thomas Jones wanted Boat 8 to return, but when those at the oars refused, he announced, “If any of us are saved, remember I wanted to go back. I would rather drown with them than leave them,”

  The failure of all but two of the eighteen lifeboats to go to the aid of the dying remains another of the great “if only’s” of the Titanic story. Many of the boats were only half-full and, had they returned quickly, could have saved dozens of lives. In the Duff Gordons’ boat alone, there was room for twenty-eight more passengers. But in Boat 1, as in most of the lifeboats, the fear of being swamped by the panicked throng overruled all other instincts. “It would have been sheer madness to have returned,” harrumphed Hugh Woolner in Collapsible D, only recently pulled into a boat himself.

  To those who had left the Titanic in the early lifeboats, the cries in the water “came as a thunderbolt, unexpected, inconceivable,” Lawrence Beesley later recalled. But Beesley also noted that “no-one in any of the boats … can have escaped the paralyzing shock of knowing that so short a distance away a tragedy, unbelievable in its magnitude, was being enacted.” Yet there were some in the lifeboats who simply could not believe that any cabin-class passengers had been left behind. “I thought it was the steerage on rafts and that they were all hysterical,” claimed one first-class passenger. Mary Eloise Smith, an eighteen-year-old U.S. congressman’s daughter, thought that the cries were from “seamen or possibly steerage who had overslept, it not occurring to me that my husband and my friends were not saved.” Yet twenty-four-year-old Lucian Smith, whom Mary Eloise had married only two months earlier, was indeed one of those not saved.

  In Boat 4, most of the women realized that their husbands and sons could be among those struggling in the icy water, since they had waved good-bye to them only half an hour before. With Quartermaster Perkis at the tiller, Marian Thayer, Madeleine Astor, and Emily Ryerson and her younger daughter began rowing back determinedly, despite a few protests in their boat. Seven men were pulled into Boat 4, all of them crew or stewards. One passenger, the wife of a New York stockbroker, recognized her bedroom steward as he was hauled aboard. Two of the rescued men soon died, and several others lay moaning and delirious for most of the night.

  In Boat 14, Fifth Officer Lowe was quite certain that it would be “suicide” to row into the tumult and decided that he would wait until the crowd “thinned out” before returning. Lowe had taken charge of four other lifeboats and had ordered them tied together with Boat 14, about 150 yards away from the sinking liner. Daisy Minahan, the sister of the Wisconsin doctor who was one of those howling in the water, was less than impressed with the conduct of the young fifth officer. She claimed that Lowe had been making flippant remarks and swearing so much that he must have been drinking. When she and a few others begged him to transfer passengers and go back to rescue swimmers, he replied, “You ought to be damn glad you are here and have got your own life.” When Lowe at last began moving passengers into the other boats, he yelled at Daisy, “Jump, God damn you, jump!” earning her permanent enmity.

  But Lowe’s language was genteel compared to that of Quartermaster Hichens in Boat 6. When the horrifying cries came across the water, several passengers pleaded with Hichens to return, but the quartermaster refused, saying there would only be a lot of “stiffs” there. This upset a number of the women, but Arthur Peuchen could only say resignedly, “It is no use arguing with that man. It is best not to discuss matters with him.” While the major sat glumly at his oar in a lifeboat less than half-full, most of his shipboard coterie—Harry Molson; Hudson and Bess Allison and their two-year-old daughter, Loraine; Mark Fortune and his nineteen-year-old son; the bachelor trio known as “the Three Musketeers”; Charles Hays, his son-in-law, and his twenty-two-year old assistant—all either drowned or slowly froze to death.

  Fifth Officer Lowe (photo credit 1.57)

  Almost an hour had passed by the time Fifth Officer Lowe finally maneuvered Boat 14 into the wreckage. By then most of the wailing had subsided and only three or four men were rescued. One very large man, a first-class passenger named W. F. Hoyt, was pulled from the water bleeding from the nose and mouth and died shortly afterward. As they prepared to leave the scene, a floating door was suddenly spotted with what appeared to be a small Japanese man lashed to it. He looked frozen stiff and Lowe said, “What’s the use? He’s dead, likely, and if he isn’t there’s others better worth saving than a Jap.” Eventually Lowe relented and the man was pulled into the boat, where several women began rubbing his chest, hands, and feet. Within seconds he opened his eyes, said a few words that no one understood, and then stood up and stretched. He soon took an oar and began rowing so diligently that Lowe had to admit that he was ashamed of what he’d said about “the little blighter.” The rescued man was actually Chinese, one of eight Donaldson Line crewmen traveling in third class, four of whom had secreted themselves in the bow of Collapsible C.

  In the dark, Lowe did not catch sight of the twenty or more people who had taken refuge on the partly submerged Collapsible A, Norris Williams among them. As he clung to the collapsible’s gunwale, Norris felt his fur coat weighing him down and quickly shrugged it off. He then made his way into the boat and found that he was able to stand in it even though the water was waist high. Someone near the bow organized a head count which soon faltered when it came to those who didn’t understand English. It was then proposed that they put up the collapsible’s canvas sides and try to bail out the boat. A passenger next to Norris became enthusiastic about this idea and asked the man ahead of him if he could borrow his bowler hat for bailing. The man refused, insisting, to Norris’s bemusement, that without his hat he would catch cold in the night air. But any hopes of bailing were abandoned when after much pulling it was discovered that the supports for the sides were broken and the canvas shredded. After this, it seemed as if only God could help them and when someone suggested a prayer, they stood together in the water with bowed heads. One of the most devout of the shivering supplicants was Rhoda Abbott, a seamstress and Salvation Army soldier who had jumped from the deck with her two teenaged sons but had lost them in the chaos near the plunging bow.

  They prayed on the back of overturned Collapsible B as well. When the cries in the water died away, a crewman near the stern took a quick poll of the faiths of those around him and then led the group in the Lord’s Prayer. This heartened Archibald Gracie, who had been intimidated by the rough-looking men around him and had feared that he might receive “short shrift” if they decided the boat needed to be lightened. Gracie had averted his eyes as swimmers were fended off with language that, in his words, “grated on my sensibilities.” As Fireman Harry Senior approached the collapsible he was hit over the head with an oar but went around to the other side and climbed on. Baker
Charles Joughin was pushed off as he tried to board, but he, too, swam around the boat until he was recognized by one of the cooks, who reached out and clasped his arm. As Algernon Barkworth breaststroked toward the collapsible in Eton-trained style, someone shouted “Look out, you will swamp us!” but Barkworth crawled aboard anyway, dripping like a wet sheepdog in his fur coat. The Yorkshire justice of the peace became the third first-class passenger, along with Gracie and Jack Thayer, among the roughly twenty-eight men on the overturned collapsible. Wireless operator Harold Bride was crowded in near the stern, next to Jack Thayer, with someone sitting on his feet. The Irish bagpiper Eugene Daly was one of approximately six third-class passengers who had also crawled aboard. Baker Joughin claimed that he simply hung on to the boat from the water, insulated by the alcohol he had drunk. The other men kneeled or crouched on the slippery ribs of the collapsible’s hull, and a few used boards and an oar to paddle away from the wreckage.

  Approximately twenty-eight men found refuge on the back of overturned Collapsible B. It was later photographed by the crew of a ship from Halifax. (photo credit 1.87)

  Second Officer Lightoller soon took charge of the boat, much to Gracie’s relief. When the second officer learned that one of the Marconi men was on board, he asked Harold Bride what ships had replied to the distress calls. The junior wireless operator said that the Carpathia was the nearest one and that it should arrive within three hours. This raised everyone’s spirits and a crewman organized shouts of “Boat Ahoy! Boat Ahoy!” which reached peak volume when green flares were seen in the distance. These, however, were being lit by Fourth Officer Boxhall, who had taken a box of them into Boat 2. When the flares disappeared, Lightoller soon put a stop to the shouting.