Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  When the order to “provision boats,” or fill them with food, reached him, Joughin instructed the 13 bakers who worked under him to grab as much bread as they could from the kitchens and deliver it to the lifeboats. After seeing that this had been done, “I went down to my room for a drink,” he told the British government inquiry investigating the sinking of the Titanic. For members of the crew, drinking alcohol was forbidden, but Joughin had a bottle of whiskey hidden in his room. Why let it go to waste?

  READY OR NOT

  At about 12:30 a.m., Joughin finished drinking and went up to the Boat Deck, where women and children were being loaded into the lifeboats. He was assigned to Lifeboat 10 on the port side aft, or to the rear of the ship, so that’s where he went. To prevent panic, the passengers had not been told that the ship was sinking, or that there were only enough lifeboats for about half of the approximately 2,200 people on board. Many of the women and children did not understand the urgency of the situation and, understandably, were reluctant to leave the safety of the “unsinkable” Titanic and climb into the lifeboats to be lowered down the side of the ship into the sea. The fact that they were being ordered to do so without their men coming along with them made them even more resistant.

  When persuasion no longer worked, Joughin and other crewmembers resorted to force, as he testified to the British inquiry:

  We got [Lifeboat 10] about half full, and then we had difficulty in finding ladies for it. They ran away from the boat and said they were safer where they were…I myself and three or four other chaps went on the next deck and forcibly brought up women and children…We threw them in…Eventually it was filled—pretty well filled anyway.

  Don’t hold your breath: It’s possible to inflate a balloon with your ear.

  Joughin was assigned to be the captain of Lifeboat 10. But he was a baker, not a sailor, and when he saw that three members of the crew were already in the boat, he gave up his spot and remained aboard the Titanic. “It would have set a bad example if I had jumped into the boat. None of the men felt inclined to get into the boat,” he testified.

  JUST A DROP

  By now it was about 1:20 a.m., and the Titanic had only an hour left. Joughin made another trip down to his cabin and drank some more whisky. He initially claimed he had just “a drop of liqueur,” but under further questioning he admitted to drinking “a tumbler, half-full” of “spirits”—whisky. Half a tumbler may have been as much as a fifth of whisky or more; added to what he’d had to drink earlier, it was probably enough to get him good and drunk.

  Joughin remained in his cabin for about 25 minutes, until the seawater flooding into his cabin was up to his ankles. No word on whether the alcohol in his system had anything to do with it, but Joughin didn’t understand where the water had come from, and he wasn’t particularly concerned about it, either. “If it had been higher I should have thought something about it, but under the circumstances I thought it might have been a pipe burst,” he testified.

  THE CHAIR MAN

  At about 1:45 a.m., Joughin stumbled out of his cabin and made his way back up to the Boat Deck. There he saw that all of the lifeboats (except for the collapsible boats) were down and away. So he headed down to the promenade on B Deck, and began throwing deck chairs overboard so that people in the water could use them as flotation devices.

  Joughin estimated that he threw about 50 deck chairs overboard, which wore him out and made him thirsty. So he made his way to the pantry on the starboard side of A Deck and got a drink of water. There he heard a crash “as if something had buckled… as if the iron was parting,” followed by the sound of people on the Boat Deck above him rushing toward the rear, or stern, of the ship. The crashing noise he heard may have been the sound of the Titanic breaking in half at the middle, separating the stern from the bow.

  His thirst quenched, Joughin went up to the Boat Deck and followed the crowd to the stern of the ship. He made it as far as the Well Deck when the Titanic suddenly started listing toward the port side, knocking everyone over—everyone, that is, except Joughin. He kept his balance, even as the list became so great that the Titanic was practically laying on its port side, with the stern rising high into the air. No longer able to stand on the deck, Joughin clambered over the side of the ship onto the hull. Holding onto the ship’s rail, he climbed upward along the hull to the stern of the ship, which had risen 150 feet out of the water and was now nearly vertical.

  Rapper Tupac Shakur died in 1996 and was cremated. His friends claim they smoked his cremains….

  FINAL DESCENT

  There, standing at the highest point on the Titanic’s stern like a man on a mountaintop, Joughin had just enough time to tighten the straps on his life preserver and check his watch—it was 2:15 a.m.—before the ship began its final descent into the sea. He rode the stern all the way down, as if it were a slow-moving elevator, then simply stepped off into the water as the Titanic slipped gently beneath the waves. “I do not believe my head went under the water at all. It may have been wetted, but no more,” he testified at the inquiry.

  He rode the stern all the way down, as if it were a slow-moving elevator.

  Though a precise count is not possible due to discrepancies on the passenger list, only about 700 of the 2,200 passengers and crew aboard the Titanic made it into the lifeboats before the ship went down. The rest, some 1,500 people, were now floating in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.

  It’s estimated that the temperature of the water that night was 28°F. The sudden shock of immersion in water that cold—the Titanic’s second officer, Charles Lightoller, described the sensation as like being stabbed by “a thousand knives”—kills some people in as little as a minute or two. Nearly everyone dies from hypothermia within 30 minutes, as their core body temperature drops so low (below 80°F) that their heart begins to beat irregularly, causing blood flow to slow or stop altogether, resulting in death. That is precisely what happened to the people in the water: with the exception of the dozen or so people who were pulled into lifeboats, nearly everyone in the water was dead within 30 minutes. Nearly everyone, but not Charles Joughin.

  IRON MAN

  After Joughin went into the water, he was unable to see any lifeboats nearby, so he started paddling around in no particular direction, just trying to keep afloat. It was “no trick at all,” he later told Walter Lord, author of A Night to Remember, a best-selling account of the Titanic disaster published in 1955.

  Joughin, who seemed unaffected by the cold, paddled from 2:20 a.m. until the first light of dawn, sometime around 4:00 a.m., when he saw what looked like a large piece of floating wreckage in the distance and swam toward it. The “wreckage” turned out to be Collapsible Boat B, which was overturned. Some 30 survivors were standing on it in two columns, swaying back and forth to counteract the rocking motion of the waves and keep the boat level. The lifeboat, which had a wooden floor and canvas sides, was submerged and slowly sinking under the weight of so many people. The water was up to their knees already, and there was no room for Joughin to climb aboard. So he paddled around to the other side, where a cook named Isaac Maynard recognized Joughin and held his hand to keep him from drifting away.

  …(In his song “Black Jesuz,” he raps that one of his “last wishes” is for his friends to “smoke my ashes.”)

  Joughin floated alongside Collapsible Boat B for about half an hour until Lifeboat 12 floated into view. When it came within 50 yards, someone on it yelled that they had room for ten more people. On hearing this, Joughin let go of Maynard’s hand and swam the 50 yards to Lifeboat 12, this after floating in the icy water for nearly two and a half hours—water so cold that it had killed 1,500 other people in minutes.

  Maybe the alcohol was finally starting to wear off, or maybe Joughin had just gone numb after so much time in the water, but it wasn’t until he was pulled into the lifeboat that he really felt a chill. “I felt colder…after I got in the lifeboat,” he told the British inquiry.

  Investigators
looking into the Titanic sinking wondered if drunkenness was what kept Joughin alive.

  ALL ABOARD

  Meanwhile, the RMS Carpathia had been steaming toward the Titanic’s last known position since picking up its distress signals shortly after midnight. It arrived in the area at about 4:00 a.m. and began picking up survivors, who were scattered over a wide area in 19 different lifeboats. (By now everyone standing on Collapsible Boat B had been transferred to Lifeboat 12 or Lifeboat 4.) Joughin and the others aboard Lifeboat 12 were the last to be picked up; they were taken aboard the Carpathia at about 8:15 a.m. By then his feet were so swollen that he had to climb the ladder up the side of the Carpathia’s hull on his knees.

  Even in 1912, the investigators looking into the Titanic sinking wondered if drunkenness was what kept Joughin alive. “My suggestion is…I think his getting a drink had a lot to do with saving his life,” an examiner named Mr. Cotter stated during the inquiry.

  Mr. Cotter may have been right: ordinarily, alcohol increases the rate that a person succumbs to hypothermia, because it causes blood vessels to dilate, allowing warm blood to flow away from the vital organs where the heat is needed most. This can cause a person’s body temperature to drop more quickly, speeding death. But that’s in cold air. In cold water, the shock of sudden immersion may cause the blood vessels to constrict sharply, overwhelming the dilation effect of the alcohol and keeping body heat near the vital organs, prolonging life.

  JUST RELAX

  Add to that the fact that alcohol is a depressant that slows the activity of the central nervous system, and it’s possible that the whisky may have prevented Joughin’s body from overreacting to the physical stress of sudden immersion in icy-cold water. Two common responses to such immersion are involuntary gasping and hyperventilation, which can cause a person to inhale water and drown. Joughin didn’t experience either of these reactions, perhaps because the alcohol had depressed his central nervous system.

  9,000 years ago, an ear of corn was about one-tenth the size it is today.

  Being drunk may have also made it harder for Joughin to feel the cold, while also giving him “liquid courage.” Thrashing around the water in a panic can speed the rate at which heat leaves the body, but Joughin didn’t panic; he paddled calmly for more than two hours until he was finally pulled into Lifeboat 12.

  (If Joughin was saved by drunkenness, he’s got lots of company. In one 2012 study of shooting and stabbing patients admitted to Illinois trauma centers, researchers found that the likelihood of a patient surviving their injuries was directly proportional to the level of alcohol in their bloodstream. The drunkest patients were nearly 50 percent more likely to survive their injuries than patients who were sober when they were shot or stabbed.)

  BACK TO WORK

  Charles Joughin survived the sinking of the Titanic with little to no lasting effect on his health, either physical or psychological. And he wasn’t fired from the White Star Line, even though drinking alcohol aboard the Titanic was a fireable offense. He continued working on ships until his retirement in 1944. According to his obituary, he was aboard the SS Oregon when it sank, but at least three ships by that name sank during Joughin’s career, and it’s not clear which one he was on (or how much he drank). He lived just long enough to be interviewed by Walter Lord for A Night to Remember, then passed away the following year at the age of 78.

  The next time you watch James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic, look for the scene near the end where Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) are holding onto the stern rail just before the ship goes down. Rose looks over at a man with a mustache who’s dressed all in white, and he looks back at her. That’s Joughin, played by Liam Tuohy. Just as in real life, he rides the Titanic all the way into the water.

  Joughin also appears in another scene three minutes earlier, again at the stern rail, this time just after the stern has risen up out of the water. In this scene he pulls a flask out of his pocket and takes a big swig. Other than a few other scenes where he’s in the panicked crowd as it surges toward the stern, that’s all you see of him. If you want to see more, have a look at the 1958 film A Night to Remember, based on Lord’s book. That film is considered a more accurate version of events, and in it Joughin gets a lot more screen time. You even get to see him in his cabin, enjoying his bottle of whisky.

  For another story related to the Titanic that’s mostly forgotten today, paddle over to “Sunk by the Titanic” on page 495.

  Random Fact: More time elapsed between when Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex lived than when Tyrannosaurus rex died out and human beings came along.

  First European colony in America: San Miguel de Gualdape, near Georgetown, SC. It failed after three months (1526).

  WEIRD DEATHS

  When you gotta go, you gotta go…even if it’s a really, really strange way to go.

  DEATH BY MAGNETS

  In 2018 Rajesh Maru, 32, went to Nair Hospital in Mumbai, India, and died there…but not the way people usually die at a hospital, like from an illness or a traffic accident. No, Maru was visiting a relative who was at the hospital for an MRI scan, and a hospital employee asked him to bring the relation’s oxygen tank into the MRI room. That’s when the MRI machine’s powerful magnetic field pulled in the metal oxygen tank along with Maru, who was holding it. His hand got pinned between the MRI machine and the oxygen cylinder, opening its valve. Maru breathed in a fatally high dose of oxygen and died instantly of a collapsed lung.

  DEATH BY ATTACK FISH

  In 2016 a Tanzanian fisherman named Robert Mwaijega was doing what he’d done hundreds of times before: standing on the riverside, fishing for a native species known locally as perege. Mwaijega and his friends had caught several, placing them into a plastic basin and letting them flop around until they died. One small fish flopped extremely hard, sending it high up into the air, and then down, right into Mwaijega’s mouth. From there it wiggled down the man’s throat and into his chest, where it became lodged, cutting off Mwaijega’s air flow. He died at a hospital before doctors could surgically remove the fish.

  DEATH BY ESCALATOR

  Xiang Liujuan was shopping at a mall with her two-year-old son in the Chinese province of Hubei one day in 2015. She was riding an ascending escalator when the paneling that covered the landing area at the top of the machine suddenly broke away, exposing the grinding machinery beneath. There was no way Xiang could get off the escalator, but she thought fast and tossed her toddler to a mall employee…as she was sucked into the escalator’s workings. Evidently, a maintenance crew had recently worked on the escalator but hadn’t secured the floor plate properly.

  DEATH BY WHIPPED CREAM

  Rebecca Burger was a 33-year-old French lifestyle blogger who demonstrated the results of her exercise and diet tips as an online model—her Instagram account had more than 160,000 followers by early 2017. That’s when Burger died. Cause of death: a whipped-cream dispenser. Burger was using her Ard’Time siphon de cuisine when a nitrous oxide capsule exploded, flew out of the device, and struck her in the chest so hard that she went into cardiac arrest and died the next day.

  Workers at Sweden’s Epicenter Co. can be implanted with microchips that open doors and buy drinks at the company store.

  DEATH BY DEAD SNAKE

  Two things you might not have known about cobras:

  1)People eat them. Cobra flesh soup is a traditional dish in some Asian countries, particularly China.

  2)Like most snakes, a cobra can bite and spread its venom even after it has been dead for as long as an hour.

  Peng Fan, a chef in Foshan, China, definitely didn’t know fact # 2. In 2014 he was working in a restaurant chopping up an Indochinese spitting cobra for soup, and had set its head aside. About 20 minutes later, he grabbed the head to throw it in the garbage…and it bit him. Diners heard screams coming from the kitchen as Peng Fan died from the fast-acting venom.

  6 JOKES THAT MIGHT GET YOU FIRED

  Q: How is a workplace like
a septic tank?

  A: The biggest lumps rise to the top.

  Q: Why’s it so hard to work at McDonald’s?

  A: Because the boss is a clown.

  Q: What’s the difference between a boss and the pope?

  A: The pope only wants you to kiss his ring.

  Q: How many bosses does it take to change a lightbulb?

  A: Why don’t you think about it, and we’ll circle around later with an action plan at tomorrow’s meeting?

  Q: Why is Christmas like a day at work?

  A: You do all the work and some guy in a suit takes all the credit.

  Q: What do a boss and a bottle of beer have in common?

  A: Both are empty from the neck up.

  Pointed up, a horseshoe over your door supposedly catches luck. Pointed down, it pours luck on those who enter.

  MOUTHING OFF

  CELEBRITY ADVICE?

  As the existential philosopher Eddie Murphy once said, “The advice I would give to someone is to not take anyone’s advice.”

  “Talk to your children, at least once a week. if you’ve got time, do it two or three times a week.”

  —Will Ferrell

  “IF YOU WANT TO BE A ROCK STAR, LOOK OUT THE WINDOW, STARE AT THE CLOUDS, AMD DO LOUD FARTS.”