Call Me Ismay (13 page)

“Who signed that?” asked Smith.

“It was signed 'Franklin.' This is a message I sent. I have not the date of it, but it was received by Mr. Franklin on April 17, 1912- '
Most desirable Titanic crew aboard Carpathia should be returned home earliest moment possible. Please send outfit of clothes, including shoes, for me. Have nothing of my own. Please reply. YAMSI.'
This is a message-”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Ismay,” Smith interrupted. “Have I understood you more than once to say 'YAMSI', right at the end of your communication?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What is the significance of that? What is its meaning?”

“That is my personal signature for private messages,” he replied, placing the notes down. “It is my surname spelled backwards.”

Smith stole a knowing glance at his colleagues before resuming. “You mean to say, sir, that you wished to
obscure
your name in a request for personal items?”

“I should- I should say, not only for this particular message, but for any correspondence of a personal nature,” Ismay, annoyed, fidgeted in his chair.

“Was this an deliberate attempt on your part to obfuscate your involvement, to somehow dodge your accountability in the wake of the disaster, then?”

“Certainly
not,
sir!” Ismay responded, punctuating his words with a tap of the walking stick he had been clinging to, his voice rising and the Conference Rooms' spectators beginning to stir once more. Ismay was slowly becoming a steaming cauldron of rage that threatened to overflow at any moment. As beads of sweat formed on his forehead, he focused on the Senator from Michigan, making his words more cutting as he undersold them in the form of a stern lecture. He removed his reading glasses. “Mr. Senator, sir. We the English would call this the proceedings of a star chamber. I should think the Americans would refer to it as a kangaroo court. While I have deemed it necessary to cooperate in any way that I can, I simply must protest the insinuations being made by this inquiry.”

“Insinuations can only be validated by your responses to them, Mr. Ismay,” Smith replied coolly.

“I- I should like to respond-” Ismay sputtered, “that my signature as described on these messages can be found on any number of communications sent or received by me in the past and is not unique to this particular exchange. Yamsi, Ismay- it's completely irrelevant. Call me simply Ismay, if you must.”

“Point taken,
Mr.
Ismay,” Senator Smith replied with a slight dose of sarcasm. “Please continue.”

Still fuming, Ismay placed his reading glasses back on, and resumed. “This is a message which Mr. Franklin dispatched to me on the 18th of April, 1912, and which I received when the
Carpathia
docked in New York: '
Concise Marconigram account of actual accident greatly needed for enlightenment public and ourselves. This most important. Franklin.'”

“What time was that?”

“It was sent by Mr. Franklin on the 18th of April-” Ismay carefully examined the message- “at 4:45 P.M.”

“That was the day you reached New York?”

“I received it, I presume, about 9 o'clock that night, when we were alongside the dock.” Ismay removed his glasses, folding them and placing them back into his coat. “Now, that is a copy of every message I sent and every message I received and I had absolutely no communication with any other ship or any shore station, or with anyone.”

Smith leaned back in his chair, silently motioning to two of his fellow Senators, Theodore Burton of Ohio and Duncan Fletcher of Florida. As they huddled in a private conference, a few lady spectators in feathered hats took the opportunity to open sack lunches they had brought along to the inquiry. Ismay sighed sadly, and reached out to the edge of his own table where he had stacked a few blank sheets of paper lifted from the press table. Despite the incessant burning and itching of his hands, which had suffered from a mild case of frostbite during the
Titanic's
sinking- and a recent strange aversion to anything with a blank, white surface, such as the papers that now lay before him- he felt compelled to somehow soothe his nerves. A man not given to emotionally revealing conversations, Ismay wasn't about to make any small talk with irritating White Star Line officials like Franklin or Sanderson or bored-looking bodyguards. Instead he took pen to paper, and began drawing, almost constantly for the duration of his questioning, a sketch of the White Star Line's flag. It was an emblem that had been a touchstone in his life, and for some reason, more now than ever, he
needed
the company's logo in his sight at all times. Focusing upon the details of the five-pointed star, filling the gaps where coloring would be with repetitive small strokes of black ink, he found stability, gentle remembrance, and yet... a feeling that some of his
own
questions about that fateful night were not being answered in his mind.

A single tap of Smith's gavel jarred him as the questioning suddenly resumed. “Mr. Ismay, as you had indicated earlier, when you were on the bridge with Captain Smith, after the accident- did he say anything to you about her condition at that time?”

“No, sir-” Ismay gave a small, frustrated sigh- “As I told you on Friday, when I went up to ask him what had happened, he told me we had struck an iceberg, and I asked him whether he thought the matter was serious, and he said he thought it was.”

“That was the first intimation you had?”

“Yes.”

“Did you hear any order given to call the passengers?”

“I did not, sir.”

“
Or any other alarm?”

“No, sir.”

“I think in my prior examination in New York, you said you entered a lifeboat from the A Deck?”

“From the Boat Deck, sir.”

“And that, at the time, there were no other persons around- no women, particularly?”

A deserted deck flashed through his mind's eye. “Absolutely none that I saw, sir.”

“Was that the last lifeboat or the last collapsible boat to leave?”

“It was the last collapsible boat that left- the starboard side- of the ship.”

“Was it filled to its capacity?”

“No, it was not.”

“It was not filled to its capacity?” Smith's disbelieving tone only added to the tenseness that threatened to overtake the Conference Room.

“No, sir.” Ismay's face reddened slightly.

“Do you know how many people were in it?”

“I believe that I already testified on this matter in New York, sir,” was Ismay's brittle response.

“Indeed, you did, Mr. Ismay,” Smith stated plainly. “And unless I am mistaken, I believe that in your prior examination, you stated that the lifeboat was practically full. Therefore, we will revisit the matter.” There was a substantial rumble of voices in the room. “Mr. Ismay, do you know how many people were in your lifeboat?”

His frustration mounting, Ismay leaned forward but restrained himself from raising his voice. “What more can I tell you, sir? I think there were about forty women in it, and some children. There was a child in arms. I think they were all third class passengers, so far as I could see...”

“At the time you entered it, did you say anything to Captain Smith about entering it?”

“No, sir, I did not.” Ismay's brief moment of emotional strength evaporated upon the senator's mention of E.J., and he sank back in his chair.  “I never saw the captain again.”

“Who, if anyone, told you to enter that lifeboat?”

“No one, sir.”

“Why did you enter it?”

Ismay froze, the tableau that had burned into the landscape under his eyelids refusing to dim: a deserted deck, a few cries in the distance, but otherwise an overwhelming sense of complete solitude on the deck of a ship that unquestionably had begun to founder.
“
Because there was room in the boat,” he replied, as if entering a plea. “She was being lowered away. I felt the ship was going down, and I got into the boat.”

More than a few spectators vocally disapproved of his statement, and Senator Smith seemed to deliberately let several seconds pass by before resuming. “Did you yourself see any icebergs at daybreak the following morning?”

“I should think I saw four or five icebergs when day broke on Monday morning.”

“How near the scene of the
Titanic
disaster?”

“I could not tell where she went down,” Ismay replied, cringing slightly. “We were some distance away from it.”

“Not desiring to be impertinent at all, Mr. Ismay,” Smith intoned, appearing to ingratiatingly lay a trap for his witness, “but in order that I may not be charged with omitting to do my duty, I would like to know where you went after you boarded the
Carpathia
and how you happened to go there?”

“Mr. Chairman.” Ismay cast his eyes down upon the table before him, allowing himself to collect his thoughts for a moment before responding. “I understand that my behaviour on board the
Titanic
, and subsequently on board the
Carpathia
, has been very severely criticized by the press through several scurrilous printed remarks. I want to court the fullest inquiry, and I place myself unreservedly in the hands of yourself and any of your colleagues, to ask me any questions in regard to my conduct, so please do not hesitate to do so and I will answer them to the best of my ability. So far as the
Carpathia
is concerned, sir, when I got on board the ship I stood up with my back against the bulkhead, and somebody came up and said something to me...” Ismay winced for an instant, struggling with his memory, then continued. “Then another man took me and put me into a room. I did not know whom occupied the room. This man proved to be the doctor of the
Carpathia.
I was in that room until I left the ship. I was never outside the door of that room. During the whole of the time I was in this room, I never had anything of a solid nature to eat, nothing at all- I lived only on soup. I did not want very much of anything. The room was constantly being entered by people asking for the doctor. The doctor did not have a suite of rooms on the ship. He simply had this one small room.”

Smith let Ismay's words hang in the air for a few moments, then moved the conversation forward. “In view of your statement, Mr. Ismay, I desire to say that I have seen none of these
comments
to which you refer,” he replied, more than a bit sarcastic. “In fact, I have not read the newspapers since I started for New York- I have deliberately avoided it so that I have seen none of these reports, and you do not understand that I have not made any criticism upon your conduct aboard the
Carpathia
?”

“No, sir. But I am here to answer any questions in regard thereto.”

“Mr. Ismay,” Senator Fletcher piped in, taking the unexpected action of rising out of his chair as he spoke. “I believe that at least one White Star official has stated that Captain Smith gave you a telegram reporting ice.”

There was an awkward silence. Ismay's mind raced while his stomach lurched.
What telegram reporting ice?
he thought frantically. “Ah... I- I... y-yes, sir,” Ismay stammered, impulsively gambling on the possibility that he in fact knew what Fletcher was talking about. “I... I certainly think that I know what you speak of,” he rambled. He was a bit startled by the senator's tactic, and it was a subject that he did not realize had been mentioned by any other witnesses. In this instance it had been Harold A. Sanderson, who from a few feet away was giving Ismay a firm grim nod of acknowledgement. Ismay was once again seized with the fear that he was not going to be able to remember some of his own actions.

“On Sunday afternoon?” Fletcher asked.

“S-Sunday afternoon, I think it was.”