The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (3 page)

By 2.00 a.m. Captain Smith had successfully shot himself, three-fifths of the platform was nailed down, and the
Titanic’
s bridge lay beneath thirty feet of icy water. The stricken liner listed horribly, nearly forty degrees, stern in the air, her triple screws, glazed with ice, lying naked against the vault of heaven. For my command post I’d selected the mesh of guylines securing the dummy funnel, a vantage from which I now beheld a great mass of humanity jammed together on the boat deck: aristocrats, second-cabin passengers, emigrants, officers, engineers, trimmers, stokers, greasers, stewards, stewardesses, musicians, barbers, chefs, cooks, bakers, waiters and scullions, the majority dressed in lifebelts and the warmest clothing they could find. Each frightened man, woman and child held onto the rails and davits for dear life. The sea spilled over the tilted gunwales and rushed across the canted boards.

“The raft!” I screamed from my lofty promontory. “Hurry! Swim!” Soon the other officers - Murdoch, Lightoller, Pitman, Boxhall, Lowe, Moody - took up the cry. “The raft! Hurry! Swim!” “The raft! Hurry! Swim!” “The raft! Hurry! Swim!”

And so they swam for it, or, rather, they splashed, thrashed, pounded, wheeled, kicked and paddled for it. Even the hundreds who spoke no English understood what was required. Heaven be praised, within twelve minutes our entire company managed to migrate from the flooded deck of the
Titanic
to the sanctuary of Mr Andrews’s machine. Our stalwart ABs pulled scores of women and children from the water, plus many elderly castaways, along with Colonel Astor’s Airedale, Mr Harper’s Pekingese, Mr Daniel’s French bulldog and six other canines. I was the last to come aboard. Glancing around, I saw to my great distress that a dozen lifebelted bodies were not moving, the majority doubtless heart-attack victims, though perhaps a few people had got crushed against the davits or trampled underfoot.

The survivors instinctively sorted themselves by station, with the emigrants gathering at the stern, the second-cabin castaways settling amidships, and our first-cabin passengers assuming their rightful places forward. After cutting the mooring lines, the ABs took up the lifeboat oars and began to stroke furiously. By the grace of Dame Fortune and the hand of Divine Providence, the
Ada
rode free of the wreck, so that when the great steamer finally snapped, breaking in two abaft the engine room, and began her vertical voyage to the bottom, we observed the whole appalling spectacle from a safe distance.

* * * *

22 April 1912

Lat. 33°42’ N, Long. 53° 11’ W

We’ve been at sea a full week now. No
Carpathia
on the horizon yet, no
Californian,
no
Olympia,
no
Baltic.
Our communal mood is grim but not despondent. Mr Hartley’s little band helps. I’ve forbidden them to play hymns, airs, ballads or any other wistful tunes. “It’s waltzes and rags or nothing,” I tell him. Thanks to Wallace Hartley’s strings and Scott Joplin’s syncopations, we may survive this ordeal.

Although no one is hungry at the moment, I worry about our eventual nutritional needs. The supplies of beef, poultry and cheese hurled overboard by the stewards will soon be exhausted, and thus far our efforts to harvest the sea have come to nothing. The spectre of thirst likewise looms. True, we still have six wine-casks in the first-cabin section, plus four amidships and three in steerage, and we’ve also deployed scores of pots, pans, pails, kettles, washtubs and tierces all over the platform. But what if the rains come too late?

Our sail is unwieldy, the wind contrary, the current fickle, and yet we’re managing, slowly, ever so slowly, to beat our way towards the thirtieth parallel. The climate has grown bearable - perhaps forty-five degrees by day, forty by night - but it’s still too cold, especially for the children and the elderly. Mr Lightoller’s Franklin stove has proven a boon for those of us in the bow, and our second-cabin passengers have managed to build and sustain a small fire amidships, but our emigrants enjoy no such comforts. They huddle miserably aft, warming each other as best they can. We must get farther south. My kingdom for a horse latitude.

The meat in steerage has thawed, though it evidently remains fresh, an effect of the cold air and the omnipresent brine. I shall soon be obligated to issue a difficult order. “Our choices are clear,” I’ll tell the
Ada’s
company, “fortitude or refinement, nourishment or nicety, survival or finesse - and in each instance I’ve opted for the former.” Messrs Lightoller, Pitman, Boxhall, Lowe and Moody share my sentiments. The only dissenter is Murdoch. My chief officer is useless to me. I would rather be sharing the bridge with our Bolshevik, Plotcharsky, than that fusty Scotsman.

In my opinion an intraspecies diet need not automatically entail depravity. Ethical difficulties arise only when such cuisine is practiced in bad faith. During my one and only visit to the Louvre, I became transfixed by Theodore Gericault’s
Scene de naufrage
“Scene of a Shipwreck”, that gruesome panorama of life aboard the notorious raft by which the refugees from the stranded freighter
Medusa
sought to save themselves. As Monsieur Gericault so vividly reveals, the players in that disaster were, almost to a man, paragons of bad faith. They ignored their leaders with insouciance, betrayed their fellows with relish and ate one another with alacrity. I am resolved that no such chaos will descend upon the
Ada.
We are not orgiasts. We are not beasts. We are not French.

* * * *

4 May 1912

Lat. 29°55’ N, Long. 54° 12’ W

At last, after nineteen days afloat, the
Ada
has crossed the thirtieth parallel. We are underfed and dehydrated but in generally good spirits. Most of the raft’s company has settled into a routine, passing their hours fishing, stargazing, card-playing, cataloguing provisions, bartering for beer and cigars, playing with the dogs, minding the children, teaching each other their native languages, repairing the hastily assembled platform and siphoning seawater from the pontoons (to stabilize the raft, not to drink, God knows). Each morning Dr O’Loughlin brings me a report. Our infirmary - the area directly above pontoon K- is presently full: five cases of chronic
mal de mer,
three of frostbite, two of flux, and four “fevers of unknown origin”.

Because the
Ada
remains so difficult to navigate, even with our newly installed wheelhouse and rudder, it would be foolish to try tacking towards the North American mainland in hopes of hitting some hospitable Florida beach. We cannot risk getting caught in the Gulf Stream and dragged back north into frigid waters. Instead we shall latch onto every southerly breeze that comes our way, eventually reaching the Lesser Antilles or, failing that, the coast of Brazil.

As darkness settled over the North Atlantic, we came upon a great mass of flotsam and jetsam from an anonymous wreck: a poaching schooner, most likely, looking for whales and seals but instead running afoul of a storm. We recovered no bodies - lifebelts have never been popular amongst such scallywags - but we salvaged plenty of timber, some medical supplies, and a copy of the
New York Post
for 17 April, stuffed securely into the pocket of a drifting macintosh. At first light I shall peruse the paper in hopes of learning how the outside world reacted to the loss of the
Titanic.

The dry wood is a godsend. Thanks to this resource, I expect to encounter only a modicum of hostility whilst making my case next week for what might be called the
Medusa
initiative for avoiding famine. “Only a degenerate savage would consume the raw flesh of his own kind,” I’ll tell our assembled company. “Thanks to the Franklin stove and its ample supply of fuel, however, we can prepare our meals via broiling, roasting, braising, and other such civilized techniques.”

* * * *

5 May 1912

Lat. 28°10’N, Long. 54°40 ‘W

I am still reeling from the
New York Post’s
coverage of the 15 April tragedy. Upon reaching the disaster site, Captain Roston of the
Carpathia
and Captain Lord of the
Californian
scanned the whole area with great diligence, finding no survivors or dead bodies, merely a few deck chairs and other debris. By the following morning they’d concluded that the mighty liner had gone down with all souls, and so they called off the search.

The
Ada’s
company greeted the news of their ostensible extinction with a broad spectrum of responses. Frustration was the principal emotion. I also witnessed despair, grief, bitterness, outrage, amusement, hysterical laughter, fatalistic resignation, and even - if I read correctly the countenances of certain first-cabin and amidships voyagers - fascination with the possibility that, should we in fact bump into one of the Lesser Antilles, a man might simply slip away, start his life anew, and allow his family and friends to count him amongst those who’d died of exposure on day one.

If the
Post
report may be believed, our would-be rescuers initially thought it odd that Captain Smith had neglected to order his passengers and crew into lifebelts. Rostron and Lord speculated that, once the
Titanic’
s entire company realized their situation was hopeless, with the Grim Reaper making ready to trawl for their souls within a mere two hours, a tragic consensus had emerged. As Stanley Lord put it, “I can hear the oath now, ringing down the
Titanic’
s companionways. ‘The time has come for us to embrace our wives, kiss our children, pet our dogs, praise the Almighty, break out the wine and stop trying to defy a Divine Will far greater than our own.’ “

Thus have we become a raft of the living dead, crewed by phantoms and populated by shades. Mr Futrelle thought immediately of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. He muttered a stanza in which the cadaverous crew, their souls having been claimed by the skull-faced, dice-addicted master of a ghost ship (its hull suggestive of an immense ribcage), return to life under the impetus of angelic spirits: “They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, nor spake nor moved their eyes. It had been strange, even in a dream, to have seen those dead men rise.” And when we all come marching home to Liverpool, Southampton, Queens-town, Belfast, Cherbourg, New York, Philadelphia and Boston - that too will be awfully strange.

* * * *

9 May 1912

Lat. 27°14’N, Long. 55°21’ W

This morning the Good Lord sent us potable water, gallons of it, splashing into our cisterns like honey from heaven. If we cleave to our usual draconian rationing, we shall not have to take up the Ancient Mariner’s despairing chant - “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink” - for at least two months. Surely we shall encounter more rain by then.

Predictably enough, my directive concerning the steerage meat occasioned a lively conversation aboard the
Ada.
A dozen first-cabin voyagers were so scandalized that they began questioning my sanity, and for a brief but harrowing interval it looked as if I might have a mutiny on my hands. But in time more rational heads prevailed, as the pragmatic majority apprehended both the utilitarian and the sacramental dimensions of such a menu.

Reverend Bateman, God bless him, volunteered to oversee the rite - the deboning, the roasting, the thanksgiving, the consecration - a procedure in which he was assisted by his Catholic confreres, Father Byles and Father Peruschitz. Not one word was spoken during the consumption phase, but I sensed that everyone was happy not only to have finally received a substantive meal but also to have set a difficult precedent and emerged from the experience spiritually unscathed.

* * * *

14 May 1912

Lat. 27°41’ N, Long. 54°29’ W

Another wreck, another set of medical supplies, another trove of cooking fuel - plus two more legible newspapers. As it happened, the
Philadelphia Bulletin
for 22 April and the
New York Times
for 29 April carried stories about the dozens of religious services held earlier in the month all over America and the United Kingdom honouring the
Titanic’’
s noble dead. I explained to our first-cabin and second-cabin passengers that I would allow each man to read about his funeral, but he must take care not to get the pages wet.

Needless to say, our most illustrious voyagers were accorded lavish tributes. The managers of the Waldorf-Astoria, St Regis, and Knickerbocker hotels in Manhattan observed a moment of silence for Colonel John Jacob Astor. (Nothing was said about his scandalously pregnant child bride, the former Madeleine Force.) The rectors of St Paul’s church in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, commissioned three Tiffany windows in memory of the dearly departed Widener family, George, Eleanor and Harry. Senator Guggenheim of Colorado graced the
Congressional Record
with a eulogy for his brother, Benjamin, the mining and smelting tycoon. President Taft decreed an official Day of Prayer at the White House for his military adviser, Major Butt. For a full week all the passenger trains running between Philadelphia and New York wore black bunting in honour of John Thayer, Second Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad. During this same interval the flags of all White Star Line steamers departing Southampton flew at half-mast in memory of the company’s president, J. Bruce Ismay, even as the directors of Macy’s Department Store in Herald Square imported a Wurlitzer and arranged for the organist to play each day a different requiem for their late employer, Isidor Straus. The Denver Women’s Club successfully petitioned the City Council to declare a Day of Mourning for Margaret Brown, who’d done so much to improve the lot of uneducated women and destitute children throughout the state.