Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (13 page)

The morning of Sunday, April 14, Gracie decided to do something about his lack of exercise. A prebreakfast game of squash with Fred Wright, the ship’s squash pro, was followed by several laps in the swimming bath, then up to the First Class Dining Saloon for a big breakfast. Later that morning he planned to attend the Divine Services, which Captain Smith, as was customary, would be conducting.

Meanwhile Mrs. Candee, in the company of Hugh Woolner, had gone exploring. At one point in their excursion through the ship they found themselves up on the Boat Deck, where they found T. W. McCawley, the gym instructor, inside the gleaming new gymnasium. They spent the better part of an hour riding the mechanical horses and pedaling furiously on the stationary bicycles, which were hooked up to big red and blue pointers on a large dial on the wall, showing how far each rider had pedaled. They even took turns on a mysterious contraption called a mechanical camel. Later they retired to the First Class Lounge, where stewards served hot tea and buttered toast. All in all it was a pleasantly quiet Sunday.
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For Dickinson and Helen Bishop, Sunday was one more wonderful memory to add to their recollections. Young newlyweds from tiny Dowagiac, Michigan, they had been taken with the idea of closing their honeymoon with a First Class passage on the maiden voyage of the largest, most luxurious ship in the world. It had been a wonderful choice.
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Benjamin and Esther Hart were traveling in Second Class, along with their daughter, seven-year-old Eva. They were bound for the province of Manitoba, Canada, where Mr. Hart was going to start a new business. Father and daughter were almost inseparable, it seemed, and together they had great fun exploring the ship over the past three days. Mrs. Hart couldn’t share their enthusiasm: she didn’t believe for a minute that the ship was “unsinkable,” despite what the press said, and had feelings of foreboding from the moment she set foot aboard the Titanic. Mr. Hart humored her, and he must have been a patient man, since Mrs. Hart was convinced that catastrophe would strike at night, so she slept during the day, and spent her nights sitting up reading or knitting.

Little Eva was also busy making new friends, and soon found herself frequently playing with six-year-old Nina Harper, once Mr. Hart settled a squabble between the two girls and solemnly informed Eva to share her precious teddy bear with Nina. Nina was traveling with her father, the Rev. John Harper, a Baptist minister from Scotland who had recently become a widower. Accompanying him and his daughter was his sister-in-law, Miss Jessie Leitch.
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Another clergyman traveling in Second Class was the Rev. Earnest Carter, vicar of the tiny parish of St. Jude in East London. He was accompanied by his wife Lilian. He was trying to make the best of the voyage, as he was fighting off a headcold he had picked up before the ship sailed. As luck would have it, the Carters had made the acquaintance of Miss Marion Wright, a young woman bound for America and marriage to an Oregon fruit farmer, who possessed a beautiful soprano singing voice; but of more immediate interest to Reverend Carter, she also had a supply of tablets that helped alleviate his cold. Since Reverend Carter had already been asked to lead the traditional Sunday night hymn singing in the Second Class Dining Saloon, he asked Miss Wright if she would grace the gathering with a solo. Flattered, Miss Wright agreed.
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In Third Class, although without such amenities as squash courts, stationary bicycles, or a mechanical camel, the steerage passengers had made themselves very much at home. Suddenly finding themselves with more leisure time on their hands than they had ever had before, the English, Irish, Swedish, Finnish, German, and Italian immigrants slowly began to try to get to know each other, often with generations of suspicion and prejudice, not to mention language barriers, to overcome. It was not an easy process, and for the most part the various nationalities tended to stick together. But there seemed an inordinate number of musicians among the steerage passengers, and almost every night there were dances in the common areas of Third Class. The steerage passengers seemed quite happy with their accommodations and there were remarkably few complaints. There was one odd deficiency though: the ship had only two bathtubs for all of Third Class, in this case over seven hundred people. Worse, both of them were located in the stern, a bit of hard luck for those berthed forward who had to make the long trek aft.

No one could deny that the poop deck, at the stern of the ship, offered some of the most spectacular views of the sea. Because it was an exclusively Third Class area, the steerage passengers would gather there in large numbers during the day. This was where young Kathy Gilnagh was sitting early that Sunday afternoon when she found herself intrigued by Eugene Daly, the young Irish piper, playing the bagpipes on the after well deck, just forward and one deck below her. The keening wail of the pipes recalled for her the Ireland she was leaving behind, filling her with melancholy.
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For the crew, after breakfast was over, came a faithfully followed Sunday ritual of a passenger ship at sea: the captain’s inspection. It was an impressive sight with Captain Smith leading the way, followed by the department heads—the chief officer, the chief engineer, the chief steward, and the purser, all in their best uniforms. From top deck to bottom, bow to stern,. and through all the public rooms, they visited every accessible part of the ship. Normally after the captain’s inspection would come boat drill, but to the crew’s less than secret relief, this Sunday the boat drill was inexplicably canceled.
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In truth, even had the boat drill taken place, it would have done little good. The boat drill as outlined by the Board of Trade only required a ship’s officers to supervise a picked crew, mustered beforehand, to uncover a designated lifeboat on each side of the ship, swing it out over the ship’s side, and climb aboard. Some officers would require the crewmen to examine the oars, mast, sail, and rigging that were stowed in each boat; others weren’t so demanding. Once this was accomplished, the crewmen would climb out of the boat, swing it back inboard, pull the cover back on, and go back to work. On the Titanic only the crew had boat stations, and these were merely assignments telling the crewmen which boats they were supposed to assist in loading and lowering. As for the passengers, there were no lifeboat assignments of any kind.

At precisely 11:00 A.M. Captain Smith held Divine Services in the First Class Dining Room. On this occasion Second and Third Class passengers were permitted in the First Class areas. The ship’s orchestra provided the music, and instead of the Book of Common Prayer, a special company-issued Book of Prayer was used. Sometimes the captain would turn the service over to one of the clergymen on board, but this time he took the service himself. In his strong, measured voice he led the assembled passengers through the General Confession and the Prayer for Those at Sea, along with other psalms and prayers, concluding with Hymn Number 418, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”
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With the Divine Service over, the captain returned to the bridge, and the stewards rearranged the tables and chairs for the afternoon luncheon. While the galley was busy with preparing the food, Captain Smith was attending to his navigation.

At noon every day, the captain and his officers would gather on the port bridge wing, each with a sextant in hand. They would each take a series of sun sightings to work out the ship’s precise position, which would then be recorded in the ship’s log, along with the distance covered in the previous twenty-four hours. As with most other liners of the day, the Titanic held a sweepstakes for the passengers to wager on the day’s run. Once the noon sun-sightings were taken and the distance known, the ship’s siren blew and those passengers who had placed bets would gather in the First Class Lounge to await the results. A rumor had sprung up that the ship was going faster than it had yet, and when the day’s figure was posted it seemed that it was true, for the ship had covered 546 miles in the past day, a speed of nearly 22 ½ knots—bettering the previous day’s run of 519 miles, and making the day before that—a mere 386 miles—seem positively poky by comparison.
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Bruce Ismay for one took considerable satisfaction in that figure. Earlier in the voyage he had given Captain Smith a list of the various speeds he wanted the ship worked up to at specific points in the crossing, and the
Titanic’s
performance so far had been as close to flawless as could be hoped for. Early that afternoon, as he and Captain Smith were sitting together in the First Class Lounge, Ismay announced his intentions: “Today we did better than yesterday, and tomorrow we shall do better still. We shall beat the Olympic’s time to New York and arrive Tuesday night!” It would be a terrific publicity coup for the White Star Line, with their newest and most luxurious ship arriving ahead of schedule—and doing so in time to make headlines in the Wednesday morning papers.
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Ismay saw nothing wrong in his usurping some of the captain’s authority, although Captain Smith may have seen it differently. Ismay believed that as the owner’s representative he had the right to interfere with the ship’s operations and navigation. It was typical of him then, when he sat down to lunch with Captain Smith around 1:30 P.M., to take a message that the captain had shown him, sent by the liner Baltic, stick it in his pocket and apparently forget about it. Of course the message hadn’t been forgotten: later that afternoon Ismay encountered Mrs. Thayer and Mrs. Ryerson, two of the most socially prominent women on board, and in the course of the conversation, Ismay (who liked to remind people that he was the chairman of the White Star Line) took the message out and read it to them. It said, “Icebergs and large quantity of field ice in 41.51 N 49.9 W” The two ladies were suitably impressed.
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For all his arrogance, though, Ismay could also be a compassionate man, as Mrs. Ryerson and her husband were to learn on their way to New York. When Ismay learned that the death of their son in America was the reason for their crossing aboard the Titanic, he arranged to have an extra cabin placed at their disposal and a steward permanently assigned to them.

The noon luncheon was quite an affair. The menu set before Ismay would have done any hotel on either side of the Atlantic proud:

That message about ice that was sitting in Ismay’s pocket during lunch was the third one the wireless operators aboard the Titanic had received that day. The senior and junior operators who constituted the wireless section of the
Titanic’s
crew were a couple of busy young men. Wireless in 1912, while something less than the “erratic novelty” that it has sometimes been depicted as being, was still new enough that it could be considered in its childhood, if not its infancy. True, ranges were limited, the performance of some sets was marginal, and there was a shortage of skilled operators, but the rapidly growing number of conventions and etiquette were adding a much-needed measure of discipline to wireless communications. What was most noticeably lacking was standardization—there were a half dozen types of equipment; two different Morse codes, American and International; no regulations concerning the hours wireless watch was to be kept; and no definite order in the ships’ crew organizations as to where the wireless operator belonged.

This was due in part to the fact that the wireless operators did not actually work for the shipping line that owned their particular vessel. Instead there were four private companies that controlled the wireless industry and hired out the services of their operators to the steamship lines: Compagnie General Telegraphique of France, Telefunken of Germany, and the twin companies of American and British Marconi Marine. Though the two wireless operators aboard the Titanic had signed the ship’s articles and took orders from the ship’s officers, they were actually employees of British Marconi.
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