Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (20 page)

But the quips and jokes only served to underscore the disorganization that was already beginning to make itself felt and would continue to frustrate the efforts of the
Titanic’s
officers and crew throughout the night. For some reason, Captain Smith, usually so decisive and swift to action, was slow to react to what he knew to be an impending disaster—the commands he was giving were sound as far as they went, but often they didn’t go far enough. After ordering the passengers on deck and the lifeboats uncovered, he seemed hesitant to give the command necessary to start putting the passengers in the boats. The presence of Chief Officer Wilde did little to help the situation either: he had never served with First Officer Murdoch or Second Officer Lightoller before, and his last-minute addition to the officers’ roster disrupted what had been a fairly well-coordinated staff; at the same time, he was demonstrating very little initiative of his own, seemingly content to pass on Captain Smith’s instructions, but never expanding on them or clarifying them as he saw fit, and rarely issuing any orders of his own. It wouldn’t be long before Lightoller, usually very strict about adhering to the chain of command, would begin ignoring Wilde altogether.
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In the meantime, as the crew finished clearing the boats away, the passengers continued to gather on the upper decks. Just off the Boat Deck, in the gymnasium, Colonel and Mrs. Astor sat side by side on the mechanical horses. The colonel had his penknife out, and was slicing open one of the lifebelts to show his wife what was inside.

By 12:20 A.M. Captain Smith, with his inspections complete, the certainty of the ship’s fate clear in his mind, and the wireless now sending out calls for assistance, finally decided to put First Officer Murdoch in charge of the starboard boats, Second Officer Lightoller in charge of the port side. Chief Officer Wilde had no specific assignment, apparently being expected to act as a sort of overseer. When Lightoller, though he didn’t yet believe the ship was in mortal danger, asked for permission to swing the boats out, Wilde told him to wait. After a few minutes Lightoller went to the bridge and got permission directly from Captain Smith. Then when Lightoller asked Wilde if he could begin loading the boats, Wilde again told him to wait. So Lightoller again went to the bridge. After a moment’s silence, Captain Smith gave Lightoller a quick nod: “Yes, put the women and children in and lower away.”

Captain Smith also suggested that Lightoller might find it easier to get the women and children in the boat if it were lowered to the level of the Promenade Deck and loaded from there. The Second Officer then went back to Boat 4, and ordered the boat lowered down to A Deck. Too late he remembered what Captain Smith apparently had forgotten: unlike the Olympic, the Titanic had the forward half of her Promenade Deck enclosed, and the windows were all shut.

Quickly he detailed some of the crew to go down to A Deck and open the windows. In the meantime, Boat 4 would have to wait, so he moved aft to Boat 6, and prepared to load it instead, this time from the Boat Deck. Standing with one foot in the boat and one on the deck, Lightoller called for women and children. The response wasn’t even half hearted—it seemed no one was willing to forfeit the warmth and bright lights of the Titanic for the chill of an open boat. Why should they? There was no apparent danger, the ship seemed to be perfectly sound, and besides, if the Titanic really was unsinkable, there wasn’t any need to bother with lifeboats.
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Suddenly, as if to heighten the sense of security aboard the ship, there was music playing. Bandmaster Wallace Hartley had assembled the
Titanic’s
orchestra in the First Class Lounge and quickly launched into a set of lively ragtime:\“Great Big Beautiful Doll,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Can’t You Hear me Caroline?” “A Little Love, a Little Kiss,” and “Moonlight Bay.” The tempo was fast, the tone light and cheerful
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Third Officer Pitman, who was working on the starboard side of the Boat Deck with First Officer Murdoch, was standing by at Boat 5, waiting for further instructions from the bridge, when a middle-aged passenger rushed up to him and shouted, “There is no time to lose!” Pitman ignored him—he had more important things to do than pay attention to busybody passengers in pajamas and slippers. The stranger then urged him to begin loading the boat with women and children. This annoyed Pitman. He turned to face the passenger directly (he had no idea who this stranger was) and calmly announced, “I await the
Captain’s
orders,” then resumed working on the boat.

Taken aback by such apparent lese majeste, Bruce Ismay retreated down to Boat 7. Pitman, who had never met Ismay before, had in the meantime realized just who the meddling stranger might be, and went forward to the bridge to ask Captain Smith if he should do as Ismay had ordered. Smith nodded and said, “Carry on!” Quickly returning to Boat 5, Pitman jumped in and called out, “Come along ladies!”
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The first to climb into the boat were Mrs. Crosby and her daughter Harriet. Her husband, Captain Crosby, no longer had any illusions about the
Titanic’s
safety. The Crosby ladies were followed by Mrs. Washington Dodge and her five-year-old son, a stewardess, Mrs. F. M. Warren, then Helen Otsby. Someone in the crowd shouted, “Put the brides and grooms in first!” so a few husbands were allowed to go with their wives, including newlyweds John and Nelle Snyder of Minneapolis, and then a few single men. Like Lightoller on the port side, Pitman was finding it difficult to persuade many passengers to leave the relative warmth and safety of the
Titanic’s
decks.
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Right aft of Boat 5, at Boat 7, First Officer Murdoch tried mightily to get as many people into the boat as he could. Ismay came bustling up, shouting, “Gentlemen, please get back!” Dorothy Gibson, a star of serial motion pictures, got in along with her mother. Their bridge companions of the evening, Frederick Seward and William Sloper, were persuaded to join them. When the shout went up at Boat 5, “Put in the brides and grooms first!” Murdoch seemed to think that this was a good idea, so the Bishops and the Greenfields, both newlyweds like the Snyders, stepped into Boat 7. J. R. McGough had just remarked to a companion that “We are certainly safer here than in that little boat!” when he felt a pair of powerful hands grab his shoulders from behind—he never saw the man, though it may have been Murdoch—while a gruff voice said “Here, you’re a big fellow; get in that boat.” McGough found himself being pushed forward into the boat, and a few other men got in after him.

Seaman Hogg was crawling about the bottom of the boat, trying to replace the drain plug, while Steward Etches was frantically trying to keep the passengers’ feet from getting tangled up in the falls. At 12:45 Murdoch felt he could wait no longer and ordered Boat 7 lowered away, the first boat down. With a capacity of sixty-five persons, it held twenty-five occupants.
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Assisting Third Officer Pitman now at Boat 5 was Fifth Officer Lowe. Lowe’s rather late appearance was due to his propensity for heavy sleeping. He was off duty this Sunday night and taking advantage of it by catching up on some much-needed rest—as he was later to explain, “You must understand that we do not have any too much sleep, and therefore when we sleep we die.” Whatever the reason, Lowe slept through the collision, even the venting of the steam. Voices outside his cabin door brought him back to the land of the living: when he looked out the porthole and saw the Boat Deck swarming with passengers and crew, all in lifebelts, he fairly leaped from his bunk, hurried into his clothes, snatched up a revolver (strictly nonregulation), and rushed out on deck. Immediately Pitman put him to work on Boat 5.
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First Officer Murdoch told Pitman to take charge of Boat 5, and once the boat had been lowered, to stand by the after gangway to take on more passengers. Evidently Murdoch was concerned that if the boats were fully loaded before they were lowered, the weight of the passengers might cause them to buckle and break in the middle, a concern Lowe shared. (Apparently neither man was aware of the fact that all of the lifeboats had been tested against just such an eventuality before the Titanic left Harland and Wolff.) Murdoch shook hands with Pitman, said, “Goodbye, good luck,” then turned to Lowe and said, “That is enough before lowering. We can get a lot more in after she’s in the water.”

About this time Ismay reappeared, and called out, “Are there any more women before this boat goes?”

“I am only a stewardess,” came a reply.

“Never mind,” Ismay said. “You are a woman—take your place.” The stewardess stepped forward and Ismay helped her into the boat. At the same time a heavy-set man, Dr. Henry Frauenthal, leaned over to kiss his wife goodbye, cried out, “I cannot leave you!” and fell into the boat. Furious, Murdoch shouted, “Throw that man out!” but as several crewmen rushed to comply, three more men jumped in, one of them dislocating two ribs of a lady passenger. Murdoch decided to get the boat away before the situation got out of hand. He nodded to Lowe, who began the slow process of lower
^ing
the boat.
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The paint was still fresh on the pulleys, and the new fall lines were stiff and had a tendency to stick. As a result Boat 5’s progress toward the water was anything but smooth. First the bow would drop several feet, then the stern, then the bow again. Anxiously watching from the railing, fearful for his wife and son, Dr. Dodge was “overwhelmed with doubts” that he might be “exposing them to greater danger than if they had remained aboard the ship.”
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Boat 5’s slow progress was a source of anxiety for Bruce Ismay as well. Not satisfied with Lowe’s best efforts, Ismay hung onto one of the davits, leaned far out over the water to watch the boat; he then began swinging his arm in huge circles, calling out over and over again, “Lower away! Lower away! Lower away! Lower away!” This was too much for Fifth Officer Lowe, and the fiery Welshman rounded on Ismay.

“If you’ll get the hell out of the way, I’ll be able to do something!” Lowe shouted in Ismay’s face. “You want me to lower away quickly? You’ll have me drown the lot of them!” Lowe then turned away in disgust and resumed lowering Boat 5, which shortly reached the water without incident. Stung by Lowe’s outburst, Ismay slunk off toward Boat 3.
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Obviously Bruce Ismay was having a bad time of it. He was in a particularly unenviable position, being every bit as aware as Captain Smith and Thomas Andrews of the inadequacy of the
Titanic’s
lifeboats, but unlike them, he bore a particular responsibility for the problem. At a conference with senior managers and designers of Harland and Wolff in early 1910, when the details of the design for the Olympic, Titanic, and Gigantic were being finalized, Ismay had been presented with a plan to equip the ships with as many as forty-eight lifeboats, with a total capacity of 2,886 persons. This had been drawn up by Alexander Carlisle, who was then the managing director of the shipyard. Ismay studied the plan for a few minutes, then rejected it on grounds of expense, declaring that the sixteen boats required by the Board of Trade would be sufficient. He then returned to questions about the ship’s decor. As Carlisle later put it, “We spent two hours discussing carpet for the First Class cabins and fifteen minutes discussing lifeboats.” Now, in the worst way imaginable, Ismay was confronted with the consequences of his offhand treatment of Carlisle’s proposal.
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Ismay’s hysterics were also notable for their uniqueness. Most of the passengers and a good number of the crew still believed that the Titanic was safe and that everyone would be rescued in a few hours. Charles Hays, catching sight of his new friend Major Peuchen, who was busy helping clear away Boats 2 and 4, called out, “Peuchen, this ship is good for eight hours yet. I have just been getting this from one of the best old seamen, Mr. Crosby of Milwaukee.” Evidently Hays had not seen the haste with which the good captain had put his wife and daughter in Boat 3.

Just as unperturbed as Hays were the four men sitting inside the First Class Smoking Room calmly playing bridge: Frank Millet, Arthur Ryerson, Clarence Moore, and Archie Butt. They seemed determined not to let the noise and confusion of the Boat Deck interfere with their game. At the Smoking Room entrance stood Monsieur Louis Gatti, the
maitre
d’ of the
a la carte
restaurant. He was still wearing the white tie and tails he had donned some hours earlier, just before the restaurant opened, and now he was a portrait of Gallic nonchalance, watching the bustle about the Boat Deck.

Farther forward, in the gymnasium, the Astors had abandoned the mechanical horses, but the gym wasn’t empty. Two couples, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Mr. and Mrs. Harper, relaxed on a quartet of deck chairs and chatted amicably.
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All this time, back at the stern of the ship, Quartermaster Rowe maintained his chill vigil on the auxiliary bridge. He had noted that shortly after the iceberg had glided by, the ship had stopped and moments later began venting steam. But the activity on the Boat Deck hadn’t attracted his attention, and so he was quite startled when about fifteen minutes before 1:00 A.M. he saw a lifeboat only about a third filled, float by on the starboard side.

He telephoned the bridge and asked if they knew there was a lifeboat adrift. The voice at the other end, Fourth Officer Boxhall, with a distinctly disbelieving tone asked who he was. Rowe explained and Boxhall realized that in the excitement Rowe had been forgotten. Boxhall told him to come to the bridge immediately and bring some distress rockets. Rowe pulled a box containing twelve white rockets from a locker on the poop deck, then began making his way forward—quite possibly the last man to learn what was happening.
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