Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (28 page)

Lightoller and Hardy were helping the women make the climb over the railing into the boat. The boat was about half full when Chief Officer Wilde strolled over from the starboard bridge wing and called out, “You go with her, Lightoller.”
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“Not damn likely,” the second officer shot back, and continued to help women into the boat. Somehow in the shuffle Mrs. Brown and Miss Evans hadn’t yet gotten into the boat. When they finally reached the railing there was only one seat left. Miss Evans turned to Mrs. Brown and said simply, “You go first. You have children waiting for you.” Mrs. Brown climbed aboard and Lightoller called out to lower away.

One deck below, at the forward end of the Promenade Deck, Hugh Woolner and Bjorn Steffanson began to realize just how tight their situation was. They had spent the past hour and a half rushing to and fro about the Boat Deck and the Promenade Deck, helping with loading and launching the boats, dealing with those cowards in Collapsible C, making sure the women in their charge were seen safely aboard the lifeboats. Now the rising sea was only a few feet away, and the last lifeboats were leaving. Just as they were resigning themselves to their fate, they saw Collapsible D being lowered right beside them. Steffanson thought there was enough room in the bow and jumped for it, followed seconds later by Woolner, who landed half in, half out of the boat. Steffanson pulled him aboard. An instant later, the boat hit the water. As the falls were freed and the boat began pulling away from the Titanic, Seaman William Lucas looked up at Edith Evans and called out, “There is another boat going to be put down for you.” It was 2:05 A.M.
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With all the boats gone and the ship obviously only moments away from foundering, there was one last, painful duty for Captain Smith to perform. First he walked up the port side of the Boat Deck to the wireless shack, where he found Phillips still hunched over his key, tapping away. Quietly, Smith told Phillips and Bride, “Men, you have done your full duty. You can do no more. Abandon your cabin. Now it’s every man for himself.” Phillips glanced up at him, then went back to Morsing. The Captain continued: “You look out for yourselves, I release you. That’s the way of it at this kind of time.” Then he turned and left the wireless shack for the last time. Without a word Phillips continued to tap out his distress call.
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Now Captain Smith moved about the Boat Deck, speaking quietly to whatever crew members he found. To the knot of men struggling atop the officers’ quarters to release Collapsibles A and B, he called up, “You’ve done your duty, men. Now it’s every man for himself.” To a small group of stewards gathered near the First Class entrance he said, “Men, do your best for the women and children, and look out for yourselves.” And again, to some of the boiler room crew that made it to the Boat Deck, he said, “Well men, I guess it’s every man for himself.”
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The boiler room crews had been released by Chief Engineer Bell. He had told his engineers that they were released too, but in their determination to keep the lights burning and power supplied to the wireless, none of them left the engine room. By now it was too late, and Bell and his men would remain at their posts until the end.
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It would be interesting to know what his second officer thought of the Captain’s sentiments. There were two collapsibles, A and B, lashed upside down to the roof of the officers’ quarters, and as long as there was a lifeboat to fill, Lightoller wasn’t about to give up. Quickly mustering the nearby crewmen and a few willing passengers such as Colonel Gracie, he set some of them to untie the lashings holding the boats in place, while others set up makeshift ramps of oars and planking to slide the boats down from the roof. Among them was Trimmer Hemming, who Lightoller recalled having told to go with Boat 6.

“Why haven’t you gone yet, Hemming?”

“Oh, plenty of time yet, sir.”

Lightoller’s efforts weren’t entirely successful. The men were able to get Collapsible A to slide down the improvised ramp, and were hurriedly trying to fit the falls from Boat Number 1’s davits to her, but Collapsible B broke through its ramp and landed on the Boat Deck upside down. Each collapsible weighed more than two tons and Lightoller just didn’t have the manpower to right it.
¹⁵

In the wireless shack Bride took Captain Smith at his word and had gathered up all the papers and the wireless log. Just after the Captain left, a woman who had fainted was brought into the shack and placed in a chair. A moment or two later she revived and left with her husband. The lights were starting to take on an orange glow as the power began slowly fading. Phillips was tinkering with the set, trying to adjust the spark to make it stronger. At 2:10 he sent out two “V”s, which were picked up faintly by the
Virginian;
they were the last transmission anyone heard from the Titanic.

Slipping behind the green curtain to gather up his money and a few personal belongings, Bride stepped back into the wireless room to find a stoker bending over Phillips. Phillips, headphones still on his head, was lost in intense concentration, totally unaware that the stoker was surreptitiously unfastening his lifebelt. With a shout Bride leaped at the stoker.

Phillips, startled, jumped up and the three men grappled. After a brief scuffle, Bride was able to pin the stoker’s arms while Phillips beat the man senseless. Dropping the unconscious man to the floor, Bride reached for the logbook, but Phillips shouted, “Let’s get out of here!” and dashed out the door, Bride hard on his heels. Phillips ran aft, while Bride turned and made his way forward.
¹⁶

Back at the base of the second funnel, on the roof of the First Class Lounge, Bandmaster Hartley tapped his bow against his violin and the ragtime ceased. A moment later the solemn strains of the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee” began drifting across the water. It was with a perhaps unintended irony that Hartley chose a hymn pleading for the mercy of the Almighty, as the ultimate material conceit of the Edwardian Age, the ship that “God Himself couldn’t sink,” foundered beneath his feet. As the band played, the slant of the deck grew steeper, while from within the hull came a rapidly increasing number of thuds, bangs, and crashes as interior furnishings broke loose and walls and partitions collapsed.
¹⁷

Higher and higher the
Titanic’s
stern rose out of the water, until the great bronze propellers, motionless now, slowly emerged from the sea. As the stern rose, the liner seemed to begin to sluggishly move forward, as with a series of dull booms (mistaken by some passengers for exploding boilers) the watertight bulkheads began to give way under the inexorable pressure of the inrushing sea. Within the ship the emptiness of the public rooms was almost oppressive—it seemed unreal for all the smoking rooms, saloons, and lounges to be deserted.

But they weren’t entirely empty. The foursome in the First Class Lounge had returned to their bridge game and were still doggedly playing, seemingly oblivious to the increasingly steep slant of the table top. Around 2:10 Steward John Stewart glanced inside the First Class Smoking Room and was astonished to see Thomas Andrews standing in the center of the room with his arms folded across his chest. At last the tremendous drive and energy were gone, and he stood motionless before the fireplace, his face devoid of expression. Puzzled, Stewart called out, “Aren’t you even going to try for it, Mr. Andrews?”

Andrews never replied—he simply continued to gaze at a painting before him, “The Approach to Plymouth Harbour,” as if he never heard the question. His lifebelt lay carelessly tossed across a green-topped card table apparently forgotten.
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At 2:15 the bridge dipped under, sweeping Captain Smith into the sea. A wave of water rushed back along the Boat Deck as the Titanic began to pivot on a point somewhere just aft of amidships. The calm dignity of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” began to be lost in the clamor of a great ship entering her death throes. Just as the sea washed over the bridge, the superstructure gave a sickening lurch, momentarily interrupting the music, when the forward expansion joint collapsed. Running athwart the superstructure even with the positions of Boats 5 and 6, the joint gave way as the ship’s center of gravity shifted. The two aftermost stays supporting the forward funnel, anchored aft of the joint, now went slack, and the remaining eight stays were suddenly forced to carry the weight of the huge funnel in an attitude for which they were never designed.
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The sounds of the ancient hymn still carried across the water, and those in the lifeboats felt a certain horrible dignity about the moment. Pierre Marechal, sitting in Boat 7, would later relate: “When three-quarters of a mile away we stopped, the spectacle before our eyes was in its own way magnificent. In a calm sea, beneath a sky moonless but sown with millions of stars, the enormous Titanic lay on the water, illuminated from the waterline to the Boat Deck. The bow was slowly sinking into the black water.”
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Aboard the ship though, an almost hysterical air gripped those who remained: that lurch of the superstructure when the expansion joint collapsed acted as a signal for those still on the upper decks to begin a mad rush toward the stern. As the water rolled up the deck, Peter Daly, the Lima representative for Haas & Sons of London, found a woman he didn’t know clutching at him, crying, “Oh, save me! Save me!”

“Good lady,” he replied, “only God can save you now.” But the woman persisted, and Daly consented to make the jump into the freezing water with her. Taking her by the arm he helped her to the Boat Deck railing, just as a big wave came sweeping up the deck, washing him clear and pulling the woman from his grasp. Daly didn’t see her among the survivors.

Steward Brown was among those still struggling to launch Collapsible A when the sea surged up around his feet. Realizing that the boat would soon be floating off, he jumped in the stern and cut the lines there, yelling for someone to cut the forward falls as well. Somebody did and at that moment the wave washed Collapsible A from the deck
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Up on the roof of the officer’s quarters, Second Officer Lightoller saw First Officer Murdoch one deck below still working desperately to get Collapsible A’s falls attached to the davits. He watched as the water rolled up the Boat Deck, engulfing Murdoch, as the bow sank lower and the stern continued to rise. As the water advanced, the crowd retreated before it, struggling “uphill” against the ever-steepening tilt of the deck. As Lightoller looked on in horror, the slow, the aged, or the merely clumsy were one by one overtaken by the rising sea, while others rushed to the stern, gripped by the drive of self preservation, prolonging their lives for a few minutes more. After a moment, Lightoller turned his back on them, and dived into the surging water.

Surfacing, he saw just ahead of him the crow’s nest, now level with the water. Some irrational instinct seized him, and for a few seconds he swam toward it, thinking it a place of safety. Quickly snapping out of it, Lightoller turned and began to swim clear of the ship, but she wasn’t ready to let him go. Tons of seawater pouring down the ventilator shafts in front of the forward funnel created an irresistible suction, which pulled him back and pinned him against a grating just below the surface of the water. “Now we’ll see if Christian Science really works,” he thought as he realized that he was trapped and would be taken down with the wreck. Almost idly he wondered how long he would last, or if the grating would break from the pressure before he drowned, dragging him inside the hull of the sinking ship.

He never found out. From somewhere deep within the ship a burst of hot air surged up the ventilator shaft, forcing him to the surface. Sputtering, Lightoller barely had time to take a deep breath before he was sucked under again, held against another grating and spit back up, like some sort of latter day Jonah. Gasping, Lightoller struck out away from the ship toward the overturned Collapsible B.
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The unfortunate boat was the object of a good deal of attention from those who had been standing on the forward end of the superstructure. Harold Bride had grabbed an oarlock as the boat was washed off, and suddenly found himself swept underneath it. A dozen other men quickly scrambled atop the overturned keel, unaware of Bride struggling in the air pocket beneath it. The collapsible seemed dubious safety at best as it bobbed close to the sinking liner. In a matter of seconds those huge funnels—large enough for two railway coaches to pass through side by side—would plunge under, swallowing huge gulps of seawater and anything floating in it.

The terror of being sucked down into the ship never materialized for Collapsible B, though. As the tilt grew steeper, the strain became unbearable for the remaining eight stays supporting the forward funnel. With a series of pistol-shot cracks, the stays parted, and accompanied by the groan of twisting steel, the funnel collapsed, falling over the starboard side of the ship amid a shower of sparks. For Lightoller and the men clinging to Collapsible B it was a blessing, for when it hit the water, the falling funnel kicked up a wave that washed them thirty yards clear of the ship. Others were less fortunate, for when it fell the funnel landed on a knot of swimmers struggling in the sea beside the wreck.
²³

Now the sea was sweeping over the forward skylight and around the base of the second funnel. Colonel Gracie, nearing exhaustion, lay at the foot of the second funnel and suddenly found himself caught up in a swirling maelstrom of seawater, which threatened to pull him under like it had done with Lightoller. Terrified of being swallowed by one of the funnels, Gracie gave a mighty kick and broke free of the ship, surfacing some twenty yards from the
Titanic.
²⁴

Jack Thayer and Milton Long, a shipboard acquaintance who had spent most of the evening in the company of young Jack, were still standing by the starboard rail just aft of the second funnel. Earlier they had watched the uproar at Collapsible C, and both were convinced that particular boat didn’t stand a chance. So they decided to wait a little longer before abandoning the Titanic. Now as they stepped out of the way of the frantically retreating crowd, they watched the advancing water close in on them. The time had come, they agreed, to jump. They shook hands, wished each other luck, then straddled the railing together. Long looked at Thayer, who was pulling off his overcoat, and asked, “You are coming, boy?”