A Night to Remember (14 page)

Besides the cold, the number of lady oarsmen dispelled the picnic illusion. In No. 4, Mrs. John B. Thayer rowed for five hours in water up to her shins. In No. 6 the irrepressible Mrs. Brown organized the women, two to an oar. One held the oar in place, while the second did the pulling. In this way Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Meyer, Mrs. Candee and others propelled the boat some three or four miles, in a hopeless effort to overtake the light that twinkled on the horizon most of the night.

Mrs. Walter Douglas handled the tiller of Boat 2. Boxhall, who was in charge, pulled an oar and helped fire the green flares. Mrs. J. Stuart White didn’t help row No. 8, but she appointed herself a sort of signalman. She had a cane with a built-in electric light, and during most of the night she waved it fiercely about, alternately helping and confusing everyone.

In No. 8, Marie Young, Gladys Cherry, Mrs. F. Joel Swift and others pulled at the oars. Mrs. William R. Bucknell noted with pride that as she rowed next to the Countess of Rothes, further down the boat her maid was rowing next to the Countess’ maid. Most of the night the Countess handled the tiller. Seaman Jones, in charge, later explained to
The Sphere
why he put her there: “There was a woman in my boat as was a woman … When I saw the way she was carrying herself and heard the quiet determined way she spoke to the others, I knew she was more of a man than any we had on board.” At the American investigation, perhaps lacking the guidance of the press, Jones phrased it a little less elegantly: “She had a lot to say, so I put her to steering the boat.”

But there was no doubt how he felt. After the rescue Jones removed the numeral “8” from the lifeboat, had it framed, and sent it to the Countess to show his admiration. For her part, she still writes him every Christmas.

As the night wore on, the early composure began to give way. In No. 3, Mrs. Charles Hays hailed the boats that came near, searching for her husband. “Charles Hays, are you there?” she would call over and over again. In No. 8, Signora de Satode Penasco screamed for her husband, Victor, until the Countess of Rothes couldn’t stand it any longer. Turning the tiller over to her cousin Gladys Cherry, she slipped down beside the Signora and spent the rest of the night rowing beside her, trying to cheer her up. In No. 6, Madame de Villiers constantly called for her son, who wasn’t even on the
Titanic.

Gradually a good deal of squabbling broke out. The women in No. 3 bickered about trifles, while their husbands sat in embarrassed silence. Mrs. Washington Dodge—who wanted to row back against the wishes of nearly everyone else in No. 5—grew so bitter that when No. 7 came by, she switched boats in mid-ocean. Maud Slocombe, the
Titanic’s
irrepressible masseuse, helped bawl out a woman who kept setting off, of all things, an alarm clock in No. 11. Seaman Diamond, a tough ex-boxer in charge of No. 15, swore oaths that turned the night air even bluer.

Many of the arguments revolved around smoking. In 1912 tobacco was not yet the great American cure-all for easing strain and tension, and the women in the boats were shocked. Miss Elizabeth Shutes begged two men sitting near her in No. 3 to stop smoking, but they kept on. To Mrs. J. Stuart White it was a matter that still rankled at the investigation. When Senator Smith asked if she wished to mention anything bearing on the crew’s discipline, she exploded, “As we cut loose from the ship these stewards took out cigarettes and lighted them. On an occasion like that!”

In the more casual intimacy of Boat 1, smoking was no problem. When Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon gave Fireman Hendrickson a good cigar, neither of the women in the boat could very well object. Miss Francatelli was employed by Sir Cosmo’s wife, and Lady Duff Gordon was too sick to care. With her head down upon the oars and tackle, she vomited away the night.

But No. 1 had its squabbles too. Sir Cosmo and Mr. C. E. Henry Stengel of Newark, New Jersey, didn’t get along very well. This might not have mattered in a crowded boat, but with only 12 people it was rather grating. According to Sir Cosmo, Mr. Stengel kept shouting, “Boat ahoy!” He also gave Lookout Symons conflicting advice on where to steer. Nobody paid any attention, but he irritated Sir Cosmo so much that he finally asked Mr. Stengel to keep quiet. Sir Cosmo was doubly annoyed when Mr. Stengel later testified that “between Sir Cosmo and myself we decided which way to go.”

Meanwhile Fireman Pusey was smoldering over Lady Duff Gordon’s efforts to condole Miss Francatelli on the loss of her nightgown. At the time he told her, “Never mind, you have saved your lives; but we have lost our kit.”

Half an hour later, still smoldering, Pusey turned to Sir Cosmo. “I suppose you have lost everything?”

“Of course.”

“But you can get more?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we have lost our kit, and the company won’t give us any more. And what’s more, our pay stops from tonight.”

Sir Cosmo had enough: “Very well, I will give you a fiver each to start a new kit.”

He did, too, but lived to regret it. The Duff Gordons’ near-monopoly of Boat 1, its failure to row back, gave the gift the look of a payoff that Sir Cosmo had a hard time living down.

Nor did subsequent events help his case. When Lady Duff Gordon reassembled the men in life jackets for a group picture after the rescue, they looked more and more like the Duff Gordons’ personal crew. Still later, when it came out that Lookout Symons, nominally in charge of the boat, spent the day with Sir Cosmo’s lawyer just before he testified at the British inquiry, it looked as though Sir Cosmo even had his personal coxswain.

There’s no evidence that Sir Cosmo was guilty of more than extreme bad taste.

Drinking caused some trouble too. When No. 4 plucked a member of the crew out of the water, he had a bottle of brandy in his pocket. It was then thrown away because, as he explained it a few weeks later to the press, “it was feared that if any hysterical person in the boat touched it, the result might be bad.” Miss Eustis had a somewhat different version: “One man was drunk and had a bottle of brandy in his pocket, which the Quartermaster promptly threw overboard, and the drunken man was thrown into the bottom of the boat …”

There was a different kind of trouble in Boat 6. Friction erupted from the moment Major Peuchen slid down the line to fill out the crew. Peuchen, used to giving orders, couldn’t resist trying to take command. Quartermaster Hitchens had other ideas. As they rowed away from the
Titanic,
Peuchen was pulling an oar and Hitchens was at the tiller, but within ten minutes Peuchen asked Hitchens to let a lady steer and join him in rowing. The Quartermaster answered that he was in charge and Peuchen’s job was to row and keep quiet.

Painfully the boat struggled away, with just Peuchen and Lookout Fleet rowing. Under Mrs. Brown’s leadership, most of the women gradually joined in, but Hitchens remained glued to the tiller, shouting at them to row harder or all would be sucked under when the
Titanic
sank.

The women began shouting back, and as the boat splashed along in the dark, the night echoed with bitter repartee. Most of the time No. 6 was heading toward the elusive light on the horizon, and when it became clear they could never reach it, Hitchens announced that all was lost; they had neither water nor food nor compass nor charts; they were hundreds of miles from land and didn’t even know which way they were heading.

Major Peuchen had given up by now, but the women tore into him. Mrs. Candee grimly showed him the North Star. Mrs. Brown told him to shut up and row. Mrs. Meyer jeered at his courage.

Then they tied up with Boat 16, and Hitchens ordered them to drift. But the women couldn’t stand the cold and insisted on rowing to keep warm. Mrs. Brown took charge, gave an oar to a grimy stoker transferred from No. 16, and told everyone to row. Hitchens moved to stop her, and Mrs. Brown told him if he came any closer, she would throw him overboard.

He sank back under a blanket and began shouting insults. Mrs. Meyer answered back—accused him of taking all the blankets and drinking all the whisky. Hitchens swore at her. The transferred stoker, wondering what on earth he had run into, called out, “I say, don’t you know you’re talking to a lady.”

Hitchens yelled back, “I know whom I’m speaking to, and I’m commanding this boat!”

But the stoker’s rebuke worked. The Quartermaster lapsed into silence. Boat 6 rowed on through the night with Hitchens subdued, Peuchen out of the picture, and Mrs. Brown virtually in charge.

Even among the men clinging desperately to overturned Boat B, there was time for petty bickering. Colonel Gracie—his teeth chattering, his matted hair now frozen stiff—noticed the man beside him wore a dry outing cap. The colonel asked to borrow the cap to warm his head for a minute. “And what would I do?” the man shot back.

Nerves on Boat B were understandably frayed. The air was leaking out from under the hull, and every minute it sank a little lower in the water. The sea occasionally washed over the keel, and one impulsive move might pitch everybody into the sea. They needed cool leadership badly.

At this point Gracie was relieved to hear the deep, rich voice of Second Officer Lightoller, and even more relieved when a somewhat tipsy crewman on the boat called out, “We will all obey what the officer orders.”

Lightoller quickly responded. Feeling that only concerted organized action would keep the boat balanced, he had all 30 men stand up. He arranged them in a double column, facing the bow. Then as the boat lurched with the sea, he shouted, “Lean to the right” … “Stand upright” … “Lean to the left”—whatever was necessary to counteract the swell.

As they threw their weight this way and that, for a while they yelled, “Boat ahoy! Boat ahoy!” Lightoller finally stopped them, urging them to save their strength.

It grew still colder, and the colonel complained again about his head, this time to Lightoller. Another man offered them both a pull from his flask. They turned him down but pointed out Walter Hurst, shivering nearby. Hurst thought it was brandy and took a big swig. He almost choked—it was essence of peppermint.

They talked a surprising amount. Assistant Cook John Maynard told how Captain Smith swam alongside the boat just before the
Titanic
took her last plunge. They pulled him on, but he slipped off again. Later Fireman Harry Senior claimed the Captain let go on purpose, saying, “I will follow the ship!” It may have been true, but Hurst is sure the Captain never reached the boat. Besides, Senior was one of the last to arrive—probably too late to have seen the Captain himself.

Most of all they talked of getting rescued. Lightoller soon discovered Harold Bride, the junior wireless operator, at the stern of the boat, and from his position in the bow he asked what ships were on the way. Bride shouted back: the
Baltic,
the
Olympic,
the
Carpathia.
Lightoller figured the
Carpathia
should arrive at daybreak … passed the word around, to buck up sagging spirits.

From then on they scanned the horizon searching for any sign. From time to time they were cheered by the green flares lit by Boxhall in Boat 2. Even Lightoller thought they must come from another ship.

Slowly the night passed. Toward dawn a slight breeze sprang up. The air seemed more frigid. The sea grew choppy. Bitter-cold waves splashed over the feet, the shins, the knees of the men on Boat B. The spray stabbed their bodies and blinded their eyes. One man, then another, then another rolled off the stern and disappeared from sight. The rest fell silent, completely absorbed in the battle to stay alive.

The sea was silent too. No one saw a trace of life in the waves that rippled the smooth Atlantic as the first light of dawn streaked the sky.

But one man still lived—thanks to a remarkable combination of initiative, luck and alcohol. Four hours earlier, Chief Baker Charles Joughin was awakened, like so many on the
Titanic,
by that strange, grinding jar. And like many others he heard the call to general quarters a little after midnight.

But Joughin didn’t merely report to the Boat Deck. He reasoned that if boats were needed, provisions were needed too; so on his own initiative he mustered his staff of 13 bakers and ransacked the
Titanic
’s larder of all spare bread. The bakers then trooped topside, carrying four loaves apiece.

This done, Joughin retired to his cabin on E Deck, port side, for a nip of whisky.

About 12:30 he felt sufficiently fortified to reascend the stairs to his Boat, No. 10. At this stage it was still difficult to persuade the women to go; so Joughin resorted to stronger methods. He went down to the Promenade Deck and hauled some up by force. Then, to use his own word, he “threw” them into the boat. Rough but effective.

Joughin was assigned to No. 10 as skipper, but he thought there were enough men to handle the boat; so he jumped out and helped launch it instead. To go with it, he explained, “would have set a bad example.”

It was now 1:20. He scampered down the slanting stairs again to his cabin on E Deck and poured himself another drink. He sat down on his bunk and nursed it along—aware but not particularly caring that the water now rippled through the cabin doorway, swilled across the checkered linoleum, and rose to the top of his shoes.

About 1:45 he saw, of all people, gentle old Dr. O’Loughlin poking around. It never occurred to Joughin to wonder what the old gentleman was doing way down here, but the proximity of the pantry suggests that Joughin and the doctor were thinking along similar lines.

In any case, Joughin greeted him briefly, then went back up to the Boat Deck. None too soon, for the
Titanic
was listing heavily now, and the slant was much steeper. Any longer, and the stairs might have been impossible.

Though all the boats were gone, Joughin was anything but discouraged. He went down to B Deck and began throwing deck chairs through the windows of the enclosed promenade. Others watched him, but they didn’t help. Altogether he pitched about 50 chairs overboard.

It was tiring work; so after he lugged the last chair to the edge and squeezed it through the window (it was a little like threading a needle), Joughin retired to the pantry on the starboard side of A Deck. It was 2:10.