Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World (13 page)

A woman watches from the boat deck as departing passengers board the tenders for Queenstown.
(photo credit 1.27)

As the
Titanic
prepared to raise anchor at around one thirty, Francis Browne headed down to board the
Ireland
with the Odell family. With him was his brother William, a Catholic priest, who had come out on the tender to have a look at the
Titanic
. At the gangway, Browne greeted Purser McElroy and one of the postal clerks, saying, “
Goodbye, I will give you copies of my photos when you come again [to Queenstown]. Pleasant voyage.” From the tender, Francis continued to snap photos, taking the last shot of Captain Smith as he looked over the side from the starboard wing bridge. On the
Ireland
, Browne spotted a fellow photographer he knew, Thomas Barker, who had been taking pictures on board for the
Cork Examiner
. Barker’s photographs along with Browne’s and twelve by Kate Odell today comprise most of the photographic archive documenting the
Titanic
’s short life. Over the next two days, the
Cork Examiner
ran two stories about the
Titanic
, extolling both her splendid public rooms and also her safety features, noting: “
Nothing is left to chance, every mechanical device that could be conceived has been employed to secure further immunity from risk either by sinking or by fire.”

As the returning tender passed Roche’s Point to enter the harbor, Queenstown came clearly into view, despite a blue haze that had descended. The town had originally been called Cove as in “The Cove of Cork” but was named Queenstown in 1849 to commemorate a visit by Queen Victoria. (After Irish independence, it would be renamed Cobh in 1922.) At the top of the town stood St. Colman’s Cathedral, where Browne’s uncle was bishop and where, following the
Titanic
disaster, as Francis Browne wrote, “
we gathered … to pray for those who had departed and for those on whom the hand of sorrow had fallen so heavily.”

Among the fortifications that dotted the hills around the harbor were stone Martello towers, similar to the one made famous by James Joyce in the opening chapter of
Ulysses
. The young Joyce had been a classmate of Francis Browne’s at Belevedere College and also at the Royal University in Dublin, and a character named “Mr Browne, the Jesuit” makes several appearances in Joyce’s last novel,
Finnegan’s Wake
. As the
Titanic
began to make its departure, Francis Browne took a shot of the liner in profile with a flock of gulls swarming around its bow. Not far from where Browne stood, a twenty-four-year-old stowaway, John Coffey, a stoker from Queenstown, lay hidden under a pile of mailbags. “
I’m going down to this tender to see my mother,” he’d told another stoker before disappearing. While Coffey headed homeward, other young Irish men and women were finding their tiny berths in the
Titanic
’s lower decks. Single men were mostly berthed in communal cabins below the bow, while single women were housed in the stern. There was less of a scramble than there had been in Cherbourg since, as one of the stewards noted, “
at least this lot spoke English.”

As the
Titanic
steamed away from Queenstown, schoolteacher Lawrence Beesley noticed how a little house on the left side of the harbor entrance continued to gleam white in the distance. He also observed the gulls who followed them and marveled at their ability to soar alongside the ship while barely moving their wings. Before long, the lighthouse on the Old Head of Kinsale, fourteen nautical miles away, was spotted and the
Titanic
then turned outward as it continued to follow the shoreline along Ireland’s southern coast. Years later, people in whitewashed cottages along the shore would remember looking up to see the huge new liner pass by, and recall what a splendid sight she was. At around four o’clock the white column of the Fastnet Lighthouse, planted on a small rocky outcrop off Ireland’s southern tip, came into view. From there, the ship turned westward to head out across the open Atlantic. As the Irish coastline retreated in the distance, Eugene Daly once again hoisted his pipes, walked to the stern railing, and saluted his homeland with a mournful dirge called “Erin’s Lament.” Seagulls wheeled over the
Titanic
’s wake as the distant hills grew dark in the lowering sun and became ever smaller, until they finally disappeared in the offshore mist.

Passengers take the air on the second-class boat deck promenade.
(photo credit 1.28)

A
t the end of the afternoon a good number of the
Titanic
’s passengers were still out on deck. Margaret Brown described this time of day as one when “
all take their exercise before descending to the dining hall … the women in luxurious furs and the men in heavy overcoats … and partly disguised in steamer caps.” The air was chilly but there was little wind and the sea was remarkably calm—like a “
silver lake” as one described it. A few passengers were walking their dogs, John Jacob Astor quite possibly among them. Although Madeleine Astor was mostly keeping to her cabin, Colonel Astor was often seen walking Kitty on the boat deck. It is thought that
the
Titanic
’s kennels were located there, behind a door just aft of the fourth funnel. Kitty, however, was frequently to be found in the Astors’ stateroom; they wanted to keep her near since she had recently gotten lost during their trip up the Nile, as Madeleine’s sister Katherine Force later related:

She [Kitty] wandered away from Colonel Astor’s side one day at a landing and [he] was greatly distressed by the loss of the dog. He spent a great deal of time looking for her, and when he had to give up and start up the Nile again he employed scores of natives to look for her, promising a handsome reward for her return. Nothing was heard of Kitty until on the return trip [downriver] when, on passing another
dahabea
[boat], Colonel Astor spotted Kitty making herself at home on board. The Astor boat was stopped and Kitty found her master with joyous barks. After that, a closer watch was kept of Kitty on board the
Titanic
. She slept in Colonel Astor’s room [and he] took frequent walks and romped with Kitty a great deal.

Frank Millet and Archie Butt, too, often opted for a walk on the boat deck at day’s end. On running into Astor on deck, both men would have greeted him, since they were social acquaintances, although the colonel was not a man for easy conversation. Astor’s military rank was a result of his outfitting a 102-man artillery regiment called the Astor Battery at the outbreal of the Spanish-American War. He had accompanied the regiment to Cuba in June of 1898 and had observed from a safe distance as his distant cousin, Teddy Roosevelt, and his Rough Riders made their famous charge up San Juan Hill. He spent only a month in Cuba but it was enough to earn him the honorific that became his chosen mode of address. The colonel did not accompany the Astor Battery when they were sent to the Philippines in 1899, but Frank Millet did, traveling across the Pacific with the regiment and treporting on the war for
Harper’s Weekly
. He later published his dispatches in book form as
The Expedition to the Philippines
.

In early February of 1910 Archie Butt had been seated near Colonel Astor at a dinner-dance in the New York mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt III. It was a thrill for Archie to be invited to this function, since, as he noted to Clara, it marked “
the first time a member of the Butt family has actually penetrated into the heart of the Four Hundred.” Archie was told that Astor had been placed at the head table under the watchful eye of the hostess for fear he might be “cut” by some of the guests due to his recent divorce from Ava. A society woman whispered to Archie that, while she did not object to John Jacob Astor’s morals, “
she thought [he] looked like an ape,” and Archie wrote,
“I had to agree with her.”

Much of the resentment toward the Astors in New York was driven by the fact that they were, in effect, the city’s biggest slumlords. The first John Jacob Astor, a butcher’s son from Baden who landed in New York in 1784, had left behind on his death in 1848 the largest fortune in the United States. Astor began as a fur trader but cashed in his fur company in the 1830s to buy up large parcels of New York real estate. “If I could live all over again,” he once said, “I would buy every square inch of Manhattan.” He very nearly succeeded—his son William would be known as “the landlord of New York” for his vast holdings in the city. The Astors preferred to lease out their land to others who would then return the improved real estate once the lease was up. This also spared the family the unpleasant business of collecting rents from the tenements that occupied many of their properties.

This 1898 magazine cartoon is captioned “A New Factor in Modern Warfare: The Jack-Ass(tor) Battery.”
(photo credit 1.68)

Astor-owned hotels like the Waldorf-Astoria and the St. Regis put an elegant gloss on the hard fact that three-quarters of the family’s income came from rents derived from New York’s poorest neighborhoods. In this, the Astors and the White Star Line had something in common; the
Olympic
and the
Titanic
would never have been built without the lucrative transatlantic immigrant trade to fill their lower decks. The accommodations the
Titanic
offered its poorer passengers, however, bore no resemblance to the squalid disease-ridden warrens that stood on Astor-owned properties. Descriptions of these by the crusading writer and photographer Jacob Riis in the 1890s had caused Colonel Astor to unload some of the worst of his holdings by 1900.

FRANK MILLET HAD
likely spent most of April 11 immersed in paperwork—shipboard days were good for that. He had a lecture on period costumes to give in early May, a progress report to write on the American Academy building on the Janiculum Hill, and he had to prepare for the pending Fine Arts Commission meeting regarding the Lincoln Memorial. Architect Daniel Burnham, the chairman of the commission, needed Millet’s persuasive gifts to keep the politicians who made up the Lincoln Memorial Commission from making a hash of their plans. Burnham, who headed a large Chicago architecture firm that had designed such Gilded Age landmarks as New York’s Flatiron Building and Washington’s Union Station, had become fast friends with Frank during the construction of the World’s Columbian Exhibition in 1892–93. Burnham was the man responsible for conjuring up a city of grand boulevards, canals, and classical facades from some scrubby acres of Chicago waterfront, and Frank Millet’s unfailing good humor and gift for managing people under impossible deadlines had made him Burnham’s closest lieutenant.

As the fair was about to open in May of 1893, Burnham asked Millet to become his director of functions and dream up events to boost attendance. Frank soon devised a host of parades, special days, and fireworks displays, but his most outrageous success was a gala evening called the Midway Ball. For this event, Turkish belly dancers and African and South Sea Island women from the Midway’s replica villages were invited to a formal dance attended by directors of the fair and other leading citizens of Chicago. The newspapers described men in white tie and tails “
swinging black Amazons with bushy hair and teeth necklaces” around the dance floor. For the late-night buffet, Frank devised a menu with dishes like “Roast Missionary à la Dahomey” and “Boiled Camel Humps à la Cairo Street.” To the
Chicago Tribune
the ball was “
the strangest gathering since the destruction of the Tower of Babel.”