The Other Side of the Night (14 page)

According to the ship’s clock on the
Carpathia
’s bridge, it was almost 3:30 and she was drawing close to the
Titanic
’s position. Captain Rostron was proud of his ship, and particularly proud of his officers and crew, his heart filled beyond words at their performance and dedication in bringing the
Carpathia
this far so quickly. Yet at the same moment his heart was sinking. Try as he might to keep his hopes up, he knew he was too late. Rostron was certain that the
Titanic
was gone. It had been nearly two hours since Cottam had last heard from her. The last message he received had been at 1:50 and had pleaded, “Come as quickly as possible, old man; the engine room is filling up to the boilers.”

Cottam had told Rostron that the
Titanic
’s signals had been getting weaker; with that last message and the ominous silence afterward, Rostron feared the worst. Those flares, he decided, couldn’t have come from the
Titanic
herself after all. At 3:50 he rang down to the engine room to “Stand By”; at 4:00 he rang for “All Stop.” The
Carpathia
was at 41.46 N, 50.14 W. There was nothing to be seen but darkness. The
Titanic
was gone.

Aboard the Leyland liner
Californian
, Second Officer Stone relieved Third Officer Groves at midnight. Passing through the wheelhouse, Stone encountered Captain Stanley Lord, and was given his orders for the middle watch. Lord, who hadn’t returned to the bridge after his conversation with Groves about the unknown ship to the south, took time to draw Stone’s particular attention to the steamer, which by now was almost abeam of the
Californian
, and also made a point of remarking about the loose field ice around their own ship, as well as the icefloes to the west and southwest.

When Lord pointed out the other ship to Stone, the Second Officer noticed that she was displaying her red (port) sidelight, along with a single masthead light and a few smaller lights; she also seemed to be showing a lot of deck lights. The glow from her lights seemed so bright that she appeared to be no more than five or six miles distant. Lord apparently didn’t notice the change in the stranger’s lights since he had first seen her–-her green starboard sidelight was gone, her red port light showing, as if she had just made a sudden hard turn to the right. Lord then left Stone with specific instructions to notify him if the stranger changed her bearing or drew any closer to the
Californian
. Stone acknowledged his instructions and made his way up to the bridge. Lord headed for the chartroom settee.

Once on the bridge, Stone took Grove’s report at the change of the watch, and was duly informed that the ship had stopped for the night and was drifting, but with steam up. Nothing particularly unusual had taken place during Grove’s watch, and the only ship known to be nearby was the ship off the starboard, to the south, which Groves believed to be a big liner. He confirmed what Captain Lord had mentioned, that he, Groves, had tried unsuccessfully to contact the stranger by Morse lamp, but said that Stone was free to continue if he felt so inclined. As the two men talked, Stone was gradually getting his night-sight as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and after a few more minutes of desultory conversation the watch-change was completed, and Groves went below.

While the two officers were conferring, they were joined by the apprentice officer, James Gibson, who brought with him welcome mugs of hot coffee. When he overheard Groves’ remarks about the strange ship to the south of the
Californian
, Gibson trained his glasses on the stranger and could clearly make out her masthead light, her red sidelight, and the glare of white lights on her after decks, a detail that Groves had missed with the naked eye. Although he didn’t know it at the time, the combination of visible lights Gibson was seeing confirmed that the stranger had made a sudden, sharp turn to starboard, toward the
Californian
. It would come to be an important point of detail in the days and weeks ahead. Gibson, picking up on the conversation between the Second and Third Officers, tried to raise the distant ship by Morse lamp, but was no more successful than Groves had been. A few moments later Groves left the bridge for the night, and Stone, as much to give the apprentice officer something to do as to actually get work done, told Gibson to fetch the gear needed to stream a new log line (a device which measured the ship’s speed while she was underway), and then bring the ship’s log up to date with the change of the watch.

While Gibson was gone, Stone paced back and forth across the bridge staring out into the night, frequently glancing over at the stranger to the south. At 12:40 Captain Lord called up the voice tube from the chartroom, asking if the other ship had come any closer. Stone replied no, that everything was the same as before. Lord informed him that he was going to lie down a bit on the chartroom settee. Stone resumed his pacing.

At 11:50 the lookout bell in the
Titanic
’s crow’s nest had rung once, signaling that a ship was spotted nearby off to port. The stars had been so bright, even down close to the horizon, that the lights of this ship hadn’t been clearly seen until the
Titanic
had turned around the iceberg and swung her bow around to the north. When the lookouts saw the other ship, they had immediately called the bridge, where Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall ran out onto the port bridge wing and through his high-powered glasses saw a steamship that appeared to be about a third the
Titanic
’s size a half-point off the port bow, a position which would have made the
Titanic
’s red sidelight plainly visible to her. The stranger appeared to be motionless and not more than ten or twelve miles away, her port running light showing clearly.

Boxhall informed Captain Smith as soon as he had returned to the bridge from his inspection with the ship’s designer, Thomas Andrews, a few minutes past midnight. Smith acknowledged Boxhall’s report, then asked him to work out the
Titanic
’s position; once he was finished with that, Smith suggested, he might have a go at contacting the other ship by Morse lamp. Boxhall quickly complied, and moments later, at 12:15 a.m., Smith walked back to the wireless room, handing Jack Phillips the scrap of paper with the
Titanic
’s position and instructing him to send out the CQD.

After being relieved by Stone, Groves hadn’t gone straight to his cabin, but instead made a short detour and stopped by the wireless office. Operator Evans lay back in his bunk, now glancing idly through a magazine, when Groves came in. Usually Evans welcomed visits from the Third Officer: young, keen Groves often stopped by to chat with Evans, picking up the latest news of the world or learning something more about wireless.

By this time, though, Evans’ usual friendly demeanor was somewhat in abeyance. He’d had a long, hard day, and the brush-off from Phillips on the
Titanic
had been the last straw. When 11:30 came, the hour he usually shut down, Evans had wasted no time in getting off the air. Now he was ready to turn in and didn’t much feel like being sociable. Groves tried anyhow: “What ships have you got, Sparks?”

“Only the
Titanic
,” Evans replied, and Groves nodded, remembering the big passenger liner he had seen overtaking the
Californian
half an hour before. He picked up the headphones and put them on, hoping to catch some traffic. Groves’ Morse was getting quite good—Evans was teaching him, and Groves joked that he could now catch one letter in three, though he was actually better than that—but he didn’t know enough about the equipment to realize that the wireless set aboard the
Californian
was equipped with a clockwork-driven magnetic detector, and when he failed to wind it up, the detector picked up nothing, so he heard nothing. Disappointed, he put the headphones down on the desk and said good night to Evans, turning out the cabin light as he left. It was just after 12:15 a.m. and Jack Phillips had just sent out the
Titanic
’s first distress call.

Quartermaster George Rowe had been standing watch on the
Titanic
’s after, or auxiliary, bridge. This was often a hardship post, for the bridge was really just an open catwalk running across the poop deck at the stern, leaving Rowe completely exposed to the elements. Tonight, though, wasn’t all that bad. The absence of any wind kept the cold from becoming unbearable, and Rowe was able to keep reasonably warm by pacing to and fro across the bridge. As he paced he noticed a curious sight: thousands of tiny ice splinters that gave off bright colors as they caught and refracted the glow of the deck lights, a phenomenon that sailors call “Whiskers ‘round the Light.” It stuck in Rowe’s mind because it usually occurred only near ice fields.

His reverie was suddenly broken by an interruption in the motion of the ship, as the steady beat of the engines changed. Stepping to the starboard side of the auxiliary bridge, he peered forward, startled to see what appeared to be a full-rigged ship, with sails set, passing perilously close by the
Titanic
’s starboard side. After a second or two, Rowe realized that he was actually looking at an iceberg, one that towered over the auxiliary bridge, itself nearly sixty feet above the water. As Rowe watched, the berg passed by swiftly and vanished. Within moments after the berg glided by, he felt the ship stop, and shortly after that the funnels began venting steam. But the activity on the Boat Deck hadn’t yet 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.

When he arrived at the bridge a few minutes later, he found Boxhall, who had had no success in raising the stranger to the north by Morse lamp, talking with Captain Smith, who turned and instructed Rowe to begin firing his rockets, and continue to fire them off, one every few minutes. The rockets Rowe carried were manufactured by the Cotton Powder Co. Ltd., of a type known as “socket distress signals”; that is, they were constructed to be fitted into a specially-made socket attached to a bulkhead or railing, and launched from there. Designed to fly as high as eight hundred feet, the rockets would then burst in a shower of white stars perhaps two hundred feet across. Rowe quickly fitted one of them into the launching socket on the port bridge wing, and struck a match. With a bright yellow flash and a loud “whoosh” the rocket sped up into the sky, where it burst with a near-deafening “BANG” and a brilliant flash of fiery white light.

Around 1:00 a.m. on the bridge of the
Californian
, Stone was startled by a flash of white light above the other ship. Taken by surprise and unsure of exactly what he had seen, he watched the stranger closely, and after a few minutes, was rewarded with another white flash—and this time he was able to identify what he was seeing: a white rocket bursting high above the unknown vessel, sending out a shower of white stars. Several minutes later he saw another—then later still another—and still another. Five white rockets…

There had been little urgency on the
Titanic
’s Boat Deck, with passengers climbing into the lifeboats in the most leisurely manner, most people believing that the fuss was just precautionary. Very few knew the extent of the damage done by the iceberg; even fewer knew that there were boats for only half as many people as were on board. Only Phillips, Bride, and the
Titanic
’s officers knew that the ship was sending out the international distress call. From bow to stern the
Titanic
, sitting motionless in the water, was ablaze with bright lights, their glow lighting the ocean for hundreds of yards in every direction. The ship’s orchestra had come up on deck and begun playing bouncy, up-tempo ragtime, while passengers and crew milled about in a calm, unhurried fashion. The ship was beginning to list noticeably down by the head, but even that didn’t seem to cause much concern. Certainly few people aboard considered the situation dangerous.

All that changed in an instant a few minutes before 1:00 a.m., just as Boat 5 was being lowered. Without warning a bright flash and a loud hiss came from the starboard bridge wing, and a few seconds later an explosion of brilliant white stars burst high over the Titanic with a tremendous bang. Moments later a second rocket went soaring into the sky, another one a short time after that. In the words of Lawrence Beesley, a passenger aboard the
Titanic
, the flash of the exploding rockets “split the night”—in every respect a textbook example of a visual signal of distress. Now everyone knew that the
Titanic
needed the help of any ship close enough to see her. She was in mortal danger.

At around 1:30 Stone decided that it was time he informed Captain Lord. Calling down the voice tube that connected the bridge to the chartroom, where Lord was napping on the settee, Stone quickly told Lord that he had watched the stranger to the south fire rockets.