The Other Side of the Night (17 page)

Captain Lord would later maintain that intervening ice again made a direct course toward the Cunard ship impossible, so the
Californian
had to take yet another roundabout route, coming up on the
Carpathia
from the southwest. As his ship approached the
Carpathia
, Lord noted that the Cunard vessel had four masts and a single funnel, but gave no indication that he recognized her as the same ship he had earlier misidentified as the mysterious rocket-firing ship of the early morning hours. Instead, Lord seemed most intent on establishing beyond any doubt that reaching the
Titanic
’s position was an arduous, difficult, and time-consuming undertaking for his ship.

In the meantime, Evans began making up for lost airtime. He began cluttering up the already overladen ether with an endless series of questions and comments about the
Titanic
; only the Telefunken operator aboard the
Frankfurt
, near-hysterical and endlessly transmitting in a garbled combination of German and English, was more annoying. What Evans did not know was that a Marconi Inspector, Gilbert Balfour, was aboard the
Baltic
, and overheard every word. Soon Balfour had enough of Evans chatter and tapped out an angry reprimand to the
Californian
’s operator for misuse of his wireless, effectively silencing Evans for most of the remainder of the day.

At 8:30 the
Californian
hove to a few hundred yards away from the
Carpathia
, and soon an exchange of flag signals began between the two ships—it was obvious to the skippers of both that there was simply too much wireless traffic at the moment for them to talk intelligently to each other through that medium. Eventually it was decided that while the
Carpathia
would immediately head for New York, the
Californian
would continue to search for survivors. The Cunard liner had just picked up what Second Officer Lightoller assured Captain Rostron was the last of the
Titanic
’s lifeboats, but the methodical Rostron, though he knew how unlikely the possibility, was taking no chances: if there were any boats unaccounted for or anyone clinging to a bit of wreckage, the
Californian
would be able to pick them up. As the
Carpathia
steered southwest and began to make her way out of the fringes of the icefield, the
Californian
began a slow traverse of the area.

There was little enough to see; unlike disasters on land, catastrophe at sea leaves little to mark its passage, and none of it is permanent. There were large pieces of reddish cork from the
Titanic
’s ruptured bulkheads, steamer chairs, cushions, lifebelts, rugs, sections of wood panels from the ship’s public rooms, bits of clothing, the odd life ring or two, the abandoned lifeboats, the red and white striped barber pole; an amazing array of debris and yet surprisingly little left to mark the passage of the largest ship in the world. Within hours it would begin to disperse and within days most of it would be lost to wind and waves. Captain Lord would later claim that he didn’t find any bodies at all. It is doubtful that he looked very hard, for the sea was littered with them, and for the next several days liners would report sighting bodies, some singly, others in groups, in an ever-widening circle around the spot where the
Titanic
went down.

The superficial nature of the
Californian’
s search should have come as no surprise to anyone, though. Third Officer Groves later maintained that the search was broken off by 10:30 a.m., though Captain Lord would maintain that it was continued until 11:40. Lord’s version was the one that went down in the
Californian’
s log, of course, but then Captain Lord’s version of many things would find their way into the
Californian’
s log. Nowhere, for example, did the ship’s log mention anything about her officers sighting white rockets in the early hours of the morning of April 15, 1912. If the
Californian
departed the area earlier than her captain maintained, it was understandable: few men would ever have as much reason as Stanley Lord to put as much distance as possible between himself and the place where the
Titanic
sank.

Standing on the keel of Collapsible B, Second Officer Lightoller struggled to keep the two dozen or so survivors still perched atop the upturned boat alive. Within minutes after the
Titanic
’s stern had disappeared, as many as sixty men, possibly more, had been desperately trying to stand upright on the wallowing keel, but their numbers steadily dwindled as cold and fatigue took their toll. Lightoller wasn’t a ruthless man, or hard-hearted, but a lifetime of adventures had put more steel into his soul than most, which often allowed him to view even the most difficult circumstances with an unemotional detachment. Yet even the strong-willed sailor had to brace himself each time he heard the soft thud of knees hitting the keel, followed seconds later by a sibilant splash as yet another man collapsed and fell into the water. Unlike so many who had remained aboard the doomed liner to the end, these weren’t men who had given up, or resigned themselves to their fate, but who instead had fought for their survival, only to have their bodies give out before their spirits faltered.

One of these victims proved to be Phillips. Intelligent, intense, and high-strung, the young wireless operator’s reserves of strength were exhausted by the combination of a near-eighteen hour workday and the stress of the two hours spent at the wireless key while the
Titanic
was slowly sinking. With almost his last breath Phillips had told Lightoller the
Carpathia
was steaming hard from the south. Moments later he collapsed and slid off Collapsible B’s keel, his body vanishing in the darkness.

It was sometime around 3:30 when the Second Officer saw a flash of light to the southeast, followed some seconds later by a faint “boom.” Lightoller hoped it was a signal from an approaching ship. That flash had been seen in the other lifeboats as well. In Number 13, Fred Barrett, a stoker, who was nearly unconscious from the cold, suddenly sat bolt upright and shouted, “That was a cannon!” In Boat 6, where the passengers had been bickering with the eternally morose and uncooperative Quartermaster Hitchens all night, Margaret Martin saw a brief glimmer of light on the horizon and cried out, “There’s a flash of lightning!” Hitchens only muttered pessimistically, “It’s a falling star.” But a few minutes later another flash was seen, and shortly after that, the masthead light of an oncoming steamer.

Soon the ship’s green and red sidelights could be seen as the vessel loomed over the horizon, still firing rockets, still coming hard. In Boat 9, Paddy McGough, a big, strapping deck hand, called out, “Let us all pray to God, for there is a ship on the horizon and it’s making for us!” and nobody dared disagree with the suggestion. In Boat 3, someone lit a rolled up newspaper and waved it wildly as a signal, followed a few minutes later by a passenger’s straw hat. In Number 8, Mrs. J. Stuart White swung her cane with its battery-powered light in the tip over her head for all she was worth. In Boat 2, Fourth Officer Boxhall lit a green flare.

Captain Rostron’s heart leaped when he saw the flare light up directly ahead of the
Carpathia
. If he was too late to reach the
Titanic
before she went down, he wasn’t too late to save those souls who were bobbing about on the open sea in the lifeboats. In the flare’s pale wash of light he could make out a boat less than a quarter mile away. He immediately rang down “Slow Ahead” on his engines and began to swing the ship to starboard, so he could pick up the boat in the shelter of his portside, which was to leeward. No sooner had the
Carpathia’
s bow begun to swing to the right then Bisset spotted a huge dark iceberg to starboard, and Rostron had to put his helm over to avoid it. The boat was now on his windward side, and as the morning breeze picked up, the swell had become choppy, causing the boat to bob up and down like a cork. As Rostron moved out onto the starboard bridge wing, megaphone in hand, a voice called up to the
Carpathia
, “We have only one seaman in the boat, and can’t work it very well!”

“All right!” Rostron shouted back, and began edging the liner closer to the boat. Turning to Bisset, he told him to go down to the starboard gangway with two quartermasters and guide the lifeboat as it came alongside. “Fend her off so that she doesn’t bump, and be careful that she doesn’t capsize.”

“Stop your engines!” A new voice floated up from the boat below, that of Fourth Officer Boxhall, and Boat 2 was now gently drifting toward the
Carpathia
’s starboard gangway. Suddenly yet another voice, a woman’s, cried out, “The
Titanic
has gone down with everyone on board!”

Boxhall turned to the woman, Mrs. Walter Douglas, and told her to shut up. She lapsed into silence, but apparently no one aboard the
Carpathia
heard her anyhow. (Boxhall later apologized: Mrs. Douglas graciously refused to take offense. Both understood that they were desperately overwrought by what they had just endured.) Lines were dropped and the boat was made fast. A rope ladder was let down from the gangway, along with a lifeline that Boxhall would secure under the arms of each passenger before they began climbing up.

The first to be brought aboard was Elizabeth Allen who, as she neared the gangway, was lifted onto the
Carpathia
by Purser Brown. She stepped aboard at 4:10 a.m. Brown asked her what had happened to the
Titanic
, and she told him it had sunk. More survivors followed her up the ladder, the last being Boxhall. Rostron sent word that he needed to see Boxhall on the bridge immediately.

When the
Titanic
’s Fourth Officer appeared, Rostron, hoping to get this painful duty over with as quickly as possible, asked him directly, “The
Titanic
has gone down?”

“Yes”—here Boxhall’s voice broke with emotion—“she went down about 2:30.”

“Were many people left on board when she sank?”

“Hundreds and hundreds! Perhaps a thousand! Perhaps more!” Boxhall went on, his voice breaking as grief began to get the better of him. “My God, sir, they’ve gone down with her. They couldn’t live in this cold water. We had room for a dozen more people in my boat, but it was dark after the ship took the plunge. We didn’t pick up any swimmers. I fired flares…I think that the people were drawn down deep by the suction. The other boats are somewhere near.”

Rostron nodded, the formalities taken care of, and sent Boxhall down to the First Class Dining Saloon. The emotional exchange with the
Titanic
’s Fourth Officer had left Rostron deeply moved, and now a profound sadness swept over him, strangely coupled with relief and satisfaction. It was a sadness brought on by the knowledge that for all he had done, he had arrived too late to save the hundreds of lives that were lost when the
Titanic
went down. The relief came from the realization that he had been able to rescue the more than seven hundred survivors, so his efforts were hardly in vain. Finally, satisfaction at knowing that he, his crew, and his ship had done a superlative job in carrying out the rescue.

The
Carpathia
had performed flawlessly despite being driven harder than she had ever been—or ever would be again—a tribute to the meticulous shipwrights at Swan-Hunter who had built her a decade earlier. The crew had risen above themselves, impelled by the knowledge that an untold number of lives were depending on their every action—and they had done everything right. It would be fair to say that no skipper on the North Atlantic had ever been more proud of his crew, or ever had more reason for his pride, than Arthur Rostron in those moments before sunrise on April 15, 1912.

Dawn was breaking and now the
Carpathia’
s captain could begin to see the rest of the
Titanic’
s boats, spread out across four or five miles of sea. The
Carpathia’
s passengers were beginning to stir now, and those who were already up were lining the rails, looking down at the pitiful handful of survivors in Boat 2, or gazing out across the water at the other boats. Mrs. Louis Ogden, a First Class passenger on board the
Carpathia
, would later recall that the lifebelts most of the survivors wore made everyone look as if they were dressed in white. She remembered what her husband had told her about the
Titanic —
he had heard the news from a quartermaster in the early hours of the morning, but both he and his wife had been skeptical—seeing the White Star emblem on the side of Boat 2 now made the awful truth clear. She felt heartsick.

In the growing light, maybe five miles off to the west, stretching from the northern horizon to the western, was a vast, unbroken sheet of ice, studded here and there with towering bergs, some as much as two hundred feet high. Smaller bergs and growlers dotted the open water between the ice floe and the ship, presenting the passengers of the
Carpathia
with a spectacle they would never forget. The sun edged over the eastern horizon, its morning rays playing across the ice, turning it shades of pink, blue, grey-green and lavender, lending a perverse beauty to its menace.