Titanic (11 page)

Harold Bride tried to make light of what was happening. “I cut in with a little remark that made us all laugh, including the Captain,” said Harold. “‘Send S.O.S.,’ I said. ‘It’s the new call, and it may be your last chance to send it.’”

With a laugh, Jack Phillips changed the CQD call to SOS.

Second class passenger Charlotte Collyer had turned into her berth early, her eight-year-old daughter, Marjorie, beside her. Her husband, Harvey, came into the cabin later and the two chatted as he got ready for bed. Charlotte definitely felt the collision when it happened.

“The sensation to me was as if the ship had been seized by a giant hand and shaken once, twice then stopped dead in its course,” she said. But “. . . I was not thrown out of my berth, and my husband staggered on his feet only slightly. We heard no strange sounds . . . but we noticed that the engines had stopped running . . .”

Harvey decided to investigate. Charlotte waited for him sleepily in the warm bunk, curled up with Marjorie. She couldn’t really imagine that anything could be seriously wrong — not on a ship the size of the
Titanic
. After all, the weather had been calm and clear. “I lay quietly in my berth with my little girl and almost fell asleep again,” she said. “In what seemed a very few moments my husband returned. He was a bit excited then.

“‘What do you think,’ he exclaimed. ‘We have struck an iceberg, a big one, but there is no danger an officer just told me so.’”

It wasn’t long before Charlotte and Harvey began to hear the sounds of footsteps in the passageway. The noise reminded the young mother of rats scurrying.

Harvey said, “‘We had better go on deck and see what’s wrong.’”

While passengers like Lawrence Beesley first noticed something was wrong when the engines stopped, Daniel Buckley, a third class passenger in the bow of the ship (possibly on F Deck or G Deck), woke up after the collision to find water seeping into his cabin. “I heard some terrible noise and I jumped out on the floor, and the first thing I knew my feet were getting wet; the water was just coming in slightly.”

Not long after, Daniel heard two sailors come along, shouting for people to get on deck. Daniel did so, but tried to return to his cabin for his life belt. He couldn’t get back — seawater was now blocking his way. “. . . just as I was going down the last flight of stairs the water was up four steps, and dashing up.”

(Preceding image)
A photo of the iceberg that purportedly sank the
Titanic
.

Earlier, Colonel Archibald Gracie had said good night to his friend James Clinch Smith and headed off to bed, tired out by his morning workout. The impact startled him awake.

“I was enjoying a good night’s rest when I was aroused by a sudden shock and noise forward on the starboard side, which I at once concluded was caused by a collision, with some other ship perhaps.”

Jumping up, Colonel Gracie turned on his light and opened the door of his cabin. “. . . there was no commotion whatever; but immediately following the collision came a great noise of escaping steam. I listened intently but could hear no machinery. There was no mistaking that something wrong had happened, because of the ship stopping and the blowing off of steam.”

Gracie could not go back to sleep. He rose, dressed, and went up to the Boat Deck. But as he looked around, Gracie was puzzled. He still couldn’t see any signs of what had happened. In fact, there were no other boats in sight. He couldn’t see any icebergs either.

It was all very puzzling. “It was a beautiful night, cloudless, and the stars shining brightly,” he recalled. “The atmosphere was quite cold, but no ice or iceberg was in sight. If another ship had struck us there was no trace of it . . .”

Colonel Gracie decided to look for an officer, but none was to be found. After a while he came upon some fellow first class passengers, including James Clinch Smith, who told him that the ship had struck an iceberg and even made a joke about it. “He opened his hand and showed me some ice, flat like my watch, coolly suggesting that I might want to take it home for a souvenir.”

The two friends tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Where had the ice come from, and what did it mean? One person had apparently spotted the iceberg itself; someone else passed on a rumor that the mail room was flooded and clerks were trying to transfer two hundred bags of mail to an upper deck.

All at once Gracie noticed something odd. It seemed to him that the boat had begun to list, or lean, to one side. Maybe something was wrong after all.

Like Lawrence Beesley, seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer only became worried when he realized that the engines had stopped. “The sudden quiet was startling and disturbing.”

Jack began to hear muffled voices and running feet outside his cabin door. Curious, Jack threw on his overcoat and stuffed his feet into slippers. He called to his parents in the next cabin that he was “going up on deck to see the fun.”

His father said he would get dressed and join him. Soon the two were walking on deck trying to find out what had happened. Shortly after midnight, the cold drove Jack and his dad inside. “There were quite a few people standing around questioning each other in a dazed kind of way. No one seemed to know what next to do.”

Through the words of a saloon steward named James Johnson we know about one of the most important conversations that night — though what was said no one will ever know. Sometime just after midnight Johnson saw ship designer Thomas Andrews go down to the engine room, “and then I saw the captain directly following him.”

We can imagine Captain Smith and Thomas Andrews putting their heads together with chief engineer Joseph Bell. Andrews had been involved with building the ship from the beginning. Bell, the father of four, had been a chief engineer for twenty years, and had recently served on the
Olympic
. These men understood the ship better than anyone.

The evidence of severe damage was overwhelming: Within ten minutes after the collision, water was eight feet deep in Boiler Room 6. There was seven feet of water in Hold 1, and the mail room had in fact flooded. Pokes and stabs from the iceberg had caused damage in the forepeak (the most forward section of the hold located in the angle of the bow) and in five other compartments along the bottom of the ship known as holds one, two, and three; Boiler Room 6; and just aft of it, Boiler Room 5.

The damage was spread out across a wide area — three hundred feet, only about ten feet from the keel. The watertight doors, which were supposed to make the ship “practically unsinkable,” would not be able to save her. With the exception of Boiler Room 5, the water had risen about fourteen feet above the keel in the first six compartments within the first ten minutes after the collision.

And so it was that around midnight of April 15, the
Titanic
’s designer knew two things that must have made his blood run cold.

First, this important, expensive, incredibly beautiful ship — a ship he and so many others had labored on for years — would sink in a matter of hours.

Second, there were not nearly enough lifeboats to save the 2,208 people on board.