Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (2 page)

Some things, though, never change. Courage, selflessness, meeting death with dignity are immutable. So are cowardice, arrogance, and stupidity. These qualities were all present in those aboard the Titanic the night she sank. It is true that the story of the Titanic contains its share of blunderers, incompetents, cowards, and even a villain or two. But more important is the story of the heroes, the men and women who rose above themselves by word or deed, who deserve to be remembered.

This is that story.

IT WAS A FORCE OF NATURE. FIVE THOUSAND YEARS IT HAD WAITED. IT WAS born in the midst of that vast sheet of ice that one day men would call the Greenland Glacier, when the Celts were migrating across Europe, the Babylonians were building their first cities in Mesopotamia, and tribes of Picts barely out of the Stone Age were populating Britain and Ireland. In three hundred years it had achieved its full stature and begun its slow migration to the arm of the Atlantic Ocean that would become known as the Labrador Sea. It was halfway there when the first Norse adventurers, setting out in their longboats, encountered its siblings. Huge and impregnable they seemed, like vast fortresses of the gods Odin and Thor. The Norsemen called them “mountains of ice”—icebergs.

Undisturbed by human affairs, the iceberg continued its slow procession to the sea, while empires were being created and plagues were sweeping across entire continents. Neither malevolent nor benevolent, it had no way of knowing that a ten-second encounter with another moving object would make it the most notorious iceberg in all the ages of the world.

Sometime in the early weeks of 1912, with a series of deafening cracks, it broke off from its parent glacier and thundered into the cold waters of the Labrador Sea, and began its slow drift southward toward the North Atlantic....

—Psalm 104:26

 

 

 

IT WAS JUST A FEW MINUTES BEFORE NOON ON MAY 31, 1911. SHE STOOD proud in the bright late-spring sunshine, and she was ready. In a matter of moments she would become the largest moving man-made object in the world. The dignitaries, reporters, and workmen standing on the concrete apron that supported her gazed in awe at the wall of steel before them. Towering cliff-like over their heads for more than ten stories, she stretched away for almost a sixth of a mile. She was a ship unrivaled in size by any that had come before her, the epitome of the shipbuilder’s art, the most luxurious ocean liner that would ever be built, destined to become the most famous ocean-going vessel. in history. Today was her launching, and she was ready. She was the Titanic.

She was conceived, along with her two sisters, on a warm summer evening in 1907. A large Daimler-Benz towncar with elegant
Roi-de-Belge
coach-work stopped at the front entrance of 27 Chelsea Street in the fashionable Belgravia district of London. A gold-and-green liveried chauffeur ushered Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Bruce Ismay into the automobile, then drove them the short distance to Downshire House, Belgrave Square, home of Lord and Lady Pirrie. The Ismays were to be the dinner guests of Lord and Lady Pirrie that evening. Bruce Ismay was the managing director of the White Star Line; Lord Pirrie was the senior partner and chairman of the board of Harland and Wolff, a Belfast shipyard.

After dinner the ladies withdrew, as was the custom of the day, leaving Ismay and Lord Pirrie to their Napoleon and Havanas, the social occasion becoming an impromptu business meeting. A special relationship existed between the two firms these men represented, had done so for nearly forty years, and would continue for another quarter century. But the consequences of this informal meeting would be the high—and low—points of that relationship.
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Joseph Bruce Ismay was the eldest son of Thomas H. Ismay, one of the great shipping magnates of the last half of the nineteenth century and himself the son of a small Mayport boatbuilder. Thomas Ismay acquired the flag of the White Star Line in 1867, then promptly reorganized it as the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company, Ltd. The White Star Line was the successor to a line of wooden sailing ships that plied the profitable Australian emigrant trade in the middle of the nineteenth century, but Ismay was a perceptive businessman, and rewarding as the Australian trade was, he was shrewd enough to realize that there were far greater profits to be made on the transatlantic passenger run—the North Atlantic Ferry as it became known—bringing immigrants from the Old World to the New and shuttling wealthier passengers back and forth between the two. Almost immediately the White Star Line created a niche for itself by sailing liners that were fast and, by the standards of the day, luxurious. In 1870 Ismay formed a partnership with William Imrie and created a holding company called Ismay, Imrie and Company, one of the first business transactions of which was to contract with Harland and Wolff of Belfast to build a fleet of iron steamships for the White Star Line. It was to be a happy union.

The origins of Harland and Wolff dated back to the 1840s, when dredging of a deep-water passage in the section of the River Lagan known as the Victoria Channel created Queen’s Island in the middle of the channel. Robert Hickson built a shipyard on the new island and began the construction of iron ships there in 1853. Edward J. Harland came to the yard, which was known as Hickson and Company, as a manager in 1854 and bought it outright from Hickson in 1859. Gustav Wolff was a silent partner when he first joined Harland in 1861, but by 1862 the yard was known as Harland and Wolff.

Gustav Wolff was the nephew of Gustavus Schwabe, a Hamburg financier who had relocated to Liverpool some years before. It was Schwabe who had loaned Harland the £5,000 he needed to buy Hickson’s shipyard, and because Schwabe also owned a substantial interest in the Bibby Line, a small North Atlantic steamship company, he was in a position to assure himself that his investment in Harland paid off. It is a matter of record that of the more than 1,500 orders for ships on Harland and Wolff’s books in the yard’s 139-year history, the first three were for ships for the Bibby Line.

While it was true that being the nephew of Gustavus Schwabe had much to do with Harland’s decision to take Wolff on as a partner, the yard itself bore the unmistakable stamp of one man only—Edward Harland. His talent for engineering, which bordered on genius, led Harland to make three lasting contributions to shipbuilding. One was purely aesthetic, but the other two were revolutionary. First he eliminated the unnecessary clutter of sailing ships from steamship design: bowsprits, jib booms, figureheads, and their associated rigging. This made the ships cleaner and more distinctive in appearance. Next he squared off the bilges on the ships’ hulls, at once making them more efficient in cutting through the water so that engine size would not need to be increased to increase speed, and also enlarging the carrying capacity of any given hull size. Finally, Harland replaced wooden upper decks with iron, which turned the hull into a giant box girder of immense strength, allowing far larger hulls than ever before to be built.

Harland and Wolff were shipbuilders in the most complete sense. Not only did the yard construct the hull and superstructure of the ships they designed, but the yard also produced the heavy machinery, engines, turbines, boilers, and most of the associated equipment as well. This not only made for a more efficient construction but also eliminated the costs of subcontracting, which saved the owners money. More importantly, it allowed Harland and Wolff to set and maintain the unusually high standards of quality that came to characterize their ships.

The first ship ever built for the White Star Line was the Oceanic, launched in 1870. She was constructed almost entirely of iron, as all-steel construction did not become standard in the shipbuilding industry until the mid-1880s. She was a large ship for her day, 420 feet long and displacing just over 3,700 tons. In many ways she would set the standard for all the White Star ships to follow. She lay long and low in the water, sporting a straight stem, a single low funnel, and four gracefully raked hollow cylindrical iron masts. Her staterooms were larger and brighter than any of her contemporaries : they had electric bells for summoning stewards; taps were available for hot and cold running water, fresh or salt, instead of the traditional pitcher and basin; lighting came from adjustable oil lamps instead of guttering candles ; and each cabin was provided with steam heat. With her unparalleled accommodations and stunning appearance—“more like an imperial yacht than a passenger liner” wrote one observer—the Oceanic established the White Star Line as the arbiter of comfort on the North Atlantic.

Within a year she was joined by three identical sisters—the Atlantic, Baltic, and
Republic
—and followed a year after that by the slightly larger Adriatic and Celtic (all White Star ships had names ending in
-ic).
All were built by Harland and Wolff, and soon the Belfast shipyard found itself building ships almost exclusively for the White Star Line. The firm operated under an unusual “cost plus” basis with its client, building the finest ships possible, then billing White Star for the cost of construction plus a fixed percentage of the cost for a profit. By all accounts this was an eminently satisfactory arrangement all around, for it guaranteed the shipyard a reasonable return for its investment in time, labor, and material, while assuring White Star ships built by a yard whose reputation for quality and probity were already becoming legendary. It is a matter of record that each and every bill submitted to the White Star Line by Harland and Wolff was paid on time, without question.
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The shipyard at its peak employed more than 14,000 men, from marine architects and draftsmen, interior designers and decorators, electricians and plumbers, carpenters and woodworkers, to a bewildering assortment of caulkers, moulders, cloot men, heater boys, holder-ups, and shell platers. To guarantee a steady supply of workmen trained to Harland and Wolff’s exacting standards, an extensive apprenticeship program was introduced.

One of these apprentices came to the drafting department in 1862, a fifteen-year-old lad of Canadian birth and Scottish ancestry. His name was William James Pirrie, and he was hardworking and ambitious. By the time he was twenty-seven he had become a partner in the firm, and upon Harland’s death in 1894 he became chairman of the board. A year later he was created a peer, so it was as Lord Pirrie that he sat down to dinner with Bruce Ismay that summer night in 1907.
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J. Bruce Ismay’s father, Thomas, had been able to buy the White Star Line in 1867 with, curiously enough, the financial assistance of the same Gustavus Schwabe who had backed Edward Harland. It was a calculated business move by Ismay to abandon the Australian trade, which was making the White Star Line a handsome profit, for the North Atlantic run, but Ismay was perceptive enough to realize, a full quarter century before the passenger trade on the Atlantic reached its flood tide, the vast money-making potential that existed there. He was also clever enough to throw out conventional ideas of shipboard accommodation and passenger comfort. Establishing a new standard of luxury at sea—or more correctly, establishing a standard of luxury at sea at all—by introducing the Oceanic and her sisters, Ismay not only gained a head start in a race between British, German, and American shipping lines to build faster, more comfortable ships for the North Atlantic run, but also laid the foundation for White Star’s reputation for an unequaled elegance that the line would not relinquish for another half century.

In 1874 Ismay ordered a pair of new 5000-ton ships from Harland and Wolff, the Britannic and Germanic, both capable of 19 knots and crossing the Atlantic in seven and a half days. In 1889 the Teutonic and Majestic appeared, nearly 10,000 tons each, with a designed speed of 20 knots, and every bit as handsome and sleek as their forebears. But these ships represented a point of departure for the White Star Line. Ismay had been studying the North Atlantic trade very closely, and came to some very definite conclusions about the line’s future in it.

It was at this time that Ismay’s son, J. Bruce, entered the family business. Born in 1862, the younger Ismay was educated at Elstree and Harrow, two of the most exclusive preparatory schools in England, and had spent a year as a pupil at the fashionable finishing school of Dinard in Paris, France, though he never acquired a university degree. After the year-long “world tour” that was customary for young men of Ismay’s station in that day, he went to work for the White Star Line. His first day was to be an illuminating experience, highlighting as it did the elder Ismay’s character as well as the nature of the relationship between father and son. Having left his hat and coat in his father’s office, the younger Ismay was startled to hear his father, in a voice loud enough for everyone in the office to hear, tell a subordinate to instruct the new office boy to leave his hat and coat elsewhere. Despite his imposing physical appearance—he stood six-feet-four and had grown up to be a handsome young man—and a carefully cultivated air of self assurance, Bruce Ismay found himself never quite able to move out of his father’s shadow, to follow comfortably in his footsteps, or to escape his dominating presence altogether. It created a hidden defect in his character that would follow him aboard the Titanic and in one night shatter him.
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