Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (29 page)

“Go ahead, I’ll be right with you,” Thayer replied. Long slid down the side of the ship, and a few seconds later Thayer stood up on the railing and jumped out as far as he could. When Thayer came to the surface Long was nowhere to be seen. He had been dragged under by the sinking ship.
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The slant of the decks had become so steep that people began to lose their footing. Chef John Collins had been trying to help a woman from steerage who had two children with her, rushing from one side of the Boat Deck to the other, trying to find a lifeboat. Collins, carrying one of the children, heard someone call out that their best chance was in the stern. Turning he began to struggle “uphill” along with the woman and the other child, finding it nearly impossible to stand upright. All four of them were caught by the rising water, and the child was swept from Collin’s grasp. He never saw mother or children again.
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Back by the fourth funnel, Olaus Abelseth braced himself for the on-rushing wave, but it never reached him. Huddled together on the raised roof over the First Class Smoking Room, Abelseth, his cousin, and brother-in-law were all clinging to a rope slung from one of the davits as a lifeline. The Titanic continued to pivot just forward of where the three men were standing, and they found themselves watching in dismay as one by one the passengers and crew remaining on the Boat Deck slid down into the water just a few feet below where they were standing. Despite the repeated urgings of his brother-in-law, Abelseth had postponed jumping off the ship until the last possible moment. Now with the sea only feet away, the three men joined hands and jumped in. Abelseth’s legs were snarled by a rope, and to free himself he had to let go of the other’s hands. They were swept away while Abelseth fought to get loose, all the time thinking “I’m a goner.” At last, his lungs near bursting, he kicked free of the last tangle of line and struggled to the surface. The other two men were never found
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The
Titanic’s
lights were glowing a dull red now, and it was difficult for those in the lifeboats to see what was happening aboard the ship. There was a growing knot of kneeling supplicants, most of them Third Class, at the very stern, gathered around Father Byles, their voices murmuring in prayer as the good Father, faithful to the last, offered absolution.

“Hail Mary, full of grace—”

The stern rose higher yet, and the mass of humanity still on board, some 1,500 souls, pressed together toward the tip, clinging to deckhouses, ventilators, cargo cranes, hatchcovers.

“The Lord is with thee—”

The ship herself shrieked with agony, her hull subjected to stresses it was never designed to withstand.

“Pray for us sinners—”

Suddenly every distinction between class and country, passenger and crew, vanished in those last terrible moments.

“Now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

No one ever knew how well or how poorly John Jacob Astor met his end. It would be nice perhaps to say that, like the Thane of Cawdor, “nothing in his life so became him as the leaving of it,” but little is certain. Legend has it that Astor placed a girl’s big hat on the head of ten-year-old William Carter, saying “Now he’s a girl, and he can go.” Surprisingly enough it may be true: Astor had already watched Lightoller bar another boy from entering Boat 4, and such a gesture would not be out of place for the eccentric but not entirely unlikable millionaire. Dr. Washington Dodge later stated that Astor and Major Butt went down together, saying, “They went down standing on the bridge, side by side. I could not mistake them.” Even though Dr. Dodge was in Boat 13, a good half mile away at the time the bridge went under, there is an element of truth in his statement: if Astor was standing on the bridge when it went under that would explain how he came to be in the water on the starboard side of the ship. When his body was later recovered, it was crushed and covered with soot: Astor had been one of those hapless swimmers caught under the forward funnel as it collapsed.
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Likewise the fate of Captain Smith remains a mystery. Later rumors would spring up claiming that he shot himself, but never with any proof. At around 2:10 A.M. Steward Brown saw the captain walk onto the bridge, still clutching his megaphone, but just minutes later Trimmer Hemming found the bridge empty. The most likely situation is that Captain Smith was washed overboard when the forward superstructure went under, for Fireman Harry Senior saw him in the water, holding a child in his arms, just moments before the Titanic began her final plunge. Still later, a swimmer approached Collapsible B, encouraging the men struggling atop the overturned lifeboat. “Good boys! Good lads!” he called out over and over again, in a voice tinged with authority, never once asking to be taken aboard. Greaser Walter Hurst tried, holding out an oar for the man to grasp onto, but the rapidly rising swell carried the man away before Hurst could reach him. To his dying day Hurst believed the man was Captain Smith.
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There is the nagging possibility that Chief Officer Wilde did indeed take his own life. Eugene Daly and George Rheims would later write to their families, each unknown to the other, describing how each man had watched a senior ship’s officer (exactly who they did not identify) put a gun to his head and pull the trigger. Wilde was one of the great mysteries of that night: unlike Captain Smith, First Officer Murdoch, or Sixth Officer Moody, all of whom were also lost, Wilde was almost totally missing in survivors’ recollections. No one remembered watching Wilde overseeing the loading of any lifeboats, shepherding any passengers to the Boat Deck, or organizing any crew; instead Wilde seems to have remained near the bridge all night, occasionally giving vague or contradictory orders to some of the other officers. Carl Jansen, a survivor from steerage, did recall later how he “glanced toward the bridge and saw the chief officer place a revolver in his mouth and shoot himself. His body toppled overboard.” The mystery is a small tragedy within a greater one, for even if he did.not commit suicide, Wilde’s apparent inactivity seems to indicate that he alone among the
Titanic’s
officers lost his nerve that night.
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Though Archie Butt was later said to have met his fate heroically, the last anyone definitely saw of him was shortly before 2:00 A.M., standing quietly to one side on the Boat Deck, having finally abandoned his card game but taking no part in loading or launching the lifeboats. Though perhaps lacking in superficial glamour, there is a certain dignity about a man quietly accepting his fate, without fuss—but then, he was a soldier.
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The rush to the stern had become a stampede as the ship rose higher into the sky. The strains of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” abruptly ceased as the deck beneath the musicians’ feet slipped away, and that gallant band—already passing into legend—was pitched into the sea. In seconds the noise became an ear-splitting din as bulkheads, frames, and hull plates began to sheer and break under the strain, while everything movable inside the ship broke loose and plunged toward the bow. Walter Lord, in A Night to Remember, described it best:

With a long moan of tortured metal, the Titanic stopped moving. The lights, which had been glowing a dark red suddenly went out completely, snapped on again with a searing flash, then went out again forever. From the fourth funnel aft, the Titanic stood almost perpendicular, a huge black shape silhouetted against the impossibly bright stars, suspended between the sea and the sky.

It was at this moment that the reckoning came—the culmination of all the terrible “ifs”: if the
Titanic’s
maiden voyage hadn’t been postponed by three weeks; if her departure from Southampton hadn’t been delayed by an hour—an hour she never made up; if any of the six ice warnings had been heeded—or if Phillips hadn’t cut off the Californian in the middle of the seventh ; if she’d been moving a knot faster or a knot slower; if there had been moonlight or a choppy sea to illuminate the berg; if the iceberg hadn’t been “blue”; if Fleet or Lee had seen the ice ten seconds sooner—or ten seconds later; then there would have never been that dreadful “convergence of the twain,” as Thomas Hardy called it, of ice and steel.

And yet—

If the Titanic had hit the ice any other way; if she’d been built with a double hull as well as a double bottom; if her watertight bulkheads had carried only one deck higher—she would still have been afloat, crippled, but not dying.

If the White Star Line had listened to Alexander Carlisle; if the Board of Trade’s regulations hadn’t been so hopelessly outdated; if the ship on the horizon had only come—then 1,500 helpless souls wouldn’t be only moments away from eternity.

But all such thoughts were pointless now. The noise died away and a pall settled over the scene. The Titanic slowly twisted as if, in Jack Thayer’s words, “She turned her deck away from us, as if to hide from us the awful spectacle.” Then the weight of the water-filled forward half of the ship began to drag the liner down. She seemed to sag for a moment, as the stern settled back somewhat toward the sea: the overstrained hull finally gave way and began to break apart, causing some of those watching in the boats to imagine that somehow she would miraculously right herself, leading others to believe that she had broken completely in two. The Titanic began to slip under, gathering speed as she went, as if to hurry and bring an end to this final indignity.

In Collapsible C Bruce Ismay turned his back and hunched over his oar—he couldn’t bear to watch. In Boat 1, C. E. Stengel cried out, “I cannot look any longer!” In Boat 14 Esther Hart held seven-year-old Eva tightly, burying her daughter’s face in her chest, so Eva wouldn’t see her father die. In Collapsible D Mrs. Goldsmith did the same to her son Franky. Standing on Collapsible B, less than fifty yards from the Titanic, Second Officer Lightoller heard a sound that would haunt him for the rest of his life: as the ship began her final plunge, he could hear people—husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children—crying out to one another, “I love you.”

Little more than twenty seconds after the liner began moving, the waters of the North Atlantic closed over the Blue Ensign at the
Titanic’s
stern. An eerie silence settled over the sea for some seconds, as if everyone, passengers and crew, those in the boats and those in the water, were momentarily unable to accept that the ship had vanished. Finally someone in Boat 13 sighed, “She’s gone, that’s the last of her.” In Boat 4 Ada Clark overheard someone murmur, “It’s gone.” In Number 5, Third Officer Pitman glanced at his watch and quietly announced, “It is 2:20 A.M.”
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—Jeremiah 49:23

 

 

 

THE STARS SHONE DOWN ON A SCENE OF ALMOST UNBELIEVABLE HORROR. The sea around the spot where the Titanic had disappeared was covered with a mass of tangled wreckage, and struggling in the midst of it were hundreds of helpless passengers and crew, swept off the ship as she took her final. plunge. Over everything a gray mist hung just a few feet above the water. To Colonel Gracie it recalled the waters of Lithe in the Aeneid.

The water where the ship had gone under was still troubled, as every few seconds a bubble of air released from the wreck welled up from below, or more wreckage and debris popped to the surface. Some of these pieces may well have been lethal—among the handful of swimmers that reached the lifeboats, a number had been injured by wreckage coming up from below, which included balks of timber, solid wood doors, sections of paneling and furniture, heavy deck chairs, and large chunks of cork.

This upwelling continued for some minutes as the field of wreckage began to spread out across the surface of the sea. For many thrashing swimmers, the debris proved a godsend as they desperately clutched at casks, gratings, deck chairs, writing desks, doors, or planking, frequently fighting one another for possession of some scrap of buoyant material in the slim hope of keeping their heads above water long enough for a lifeboat to come and pluck them out of the water.
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