Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (33 page)

 

The
Titanic’s
orchestra.
Concertmaster and first violinist
Wallace Hartley is at the center.
Other members are, clockwise
from upper left: Fred Clarke, bassviol ; Percy C. Taylor, piano;
Theodore Brailey, piano;
J. W. Woodward, cello; John Law
“Jock” Hume, second violin;
George Krins, viola. Not shown is
another cellist, Roger Bricoux.
Southampton
City Heritage Services,
Southampton
City Museums.

 

“Women and Children First,” a lithograph produced in 1912. Though somewhat romanticized,it nevertheless conveys a sense of the powerful emotions present on the Boat Deck of the Titanic as the lifeboats were being filled and lowered. Mariners’ Museum, Newport News,
Virginia.

 

Captain Arthur H. Rostron on board the Carpathia, wearing the medal for heroism given to him by the U.S. Congress. Mariners’ Museum, Newport News, Virginia.

 

The
Carpathia.
She was fifty-eight miles away when she received the
Titanic’s
distress signal. Her top speed was officially only 14 knots, but Captain Rostron pushed her to 17 knots as she dashed to the aid of the sinking Titanic. MarinersMuseum, Newport News, Virginia.

 

Fairview Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Of the victims recovered, 129 of them are buried here. A special trust fund, set up by the White Star Line and still active, provides for the maintenance of the graves.
Author’s
collection.

 

This is almost certainly the iceberg struck by the Titanic. It was photographed by the chief steward of the liner Prinze Adelbert on the morning of April 15, 1912, just a few miles south of where the Titanic went down. The steward hadn’t yet heard about the Titanic: what caught his attention was the smear of red paint along the base of the berg, indicating that it had collided with a ship sometime in the previous twelve hours. The Walter Lord Collection.

 

Survivors in a dangerously overloaded Boat 12, the last lifeboat to be picked up by the
Carpathia,
are assisted aboard. Boat 12 had picked up the thirty men who had spent the night standing atop the overturned Collapsible B. Southampton City Heritage Services,
Southampton
City Museums.

 

Lord Mersey (right), the wreck commissioner, and Captain Bigham, the secretary of the Wreck Commission, on their way to a session of the British Inquiry. Southampton City Heritage Services, Southampton City Museums.

Colonel Gracie was particularly suffering, for the effects of prolonged immersion in ice-cold water were hard on a young man, let alone one of fifty-four, no matter how fit. Even his hair was matted down and frozen to his scalp. When the colonel noticed a man wearing a wool cap standing next to him, he asked if he might borrow it for a few minutes to warm his head. “And what would I do then?” was the man’s incredulous reply. (The immersion in the ice-cold water would eventually lead to complications for the colonel, whose health would never recover from the ordeal, and he would be dead before the year was out.) A sailor offered Gracie a pull from his flask, which he politely refused, suggesting that Greaser Hurst, shivering violently a few feet away, might benefit from it. Hurst accepted the flask gratefully and took a long pull—and nearly choked: he thought it was whiskey, it was essence of peppermint.

Lightoller discovered that Jack Phillips had somehow made it to Collapsible B, and was standing toward the stern, near Harold Bride. When Lightoller asked what ships were coming, Phillips told him the
Carpathia,
the Mount Temple, the Olympic, and the
Baltic
—and that the Carpathia would probably arrive around daybreak. This was particularly good news to Lightoller, who realized that even his best coordinated efforts couldn’t keep Collapsible B afloat indefinitely. Even now the boat had sunk so low in the water that the larger swells were washing across it. Ominous gurgling sounds were heard from under the boat, and it was only a matter of time before it sank.

Lightoller didn’t know it, but Phillips had performed his last service for the passengers and crew of the Titanic. The long twelve-hour work shift on Sunday, the nerve-wracking two hours bent over the wireless key, trying to summon any ship to the stricken liner’s side, and the immersion in the frigid water before reaching Collapsible B had completely sapped the young man’s energy. Sometime around 4:00 he silently collapsed and died, his body sliding off into the sea.
¹³

The cold was vicious to everyone. In Boat 6, Mrs. Brown wrapped her sable stole around the legs of a stoker who sat shivering uncontrollably as he pulled at his oar. In Boat 4 Mrs. Astor lent her shawl to a steerage woman whose little girl was softly crying from the cold; Third Officer Pitman had to wrap the sail about Mrs. Crosby in Boat 5. Charlotte Collyer passed out, numb from the cold, in the bottom of Boat 14; as she fell, her scalp caught in an oarlock and a big piece of her hair was yanked out, but she didn’t feel a thing. In Boat 12, Lillian Bentham noticed that a stoker who was clad only in his uniform jumper was sitting with his feet in a pool of freezing water that had collected at the bottom of the boat. The keel beneath her seat was dry, so with a forcefulness that belied her nineteen years, she insisted that the man trade places with her.
¹⁴

The crew did what they could for the passengers. Steward Ray had snatched up a half-dozen handkerchiefs before leaving his cabin, and now as he sat in Boat 13 he showed how to tie a knot in each corner and turn the handkerchiefs into six caps. Just behind him Fireman Beauchamp, clad only in his work jumper, turned down the offer of an extra coat an elderly woman had brought along, saying that it should go to a young steerage girl farther back in the boat who had been whimpering from the cold. In Boat 5, Mrs. Dodge was shivering violently and her feet were almost numb: she hadn’t bothered to button her shoes before she left her cabin on the Titanic, and now, with the nearest buttonhook two miles below on the floor of the Atlantic, there was no way they could be fastened. Seaman Olliver, seeing this, took off his stockings and handed them to Mrs. Dodge, with the comment, “I assure you, ma’am, they are perfectly clean. I just put them on this morning.”