Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (34 page)

In Boat 4, Trimmer Thomas Dillon, who had clearly had too much to drink, suddenly produced another bottle of brandy and offered it to those around him, but Quartermaster Walter Perkis promptly seized it and threw it overboard. Dillon was tossed, but not very roughly, to the bottom of the boat. Seaman Diamond, who was in charge of Boat 15, stood at the tiller, an exposed position, shivering violently and muttering curses about the cold that those in the boat couldn’t help but overhear.
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Soon the initial shock of what the survivors had witnessed a few hours before began to wear off, the awful reality set in, and with it for a few came hysteria. In Boat 8, seventeen-year-old Signora de Satode Penasco began screaming for her husband of three weeks, Victor. The young man, like so many of his elders, had stayed behind after seeing his wife safely into a boat. The strangest reaction though, was from Madame de Villiers: she kept crying out for her son, whom she thought was lost, but who hadn’t even been on the
Titanic.
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Some of the women were more subdued in their grief. In Boat 9, Kate Buss and Marion Wright sat together and mourned for Douglas Norman and Dr. Pain, and hoped that Reverend and Mrs. Carter had been saved. In Boat 6, some of the women who had left husbands or fathers behind embraced each other and quietly wept. Sitting in the bow of Boat 3, Mrs. Hays kept calling out to every passing boat, “Charles Hays, are you there?” hoping for a reply. It never came. Aft of where Mrs. Hays was maintaining her vigil a woman from steerage kept saying over and over again to Mrs. Vera Dick, “Oh my poor father! He put me on this boat, and wouldn’t save himselfl Why didn’t I die? Why can’t I die now?”
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But most of the women sat mute, their grief so intense that it couldn’t be vocalized—women like Mrs. Ryerson or Mrs. Thayer, or Daniel Marvin’s young bride Mary, wed, like the Signora Penasco, only a few weeks ago, or Celiney Yasbeck who left behind a husband she had married just fifty days before. Those who could did their best to cheer up the ones who were grieving the hardest. In Boat 8, the Countess of Rothes, a dark, pretty, delicate-looking woman, had been handling the tiller, but she turned it over to her cousin, Gladys Cherry, and sat down beside the Penasco girl, calming her and spending the rest of the night trying to comfort her.

The Countess had been given the position at the tiller, normally reserved for the person in charge, by Seaman Jones, who had been given command of the boat. Her courage and determination made quite an impression on Jones, and when he decided to leave the tiller and take a turn at one of the oars, he quickly decided that the Countess should be his replacement. He later explained his reasoning to The Sphere, saying, “When I saw the way she was carrying herself and heard the quiet, determined way she spoke to the others, I knew she was more of a man than any we had on board.” (When they arrived in New York, Jones had the numeral 8 removed from the gunwale of the boat, framed, and presented to her as a keepsake. The countess, in turn, would remember Jones at every Christmas after that.)
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On Collapsible B, Lightoller’s attention was focused to the southeast, where sometime around 3:30 he had seen a flash of light, followed some seconds later by a faint “boom.” He knew from what Phillips had told him that the
Carpathia
was steaming hard from the south, and Lightoller was hoping it was a signal from the oncoming liner. People in the other boats had seen it too. In Boat 13, Fred Barrett, who was nearly unconscious from the cold, suddenly sat bolt upright and shouted, “That was a cannon!” In Boat 6, Margaret Martin saw a brief glimmer of light on the horizon and cried out, “There’s a flash of lightning!” while Hitchens muttered, “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 sidelight 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 Mrs. Davidson’s straw hat. In Boat 8, Mrs. White, who now had something to distract her from those stewards and their cigarettes, swung her cane, which had a battery powered light in it, over her head for all she was worth. In Boat 2, Fourth Officer Boxhall lit the last of his green flares.
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Captain Rostron’s heart leaped when he saw a green flare light up directly ahead of the
Carpathia.
In the pale wash of light he could make out a lifeboat less than a quarter mile away. Quickly he ordered “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. 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!” The voice was Boxhall‘s, and Boat 2 was now drifting toward the
Carpathia’s
starboard gangway. Suddenly 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 understood and refused to take offense.) 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 was Miss 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 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”—Boxhall’s voice broke—“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 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.”
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Rostron nodded, the formalities taken care of, and sent Boxhall down to the First Class Dining Saloon. 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. 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 were skeptical. Seeing the White Star emblem on the side of Boat 2 now made the truth clear. She felt heartsick.
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In the growing light, maybe five miles off, 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 200 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, gray-green, and lavender, lending a peculiar beauty to its menace.

One of the male passengers, Charles Hurd, apparently a heavy sleeper who hadn’t been aroused by the
Carpathia’s
thundering dash north, awoke to find the ship stopped in the middle of the ocean. He hunted up his stewardess to demand an explanation. The woman was weeping, and before the man could say a word, she pointed to a cluster of haphazardly dressed women making their way into the Dining Saloon, and through her tears said, “They are from the Titanic. She’s at the bottom of the ocean.”
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The sky was brilliantly clear, with the sun’s golden rays fanning out across the blue. A pale sliver of light appeared, causing Firemen Fred Barrett to cry out in sheer joy at being rescued, “A new moon, boys! Turn your money over, that is, if you have any!” (Barrett had a point: the crew’s pay stopped the moment the Titanic went under.) As the growing dawn made it clear that the
Carpathia
had indeed stopped to rescue the
Titanic’s
survivors, shouts of relief rose up from some of the boats. Others gave organized cheers as they began pulling for the liner. In Boat 13 they sang “Pull for the Shore, Sailor” as they rowed toward the Carpathia.

But some boats were very, very quiet. In Boat 7, Lookout Hogg told his charges, “It’s all right, ladies, do not grieve. We are picked up.” The women, though, just sat there, speechless with the grief of the silently relieved.
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There were no cheers from the freezing men on Collapsible B either—it took too much effort just to stay afloat. As dawn broke, Lightoller spotted Boats 4, 10, and 12, along with Collapsible D, tied together just as Fourth Officer Lowe had left them, about a third of a mile away. Concerted shouts of “Ship ahoy!” produced no results, but when Lightoller found an officer’s whistle in his pocket and gave it three sharp blasts, that got the attention of everyone.

Seaman Clinch in Boat 12 and Quartermaster Perkis in Boat 4 quickly cast off from the other two boats and brought their boats alongside Collapsible B. The overturned boat was wallowing badly now, the men almost knee deep in water, and when Boat 4 came alongside, it nearly washed everyone off. Lightoller, taking no chances, especially now that rescue was so close at hand, warned the men not to jump all at once. One by one, they scrambled into two waiting lifeboats, Colonel Gracie crawling aboard Boat 12. He was afraid of losing his footing and being pitched into the water again. Jack Thayer was so cold that as he sat shivering in Boat 12 he didn’t notice his mother, equally cold and miserable, huddled in Boat 4 only a few feet away.
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Lightoller was the last man off Collapsible B, carefully climbing into Boat 12 , taking charge of the now dangerously overloaded boat, and guiding her toward the
Carpathia.
Fifth Officer Lowe was equally as busy. He had hoisted the sail aboard Boat 14 as soon as the
Carpathia
hove into view, taking advantage of the early morning breeze. Not every sailor could do that, for as he later explained at the Senate Inquiry, “Not all sailors are boatmen, and not all boatmen are sailors.” Lowe was both, and taking advantage of the skills he had learned sailing up and down the Gold Coast, he soon had Boat 14 cutting along at close to four knots. He noticed that Collapsible D was particularly low in the water, and swung his boat over toward her.

“We have about all we want!” Hugh Woolner called out to Lowe. He thought the Fifth Officer was going to transfer more passengers to the already wallowing collapsible, but Lowe quickly told him to tie Boat 14’s painter to Collapsible D’s bow, and he would tow her to the
Carpathia.
Woolner gratefully complied.

Lowe then spotted Collapsible A, almost a mile and a half off, looking like it could sink any minute. More than half the thirty people who had taken refuge in Collapsible A during the night had frozen to death and fallen overboard. Now only a dozen men and Mrs. Abbott were left. Lowe wasted no time and got them aboard Boat 14 as quickly as possible, then put about for the
Carpathia.
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