Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (36 page)

Peeved at Phillips’s brush off—and perhaps realizing his own mistake—Evans pulled the headphones off and shut down his set. Captain Lord, strangely enough, hadn’t asked for an acknowledgment from the Titanic, and Evans wasn’t about to face Phillips’s ire a second time by asking for one, or, an even more frightening prospect, risk his captain’s wrath by reporting the consequences of his mistake. Besides, the Titanic, wherever she was, was so close that her powerful transmitter nearly blew his ears off when Phillips had responded. So just a few minutes before 11:30, Evans pulled on his pajamas and settled into his bunk with a book.

Just before midnight, the
Californian’s
second officer, Herbert Stone, was making his way to the bridge for the midnight-to-four watch. Stopping by the chartroom, he spoke briefly with Captain Lord, who informed Stone that the ship was surrounded by ice and stopped for the night. He also mentioned the steamer off to the southeast that had come up less than an hour before, and was now showing one masthead light and one red light. Just before Stone climbed up the bridge, Lord gave him one last instruction: to let him know if the other ship’s bearing altered in any way, or if the ship moved closer to the Californian.

Stone duly relieved Groves at midnight and was soon joined by an apprentice officer, a young man by the name of James Gibson. Gibson trained his glasses on the stranger and could clearly make out her masthead light, her red sidelight, and the glare of white lights on her after decks. He tried to raise the ship by Morse lamp but was no more successful than Groves had been, and after a while he left to attend to the patent log.

Meanwhile Groves, after being relieved by Stone, hadn’t gone straight to his cabin, but instead made a short detour and stopped by the wireless office. Evans lay back in his bunk, now glancing idly through a magazine, when Groves came in. Usually Evans welcomed visits from the third officer: young, keen Groves often stopped by to chat with Evans, picking up the latest news of the world or learning something more about wireless.

This night, though, Evans’s usual friendly demeanor was somewhat in abeyance. He had a long, hard day—it began around 7:00 A.M. every day, and Evans was the only wireless operator the
Californian
had—and the brush off from Phillips on the Titanic had been the last straw. When 11:30 came, his usual shut-down time, Evans had wasted no time in getting off the air. Now he was ready to turn in and didn’t feel like being sociable. Groves tried anyhow: “What ships have you got, Sparks?”

“Only the
Titanic,”
Evans replied, and Groves nodded, remembering the big passenger liner he had seen overtaking the Californian half an hour before. He picked up the headphones and put them on, hoping to catch some traffic. Groves’s Morse was getting quite good—Evans was teaching him, and Groves joked that he could now catch one letter in three, though he was actually better than that—but he didn’t know enough about the equipment to realize that the
Californian’s
wireless set was equipped with a magnetic detector driven by clockwork, so when he failed to wind it up, he heard nothing. Disappointed, he put the headphones down on the desk and said good night to Evans, turning out the cabin light as he left. It was just after 12:15 A.M. and Jack Phillips had just sent out his first distress call.
³

While Gibson worked on the log, Stone paced back and forth across the bridge. At 12:40 Captain Lord called up the voice tube from the chartroom, asking if the stranger had come any closer. Stone replied no, everything was the same as before. Lord informed him that he was going to lie down a bit on the chartroom settee. Stone resumed his pacing.

Less than ten minutes later he was startled by a flash of white light bursting above the other ship. Unsure of what he had seen, he watched the stranger closely, and after a few minutes, was rewarded with another white flash—a white rocket bursting high above the unknown vessel, sending out a shower of white stars. Several minutes later he saw another—then later still another—and still another. Five white rockets....

Stone called down the voice tube to Captain Lord and told him about the five rockets. “Are they company signals?” Lord asked.

“I don’t know, sir, but they appear to me to be all white.”

“Well, go on Morsing.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And when you get an answer, let me know by Gibson.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lord returned to his nap on the settee and Stone returned to studying the distant ship. The Californian continued to drift, slowly turning to starboard, her bow gradually coming around until it was bearing directly on the other ship. About this time Gibson returned to the bridge, and Stone told him about the strange ship firing rockets. Gibson raised his glasses to his eyes and as he focused on the unknown vessel he was rewarded with the sight of another rocket being fired off. Gibson’s glasses, which were more powerful than Stone’s, allowed him to see detail Stone couldn’t pick up with the naked eye: the white detonating flash, the rocket streaking up into the sky, the near-blinding white flash as the rocket burst, and the spray of slowly falling white stars.
⁴

It seemed strange, Stone thought, that a ship would fire rockets at night. As the two officers watched, a seventh rocket climbed into the sky and burst above the stranger. Stone borrowed Gibson’s glasses and studied her for some minutes, then handed them back to the apprentice officer, remarking, “Have a look at her now. She looks very queer out of the water—her lights look queer.”

Gibson peered at the stranger carefully. She seemed to be listing, and had, as he later described it “a big side out of the water.” Stone noticed her red sidelight had disappeared.

The Californian continued her slow, drifting turn to starboard until the stranger was now off the port bow. About 1:40 A.M. they saw an eighth rocket burst over the ship. “A ship is not going to fire rockets at sea for nothing,” Stone remarked and Gibson agreed. “There must be something wrong with her.” Gibson said he thought she might be in some sort of distress.
⁵

As the men continued to watch, the stranger slowly began to disappear. To Stone she had seemed to be steaming away from the time she began firing the rockets, and now she seemed to be changing her bearing—Gibson hadn’t noticed any bearing change, though he too decided that she was gradually disappearing, but he remarked how she had showed her red sidelight but never her green, as would have been the case with a ship steaming away to the southwest.

At 2:00 A.M. Stone sent Gibson down to wake up Captain Lord. “Tell him that the ship is disappearing in the southwest and that she had fired altogether eight rockets.” Gibson knocked on the chartroom door, opened it, and relayed Stone’s message. Sleepily, Lord asked, “Were they all white rockets?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What time is it?”

“Two oh five by the wheelhouse clock, sir.”

Lord nodded, turned out the light, and went back to sleep, and Gibson went back to the bridge. At 2:20 Stone thought he could still faintly make out the strange ship, then her lights seemed to fade away completely. By 2:40 he was certain that the stranger was gone, and whistled down the speaking tube to the chartroom. When Lord answered, Stone told him that the other ship had disappeared to the southwest and was completely out of sight. One last time Lord asked about the rockets, and Stone assured him that there were no colors, “just white rockets.” Lord told Stone to record it in the log, then went back to sleep.
⁶

Stone and Gibson resumed their watch. For the next hour nothing happened. Then at 3:30 A.M. Gibson suddenly saw another rocket, this one off to the south and farther away than the other rockets had been. Drawing Stone’s attention to it, Gibson watched as a second, then a third rocket was launched. The ship firing these rockets was below the horizon, so the two officers never actually saw her, but both men noted that these rockets were company signals, not the white rockets the other ship had fired earlier. Oddly, Stone did not report these new rockets to the captain.
⁷

At 4:00 A.M. Chief Officer George F. Stewart appeared on the bridge, relieving Stone. Stone described the night’s events—the strange ship to the southwest, the eight white rockets she fired, the ship slowly disappearing, and his informing Captain Lord of these events three different times.

As Stone was talking, Stewart raised his glasses and peering southward spotted a four-masted steamer with one funnel and “a lot of light amidships.” He asked Stone if this was the ship that had fired the rockets, and Stone replied that he had not seen this ship before, and that he was sure that it was not the same one that had fired the first eight rockets. With that, Stone went below, leaving a somewhat bemused Chief Officer Stewart alone on the bridge.

Stewart had an uneasy feeling, a vague sense that “something had happened.” Rockets at sea normally meant distress, and Stewart couldn’t help but think that may have been the case here. Even so it wasn’t until 4:30 that he did anything, and that was to awaken Captain Lord at his accustomed hour. Knocking politely on the chartroom door, Stewart began recounting the night’s events as told to him by Stone. About halfway through this recitation Lord stopped him, saying, “Yes, I know. Stone’s been telling me.”

Once he was dressed Captain Lord went up to the bridge and began to describe to Stewart how he intended to work his way out of the ice field. Stewart asked him if he was going to first try to learn something about the ship that had been firing rockets off to the southwest. Lord raised his glasses and studied the four-masted steamer off to the south and said, “No, she looks all right, She’s not making any signals now.” For some reason Stewart did not explain to his captain that the ship he was looking at was not the one Stewart was referring to and was not at all the ship that had fired the eight white xockets.
⁸

Over the course of the next hour, conversation on the bridge was desultory as the two men waited for the dawn. Finally the feeling that had been nagging at Stewart caused him to run down to the
Californian’s
wireless room and wake up Cyril Evans with the words “Sparks, there’s a ship been firing rockets in the night. Will you see if you can find out what is wrong—what is the matter?”

Evans fumbled about a bit, then wound up the magnetic detector, slipped on the headphones, and began listening. Within minutes Stewart was racing up the stairs to the bridge, shouting to Captain Lord that a ship had been sunk. A quick dash back down to the wireless office, then back up to bridge with the devastating news: “The Titanic has hit a berg and sunk
⁹

Lord immediately started his engines and began steaming toward the
Titanic’s
last reported position. It was slow going for the first four or five miles as Lord picked his way through the heavy field ice that had drifted in during the night and which was frequently studded with bergs. He moved at what he deemed a maximum safe speed—four knots. By 7:00 A.M. the
Californian
was in clear water and carefully worked her way up to her top speed of fourteen knots.

Around half past seven Captain Lord calculated that he had arrived at the
Titanic’s
position, but the ship was nowhere to be seen. Only the Mount Temple, another ship that had answered the
Titanic’s
distress call, was nearby. Some six miles to the east of these two ships sat the Cunard liner
Carpathia.
Evans sent a message to the bridge saying that he had learned that the
Carpathia
was conducting the rescue of the
Titanic’s
survivors. Lord decided to make for the rescue ship to see if he could be of any assistance. The ice made a direct course impossible, so the Californian had to take a roundabout route, coming up on the
Carpathia
from the southwest. As his ship approached the
Carpathia,
Captain Lord noted that the Cunard vessel had four masts and a single funnel.

The whole crew of the Californian was roused by now. Extra lookouts were posted and lifeboats were swung out. Third Officer Groves, awakened by Chief Officer Stewart, stopped by Second Officer Stone’s cabin to ask if it was true about the Titanic. “Yes, old chap,” Stone assured him, “I saw rockets on my watch.”

Just on 8:30 the
Californian
hove to alongside the
Carpathia,
and in an exchange of flag signals it was decided that the
Carpathia
would head for New York, while the Californian continued to search for survivors.

There was little enough to see—large pieces of reddish cork from the ruptured bulkheads, steamer chairs, cushions, lifebelts, rugs, the abandoned lifeboats, the
Titanic’s
red and white striped barber pole. Captain Lord would later claim that he didn’t find any bodies at all, but it is doubtful that he looked very hard. Third Officer Groves later maintained that the search was broken off by 10:30 A.M., though Captain Lord was to say that it was continued until 11:40. Lord’s version was the one that went down in the
Californian’s
log, of course, but then Captain Lord’s version of many things would find their way into the
Californian’s
log.
¹⁰

Nowhere did the ship’s log mention anything about her officers sighting white rockets in the early hours of the morning of April 15, 1912.
¹¹

—Ecclesiastes 11:8

 

 

 

THE
CARPATHLA’
S RETURN PASSAGE TO NEW YORK WAS MARKED BY BRIGHT, sunny, and bitterly cold weather and calm seas. The little Cunard liner’s passengers were wonderful, digging into their luggage for extra clothing and toilet articles for the
Titanic’s
survivors, helping the stewards distribute blankets and hot drinks, sewing smocks and shifts for children and women out of steamer blankets, offering spare berths to relieve some of the crowding in the makeshift dormitories. They did their best to be cheerful and make the crowded little ship a little less tense. But an almost tangible pall hung over the ship that no amount of hard work, however cheerfully done, could dispel.