Voyagers of the Titanic (27 page)

The first port lifeboat to be launched was 6: the orthodox estimate is that it left seventy-five minutes after the collision, at twelve fifty-five on Sunday morning. Quartermaster Hichens (who had been at the helm when the iceberg was struck) was in charge, with Fleet, the lookout who sounded the alarm, as his only crewman. Both men were scared, defensive, and shocked. A Canadian from first class, Arthur Peuchen, had been dragooned on board to help with the rowing, and Fahim Leeni, a young Lebanese laborer from third class (heading for Niles, an iron foundry city near Youngstown, Ohio), probably infiltrated when Lightoller’s back was turned and took refuge in a dark corner. Twenty-four out of the twenty-eight occupants were women. They included the Canadian millionairesse Hélène Baxter; Quigg Baxter’s girlfriend, Berthe Mayné; Margaret Brown; Helen Candee; the newlywed Eloise Smith; and the English mother and daughter Edith and Elsie Bowerman. The Bowermans are named in few accounts of lifeboat 6: although normally outspoken, they were reticent in the boat either through shock or good sense; it seems that Elsie Bowerman neither repined over her experiences nor left any record of them.

Eloise Smith, however, described the prelude to her boarding lifeboat 6. “There was no commotion, no panic, and no one seemed particularly frightened; in fact, most people seemed interested in the unusual occurrence, many having crossed 50 and 60 times.” She declined to leave without her husband, Lucien, and asked Captain Smith, who was standing nearby, if he might join her in lifeboat 6. “He ignored me personally, but shouted again through his megaphone, ‘Women and children first.’ My husband said, ‘Never mind, Captain, about that; I will see that she gets in the boat.’ He then said, ‘I never expected to ask you to obey, but this is one time you must; it is only a matter of form to have women and children first. The boat is thoroughly equipped, and everyone on her will be saved.’ I asked him if that was absolutely honest, and he said, ‘Yes.’ I felt better then, because I had absolute confidence in what he said. He kissed me good-bye and placed me in the lifeboat with the assistance of an officer. As the boat was being lowered he yelled from the deck, ‘Keep your hands in your pockets: it is very cold weather.’ That was the last I saw of him, and now I remember the many husbands that turned their backs as the small boat was lowered, the women blissfully innocent of their husbands’ peril, and said good-bye with the expectation of seeing them within the next hour or two.”
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She would never have left had she known of the shortage of lifeboats; but it was unthinkable to her. More embittering would have been the knowledge that her husband perished because they were on the port deck. On the starboard, Murdoch’s team had already let two grooms join their brides.

An hour and twenty minutes after the collision, around 1
A.M
., the fourth officer, Boxhall, began to fire distress signals, often described as rockets, from the starboard side of the bridge. Lifeboat 3 had just departed half-full with Clara Hays; her daughter, Orian Davidson; Henry Harper with his wife, dragoman, and Pekinese; and the Cardeza mother and son among its thirty-two first-class passengers. Mortars launched the signals eight hundred feet into the sky, where they burst into a cascade of white stars that fell slowly downward. The boom of the signals when they were launched, and the loud detonations in the sky, scared many passengers, although Lightoller tried to subdue alarm by assuring inquirers that Boxhall was summoning the ship whose lights could be seen some miles off.

The most controversial lifeboat launching occurred at this phase of the crisis. Starboard lifeboat 1, an emergency cutter intended to deal with such mishaps as a man overboard, with capacity for forty occupants, was launched shortly after the distress signals started, with five passengers, seven crewmen, and twenty-eight vacancies. The passengers were Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon with his wife and her secretary, Laura Francatelli, who were joined by the Manhattan wholesaler Abraham Salomon and Henry Stengel. As Lady Duff Gordon would not leave without her husband, and Miss Francatelli would not go alone, Sir Cosmo had asked Murdoch if they could all enter the boat and was told, “Yes, I wish you would.” They got in, Murdoch called again for women and children, but none appeared. Like other women, Lady Duff Gordon was scared throughout the launching. “I shall never forget how black and deep the water looked below us, and how I hated leaving the big, homely ship for this frail little boat . . . a man was sending off rockets, and the ear-splitting noise added to the horror of being suspended in mid-air.”
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Henry Stengel described finding the small lifeboat with three passengers in it. “Jump in,” Murdoch told him. Stengel did as he was told, but leaped the guardrail clumsily and rolled into the lifeboat. “That is the funniest sight I have seen tonight,” Murdoch said with a laugh. Stengel felt heartened by Murdoch’s amusement: “I thought perhaps it was not so dangerous as I imagined.” Moments later, Abraham Salomon, after seeking permission, clambered in. Murdoch was keen to get lifeboat 1 away, as he needed its davits for larger lifeboats: having called again for women and children, he dispatched it two-thirds empty. At one ten—ninety minutes after the collision—the ocean was lapping the portholes under the ship’s name as lifeboat 1 rowed away.

The Duff Gordons were subsequently reviled by American journalists and Washington senators for having escaped in a near-empty lifeboat, and suffered in their English reputations, too. It was suspected that they had bribed the crew to leave hurriedly, or not to rescue people freezing to death in the ocean. Tips given by Duff Gordon to the lifeboat crew were misrepresented as “hush money.” Sir Cosmo was a traditional upper-class Englishman, so drilled in conventional manners as to be baffled and ineffectual when he was jolted off his customary tracks. His title and demeanor were held against the couple, who were decried without respite; but the fact is that they obeyed instructions at launch time and were not responsible for the actions of the crewmen who put lifeboat 1 on the water with such a shockingly low occupancy.

Lifeboat 8 on the port side was launched around the same time as lifeboat 1 was loaded on the starboard. With a capacity for sixty-five, it left with three crewmen and twenty-four women, whom Lightoller had divided from their men. As Ella White testified, “there was a lot of pathos when husbands and wives kissed each other goodbye.”
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The tension was increased by the booming and bursting of distress rockets, which made it hard to believe that, as Emma Bucknell was told when she boarded, “it is only a matter of precaution, and there is really no danger.” Lifeboat 8 was commanded by Able Seaman Thomas Jones, supported by a sailor from Cornwall, Charles Pascoe, and a bedroom steward from London, Alfred Crawford. “They did not seem to understand how to operate the ropes, and . . . launching the lifeboat, which should not take more than two minutes, took ten,” complained Mrs. Bucknell. “On the vessel there was beginning to be the signs of the great tragedy about to descend. Wives and husbands were separated when the women were put in our boat. A few of the men grew seemingly desperate, and Captain Smith, who was standing by, cried out: ‘Behave yourselves like men! Look at all of these women! See how splendid they are. Can’t you behave like men?’” On lifeboat 8, she said, all but one woman stayed calm, although they had been torn from their loved ones. The exception was Maria Peñasco y Castellana, a little Spanish bride, crying inconsolably for her husband, who had been held back by other men.
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Lightoller also excluded men from lifeboat 10, which he loaded immediately afterward with heightened urgency. The distress rockets were wracking passengers’ nerves as second- and third-class passengers congregated in great numbers on the boat deck. Even so, the chief baker, Charles Joughin, testified of lifeboat 10: “we had difficulty finding ladies for it. They ran away from the boat, and said they were safer where they were.”
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The women and children from second class on lifeboat 10 included the Deans, Drews, and Wests. The Wests, from Cornwall heading for Gainesville, Florida, had been asleep when the accident occurred. Arthur West put his two sleepy daughters in their life jackets and carried them to the boat deck—his pregnant wife, Ada, following with her handbag. After entrusting them to safety, he lowered a thermos of hot milk by rope to his wife in the descending lifeboat: their younger daughter was eleven months old. This was his wife’s last glimpse of him. The heart-wrenching partings and everlasting farewells were never forgotten by survivors. Lillian Asplund, aged five in 1912, was (when she died in 2006) the last survivor who could remember the disaster: the others had all been babies. She recalled being handed into lifeboat 15, and had a forlorn image of her father holding her twin brother in his arms, with her two other brothers, aged thirteen and nine, standing on each side of him.

Clara Frauenthal was among the sixteen women from first class in lifeboat 5, the second launched from starboard. As it was lowered, her portly husband and brother-in-law jumped in. Henry Frauenthal’s boots stunned Annie Stengel, whose indignant husband ensured that this incident was publicized when they reached New York, where doubtless it would have encouraged unpleasant stereotypes if two other episodes, featuring Ida and Isidor Straus and their kinsman Ben Guggenheim, had not captured the world’s imagination.

When Woolner tried to usher Ida and Isidor Straus into starboard lifeboat 3, saying “nobody would object to an old gentleman like you getting in,” the millionaire insisted: “I will not go before the other men.”
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When later the Strauses were watching the loading of lifeboat 8, Archibald Gracie heard Ida being asked to step in. “No, I will not be separated from my husband,” she replied. “As we have lived, so will we die, together.” When it was urged that no one would object if an old man like Straus boarded a lifeboat, he declared, “I do not wish any distinction in my favour which is not granted to others.” A steward testified that Ida Straus got into lifeboat 8 and then stepped out—telling her husband, “We have been living together for many years, and where you go, I go.”
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Ida Straus gave a fur stole to her maid, Ellen Bird, as the latter climbed weeping into lifeboat 8, and the elderly pair withdrew to deck chairs to await the end. This self-sacrifice was thought exemplary. A few days later, Straus’s rabbi in New York called him “a loyal son of his people, and a loyal American,” and compared his death to Abraham Lincoln’s. “Isidor Straus was a great Jew,” he continued. “Now when we are asked, ‘Can a Jew die bravely?,’ there is an answer written in the annals of time.”
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Shortly after the loading of lifeboat 8, Straus’s kinsman Ben Guggenheim escorted his mistress, Léontine Aubart, and her maid, Emma Sägesser, onto lifeboat 9. He did not try to board it, although in addition to forty-two women, it carried six men with eight crewmen and therefore had about ten spare places. After lifeboat 9 was lowered around one twenty, Guggenheim discarded his life jacket, repaired to his stateroom, and together with his valet, Victor Giglio, donned evening dress. “We’ve dressed in our best, and are prepared to go down like gentlemen,” he told a steward who saw them after one thirty. “There is grave doubt that the men will get off. I am willing to remain and play the man’s game if there are not enough boats for more than the women and children. I won’t die here like a beast. Tell my wife . . . I played the game out straight and to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward.”
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Guggenheim, like Straus, wished to belie the anti-Semites.

Disorder began about an hour and forty minutes after the collision. By then the boat decks were teeming with second- and third-class passengers, who saw that there were insufficient lifeboats, felt the increasing list of the ship, and were scared by the distress rockets, which were fired until about one twenty. Panic erupted during the loading of lifeboat 14, which finally was lowered around one thirty with twenty-eight vacancies. Many of the thirty-seven occupants were women and children from second class: the Laroches, whose husband and father was the only black man on board, the Harts, the Collyers, and the Davies and Wells families. Agnes Davies, a widow from Saint Ives, with her eight-year-old son, was helped into the boat by her nineteen-year-old son, Joseph Nicholls, her sole support. He asked permission to join her, but was told that he would be shot if he attempted to get in, she said. She never saw him after the lifeboat was lowered, and her grief was harder to bear because his death seemed unnecessary: there was spare room, she knew, in the boat. Seaman Joseph Scarrott had loaded twenty women into lifeboat 14 when “some men tried to rush the boat, foreigners they were, because they could not understand the order which I gave them, and I had to use a bit of persuasion [with] the boat’s tiller.” One culprit jumped in twice, and twice Scarrott ejected him.
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The loading of lifeboat 14 was described by the second-class passenger and grocer’s wife Charlotte Collyer: “above the clamour of people asking questions of each other, there came the terrible cry: ‘Lower the boats. Women and children first!’ They struck utter terror into my heart, and now they will ring in my ears until I die. They meant my own safety, but they also meant the greatest loss I have ever suffered—the life of my husband.” She hung back from the first two boats she saw loaded and would not leave her husband. “The third boat was about half full when a sailor caught Marjorie, my daughter, in his arms, tore her away from me and threw her into the boat. She was not even given a chance to tell her father good-bye! . . . The deck seemed to be slipping under my feet. It was leaning at a sharp angle.” As she, dressed in her nightgown, clung to her husband, one man seized her arm while another held her around the waist: she was tugged and hurled into the lifeboat. Her husband called, “Go, Lotty! For God’s sake, be brave, and go! I’ll get a seat in another boat.” She stumbled to her feet and saw Collyer’s back as he walked away down the deck—looking for a seat in another boat, she assumed. “I let myself be saved, because I believed that he, too, would escape,” she said afterward, “but I sometimes envy those whom no earthly power could tear from their husbands’ arms. There were several such among those brave second-cabin passengers. I saw them standing by their loved ones to the last.”
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