Voyagers of the Titanic (28 page)

Fifth Officer Harold Lowe jumped into lifeboat 14 and ordered it to lower away. “The sailors on deck had started to obey him, when a very sad thing happened,” Charlotte Collyer continued. “A young lad”—possibly the sixteen-year-old Liverpudlian Alfred Gaskell, who was being taken to Canada in second class by bachelor Joseph Fynney—“almost small enough to be counted as a child, was standing close to the rail. He had made no attempt to force his way into the boat, though his eyes had been fixed piteously on the officer. Now, when he realized that he was really to be left behind, his courage failed him. With a cry, he climbed upon the rail and leaped down into the boat. He fell among us women, and crawled under a seat. I and another woman covered him up with our skirts. We wanted to give the poor lad a chance; but the officer dragged him to his feet and ordered him back upon the ship.” The stripling begged for his life, saying that he would not fill much space; but Lowe drew his revolver and thrust it at his face. “ ‘I give you just ten seconds to get back on that ship before I blow your brains out!’ he shouted. The lad only begged the harder, and I thought I should see him shot as he stood. But the officer suddenly changed his tone. He lowered his revolver, and looked the boy squarely in the eyes. ‘For God’s sake, be a man!’ he said gently. ‘We’ve got women and children to save. We must stop at the decks lower down and take on women and children.’” In truth, no lifeboat halted at a lower deck for women and children. The lad climbed back over the rail speechlessly, took a few unsteady steps, then lay face down upon the deck with his head beside a coil of rope. The women in the lifeboat were sobbing.
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As Lowe shouted again for the lifeboat to be lowered, a third-class passenger hurled himself into the lifeboat. Lowe seized him and by brute strength pushed him out onto the boat deck. A dozen men from second class encircled him and pummeled his face with their fists. Lowe was “scared” that lifeboat 14 would plunge as it was lowered, and fired his revolver along the side of the liner to deter last-moment jumpers. The shudder of an additional body falling into the lifeboat might jerk away the hooks or dislodge a tie, he feared. As they descended past the open deck, he recalled seeing “a lot of Italians, Latin people, all along the ship’s rail . . . all glaring, more or less like wild beasts, ready to spring. That is why I yelled out and . . . let go, bang!”
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Later, at sea, Lowe discovered that there was a stowaway on board, Edward Ryan, from Ballinaveen, County Tipperary, whom he described as “Italian.”
*
Lowe treated Ryan roughly, but later the youth described his escape to his parents, in an unabashed letter reproduced in the
Cork Examiner:
“I had a towel around my neck. I just threw this over my head and let it hang at the back. I wore my waterproof raincoat. I then walked very stiff past the officers . . . They thought I was a woman.”
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The disorder on the port side was aggravated by Lightoller’s determination to exclude men even if lifeboats had spare places. Lifeboat 13, launched on the starboard side with far less aggression around the same time (one thirty) as stormy lifeboat 14, had fifty occupants, including crewmen and male passengers. The latter were a medley of nationalities and vocations. They included the physician Washington Dodge from first class and from second class the schoolmaster Lawrence Beesley, missionary Albert Caldwell, Japanese bureaucrat Masabumi Hosono, and Percy Oxenham, a young mason journeying from Ponders End to New Jersey. The men from third class comprised three young Norwegians, the Irishman Daniel Buckley, a fourteen-year-old Swede named Johan Svenson, and David Vartanian, from Keghi, whose twenty-second birthday was April 15, 1912.

Washington Dodge stated that when women stopped arriving for lifeboat 13, someone shouted, “Get in, doctor!,” so he did. Masabumi Hosono, the only Japanese on the
Titanic,
recorded that when he reached the boat deck from his second-class cabin, he was ordered below, away from the lifeboats, by crewmen who thought of him as a third-class Chinaman. The distress flares terrified him. He tried to compose himself for death but longed to see his wife and children again, and stepped—unchallenged—into lifeboat 13. Similarly, with Sylvia Caldwell and her baby aboard, her husband stepped into the bow as the boat was lowered. Lawrence Beesley said that when lifeboat 13 came swinging level with him, the call came twice: “Any more ladies?” No women appearing, a sensible crewman eyed him and said, “You had better jump.” He jumped. By contrast, the young Irishman Daniel Buckley attributed his survival in lifeboat 13 to another passenger’s compassion. He had got in early, with a crowd of other men, all of whom were ordered out to let women in. He started crying, and a woman threw her shawl over him and told him to stay still. The seamen did not realize Buckley’s sex.
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Two lifeboats were launched around one thirty-five (just under two hours after the collision). Lifeboat 15 left from starboard with forty-three occupants, including five crewmen and twenty-one other men. These included the cardsharp Harry Homer from first class, who lived by the precept that God helps those who help themselves, and three experienced Atlantic travelers, a Belgian named Guillaume de Messemaeker, who worked a homestead between Tampico and Vandalia, near the Milk River in Montana; the Slovenian Franz Karun and his four-year-old daughter, Manca; and Nikola Lulic, the sojourner in Chisholm, Minnesota, who was chaperoning a party of fellow Croatians for the Swiss travel agent Büchel—and inveigled his way onto lifeboat 15 by finding a sailor’s cap, which he plumped on his head. There were also six Swedes, five Finns, and two Lebanese.

Lifeboat 16 was lowered from port by Lightoller with thirty occupants—twenty-three women, five crewmen, a small Lebanese boy, and an Irish youth whom no one seemed to notice called Bernard McCoy, who had joined his two sisters. The women were mostly Irish and other voyagers from third class together with stewardess Violet Jessop. According to one report of the Addergoole party, “they shoved Annie Kelly on the boat, in her nightgown and all as she was, and they would have taken Kate Bourke, too, and Mary, her sister-in-law, but Kate clung to her husband and said if he must die, she would die with him, and so did Mary say she would not go without her brother, and they pushed the little Flynn boy back, and out away. It was pitiful that they wouldn’t let the boy on the lifeboat, and he only a child, and it not full.”
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(The “little Flynn boy” was a laborer aged twenty-eight.) After Olaus Abelseth had shepherded his girl cousin onto lifeboat 16, seeing there were no more port lifeboats, he crossed to the starboard side with his brother-in-law Moen and cousin Søholt. “Are there any sailors here?” they were asked by an officer seeking help with lifeboat C. Abelseth had started work at sea “when I was ten years old with my dad fishing,” only stopping when he moved to the American Midwest at the age of sixteen; but he said nothing, because Moen and Søholt said in Norwegian, “Let us stay here together.” The three kin stood in gloomy silence. For Abelseth, with his restraint and self-sacrifice, there was no frantic rush to escape.

The loading of lifeboat 1 with the Duff Gordons and three other passengers proved to be the most contentious of the night. Vying with it was the starboard launching two hours after the collision, around one forty, of lifeboat C. This was a so-called collapsible, with a flat, clinker-built double bottom and low wooden sides topped by canvas. It left with forty-one occupants, including many Lebanese women and children, and Emily Goldsmith with her nine-year-old son, Frankie. Frank Goldsmith embraced his wife and kissed her good-bye. Reaching down, he hugged his son, and said, “So long, Frankie: I’ll see you later.” Their travel companion Tom Theobald took off his wedding ring and gave it to Emily Goldsmith saying: “If I don’t see you in New York, will you see that my wife gets this?”
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Frank Goldsmith and Tom Theobald stood back, as did their sixteen-year-old companion, Alfred Rush, although there were male passengers aboard. No one objected to the presence of Abraham Hyman, a Manchester picture framer, or four Chinese voyagers; still less to a young Lebanese, Sahid Nakid, who was accompanying his wife and their baby. The uproar occurred because, when no more women and children arrived, and the lowering of the boat was starting, Ismay stepped in just as its gunwale reached the level of the deck and sat in an empty place near the bow. Until this impulsive move, he had been helping, and sometimes hindering, the loading of successive lifeboats. Billy Carter followed him. Both men later insisted that no women were visible nearby and that there was room for six more people in the boat; but in America, Ismay was to become a hate figure because of his impulse, which tarnished his name in England, too.

The patience of the millionaire women was conspicuous. Lifeboat 4 had been the first one ready on the port side but was the last of the larger lifeboats to be launched. Captain Smith told Lightoller to fill it from the promenade deck, thinking that this would be easier and safer for women than the open boat deck. Passengers waiting on the boat deck duly filed down to the promenade deck, but Smith had forgotten that the
Titanic
promenade deck, unlike the
Olympic
’s, was protected from ocean winds by the glass windows known as Ismay screens. Woolner reminded him of his mistake: “By God, you are right! Call those people back.”
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The women and children returned to the boat deck by the inner stairs as lifeboat 4 was lowered outside to the promenade deck. Lightoller decided it would be easier to displace a glass screen than to haul the lifeboat back, and for a second time the women and children trooped down. Madeleine Astor, Lucile Carter, Marion Thayer, and Eleanor Widener were among the troopers. Their counterparts a century later might have thrown tantrums, or insisted on their privileges, but these millionaires’ wives cared about showing good manners: they had a sense of entitlement but did not confuse an infantile, assertive temper with strength of character. They waited anxiously, patiently, proudly.

It took an hour before Lightoller’s men returned to lifeboat 4. By then it was nearly 2
A.M
., and the water was within ten feet of the promenade deck. In addition to the millionaire women, Thayer senior had escorted Martha Stephenson and her sister, Elizabeth Eustis, to lifeboat 4; Emily Ryerson and her lady’s maid, Victorine Chaudanson, escaped in it; so, too, did the Cornish mother and daughter from second class, Eliza and Nellie Hocking, and from third class a Finnish woman heading for Detroit with her baby. Deck chairs were stacked into makeshift steps that enabled passengers to climb through the Ismay screen. Lightoller stood with one foot on deck and one in the lifeboat as (helped by Astor and John Thayer) he handed the women and children on board. “Get into the lifeboat to please me,” Astor told his reluctant wife. He then asked Lightoller if he might join his pregnant wife, whom he described as in “a delicate condition,” for the boat was only two-thirds full; but Lightoller replied, “No, sir, no men are allowed in these boats until the women are loaded first.” Astor was displeased, but made no protest. “The sea is calm,” he told his wife. “You’ll be all right. You’re in good hands. I’ll meet you in the morning.” He handed his gloves to her, stepped back from the rail, and saluted her.
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Emily Ryerson, whose elder son had so recently been killed in a motoring smash, said that she was determined “not to make a fuss and to do as we were told.” When she begged her husband to let her stay with him, he replied that she must obey orders: “You must go when your turn comes. I’ll stay with John Thayer. We will be all right.” On deck A she waited in line with the women millionaires and her surviving son, Jack. Lightoller halted them, saying, “That boy can’t go”; but her husband insisted: “Of course that boy goes with his mother; he is only thirteen.” Lightoller let the child pass, but reiterated, “No more boys.” This seemed likely to exclude William Carter, aged eleven, but Astor plonked a girl’s hat on the boy’s head and lifted him into the boat just before it was lowered. Then he sauntered off to find his Airedale, Kitty. Emily Ryerson kissed her husband for the last time: as the lifeboat descended, she saw him, John Thayer, and Widener standing together somberly, and the ocean swamping through open portholes.
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There was such hurry in launching lifeboat 4 that twenty-nine places were left empty: it makes the attempted exclusion of the Carter and Ryerson boys seem shameful.

Collapsible D, the final lifeboat launched, left the port side shortly after 2
A.M
., two hours and twenty minutes after the collision. Lightoller recalled that when first he reached it, there were men in the boat. “They weren’t British, nor of the English-speaking race. I won’t even attribute any nationality to them, beyond saying that they come under the broad category known to sailors as ‘dagoes.’ They hopped out mighty quickly, and I encouraged them verbally, also by vigorously flourishing my revolver.”
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The ocean was lapping up the stairway to the boat deck: collapsible D needed to be lowered only ten feet to the ocean’s surface. Even at this crisis, women would not leave their men. The novelist Jacques Futrelle forced his wife, Lily May, aboard: “It’s your last chance: go!” She submitted and survived, but an old woman who had been coaxed into the lifeboat changed her mind and was helped out because she insisted on rejoining her husband.
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Lightoller claimed that he repeatedly called for “more women and children” but had difficulty filling D with more than twenty-four out of a possible forty occupants. Cruelly, however, passengers longing to be rescued were excluded. Just before it was lowered, Seaman William Lucas told two women appealing to him from the deck that there was no room for them: they must wait for collapsibles A and B, which would be loaded next.
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One of them was Edith Evans, companion of the American sisters Appleton and Brown, who were already aboard. Lucas unwittingly condemned both women to death: A and B were never loaded.