THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC SEEN FROM A LIFEBOAT
Looking back now on the descent of our boat down the ship's side, it
is a matter of surprise, I think, to all the occupants to remember how
little they thought of it at the time. It was a great adventure,
certainly: it was exciting to feel the boat sink by jerks, foot by
foot, as the ropes were paid out from above and shrieked as they
passed through the pulley blocks, the new ropes and gear creaking
under the strain of a boat laden with people, and the crew calling to
the sailors above as the boat tilted slightly, now at one end, now at
the other, "Lower aft!" "Lower stern!" and "Lower together!" as she
came level again--but I do not think we felt much apprehension about
reaching the water safely. It certainly was thrilling to see the black
hull of the ship on one side and the sea, seventy feet below, on the
other, or to pass down by cabins and saloons brilliantly lighted; but
we knew nothing of the apprehension felt in the minds of some of the
officers whether the boats and lowering-gear would stand the strain of
the weight of our sixty people. The ropes, however, were new and
strong, and the boat did not buckle in the middle as an older boat
might have done. Whether it was right or not to lower boats full of
people to the water,--and it seems likely it was not,--I think there
can be nothing but the highest praise given to the officers and crew
above for the way in which they lowered the boats one after the other
safely to the water; it may seem a simple matter, to read about such a
thing, but any sailor knows, apparently, that it is not so. An
experienced officer has told me that he has seen a boat lowered in
practice from a ship's deck, with a trained crew and no passengers in
the boat, with practised sailors paying out the ropes, in daylight, in
calm weather, with the ship lying in dock--and has seen the boat tilt
over and pitch the crew headlong into the sea. Contrast these
conditions with those obtaining that Monday morning at 12.45 A.M., and
it is impossible not to feel that, whether the lowering crew were
trained or not, whether they had or had not drilled since coming on
board, they did their duty in a way that argues the greatest
efficiency. I cannot help feeling the deepest gratitude to the two
sailors who stood at the ropes above and lowered us to the sea: I do
not suppose they were saved.
Perhaps one explanation of our feeling little sense of the unusual in
leaving the Titanic in this way was that it seemed the climax to a
series of extraordinary occurrences: the magnitude of the whole thing
dwarfed events that in the ordinary way would seem to be full of
imminent peril. It is easy to imagine it,--a voyage of four days on a
calm sea, without a single untoward incident; the presumption, perhaps
already mentally half realized, that we should be ashore in
forty-eight hours and so complete a splendid voyage,--and then to feel
the engine stop, to be summoned on deck with little time to dress, to
tie on a lifebelt, to see rockets shooting aloft in call for help, to
be told to get into a lifeboat,--after all these things, it did not
seem much to feel the boat sinking down to the sea: it was the natural
sequence of previous events, and we had learned in the last hour to
take things just as they came. At the same time, if any one should
wonder what the sensation is like, it is quite easy to measure
seventy-five feet from the windows of a tall house or a block of
flats, look down to the ground and fancy himself with some sixty other
people crowded into a boat so tightly that he could not sit down or
move about, and then picture the boat sinking down in a continuous
series of jerks, as the sailors pay out the ropes through cleats
above. There are more pleasant sensations than this! How thankful we
were that the sea was calm and the Titanic lay so steadily and quietly
as we dropped down her side. We were spared the bumping and grinding
against the side which so often accompanies the launching of boats: I
do not remember that we even had to fend off our boat while we were
trying to get free.
As we went down, one of the crew shouted, "We are just over the
condenser exhaust: we don't want to stay in that long or we shall be
swamped; feel down on the floor and be ready to pull up the pin which
lets the ropes free as soon as we are afloat." I had often looked over
the side and noticed this stream of water coming out of the side of
the Titanic just above the water-line: in fact so large was the volume
of water that as we ploughed along and met the waves coming towards
us, this stream would cause a splash that sent spray flying. We felt,
as well as we could in the crowd of people, on the floor, along the
sides, with no idea where the pin could be found,--and none of the
crew knew where it was, only of its existence somewhere,--but we never
found it. And all the time we got closer to the sea and the exhaust
roared nearer and nearer--until finally we floated with the ropes
still holding us from above, the exhaust washing us away and the force
of the tide driving us back against the side,--the latter not of much
account in influencing the direction, however. Thinking over what
followed, I imagine we must have touched the water with the condenser
stream at our bows, and not in the middle as I thought at one time: at
any rate, the resultant of these three forces was that we were carried
parallel to the ship, directly under the place where boat 15 would
drop from her davits into the sea. Looking up we saw her already
coming down rapidly from B deck: she must have filled almost
immediately after ours. We shouted up, "Stop lowering 14," [Footnote:
In an account which appeared in the newspapers of April 19 I have
described this boat as 14, not knowing they were numbered
alternately.] and the crew and passengers in the boat above, hearing
us shout and seeing our position immediately below them, shouted the
same to the sailors on the boat deck; but apparently they did not
hear, for she dropped down foot by foot,--twenty feet, fifteen,
ten,--and a stoker and I in the bows reached up and touched her bottom
swinging above our heads, trying to push away our boat from under her.
It seemed now as if nothing could prevent her dropping on us, but at
this moment another stoker sprang with his knife to the ropes that
still held us and I heard him shout, "One! Two!" as he cut them
through. The next moment we had swung away from underneath 15, and
were clear of her as she dropped into the water in the space we had
just before occupied. I do not know how the bow ropes were freed, but
imagine that they were cut in the same way, for we were washed clear
of the Titanic at once by the force of the stream and floated away as
the oars were got out.
I think we all felt that that was quite the most exciting thing we had
yet been through, and a great sigh of relief and gratitude went up as
we swung away from the boat above our heads; but I heard no one cry
aloud during the experience--not a woman's voice was raised in fear or
hysteria. I think we all learnt many things that night about the bogey
called "fear," and how the facing of it is much less than the dread of
it.
The crew was made up of cooks and stewards, mostly the former, I
think; their white jackets showing up in the darkness as they pulled
away, two to an oar: I do not think they can have had any practice in
rowing, for all night long their oars crossed and clashed; if our
safety had depended on speed or accuracy in keeping time it would have
gone hard with us. Shouting began from one end of the boat to the
other as to what we should do, where we should go, and no one seemed
to have any knowledge how to act. At last we asked, "Who is in charge
of this boat?" but there was no reply. We then agreed by general
consent that the stoker who stood in the stern with the tiller should
act as captain, and from that time he directed the course, shouting to
other boats and keeping in touch with them. Not that there was
anywhere to go or anything we could do. Our plan of action was simple:
to keep all the boats together as far as possible and wait until we
were picked up by other liners. The crew had apparently heard of the
wireless communications before they left the Titanic, but I never
heard them say that we were in touch with any boat but the Olympic: it
was always the Olympic that was coming to our rescue. They thought
they knew even her distance, and making a calculation, we came to the
conclusion that we ought to be picked up by her about two o'clock in
the afternoon. But this was not our only hope of rescue: we watched
all the time the darkness lasted for steamers' lights, thinking there
might be a chance of other steamers coming near enough to see the
lights which some of our boats carried. I am sure there was no feeling
in the minds of any one that we should not be picked up next day: we
knew that wireless messages would go out from ship to ship, and as one
of the stokers said: "The sea will be covered with ships to-morrow
afternoon: they will race up from all over the sea to find us." Some
even thought that fast torpedo boats might run up ahead of the
Olympic. And yet the Olympic was, after all, the farthest away of them
all; eight other ships lay within three hundred miles of us.
How thankful we should have been to know how near help was, and how
many ships had heard our message and were rushing to the Titanic's
aid. I think nothing has surprised us more than to learn so many ships
were near enough to rescue us in a few hours. Almost immediately after
leaving the Titanic we saw what we all said was a ship's lights down
on the horizon on the Titanic's port side: two lights, one above the
other, and plainly not one of our boats; we even rowed in that
direction for some time, but the lights drew away and disappeared
below the horizon.
But this is rather anticipating: we did none of these things first. We
had no eyes for anything but the ship we had just left. As the oarsmen
pulled slowly away we all turned and took a long look at the mighty
vessel towering high above our midget boat, and I know it must have
been the most extraordinary sight I shall ever be called upon to
witness; I realize now how totally inadequate language is to convey to
some other person who was not there any real impression of what we
saw.
But the task must be attempted: the whole picture is so intensely
dramatic that, while it is not possible to place on paper for eyes to
see the actual likeness of the ship as she lay there, some sketch of
the scene will be possible. First of all, the climatic conditions were
extraordinary. The night was one of the most beautiful I have ever
seen: the sky without a single cloud to mar the perfect brilliance of
the stars, clustered so thickly together that in places there seemed
almost more dazzling points of light set in the black sky than
background of sky itself; and each star seemed, in the keen
atmosphere, free from any haze, to have increased its brilliance
tenfold and to twinkle and glitter with a staccato flash that made the
sky seem nothing but a setting made for them in which to display their
wonder. They seemed so near, and their light so much more intense than
ever before, that fancy suggested they saw this beautiful ship in dire
distress below and all their energies had awakened to flash messages
across the black dome of the sky to each other; telling and warning of
the calamity happening in the world beneath. Later, when the Titanic
had gone down and we lay still on the sea waiting for the day to dawn
or a ship to come, I remember looking up at the perfect sky and
realizing why Shakespeare wrote the beautiful words he puts in the
mouth of Lorenzo:--
"Jessica, look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."
But it seemed almost as if we could--that night: the stars seemed
really to be alive and to talk. The complete absence of haze produced
a phenomenon I had never seen before: where the sky met the sea the
line was as clear and definite as the edge of a knife, so that the
water and the air never merged gradually into each other and blended
to a softened rounded horizon, but each element was so exclusively
separate that where a star came low down in the sky near the clear-cut
edge of the waterline, it still lost none of its brilliance. As the
earth revolved and the water edge came up and covered partially the
star, as it were, it simply cut the star in two, the upper half
continuing to sparkle as long as it was not entirely hidden, and
throwing a long beam of light along the sea to us.
In the evidence before the United States Senate Committee the captain
of one of the ships near us that night said the stars were so
extraordinarily bright near the horizon that he was deceived into
thinking that they were ships' lights: he did not remember seeing such
a night before. Those who were afloat will all agree with that
statement: _we_ were often deceived into thinking they were
lights of a ship.
And next the cold air! Here again was something quite new to us: there
was not a breath of wind to blow keenly round us as we stood in the
boat, and because of its continued persistence to make us feel cold;
it was just a keen, bitter, icy, motionless cold that came from
nowhere and yet was there all the time; the stillness of it--if one
can imagine "cold" being motionless and still--was what seemed new and
strange.
And these--the sky and the air--were overhead; and below was the sea.
Here again something uncommon: the surface was like a lake of oil,
heaving gently up and down with a quiet motion that rocked our boat
dreamily to and fro. We did not need to keep her head to the swell:
often I watched her lying broadside on to the tide, and with a boat
loaded as we were, this would have been impossible with anything like
a swell. The sea slipped away smoothly under the boat, and I think we
never heard it lapping on the sides, so oily in appearance was the
water. So when one of the stokers said he had been to sea for
twenty-six years and never yet seen such a calm night, we accepted it
as true without comment. Just as expressive was the remark of
another--"It reminds me of a bloomin' picnic!" It was quite true; it
did: a picnic on a lake, or a quiet inland river like the Cam, or a
backwater on the Thames.
And so in these conditions of sky and air and sea, we gazed broadside
on the Titanic from a short distance. She was absolutely still--indeed
from the first it seemed as if the blow from the iceberg had taken all
the courage out of her and she had just come quietly to rest and was
settling down without an effort to save herself, without a murmur of
protest against such a foul blow. For the sea could not rock her: the
wind was not there to howl noisily round the decks, and make the ropes
hum; from the first what must have impressed all as they watched was
the sense of stillness about her and the slow, insensible way she sank
lower and lower in the sea, like a stricken animal.
The mere bulk alone of the ship viewed from the sea below was an
awe-inspiring sight. Imagine a ship nearly a sixth of a mile long, 75
feet high to the top decks, with four enormous funnels above the
decks, and masts again high above the funnels; with her hundreds of
portholes, all her saloons and other rooms brilliant with light, and
all round her, little boats filled with those who until a few hours
before had trod her decks and read in her libraries and listened to
the music of her band in happy content; and who were now looking up in
amazement at the enormous mass above them and rowing away from her
because she was sinking.
I had often wanted to see her from some distance away, and only a few
hours before, in conversation at lunch with a fellow-passenger, had
registered a vow to get a proper view of her lines and dimensions when
we landed at New York: to stand some distance away to take in a full
view of her beautiful proportions, which the narrow approach to the
dock at Southampton made impossible. Little did I think that the
opportunity was to be found so quickly and so dramatically. The
background, too, was a different one from what I had planned for her:
the black outline of her profile against the sky was bordered all
round by stars studded in the sky, and all her funnels and masts were
picked out in the same way: her bulk was seen where the stars were
blotted out. And one other thing was different from expectation: the
thing that ripped away from us instantly, as we saw it, all sense of
the beauty of the night, the beauty of the ship's lines, and the
beauty of her lights,--and all these taken in themselves were
intensely beautiful,--that thing was the awful angle made by the level
of the sea with the rows of porthole lights along her side in dotted
lines, row above row. The sea level and the rows of lights should have
been parallel--should never have met--and now they met at an angle
inside the black hull of the ship. There was nothing else to indicate
she was injured; nothing but this apparent violation of a simple
geometrical law--that parallel lines should "never meet even if
produced ever so far both ways"; but it meant the Titanic had sunk by
the head until the lowest portholes in the bows were under the sea,
and the portholes in the stern were lifted above the normal height. We
rowed away from her in the quietness of the night, hoping and praying
with all our hearts that she would sink no more and the day would find
her still in the same position as she was then. The crew, however, did
not think so. It has been said frequently that the officers and crew
felt assured that she would remain afloat even after they knew the
extent of the damage. Some of them may have done so--and perhaps, from
their scientific knowledge of her construction, with more reason at
the time than those who said she would sink--but at any rate the
stokers in our boat had no such illusion. One of them--I think he was
the same man that cut us free from the pulley ropes--told us how he
was at work in the stoke-hole, and in anticipation of going off duty
in quarter of an hour,--thus confirming the time of the collision as
11.45,--had near him a pan of soup keeping hot on some part of the
machinery; suddenly the whole side of the compartment came in, and the
water rushed him off his feet. Picking himself up, he sprang for the
compartment doorway and was just through the aperture when the
watertight door came down behind him, "like a knife," as he said;
"they work them from the bridge." He had gone up on deck but was
ordered down again at once and with others was told to draw the fires
from under the boiler, which they did, and were then at liberty to
come on deck again. It seems that this particular knot of stokers must
have known almost as soon as any one of the extent of injury. He added
mournfully, "I could do with that hot soup now"--and indeed he could:
he was clad at the time of the collision, he said, in trousers and
singlet, both very thin on account of the intense heat in the
stoke-hole; and although he had added a short jacket later, his teeth
were chattering with the cold. He found a place to lie down underneath
the tiller on the little platform where our captain stood, and there
he lay all night with a coat belonging to another stoker thrown over
him and I think he must have been almost unconscious. A lady next to
him, who was warmly clad with several coats, tried to insist on his
having one of hers--a fur-lined one--thrown over him, but he
absolutely refused while some of the women were insufficiently clad;
and so the coat was given to an Irish girl with pretty auburn hair
standing near, leaning against the gunwale--with an "outside berth"
and so more exposed to the cold air. This same lady was able to
distribute more of her wraps to the passengers, a rug to one, a fur
boa to another; and she has related with amusement that at the moment
of climbing up the Carpathia's side, those to whom these articles had
been lent offered them all back to her; but as, like the rest of us,
she was encumbered with a lifebelt, she had to say she would receive
them back at the end of the climb, I had not seen my dressing-gown
since I dropped into the boat, but some time in the night a steerage
passenger found it on the floor and put it on.
It is not easy at this time to call to mind who were in the boat,
because in the night it was not possible to see more than a few feet
away, and when dawn came we had eyes only for the rescue ship and the
icebergs; but so far as my memory serves the list was as follows: no
first-class passengers; three women, one baby, two men from the second
cabin; and the other passengers steerage--mostly women; a total of
about 35 passengers. The rest, about 25 (and possibly more), were crew
and stokers. Near to me all night was a group of three Swedish girls,
warmly clad, standing close together to keep warm, and very silent;
indeed there was very little talking at any time.
One conversation took place that is, I think, worth repeating: one
more proof that the world after all is a small place. The ten months'
old baby which was handed down at the last moment was received by a
lady next to me--the same who shared her wraps and coats. The mother
had found a place in the middle and was too tightly packed to come
through to the child, and so it slept contentedly for about an hour in
a stranger's arms; it then began to cry and the temporary nurse said:
"Will you feel down and see if the baby's feet are out of the blanket!
I don't know much about babies but I think their feet must be kept
warm." Wriggling down as well as I could, I found its toes exposed to
the air and wrapped them well up, when it ceased crying at once: it
was evidently a successful diagnosis! Having recognized the lady by
her voice,--it was much too dark to see faces,--as one of my vis-à-vis
at the purser's table, I said,--"Surely you are Miss ----?" "Yes,"
she replied, "and you must be Mr. Beesley; how curious we should find
ourselves in the same boat!" Remembering that she had joined the boat
at Queenstown, I said, "Do you know Clonmel? a letter from a great
friend of mine who is staying there at ---- [giving the address] came
aboard at Queenstown." "Yes, it is my home: and I was dining
at ---- just before I came away." It seemed that she knew my friend,
too; and we agreed that of all places in the world to recognize mutual
friends, a crowded lifeboat afloat in mid-ocean at 2 A.M. twelve
hundred miles from our destination was one of the most unexpected.
And all the time, as we watched, the Titanic sank lower and lower by
the head and the angle became wider and wider as the stern porthole
lights lifted and the bow lights sank, and it was evident she was not
to stay afloat much longer. The captain-stoker now told the oarsmen to
row away as hard as they could. Two reasons seemed to make this a wise
decision: one that as she sank she would create such a wave of suction
that boats, if not sucked under by being too near, would be in danger
of being swamped by the wave her sinking would create--and we all knew
our boat was in no condition to ride big waves, crowded as it was and
manned with untrained oarsmen. The second was that an explosion might
result from the water getting to the boilers, and dèbris might fall
within a wide radius. And yet, as it turned out, neither of these
things happened.
At about 2.15 A.M. I think we were any distance from a mile to two
miles away. It is difficult for a landsman to calculate distance at
sea but we had been afloat an hour and a half, the boat was heavily
loaded, the oarsmen unskilled, and our course erratic: following now
one light and now another, sometimes a star and sometimes a light from
a port lifeboat which had turned away from the Titanic in the opposite
direction and lay almost on our horizon; and so we could not have gone
very far away.
About this time, the water had crept up almost to her sidelight and
the captain's bridge, and it seemed a question only of minutes before
she sank. The oarsmen lay on their oars, and all in the lifeboat were
motionless as we watched her in absolute silence--save some who would
not look and buried their heads on each others' shoulders. The lights
still shone with the same brilliance, but not so many of them: many
were now below the surface. I have often wondered since whether they
continued to light up the cabins when the portholes were under water;
they may have done so.
And then, as we gazed awe-struck, she tilted slowly up, revolving
apparently about a centre of gravity just astern of amidships, until
she attained a vertically upright position; and there she
remained--motionless! As she swung up, her lights, which had shone
without a flicker all night, went out suddenly, came on again for a
single flash, then went out altogether. And as they did so, there came
a noise which many people, wrongly I think, have described as an
explosion; it has always seemed to me that it was nothing but the
engines and machinery coming loose from their bolts and bearings, and
falling through the compartments, smashing everything in their way. It
was partly a roar, partly a groan, partly a rattle, and partly a
smash, and it was not a sudden roar as an explosion would be: it went
on successively for some seconds, possibly fifteen to twenty, as the
heavy machinery dropped down to the bottom (now the bows) of the ship:
I suppose it fell through the end and sank first, before the ship. But
it was a noise no one had heard before, and no one wishes to hear
again: it was stupefying, stupendous, as it came to us along the
water. It was as if all the heavy things one could think of had been
thrown downstairs from the top of a house, smashing each other and the
stairs and everything in the way. Several apparently authentic
accounts have been given, in which definite stories of explosions have
been related--in some cases even with wreckage blown up and the ship
broken in two; but I think such accounts will not stand close
analysis. In the first place the fires had been withdrawn and the
steam allowed to escape some time before she sank, and the possibility
of explosion from this cause seems very remote. Then, as just related,
the noise was not sudden and definite, but prolonged--more like the
roll and crash of thunder. The probability of the noise being caused
by engines falling down will be seen by referring to Figure 2, page
116, where the engines are placed in compartments 3, 4, and 5. As the
Titanic tilted up they would almost certainly fall loose from their
bed and plunge down through the other compartments.
No phenomenon like that pictured in some American and English papers
occurred--that of the ship breaking in two, and the two ends being
raised above the surface. I saw these drawings in preparation on board
the Carpathia, and said at the time that they bore no resemblance to
what actually happened.
When the noise was over the Titanic was still upright like a column:
we could see her now only as the stern and some 150 feet of her stood
outlined against the star-specked sky, looming black in the darkness,
and in this position she continued for some minutes--I think as much
as five minutes, but it may have been less. Then, first sinking back a
little at the stern, I thought, she slid slowly forwards through the
water and dived slantingly down; the sea closed over her and we had
seen the last of the beautiful ship on which we had embarked four days
before at Southampton.
And in place of the ship on which all our interest had been
concentrated for so long and towards which we looked most of the time
because it was still the only object on the sea which was a fixed
point to us--in place of the Titanic, we had the level sea now
stretching in an unbroken expanse to the horizon: heaving gently just
as before, with no indication on the surface that the waves had just
closed over the most wonderful vessel ever built by man's hand; the
stars looked down just the same and the air was just as bitterly cold.
There seemed a great sense of loneliness when we were left on the sea
in a small boat without the Titanic: not that we were uncomfortable
(except for the cold) nor in danger: we did not think we were either,
but the Titanic was no longer there.
We waited head on for the wave which we thought might come--the wave
we had heard so much of from the crew and which they said had been
known to travel for miles--and it never came. But although the Titanic
left us no such legacy of a wave as she went to the bottom, she left
us something we would willingly forget forever, something which it is
well not to let the imagination dwell on--the cries of many hundreds
of our fellow-passengers struggling in the ice-cold water.
I would willingly omit any further mention of this part of the
disaster from this book, but for two reasons it is not possible--first,
that as a matter of history it should be put on record;
and secondly, that these cries were not only an appeal for
help in the awful conditions of danger in which the drowning
found themselves,--an appeal that could never be answered,--but
an appeal to the whole world to make such conditions of
danger and hopelessness impossible ever again; a cry that called
to the heavens for the very injustice of its own existence; a cry
that clamoured for its own destruction.
We were utterly surprised to hear this cry go up as the waves closed
over the Titanic: we had heard no sound of any kind from her since we
left her side; and, as mentioned before, we did not know how many
boats she had or how many rafts. The crew may have known, but they
probably did not, and if they did, they never told the passengers; we
should not have been surprised to know all were safe on some
life-saving device.
So that unprepared as we were for such a thing, the cries of the
drowning floating across the quiet sea filled us with stupefaction: we
longed to return and rescue at least some of the drowning, but we knew
it was impossible. The boat was filled to standing-room, and to return
would mean the swamping of us all, and so the captain-stoker told his
crew to row away from the cries. We tried to sing to keep all from
thinking of them; but there was no heart for singing in the boat at
that time.
The cries, which were loud and numerous at first, died away gradually
one by one, but the night was clear, frosty and still, the water
smooth, and the sounds must have carried on its level surface free
from any obstruction for miles, certainly much farther from the ship
than we were situated. I think the last of them must have been heard
nearly forty minutes after the Titanic sank. Lifebelts would keep the
survivors afloat for hours; but the cold water was what stopped the
cries.
There must have come to all those safe in the lifeboats, scattered
round the drowning at various distances, a deep resolve that, if
anything could be done by them in the future to prevent the repetition
of such sounds, they would do it--at whatever cost of time or other
things. And not only to them are those cries an imperative call, but
to every man and woman who has known of them. It is not possible that
ever again can such conditions exist; but it is a duty imperative on
one and all to see that they do not. Think of it! a few more boats, a
few more planks of wood nailed together in a particular way at a
trifling cost, and all those men and women whom the world can so ill
afford to lose would be with us to-day, there would be no mourning in
thousands of homes which now are desolate, and these words need not
have been written.