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Title: The Loss of the SS. Titanic

Author: Lawrence Beesley

Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6675]
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THE LOSS OF THE S. S. TITANIC


ITS STORY AND ITS LESSONS

BY

LAWRENCE BEESLEY

B. A. (_Cantab_.)

Scholar of Gonville and Caius College

ONE OF THE SURVIVORS



PREFACE

The circumstances in which this book came to be written are as
follows. Some five weeks after the survivors from the Titanic landed
in New York, I was the guest at luncheon of Hon. Samuel J. Elder and
Hon. Charles T. Gallagher, both well-known lawyers in Boston. After
luncheon I was asked to relate to those present the experiences of the
survivors in leaving the Titanic and reaching the Carpathia.

When I had done so, Mr. Robert Lincoln O'Brien, the editor of the
_Boston Herald_, urged me as a matter of public interest to write
a correct history of the Titanic disaster, his reason being that he
knew several publications were in preparation by people who had not
been present at the disaster, but from newspaper accounts were piecing
together a description of it. He said that these publications would
probably be erroneous, full of highly coloured details, and generally
calculated to disturb public thought on the matter. He was supported
in his request by all present, and under this general pressure I
accompanied him to Messrs. Houghton Mifflin Company, where we
discussed the question of publication.

Messrs. Houghton Mifflin Company took at that time exactly the same
view that I did, that it was probably not advisable to put on record
the incidents connected with the Titanic's sinking: it seemed better
to forget details as rapidly as possible.

However, we decided to take a few days to think about it. At our next
meeting we found ourselves in agreement again,--but this time on the
common ground that it would probably be a wise thing to write a
history of the Titanic disaster as correctly as possible. I was
supported in this decision by the fact that a short account, which I
wrote at intervals on board the Carpathia, in the hope that it would
calm public opinion by stating the truth of what happened as nearly as
I could recollect it, appeared in all the American, English, and
Colonial papers and had exactly the effect it was intended to have.
This encourages me to hope that the effect of this work will be the
same.

Another matter aided me in coming to a decision,--the duty that we, as
survivors of the disaster, owe to those who went down with the ship,
to see that the reforms so urgently needed are not allowed to be
forgotten.

Whoever reads the account of the cries that came to us afloat on the
sea from those sinking in the ice-cold water must remember that they
were addressed to him just as much as to those who heard them, and
that the duty, of seeing that reforms are carried out devolves on
every one who knows that such cries were heard in utter helplessness
the night the Titanic sank.



CONTENTS

I.    CONSTRUCTION AND PREPARATIONS FOR THE FIRST VOYAGE

II.   FROM SOUTHAMPTON TO THE NIGHT OF THE COLLISION

III.  THE COLLISION AND EMBARKATION IN LIFEBOATS

IV.   THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC, SEEN FROM A LIFEBOAT

V.    THE RESCUE

VI.   THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC, SEEN FROM HER DECK

VII.  THE CARPATHIA'S RETURN TO NEW YORK

VIII. THE LESSONS TAUGHT BY THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC

IX.   SOME IMPRESSIONS



ILLUSTRATIONS

THE TITANIC From a photograph taken in Belfast Harbour. Copyrighted by
Underwood and Underwood, New York.

VIEW OF FOUR DECKS OF THE OLYMPIC, SISTER SHIP OF THE TITANIC From a
photograph published in the "Sphere," May 4,1918 TRANSVERSE (amidship)
SECTION THROUGH THE TITANIC After a drawing furnished by the White
Star Line.

LONGITUDINAL SECTIONS AND DECK PLAN OF THE TITANIC After plans
published in the "Shipbuilder."

THE CARPATHIA From a photograph furnished by the Cunard Steamship Co.




CHAPTER I

CONSTRUCTION AND PREPARATIONS FOR THE FIRST VOYAGE


The history of the R.M.S. Titanic, of the White Star Line, is one of
the most tragically short it is possible to conceive. The world had
waited expectantly for its launching and again for its sailing; had
read accounts of its tremendous size and its unexampled completeness
and luxury; had felt it a matter of the greatest satisfaction that
such a comfortable, and above all such a safe boat had been designed
and built--the "unsinkable lifeboat";--and then in a moment to hear
that it had gone to the bottom as if it had been the veriest tramp
steamer of a few hundred tons; and with it fifteen hundred passengers,
some of them known the world over! The improbability of such a thing
ever happening was what staggered humanity.

If its history had to be written in a single paragraph it would be
somewhat as follows:--

"The R.M.S. Titanic was built by Messrs. Harland & Wolff at their
well-known ship-building works at Queen's Island, Belfast, side by
side with her sister ship the Olympic. The twin vessels marked such an
increase in size that specially laid-out joiner and boiler shops were
prepared to aid in their construction, and the space usually taken up
by three building slips was given up to them. The keel of the Titanic
was laid on March 31, 1909, and she was launched on May 31, 1911; she
passed her trials before the Board of Trade officials on March 31,
1912, at Belfast, arrived at Southampton on April 4, and sailed the
following Wednesday, April 10, with 2208 passengers and crew, on her
maiden voyage to New York. She called at Cherbourg the same day,
Queenstown Thursday, and left for New York in the afternoon, expecting
to arrive the following Wednesday morning. But the voyage was never
completed. She collided with an iceberg on Sunday at 11.45 P.M. in
Lat. 41° 46' N. and Long. 50° 14' W., and sank two hours and a half
later; 815 of her passengers and 688 of her crew were drowned and 705
rescued by the Carpathia."

Such is the record of the Titanic, the largest ship the world had ever
seen--she was three inches longer than the Olympic and one thousand
tons more in gross tonnage--and her end was the greatest maritime
disaster known. The whole civilized world was stirred to its depths
when the full extent of loss of life was learned, and it has not yet
recovered from the shock. And that is without doubt a good thing. It
should not recover from it until the possibility of such a disaster
occurring again has been utterly removed from human society, whether
by separate legislation in different countries or by international
agreement. No living person should seek to dwell in thought for one
moment on such a disaster except in the endeavour to glean from it
knowledge that will be of profit to the whole world in the future.
When such knowledge is practically applied in the construction,
equipment, and navigation of passenger steamers--and not until
then--will be the time to cease to think of the Titanic disaster and
of the hundreds of men and women so needlessly sacrificed.

A few words on the ship's construction and equipment will be necessary
in order to make clear many points that arise in the course of this
book. A few figures have been added which it is hoped will help the
reader to follow events more closely than he otherwise could.

The considerations that inspired the builders to design the Titanic on
the lines on which she was constructed were those of speed, weight of
displacement, passenger and cargo accommodation. High speed is very
expensive, because the initial cost of the necessary powerful
machinery is enormous, the running expenses entailed very heavy, and
passenger and cargo accommodation have to be fined down to make the
resistance through the water as little as possible and to keep the
weight down. An increase in size brings a builder at once into
conflict with the question of dock and harbour accommodation at the
ports she will touch: if her total displacement is very great while
the lines are kept slender for speed, the draught limit may be
exceeded. The Titanic, therefore, was built on broader lines than the
ocean racers, increasing the total displacement; but because of the
broader build, she was able to keep within the draught limit at each
port she visited. At the same time she was able to accommodate more
passengers and cargo, and thereby increase largely her earning
capacity. A comparison between the Mauretania and the Titanic
illustrates the difference in these respects:--


             Displacement  Horse power  Speed in knots
 Mauretania     44,640       70,000           26
 Titanic        60,000       46,000           21

The vessel when completed was 883 feet long, 92 1/2 feet broad; her
height from keel to bridge was 104 feet. She had 8 steel decks, a
cellular double bottom, 5 1/4 feet through (the inner and outer
"skins" so-called), and with bilge keels projecting 2 feet for 300
feet of her length amidships. These latter were intended to lessen the
tendency to roll in a sea; they no doubt did so very well, but, as it
happened, they proved to be a weakness, for this was the first portion
of the ship touched by the iceberg and it has been suggested that the
keels were forced inwards by the collision and made the work of
smashing in the two "skins" a more simple matter. Not that the final
result would have been any different.

Her machinery was an expression of the latest progress in marine
engineering, being a combination of reciprocating engines with
Parsons's low-pressure turbine engine,--a combination which gives
increased power with the same steam consumption, an advance on the use
of reciprocating engines alone. The reciprocating engines drove the
wing-propellers and the turbine a mid-propeller, making her a
triple-screw vessel. To drive these engines she had 29 enormous
boilers and 159 furnaces. Three elliptical funnels, 24 feet 6 inches
in the widest diameter, took away smoke and water gases; the fourth
one was a dummy for ventilation.

She was fitted with 16 lifeboats 30 feet long, swung on davits of the
Welin double-acting type. These davits are specially designed for
dealing with two, and, where necessary, three, sets of lifeboats,--i.e.,
48 altogether; more than enough to have saved every soul on board
on the night of the collision. She was divided into 16 compartments by
15 transverse watertight bulkheads reaching from the double bottom
to the upper deck in the forward end and to the saloon deck in the
after end (Fig. 2), in both cases well above the water line.
Communication between the engine rooms and boiler rooms was
through watertight doors, which could all be closed instantly from the
captain's bridge: a single switch, controlling powerful electro-magnets,
operated them. They could also be closed by hand with a lever,
and in case the floor below them was flooded by accident, a
float underneath the flooring shut them automatically. These
compartments were so designed that if the two largest were flooded
with water--a most unlikely contingency in the ordinary way--the ship
would still be quite safe. Of course, more than two were flooded the
night of the collision, but exactly how many is not yet thoroughly
established.

Her crew had a complement of 860, made up of 475 stewards, cooks,
etc., 320 engineers, and 65 engaged in her navigation. The machinery
and equipment of the Titanic was the finest obtainable and represented
the last word in marine construction. All her structure was of steel,
of a weight, size, and thickness greater than that of any ship yet
known: the girders, beams, bulkheads, and floors all of exceptional
strength. It would hardly seem necessary to mention this, were it not
that there is an impression among a portion of the general public that
the provision of Turkish baths, gymnasiums, and other so-called
luxuries involved a sacrifice of some more essential things, the
absence of which was responsible for the loss of so many lives. But
this is quite an erroneous impression. All these things were an
additional provision for the comfort and convenience of passengers,
and there is no more reason why they should not be provided on these
ships than in a large hotel. There were places on the Titanic's deck
where more boats and rafts could have been stored without sacrificing
these things. The fault lay in not providing them, not in designing
the ship without places to put them. On whom the responsibility must
rest for their not being provided is another matter and must be left
until later.

When arranging a tour round the United States, I had decided to cross
in the Titanic for several reasons--one, that it was rather a novelty
to be on board the largest ship yet launched, and another that friends
who had crossed in the Olympic described her as a most comfortable
boat in a seaway, and it was reported that the Titanic had been still
further improved in this respect by having a thousand tons more built
in to steady her. I went on board at Southampton at 10 A.M. Wednesday,
April 10, after staying the night in the town. It is pathetic to
recall that as I sat that morning in the breakfast room of an hotel,
from the windows of which could be seen the four huge funnels of the
Titanic towering over the roofs of the various shipping offices
opposite, and the procession of stokers and stewards wending their way
to the ship, there sat behind me three of the Titanic's passengers
discussing the coming voyage and estimating, among other things, the
probabilities of an accident at sea to the ship. As I rose from
breakfast, I glanced at the group and recognized them later on board,
but they were not among the number who answered to the roll-call on
the Carpathia on the following Monday morning.

Between the time of going on board and sailing, I inspected, in the
company of two friends who had come from Exeter to see me off, the
various decks, dining-saloons and libraries; and so extensive were
they that it is no exaggeration to say that it was quite easy to lose
one's way on such a ship. We wandered casually into the gymnasium on
the boatdeck, and were engaged in bicycle exercise when the instructor
came in with two photographers and insisted on our remaining there
while his friends--as we thought at the time--made a record for him of
his apparatus in use. It was only later that we discovered that they
were the photographers of one of the illustrated London papers. More
passengers came in, and the instructor ran here and there, looking the
very picture of robust, rosy-cheeked health and "fitness" in his white
flannels, placing one passenger on the electric "horse," another on
the "camel," while the laughing group of onlookers watched the
inexperienced riders vigorously shaken up and down as he controlled
the little motor which made the machines imitate so realistically
horse and camel exercise.

It is related that on the night of the disaster, right up to the time
of the Titanic's sinking, while the band grouped outside the gymnasium
doors played with such supreme courage in face of the water which rose
foot by foot before their eyes, the instructor was on duty inside,
with passengers on the bicycles and the rowing-machines, still
assisting and encouraging to the last. Along with the bandsmen it is
fitting that his name, which I do not think has yet been put on
record--it is McCawley--should have a place in the honourable list of
those who did their duty faithfully to the ship and the line they
served.




CHAPTER II

FROM SOUTHAMPTON TO THE NIGHT OF THE COLLISION


Soon after noon the whistles blew for friends to go ashore, the
gangways were withdrawn, and the Titanic moved slowly down the dock,
to the accompaniment of last messages and shouted farewells of those
on the quay. There was no cheering or hooting of steamers' whistles
from the fleet of ships that lined the dock, as might seem probable on
the occasion of the largest vessel in the world putting to sea on her
maiden voyage; the whole scene was quiet and rather ordinary, with
little of the picturesque and interesting ceremonial which imagination
paints as usual in such circumstances. But if this was lacking, two
unexpected dramatic incidents supplied a thrill of excitement and
interest to the departure from dock. The first of these occurred just
before the last gangway was withdrawn:--a knot of stokers ran along
the quay, with their kit slung over their shoulders in bundles, and
made for the gangway with the evident intention of joining the ship.
But a petty officer guarding the shore end of the gangway firmly
refused to allow them on board; they argued, gesticulated, apparently
attempting to explain the reasons why they were late, but he remained
obdurate and waved them back with a determined hand, the gangway was
dragged back amid their protests, putting a summary ending to their
determined efforts to join the Titanic. Those stokers must be thankful
men to-day that some circumstance, whether their own lack of
punctuality or some unforeseen delay over which they had no control,
prevented their being in time to run up that last gangway! They will
have told--and will no doubt tell for years--the story of how their
lives were probably saved by being too late to join the Titanic.

The second incident occurred soon afterwards, and while it has no
doubt been thoroughly described at the time by those on shore, perhaps
a view of the occurrence from the deck of the Titanic will not be
without interest. As the Titanic moved majestically down the dock, the
crowd of friends keeping pace with us along the quay, we came together
level with the steamer New York lying moored to the side of the dock
along with the Oceanic, the crowd waving "good-byes" to those on board
as well as they could for the intervening bulk of the two ships. But
as the bows of our ship came about level with those of the New York,
there came a series of reports like those of a revolver, and on the
quay side of the New York snaky coils of thick rope flung themselves
high in the air and fell backwards among the crowd, which retreated in
alarm to escape the flying ropes. We hoped that no one was struck by
the ropes, but a sailor next to me was certain he saw a woman carried
away to receive attention. And then, to our amazement the New York
crept towards us, slowly and stealthily, as if drawn by some invisible
force which she was powerless to withstand. It reminded me instantly
of an experiment I had shown many times to a form of boys learning the
elements of physics in a laboratory, in which a small magnet is made
to float on a cork in a bowl of water and small steel objects placed
on neighbouring pieces of cork are drawn up to the floating magnet by
magnetic force. It reminded me, too, of seeing in my little boy's bath
how a large celluloid floating duck would draw towards itself, by what
is called capillary attraction, smaller ducks, frogs, beetles, and
other animal folk, until the menagerie floated about as a unit,
oblivious of their natural antipathies and reminding us of the "happy
families" one sees in cages on the seashore. On the New York there was
shouting of orders, sailors running to and fro, paying out ropes and
putting mats over the side where it seemed likely we should collide;
the tug which had a few moments before cast off from the bows of the
Titanic came up around our stern and passed to the quay side of the
New York's stern, made fast to her and started to haul her back with
all the force her engines were capable of; but it did not seem that
the tug made much impression on the New York. Apart from the serious
nature of the accident, it made an irresistibly comic picture to see
the huge vessel drifting down the dock with a snorting tug at its
heels, for all the world like a small boy dragging a diminutive puppy
down the road with its teeth locked on a piece of rope, its feet
splayed out, its head and body shaking from side to side in the effort
to get every ounce of its weight used to the best advantage. At first
all appearance showed that the sterns of the two vessels would
collide; but from the stern bridge of the Titanic an officer directing
operations stopped us dead, the suction ceased, and the New York with
her tug trailing behind moved obliquely down the dock, her stern
gliding along the side of the Titanic some few yards away. It gave an
extraordinary impression of the absolute helplessness of a big liner
in the absence of any motive power to guide her. But all excitement
was not yet over: the New York turned her bows inward towards the
quay, her stern swinging just clear of and passing in front of our
bows, and moved slowly head on for the Teutonic lying moored to the
side; mats were quickly got out and so deadened the force of the
collision, which from where we were seemed to be too slight to cause
any damage. Another tug came up and took hold of the New York by the
bows; and between the two of them they dragged her round the corner of
the quay which just here came to an end on the side of the river.

We now moved slowly ahead and passed the Teutonic at a creeping pace,
but notwithstanding this, the latter strained at her ropes so much
that she heeled over several degrees in her efforts to follow the
Titanic: the crowd were shouted back, a group of gold-braided
officials, probably the harbour-master and his staff, standing on the
sea side of the moored ropes, jumped back over them as they drew up
taut to a rigid line, and urged the crowd back still farther. But we
were just clear, and as we slowly turned the corner into the river I
saw the Teutonic swing slowly back into her normal station, relieving
the tension alike of the ropes and of the minds of all who witnessed
the incident.

[Illustration: FOUR DECKS OF OLYMPIC, SISTER SHIP OF TITANIC]

Unpleasant as this incident was, it was interesting to all the
passengers leaning over the rails to see the means adopted by the
officers and crew of the various vessels to avoid collision, to see on
the Titanic's docking-bridge (at the stern) an officer and seamen
telephoning and ringing bells, hauling up and down little red and
white flags, as danger of collision alternately threatened and
diminished. No one was more interested than a young American
kinematograph photographer, who, with his wife, followed the whole
scene with eager eyes, turning the handle of his camera with the most
evident pleasure as he recorded the unexpected incident on his films.
It was obviously quite a windfall for him to have been on board at
such a time. But neither the film nor those who exposed it reached the
other side, and the record of the accident from the Titanic's deck has
never been thrown on the screen.

As we steamed down the river, the scene we had just witnessed was the
topic of every conversation: the comparison with the Olympic-Hawke
collision was drawn in every little group of passengers, and it seemed
to be generally agreed that this would confirm the suction theory
which was so successfully advanced by the cruiser Hawke in the law
courts, but which many people scoffed at when the British Admiralty
first suggested it as the explanation of the cruiser ramming the
Olympic. And since this is an attempt to chronicle facts as they
happened on board the Titanic, it must be recorded that there were
among the passengers and such of the crew as were heard to speak on
the matter, the direst misgivings at the incident we had just
witnessed. Sailors are proverbially superstitious; far too many people
are prone to follow their lead, or, indeed, the lead of any one who
asserts a statement with an air of conviction and the opportunity of
constant repetition; the sense of mystery that shrouds a prophetic
utterance, particularly if it be an ominous one (for so constituted
apparently is the human mind that it will receive the impress of an
evil prophecy far more readily than it will that of a beneficent one,
possibly through subservient fear to the thing it dreads, possibly
through the degraded, morbid attraction which the sense of evil has
for the innate evil in the human mind), leads many people to pay a
certain respect to superstitious theories. Not that they wholly
believe in them or would wish their dearest friends to know they ever
gave them a second thought; but the feeling that other people do so
and the half conviction that there "may be something in it, after
all," sways them into tacit obedience to the most absurd and childish
theories. I wish in a later chapter to discuss the subject of
superstition in its reference to our life on board the Titanic, but
will anticipate events here a little by relating a second so-called
"bad omen" which was hatched at Queenstown. As one of the tenders
containing passengers and mails neared the Titanic, some of those on
board gazed up at the liner towering above them, and saw a stoker's
head, black from his work in the stokehold below, peering out at them
from the top of one of the enormous funnels--a dummy one for
ventilation--that rose many feet above the highest deck. He had
climbed up inside for a joke, but to some of those who saw him there
the sight was seed for the growth of an "omen," which bore fruit in an
unknown dread of dangers to come. An American lady--may she forgive me
if she reads these lines!--has related to me with the deepest
conviction and earnestness of manner that she saw the man and
attributes the sinking of the Titanic largely to that. Arrant
foolishness, you may say! Yes, indeed, but not to those who believe in
it; and it is well not to have such prophetic thoughts of danger
passed round among passengers and crew: it would seem to have an
unhealthy influence.

We dropped down Spithead, past the shores of the Isle of Wight looking
superbly beautiful in new spring foliage, exchanged salutes with a
White Star tug lying-to in wait for one of their liners inward bound,
and saw in the distance several warships with attendant black
destroyers guarding the entrance from the sea. In the calmest weather
we made Cherbourg just as it grew dusk and left again about 8.30,
after taking on board passengers and mails. We reached Queenstown
about 12 noon on Thursday, after a most enjoyable passage across the
Channel, although the wind was almost too cold to allow of sitting out
on deck on Thursday morning.

The coast of Ireland looked very beautiful as we approached Queenstown
Harbour, the brilliant morning sun showing up the green hillsides and
picking out groups of dwellings dotted here and there above the rugged
grey cliffs that fringed the coast. We took on board our pilot, ran
slowly towards the harbour with the sounding-line dropping all the
time, and came to a stop well out to sea, with our screws churning up
the bottom and turning the sea all brown with sand from below. It had
seemed to me that the ship stopped rather suddenly, and in my
ignorance of the depth of the harbour entrance, that perhaps the
sounding-line had revealed a smaller depth than was thought safe for
the great size of the Titanic: this seemed to be confirmed by the
sight of sand churned up from the bottom--but this is mere
supposition. Passengers and mails were put on board from two tenders,
and nothing could have given us a better idea of the enormous length
and bulk of the Titanic than to stand as far astern as possible and
look over the side from the top deck, forwards and downwards to where
the tenders rolled at her bows, the merest cockleshells beside the
majestic vessel that rose deck after deck above them. Truly she was a
magnificent boat! There was something so graceful in her movement as
she rode up and down on the slight swell in the harbour, a slow,
stately dip and recover, only noticeable by watching her bows in
comparison with some landmark on the coast in the near distance; the
two little tenders tossing up and down like corks beside her
illustrated vividly the advance made in comfort of motion from the
time of the small steamer.

Presently the work of transfer was ended, the tenders cast off, and at
1.30 P.M., with the screws churning up the sea bottom again, the
Titanic turned slowly through a quarter-circle until her nose pointed
down along the Irish coast, and then steamed rapidly away from
Queenstown, the little house on the left of the town gleaming white on
the hillside for many miles astern. In our wake soared and screamed
hundreds of gulls, which had quarrelled and fought over the remnants
of lunch pouring out of the waste pipes as we lay-to in the harbour
entrance; and now they followed us in the expectation of further
spoil. I watched them for a long time and was astonished at the ease
with which they soared and kept up with the ship with hardly a motion
of their wings: picking out a particular gull, I would keep him under
observation for minutes at a time and see no motion of his wings
downwards or upwards to aid his flight. He would tilt all of a piece
to one side or another as the gusts of wind caught him: rigidly
unbendable, as an aeroplane tilts sideways in a puff of wind. And yet
with graceful ease he kept pace with the Titanic forging through the
water at twenty knots: as the wind met him he would rise upwards and
obliquely forwards, and come down slantingly again, his wings curved
in a beautiful arch and his tail feathers outspread as a fan. It was
plain that he was possessed of a secret we are only just beginning to
learn--that of utilizing air-currents as escalators up and down which
he can glide at will with the expenditure of the minimum amount of
energy, or of using them as a ship does when it sails within one or
two points of a head wind. Aviators, of course, are imitating the
gull, and soon perhaps we may see an aeroplane or a glider dipping
gracefully up and down in the face of an opposing wind and all the
time forging ahead across the Atlantic Ocean. The gulls were still
behind us when night fell, and still they screamed and dipped down
into the broad wake of foam which we left behind; but in the morning
they were gone: perhaps they had seen in the night a steamer bound for
their Queenstown home and had escorted her back.

All afternoon we steamed along the coast of Ireland, with grey cliffs
guarding the shores, and hills rising behind gaunt and barren; as dusk
fell, the coast rounded away from us to the northwest, and the last we
saw of Europe was the Irish mountains dim and faint in the dropping
darkness. With the thought that we had seen the last of land until we
set foot on the shores of America, I retired to the library to write
letters, little knowing that many things would happen to us all--many
experiences, sudden, vivid and impressive to be encountered, many
perils to be faced, many good and true people for whom we should have
to mourn--before we saw land again.

There is very little to relate from the time of leaving Queenstown on
Thursday to Sunday morning. The sea was calm,--so calm, indeed,
that very few were absent from meals: the wind westerly and
southwesterly,--"fresh" as the daily chart described it,--but often
rather cold, generally too cold to sit out on deck to read or write,
so that many of us spent a good part of the time in the library,
reading and writing. I wrote a large number of letters and posted them
day by day in the box outside the library door: possibly they are
there yet.

Each morning the sun rose behind us in a sky of circular clouds,
stretching round the horizon in long, narrow streaks and rising tier
upon tier above the sky-line, red and pink and fading from pink to
white, as the sun rose higher in the sky. It was a beautiful sight to
one who had not crossed the ocean before (or indeed been out of sight
of the shores of England) to stand on the top deck and watch the swell
of the sea extending outwards from the ship in an unbroken circle
until it met the sky-line with its hint of infinity: behind, the wake
of the vessel white with foam where, fancy suggested, the propeller
blades had cut up the long Atlantic rollers and with them made a level
white road bounded on either side by banks of green, blue, and
blue-green waves that would presently sweep away the white road,
though as yet it stretched back to the horizon and dipped over the
edge of the world back to Ireland and the gulls, while along it the
morning sun glittered and sparkled. And each night the sun sank right
in our eyes along the sea, making an undulating glittering path way, a
golden track charted on the surface of the ocean which our ship
followed unswervingly until the sun dipped below the edge of the
horizon, and the pathway ran ahead of us faster than we could steam
and slipped over the edge of the skyline,--as if the sun had been a
golden ball and had wound up its thread of gold too quickly for us to
follow.

From 12 noon Thursday to 12 noon Friday we ran 386 miles, Friday to
Saturday 519 miles, Saturday to Sunday 546 miles. The second day's run
of 519 miles was, the purser told us, a disappointment, and we should
not dock until Wednesday morning instead of Tuesday night, as we had
expected; however, on Sunday we were glad to see a longer run had been
made, and it was thought we should make New York, after all, on
Tuesday night. The purser remarked: "They are not pushing her this
trip and don't intend to make any fast running: I don't suppose we
shall do more than 546 now; it is not a bad day's run for the first
trip." This was at lunch, and I remember the conversation then turned
to the speed and build of Atlantic liners as factors in their comfort
of motion: all those who had crossed many times were unanimous in
saying the Titanic was the most comfortable boat they had been on, and
they preferred the speed we were making to that of the faster boats,
from the point of view of lessened vibration as well as because the
faster boats would bore through the waves with a twisted, screw-like
motion instead of the straight up-and-down swing of the Titanic. I
then called the attention of our table to the way the Titanic listed
to port (I had noticed this before), and we all watched the sky-line
through the portholes as we sat at the purser's table in the saloon:
it was plain she did so, for the sky-line and sea on the port side
were visible most of the time and on the starboard only sky. The
purser remarked that probably coal had been used mostly from the
starboard side. It is no doubt a common occurrence for all vessels to
list to some degree; but in view of the fact that the Titanic was cut
open on the starboard side and before she sank listed so much to port
that there was quite a chasm between her and the swinging lifeboats,
across which ladies had to be thrown or to cross on chairs laid flat,
the previous listing to port may be of interest.

Returning for a moment to the motion of the Titanic, it was
interesting to stand on the boat-deck, as I frequently did, in the
angle between lifeboats 13 and 15 on the starboard side (two boats I
have every reason to remember, for the first carried me in safety to
the Carpathia, and it seemed likely at one time that the other would
come down on our heads as we sat in 13 trying to get away from the
ship's side), and watch the general motion of the ship through the
waves resolve itself into two motions--one to be observed by
contrasting the docking-bridge, from which the log-line trailed away
behind in the foaming wake, with the horizon, and observing the long,
slow heave as we rode up and down. I timed the average period occupied
in one up-and-down vibration, but do not now remember the figures. The
second motion was a side-to-side roll, and could be calculated by
watching the port rail and contrasting it with the horizon as before.
It seems likely that this double motion is due to the angle at which
our direction to New York cuts the general set of the Gulf Stream
sweeping from the Gulf of Mexico across to Europe; but the almost
clock-like regularity of the two vibratory movements was what
attracted my attention: it was while watching the side roll that I
first became aware of the list to port. Looking down astern from the
boat-deck or from B deck to the steerage quarters, I often noticed how
the third-class passengers were enjoying every minute of the time: a
most uproarious skipping game of the mixed-double type was the great
favourite, while "in and out and roundabout" went a Scotchman with his
bagpipes playing something that Gilbert says "faintly resembled an
air." Standing aloof from all of them, generally on the raised stern
deck above the "playing field," was a man of about twenty to
twenty-four years of age, well-dressed, always gloved and nicely
groomed, and obviously quite out of place among his fellow-passengers:
he never looked happy all the time. I watched him, and classified him
at hazard as the man who had been a failure in some way at home and
had received the proverbial shilling plus third-class fare to America:
he did not look resolute enough or happy enough to be working out his
own problem. Another interesting man was travelling steerage, but had
placed his wife in the second cabin: he would climb the stairs leading
from the steerage to the second deck and talk affectionately with his
wife across the low gate which separated them. I never saw him after
the collision, but I think his wife was on the Carpathia. Whether they
ever saw each other on the Sunday night is very doubtful: he would not
at first be allowed on the second-class deck, and if he were, the
chances of seeing his wife in the darkness and the crowd would be very
small, indeed. Of all those playing so happily on the steerage deck I
did not recognize many afterwards on the Carpathia.

Coming now to Sunday, the day on which the Titanic struck the iceberg,
it will be interesting, perhaps, to give the day's events in some
detail, to appreciate the general attitude of passengers to their
surroundings just before the collision. Service was held in the saloon
by the purser in the morning, and going on deck after lunch we found
such a change in temperature that not many cared to remain to face the
bitter wind--an artificial wind created mainly, if not entirely, by
the ship's rapid motion through the chilly atmosphere. I should judge
there was no wind blowing at the time, for I had noticed about the
same force of wind approaching Queenstown, to find that it died away
as soon as we stopped, only to rise again as we steamed away from the
harbour.

Returning to the library, I stopped for a moment to read again the
day's run and observe our position on the chart; the Rev. Mr. Carter,
a clergyman of the Church of England, was similarly engaged, and we
renewed a conversation we had enjoyed for some days: it had
commenced with a discussion of the relative merits of his
university--Oxford--with mine--Cambridge--as world-wide educational
agencies, the opportunities at each for the formation of character
apart from mere education as such, and had led on to the lack of
sufficiently qualified men to take up the work of the Church of
England (a matter apparently on which he felt very deeply) and from
that to his own work in England as a priest. He told me some of his
parish problems and spoke of the impossibility of doing half his work
in his Church without the help his wife gave. I knew her only slightly
at that time, but meeting her later in the day, I realized something
of what he meant in attributing a large part of what success he had as
a vicar to her. My only excuse for mentioning these details about the
Carters--now and later in the day--is that, while they have perhaps
not much interest for the average reader, they will no doubt be some
comfort to the parish over which he presided and where I am sure he
was loved. He next mentioned the absence of a service in the evening
and asked if I knew the purser well enough to request the use of the
saloon in the evening where he would like to have a "hymn sing-song";
the purser gave his consent at once, and Mr. Carter made preparations
during the afternoon by asking all he knew--and many he did not--to
come to the saloon at 8.30 P.M.

The library was crowded that afternoon, owing to the cold on deck: but
through the windows we could see the clear sky with brilliant sunlight
that seemed to augur a fine night and a clear day to-morrow, and the
prospect of landing in two days, with calm weather all the way to New
York, was a matter of general satisfaction among us all. I can look
back and see every detail of the library that afternoon--the
beautifully furnished room, with lounges, armchairs, and small writing
or card-tables scattered about, writing-bureaus round the walls of the
room, and the library in glass-cased shelves flanking one side,--the
whole finished in mahogany relieved with white fluted wooden columns
that supported the deck above. Through the windows there is the
covered corridor, reserved by general consent as the children's
playground, and here are playing the two Navatril children with their
father,--devoted to them, never absent from them. Who would have
thought of the dramatic history of the happy group at play in the
corridor that afternoon!--the abduction of the children in Nice, the
assumed name, the separation of father and children in a few hours,
his death and their subsequent union with their mother after a period
of doubt as to their parentage! How many more similar secrets the
Titanic revealed in the privacy of family life, or carried down with
her untold, we shall never know.

In the same corridor is a man and his wife with two children, and one
of them he is generally carrying: they are all young and happy: he is
dressed always in a grey knickerbocker suit--with a camera slung over
his shoulder. I have not seen any of them since that afternoon.

Close beside me--so near that I cannot avoid hearing scraps of their
conversation--are two American ladies, both dressed in white, young,
probably friends only: one has been to India and is returning by way
of England, the other is a school-teacher in America, a graceful girl
with a distinguished air heightened by a pair of _pince-nez_.
Engaged in conversation with them is a gentleman whom I subsequently
identified from a photograph as a well-known resident of Cambridge,
Massachusetts, genial, polished, and with a courtly air towards the
two ladies, whom he has known but a few hours; from time to time as
they talk, a child acquaintance breaks in on their conversation and
insists on their taking notice of a large doll clasped in her arms; I
have seen none of this group since then. In the opposite corner are
the young American kinematograph photographer and his young wife,
evidently French, very fond of playing patience, which she is doing
now, while he sits back in his chair watching the game and interposing
from time to time with suggestions. I did not see them again. In the
middle of the room are two Catholic priests, one quietly
reading,--either English or Irish, and probably the latter,--the
other, dark, bearded, with broad-brimmed hat, talking earnestly to a
friend in German and evidently explaining some verse in the open Bible
before him; near them a young fire engineer on his way to Mexico, and
of the same religion as the rest of the group. None of them were
saved. It may be noted here that the percentage of men saved in the
second-class is the lowest of any other division--only eight per cent.

Many other faces recur to thought, but it is impossible to describe
them all in the space of a short book: of all those in the library
that Sunday afternoon, I can remember only two or three persons who
found their way to the Carpathia. Looking over this room, with his
back to the library shelves, is the library steward, thin, stooping,
sad-faced, and generally with nothing to do but serve out books; but
this afternoon he is busier than I have ever seen him, serving out
baggage declaration-forms for passengers to fill in. Mine is before me
as I write: "Form for nonresidents in the United States. Steamship
Titanic: No. 31444, D," etc. I had filled it in that afternoon and
slipped it in my pocket-book instead of returning it to the steward.
Before me, too, is a small cardboard square: "White Star Line. R.M.S.
Titanic. 208. This label must be given up when the article is
returned. The property will be deposited in the Purser's safe. The
Company will not be liable to passengers for the loss of money,
jewels, or ornaments, by theft or otherwise, not so deposited." The
"property deposited" in my case was money, placed in an envelope,
sealed, with my name written across the flap, and handed to the
purser; the "label" is my receipt. Along with other similar envelopes
it may be still intact in the safe at the bottom of the sea, but in
all probability it is not, as will be seen presently.

After dinner, Mr. Carter invited all who wished to the saloon, and
with the assistance at the piano of a gentleman who sat at the
purser's table opposite me (a young Scotch engineer going out to join
his brother fruit-farming at the foot of the Rockies), he started some
hundred passengers singing hymns. They were asked to choose whichever
hymn they wished, and with so many to choose, it was impossible for
him to do more than have the greatest favourites sung. As he announced
each hymn, it was evident that he was thoroughly versed in their
history: no hymn was sung but that he gave a short sketch of its
author and in some cases a description of the circumstances in which
it was composed. I think all were impressed with his knowledge of
hymns and with his eagerness to tell us all he knew of them. It was
curious to see how many chose hymns dealing with dangers at sea. I
noticed the hushed tone with which all sang the hymn, "For those in
peril on the Sea."

The singing must have gone on until after ten o'clock, when, seeing
the stewards standing about waiting to serve biscuits and coffee
before going off duty, Mr. Carter brought the evening to a close by a
few words of thanks to the purser for the use of the saloon, a short
sketch of the happiness and safety of the voyage hitherto, the great
confidence all felt on board this great liner with her steadiness and
her size, and the happy outlook of landing in a few hours in New York
at the close of a delightful voyage; and all the time he spoke, a few
miles ahead of us lay the "peril on the sea" that was to sink this
same great liner with many of those on board who listened with
gratitude to his simple, heartfelt words. So much for the frailty of
human hopes and for the confidence reposed in material human designs.

Think of the shame of it, that a mass of ice of no use to any one or
anything should have the power fatally to injure the beautiful
Titanic! That an insensible block should be able to threaten, even in
the smallest degree, the lives of many good men and women who think
and plan and hope and love--and not only to threaten, but to end their
lives. It is unbearable! Are we never to educate ourselves to foresee
such dangers and to prevent them before they happen? All the evidence
of history shows that laws unknown and unsuspected are being
discovered day by day: as this knowledge accumulates for the use of
man, is it not certain that the ability to see and destroy beforehand
the threat of danger will be one of the privileges the whole world
will utilize? May that day come soon. Until it does, no precaution too
rigorous can be taken, no safety appliance, however costly, must be
omitted from a ship's equipment.

After the meeting had broken up, I talked with the Carters over a cup
of coffee, said good-night to them, and retired to my cabin at about
quarter to eleven. They were good people and this world is much poorer
by their loss.

It may be a matter of pleasure to many people to know that their
friends were perhaps among that gathering of people in the saloon, and
that at the last the sound of the hymns still echoed in their ears as
they stood on the deck so quietly and courageously. Who can tell how
much it had to do with the demeanour of some of them and the example
this would set to others?




CHAPTER III

THE COLLISION AND EMBARKATION IN LIFEBOATS


I had been fortunate enough to secure a two-berth cabin to myself,--D
56,--quite close to the saloon and most convenient in every way for
getting about the ship; and on a big ship like the Titanic it was
quite a consideration to be on D deck, only three decks below the top
or boat-deck. Below D again were cabins on E and F decks, and to walk
from a cabin on F up to the top deck, climbing five flights of stairs
on the way, was certainly a considerable task for those not able to
take much exercise. The Titanic management has been criticised, among
other things, for supplying the boat with lifts: it has been said they
were an expensive luxury and the room they took up might have been
utilized in some way for more life-saving appliances. Whatever else
may have been superfluous, lifts certainly were not: old ladies, for
example, in cabins on F deck, would hardly have got to the top deck
during the whole voyage had they not been able to ring for the
lift-boy. Perhaps nothing gave one a greater impression of the size of
the ship than to take the lift from the top and drop slowly down past
the different floors, discharging and taking in passengers just as in
a large hotel. I wonder where the lift-boy was that night. I would
have been glad to find him in our boat, or on the Carpathia when we
took count of the saved. He was quite young,--not more than sixteen, I
think,--a bright-eyed, handsome boy, with a love for the sea and the
games on deck and the view over the ocean--and he did not get any of
them. One day, as he put me out of his lift and saw through the
vestibule windows a game of deck quoits in progress, he said, in a
wistful tone, "My! I wish I could go out there sometimes!" I wished he
could, too, and made a jesting offer to take charge of his lift for an
hour while he went out to watch the game; but he smilingly shook his
head and dropped down in answer to an imperative ring from below. I
think he was not on duty with his lift after the collision, but if he
were, he would smile at his passengers all the time as he took them up
to the boats waiting to leave the sinking ship.

After undressing and climbing into the top berth, I read from about
quarter-past eleven to the time we struck, about quarter to twelve.
During this time I noticed particularly the increased vibration of the
ship, and I assumed that we were going at a higher speed than at any
other time since we sailed from Queenstown. Now I am aware that this
is an important point, and bears strongly on the question of
responsibility for the effects of the collision; but the impression of
increased vibration is fixed in my memory so strongly that it seems
important to record it. Two things led me to this conclusion--first,
that as I sat on the sofa undressing, with bare feet on the floor, the
jar of the vibration came up from the engines below very noticeably;
and second, that as I sat up in the berth reading, the spring mattress
supporting me was vibrating more rapidly than usual: this cradle-like
motion was always noticeable as one lay in bed, but that night there
was certainly a marked increase in the motion. Referring to the plan,
[Footnote: See Figure 2, page 116.] it will be seen that the vibration
must have come almost directly up from below, when it is mentioned
that the saloon was immediately above the engines as shown in the
plan, and my cabin next to the saloon. From these two data, on the
assumption that greater vibration is an indication of higher
speed,--and I suppose it must be,--then I am sure we were going faster
that night at the time we struck the iceberg than we had done before,
i.e., during the hours I was awake and able to take note of anything.

And then, as I read in the quietness of the night, broken only by the
muffled sound that came to me through the ventilators of stewards
talking and moving along the corridors, when nearly all the passengers
were in their cabins, some asleep in bed, others undressing, and
others only just down from the smoking-room and still discussing many
things, there came what seemed to me nothing more than an extra heave
of the engines and a more than usually obvious dancing motion of the
mattress on which I sat. Nothing more than that--no sound of a crash
or of anything else: no sense of shock, no jar that felt like one
heavy body meeting another. And presently the same thing repeated with
about the same intensity. The thought came to me that they must have
still further increased the speed. And all this time the Titanic was
being cut open by the iceberg and water was pouring in her side, and
yet no evidence that would indicate such a disaster had been presented
to us. It fills me with astonishment now to think of it. Consider the
question of list alone. Here was this enormous vessel running
starboard-side on to an iceberg, and a passenger sitting quietly in
bed, reading, felt no motion or list to the opposite or port side, and
this must have been felt had it been more than the usual roll of the
ship--never very much in the calm weather we had all the way. Again,
my bunk was fixed to the wall on the starboard side, and any list to
port would have tended to fling me out on the floor: I am sure I
should have noted it had there been any. And yet the explanation is
simple enough: the Titanic struck the berg with a force of impact of
over a million foot-tons; her plates were less than an inch thick, and
they must have been cut through as a knife cuts paper: there would be
no need to list; it would have been better if she had listed and
thrown us out on the floor, for it would have been an indication that
our plates were strong enough to offer, at any rate, some resistance
to the blow, and we might all have been safe to-day.

And so, with no thought of anything serious having happened to the
ship, I continued my reading; and still the murmur from the stewards
and from adjoining cabins, and no other sound: no cry in the night; no
alarm given; no one afraid--there was then nothing which could cause
fear to the most timid person. But in a few moments I felt the engines
slow and stop; the dancing motion and the vibration ceased suddenly
after being part of our very existence for four days, and that was the
first hint that anything out of the ordinary had happened. We have all
"heard" a loud-ticking clock stop suddenly in a quiet room, and then
have noticed the clock and the ticking noise, of which we seemed until
then quite unconscious. So in the same way the fact was suddenly
brought home to all in the ship that the engines--that part of the
ship that drove us through the sea--had stopped dead. But the stopping
of the engines gave us no information: we had to make our own
calculations as to why we had stopped. Like a flash it came to me: "We
have dropped a propeller blade: when this happens the engines always
race away until they are controlled, and this accounts for the extra
heave they gave"; not a very logical conclusion when considered now,
for the engines should have continued to heave all the time until we
stopped, but it was at the time a sufficiently tenable hypothesis to
hold. Acting on it, I jumped out of bed, slipped on a dressing-gown
over pyjamas, put on shoes, and went out of my cabin into the hall
near the saloon. Here was a steward leaning against the staircase,
probably waiting until those in the smoke-room above had gone to bed
and he could put out the lights. I said, "Why have we stopped?" "I
don't know, sir," he replied, "but I don't suppose it is anything
much." "Well," I said, "I am going on deck to see what it is," and
started towards the stairs. He smiled indulgently at me as I passed
him, and said, "All right, sir, but it is mighty cold up there." I am
sure at that time he thought I was rather foolish to go up with so
little reason, and I must confess I felt rather absurd for not
remaining in the cabin: it seemed like making a needless fuss to walk
about the ship in a dressing-gown. But it was my first trip across the
sea; I had enjoyed every minute of it and was keenly alive to note
every new experience; and certainly to stop in the middle of the sea
with a propeller dropped seemed sufficient reason for going on deck.
And yet the steward, with his fatherly smile, and the fact that no one
else was about the passages or going upstairs to reconnoitre, made me
feel guilty in an undefined way of breaking some code of a ship's
régime--an Englishman's fear of being thought "unusual," perhaps!

I climbed the three flights of stairs, opened the vestibule door
leading to the top deck, and stepped out into an atmosphere that cut
me, clad as I was, like a knife. Walking to the starboard side, I
peered over and saw the sea many feet below, calm and black; forward,
the deserted deck stretching away to the first-class quarters and the
captain's bridge; and behind, the steerage quarters and the stern
bridge; nothing more: no iceberg on either side or astern as far as we
could see in the darkness. There were two or three men on deck, and
with one--the Scotch engineer who played hymns in the saloon--I
compared notes of our experiences. He had just begun to undress when
the engines stopped and had come up at once, so that he was fairly
well-clad; none of us could see anything, and all being quiet and
still, the Scotchman and I went down to the next deck. Through the
windows of the smoking-room we saw a game of cards going on, with
several onlookers, and went in to enquire if they knew more than we
did. They had apparently felt rather more of the heaving motion, but
so far as I remember, none of them had gone out on deck to make any
enquiries, even when one of them had seen through the windows an
iceberg go by towering above the decks. He had called their attention
to it, and they all watched it disappear, but had then at once resumed
the game. We asked them the height of the berg and some said one
hundred feet, others, sixty feet; one of the onlookers--a motor
engineer travelling to America with a model carburetter (he had filled
in his declaration form near me in the afternoon and had questioned
the library steward how he should declare his patent)--said, "Well, I
am accustomed to estimating distances and I put it at between eighty
and ninety feet." We accepted his estimate and made guesses as to what
had happened to the Titanic: the general impression was that we had
just scraped the iceberg with a glancing blow on the starboard side,
and they had stopped as a wise precaution, to examine her thoroughly
all over. "I expect the iceberg has scratched off some of her new
paint," said one, "and the captain doesn't like to go on until she is
painted up again." We laughed at his estimate of the captain's care
for the ship. Poor Captain Smith!--he knew by this time only too well
what had happened.

One of the players, pointing to his glass of whiskey standing at his
elbow, and turning to an onlooker, said, "Just run along the deck and
see if any ice has come aboard: I would like some for this." Amid the
general laughter at what we thought was his imagination,--only too
realistic, alas! for when he spoke the forward deck was covered with
ice that had tumbled over,--and seeing that no more information was
forthcoming, I left the smoking-room and went down to my cabin, where
I sat for some time reading again. I am filled with sorrow to think I
never saw any of the occupants of that smoking-room again: nearly all
young men full of hope for their prospects in a new world; mostly
unmarried; keen, alert, with the makings of good citizens. Presently,
hearing people walking about the corridors, I looked out and saw
several standing in the hall talking to a steward--most of them ladies
in dressing-gowns; other people were going upstairs, and I decided to
go on deck again, but as it was too cold to do so in a dressing-gown,
I dressed in a Norfolk jacket and trousers and walked up. There were
now more people looking over the side and walking about, questioning
each other as to why we had stopped, but without obtaining any
definite information. I stayed on deck some minutes, walking about
vigorously to keep warm and occasionally looking downwards to the sea
as if something there would indicate the reason for delay. The ship
had now resumed her course, moving very slowly through the water with
a little white line of foam on each side. I think we were all glad to
see this: it seemed better than standing still. I soon decided to go
down again, and as I crossed from the starboard to the port side to go
down by the vestibule door, I saw an officer climb on the last
lifeboat on the port side--number 16--and begin to throw off the
cover, but I do not remember that any one paid any particular
attention to him. Certainly no one thought they were preparing to man
the lifeboats and embark from the ship. All this time there was no
apprehension of any danger in the minds of passengers, and no one was
in any condition of panic or hysteria; after all, it would have been
strange if they had been, without any definite evidence of danger.

As I passed to the door to go down, I looked forward again and saw to
my surprise an undoubted tilt downwards from the stern to the bows:
only a slight slope, which I don't think any one had noticed,--at any
rate, they had not remarked on it. As I went downstairs a confirmation
of this tilting forward came in something unusual about the stairs, a
curious sense of something out of balance and of not being able to put
one's feet down in the right place: naturally, being tilted forward,
the stairs would slope downwards at an angle and tend to throw one
forward. I could not see any visible slope of the stairway: it was
perceptible only by the sense of balance at this time.

On D deck were three ladies--I think they were all saved, and it is a
good thing at least to be able to chronicle meeting some one who was
saved after so much record of those who were not--standing in the
passage near the cabin. "Oh! why have we stopped?" they said. "We did
stop," I replied, "but we are now going on again.". "Oh, no," one
replied; "I cannot feel the engines as I usually do, or hear them.
Listen!" We listened, and there was no throb audible. Having noticed
that the vibration of the engines is most noticeable lying in a bath,
where the throb comes straight from the floor through its metal
sides--too much so ordinarily for one to put one's head back with
comfort on the bath,--I took them along the corridor to a bathroom and
made them put their hands on the side of the bath: they were much
reassured to feel the engines throbbing down below and to know we were
making some headway. I left them and on the way to my cabin passed
some stewards standing unconcernedly against the walls of the saloon:
one of them, the library steward again, was leaning over a table,
writing. It is no exaggeration to say that they had neither any
knowledge of the accident nor any feeling of alarm that we had stopped
and had not yet gone on again full speed: their whole attitude
expressed perfect confidence in the ship and officers.

Turning into my gangway (my cabin being the first in the gangway), I
saw a man standing at the other end of it fastening his tie. "Anything
fresh?" he said. "Not much," I replied; "we are going ahead slowly and
she is down a little at the bows, but I don't think it is anything
serious." "Come in and look at this man," he laughed; "he won't get
up." I looked in, and in the top bunk lay a man with his back to me,
closely wrapped in his bed-clothes and only the back of his head
visible. "Why won't he get up? Is he asleep?" I said. "No," laughed
the man dressing, "he says--" But before he could finish the sentence
the man above grunted: "You don't catch me leaving a warm bed to go up
on that cold deck at midnight. I know better than that." We both told
him laughingly why he had better get up, but he was certain he was
just as safe there and all this dressing was quite unnecessary; so I
left them and went again to my cabin. I put on some underclothing, sat
on the sofa, and read for some ten minutes, when I heard through the
open door, above, the noise of people passing up and down, and a loud
shout from above: "All passengers on deck with lifebelts on."

I placed the two books I was reading in the side pockets of my Norfolk
jacket, picked up my lifebelt (curiously enough, I had taken it down
for the first time that night from the wardrobe when I first retired
to my cabin) and my dressing-gown, and walked upstairs tying on the
lifebelt. As I came out of my cabin, I remember seeing the purser's
assistant, with his foot on the stairs about to climb them, whisper to
a steward and jerk his head significantly behind him; not that I
thought anything of it at the time, but I have no doubt he was telling
him what had happened up in the bows, and was giving him orders to
call all passengers.

Going upstairs with other passengers,--no one ran a step or seemed
alarmed,--we met two ladies coming down: one seized me by the arm and
said, "Oh! I have no lifebelt; will you come down to my cabin and help
me to find it?" I returned with them to F deck,--the lady who had
addressed me holding my arm all the time in a vise-like grip, much to
my amusement,--and we found a steward in her gangway who took them in
and found their lifebelts. Coming upstairs again, I passed the
purser's window on F deck, and noticed a light inside; when halfway up
to E deck, I heard the heavy metallic clang of the safe door, followed
by a hasty step retreating along the corridor towards the first-class
quarters. I have little doubt it was the purser, who had taken all
valuables from his safe and was transferring them to the charge of the
first-class purser, in the hope they might all be saved in one
package. That is why I said above that perhaps the envelope containing
my money was not in the safe at the bottom of the sea: it is probably
in a bundle, with many others like it, waterlogged at the bottom.

Reaching the top deck, we found many people assembled there,--some
fully dressed, with coats and wraps, well-prepared for anything that
might happen; others who had thrown wraps hastily round them when they
were called or heard the summons to equip themselves with
lifebelts--not in much condition to face the cold of that night.
Fortunately there was no wind to beat the cold air through our
clothing: even the breeze caused by the ship's motion had died
entirely away, for the engines had stopped again and the Titanic lay
peacefully on the surface of the sea--motionless, quiet, not even
rocking to the roll of the sea; indeed, as we were to discover
presently, the sea was as calm as an inland lake save for the gentle
swell which could impart no motion to a ship the size of the Titanic.
To stand on the deck many feet above the water lapping idly against
her sides, and looking much farther off than it really was because of
the darkness, gave one a sense of wonderful security: to feel her so
steady and still was like standing on a large rock in the middle of
the ocean. But there were now more evidences of the coming catastrophe
to the observer than had been apparent when on deck last: one was the
roar and hiss of escaping steam from the boilers, issuing out of a
large steam pipe reaching high up one of the funnels: a harsh,
deafening boom that made conversation difficult and no doubt increased
the apprehension of some people merely because of the volume of noise:
if one imagines twenty locomotives blowing off steam in a low key it
would give some idea of the unpleasant sound that met us as we climbed
out on the top deck.

But after all it was the kind of phenomenon we ought to expect:
engines blow off steam when standing in a station, and why should not
a ship's boilers do the same when the ship is not moving? I never
heard any one connect this noise with the danger of boiler explosion,
in the event of the ship sinking with her boilers under a high
pressure of steam, which was no doubt the true explanation of this
precaution. But this is perhaps speculation; some people may have
known it quite well, for from the time we came on deck until boat 13
got away, I heard very little conversation of any kind among the
passengers. It is not the slightest exaggeration to say that no signs
of alarm were exhibited by any one: there was no indication of panic
or hysteria; no cries of fear, and no running to and fro to discover
what was the matter, why we had been summoned on deck with lifebelts,
and what was to be done with us now we were there. We stood there
quietly looking on at the work of the crew as they manned the
lifeboats, and no one ventured to interfere with them or offered to
help them. It was plain we should be of no use; and the crowd of men
and women stood quietly on the deck or paced slowly up and down
waiting for orders from the officers. Now, before we consider any
further the events that followed, the state of mind of passengers at
this juncture, and the motives which led each one to act as he or she
did in the circumstances, it is important to keep in thought the
amount of information at our disposal. Men and women act according to
judgment based on knowledge of the conditions around them, and the
best way to understand some apparently inconceivable things that
happened is for any one to imagine himself or herself standing on deck
that night. It seems a mystery to some people that women refused to
leave the ship, that some persons retired to their cabins, and so on;
but it is a matter of judgment, after all.

So that if the reader will come and stand with the crowd on deck, he
must first rid himself entirely of the knowledge that the Titanic has
sunk--an important necessity, for he cannot see conditions as they
existed there through the mental haze arising from knowledge of the
greatest maritime tragedy the world has known: he must get rid of any
foreknowledge of disaster to appreciate why people acted as they did.
Secondly, he had better get rid of any picture in thought painted
either by his own imagination or by some artist, whether pictorial or
verbal, "from information supplied." Some are most inaccurate (these,
mostly word-pictures), and where they err, they err on the highly
dramatic side. They need not have done so: the whole conditions were
dramatic enough in all their bare simplicity, without the addition of
any high colouring.

Having made these mental erasures, he will find himself as one of the
crowd faced with the following conditions: a perfectly still
atmosphere; a brilliantly beautiful starlight night, but no moon, and
so with little light that was of any use; a ship that had come quietly
to rest without any indication of disaster--no iceberg visible, no
hole in the ship's side through which water was pouring in, nothing
broken or out of place, no sound of alarm, no panic, no movement of
any one except at a walking pace; the absence of any knowledge of the
nature of the accident, of the extent of damage, of the danger of the
ship sinking in a few hours, of the numbers of boats, rafts, and other
lifesaving appliances available, their capacity, what other ships were
near or coming to help--in fact, an almost complete absence of any
positive knowledge on any point. I think this was the result of
deliberate judgment on the part of the officers, and perhaps, it was
the best thing that could be done. In particular, he must remember
that the ship was a sixth of a mile long, with passengers on three
decks open to the sea, and port and starboard sides to each deck: he
will then get some idea of the difficulty presented to the officers of
keeping control over such a large area, and the impossibility of any
one knowing what was happening except in his own immediate vicinity.
Perhaps the whole thing can be summed up best by saying that, after we
had embarked in the lifeboats and rowed away from the Titanic, it
would not have surprised us to hear that all passengers would be
saved: the cries of drowning people after the Titanic gave the final
plunge were a thunderbolt to us. I am aware that the experiences of
many of those saved differed in some respects from the above: some had
knowledge of certain things, some were experienced travellers and
sailors, and therefore deduced more rapidly what was likely to happen;
but I think the above gives a fairly accurate representation of the
state of mind of most of those on deck that night.

All this time people were pouring up from the stairs and adding to the
crowd: I remember at that moment thinking it would be well to return
to my cabin and rescue some money and warmer clothing if we were to
embark in boats, but looking through the vestibule windows and seeing
people still coming upstairs, I decided it would only cause confusion
passing them on the stairs, and so remained on deck.

I was now on the starboard side of the top boat deck; the time about
12.20. We watched the crew at work on the lifeboats, numbers 9, 11,
13, 15, some inside arranging the oars, some coiling ropes on the
deck,--the ropes which ran through the pulleys to lower to the
sea,--others with cranks fitted to the rocking arms of the davits. As
we watched, the cranks were turned, the davits swung outwards until
the boats hung clear of the edge of the deck. Just then an officer
came along from the first-class deck and shouted above the noise of
escaping steam, "All women and children get down to deck below and all
men stand back from the boats." He had apparently been off duty when
the ship struck, and was lightly dressed, with a white muffler twisted
hastily round his neck. The men fell back and the women retired below
to get into the boats from the next deck. Two women refused at first
to leave their husbands, but partly by persuasion and partly by force
they were separated from them and sent down to the next deck. I think
that by this time the work on the lifeboats and the separation of men
and women impressed on us slowly the presence of imminent danger, but
it made no difference in the attitude of the crowd: they were just as
prepared to obey orders and to do what came next as when they first
came on deck. I do not mean that they actually reasoned it out: they
were the average Teutonic crowd, with an inborn respect for law and
order and for traditions bequeathed to them by generations of
ancestors: the reasons that made them act as they did were impersonal,
instinctive, hereditary.

But if there were any one who had not by now realized that the ship
was in danger, all doubt on this point was to be set at rest in a
dramatic manner. Suddenly a rush of light from the forward deck, a
hissing roar that made us all turn from watching the boats, and a
rocket leapt upwards to where the stars blinked and twinkled above us.
Up it went, higher and higher, with a sea of faces upturned to watch
it, and then an explosion that seemed to split the silent night in
two, and a shower of stars sank slowly down and went out one by one.
And with a gasping sigh one word escaped the lips of the crowd:
"Rockets!" Anybody knows what rockets at sea mean. And presently
another, and then a third. It is no use denying the dramatic intensity
of the scene: separate it if you can from all the terrible events that
followed, and picture the calmness of the night, the sudden light on
the decks crowded with people in different stages of dress and
undress, the background of huge funnels and tapering masts revealed by
the soaring rocket, whose flash illumined at the same time the faces
and minds of the obedient crowd, the one with mere physical light, the
other with a sudden revelation of what its message was. Every one knew
without being told that we were calling for help from any one who was
near enough to see.

The crew were now in the boats, the sailors standing by the pulley
ropes let them slip through the cleats in jerks, and down the boats
went till level with B deck; women and children climbed over the rail
into the boats and filled them; when full, they were lowered one by
one, beginning with number 9, the first on the second-class deck, and
working backwards towards 15. All this we could see by peering over
the edge of the boat-deck, which was now quite open to the sea, the
four boats which formed a natural barrier being lowered from the deck
and leaving it exposed.

About this time, while walking the deck, I saw two ladies come over
from the port side and walk towards the rail separating the
second-class from the first-class deck. There stood an officer barring
the way. "May we pass to the boats?" they said. "No, madam," he
replied politely, "your boats are down on your own deck," pointing to
where they swung below. The ladies turned and went towards the
stairway, and no doubt were able to enter one of the boats: they had
ample time. I mention this to show that there was, at any rate, some
arrangement--whether official or not--for separating the classes in
embarking in boats; how far it was carried out, I do not know, but if
the second-class ladies were not expected to enter a boat from the
first-class deck, while steerage passengers were allowed access to the
second-class deck, it would seem to press rather hardly on the
second-class men, and this is rather supported by the low percentage
saved.

Almost immediately after this incident, a report went round among men
on the top deck--the starboard side--that men were to be taken off on
the port side; how it originated, I am quite unable to say, but can
only suppose that as the port boats, numbers 10 to 16, were not
lowered from the top deck quite so soon as the starboard boats (they
could still be seen on deck), it might be assumed that women were
being taken off on one side and men on the other; but in whatever way
the report started, it was acted on at once by almost all the men, who
crowded across to the port side and watched the preparation for
lowering the boats, leaving the starboard side almost deserted. Two or
three men remained, However: not for any reason that we were
consciously aware of; I can personally think of no decision arising
from reasoned thought that induced me to remain rather than to cross
over. But while there was no process of conscious reason at work, I am
convinced that what was my salvation was a recognition of the
necessity of being quiet and waiting in patience for some opportunity
of safety to present itself.

Soon after the men had left the starboard side, I saw a bandsman--the
'cellist--come round the vestibule corner from the staircase entrance
and run down the now deserted starboard deck, his 'cello trailing
behind him, the spike dragging along the floor. This must have been
about 12.40 A.M. I suppose the band must have begun to play soon after
this and gone on until after 2 A.M. Many brave things were done that
night, but none more brave than by those few men playing minute after
minute as the ship settled quietly lower and lower in the sea and the
sea rose higher and higher to where they stood; the music they played
serving alike as their own immortal requiem and their right to be
recorded on the rolls of undying fame.

Looking forward and downward, we could see several of the boats now in
the water, moving slowly one by one from the side, without confusion
or noise, and stealing away in the darkness which swallowed them in
turn as the crew bent to the oars. An officer--I think First Officer
Murdock--came striding along the deck, clad in a long coat, from his
manner and face evidently in great agitation, but determined and
resolute; he looked over the side and shouted to the boats being
lowered: "Lower away, and when afloat, row around to the gangway and
wait for orders." "Aye, aye, sir," was the reply; and the officer
passed by and went across the ship to the port side.

Almost immediately after this, I heard a cry from below of, "Any more
ladies?" and looking over the edge of the deck, saw boat 13 swinging
level with the rail of B deck, with the crew, some stokers, a few men
passengers and the rest ladies,--the latter being about half the total
number; the boat was almost full and just about to be lowered. The
call for ladies was repeated twice again, but apparently there were
none to be found. Just then one of the crew looked up and saw me
looking over. "Any ladies on your deck?" he said. "No," I replied.
"Then you had better jump." I sat on the edge of the deck with my feet
over, threw the dressing-gown (which I had carried on my arm all of
the time) into the boat, dropped, and fell in the boat near the stern.

As I picked myself up, I heard a shout: "Wait a moment, here are two
more ladies," and they were pushed hurriedly over the side and tumbled
into the boat, one into the middle and one next to me in the stern.
They told me afterwards that they had been assembled on a lower deck
with other ladies, and had come up to B deck not by the usual stairway
inside, but by one of the vertically upright iron ladders that connect
each deck with the one below it, meant for the use of sailors passing
about the ship. Other ladies had been in front of them and got up
quickly, but these two were delayed a long time by the fact that one
of them--the one that was helped first over the side into boat 13 near
the middle--was not at all active: it seemed almost impossible for her
to climb up a vertical ladder. We saw her trying to climb the swinging
rope ladder up the Carpathia's side a few hours later, and she had the
same difficulty.

As they tumbled in, the crew shouted, "Lower away"; but before the
order was obeyed, a man with his wife and a baby came quickly to the
side: the baby was handed to the lady in the stern, the mother got in
near the middle and the father at the last moment dropped in as the
boat began its journey down to the sea many feet below.




CHAPTER IV

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.




CHAPTER V

THE RESCUE


All accounts agree that the Titanic sunk about 2:20 A.M.: a watch in
our boat gave the time as 2:30 A.M. shortly afterwards. We were then
in touch with three other boats: one was 15, on our starboard quarter,
and the others I have always supposed were 9 and 11, but I do not know
definitely. We never got into close touch with each other, but called
occasionally across the darkness and saw them looming near and then
drawing away again; we called to ask if any officer were aboard the
other three, but did not find one. So in the absence of any plan of
action, we rowed slowly forward--or what we thought was forward, for
it was in the direction the Titanic's bows were pointing before she
sank. I see now that we must have been pointing northwest, for we
presently saw the Northern Lights on the starboard, and again, when
the Carpathia came up from the south, we saw her from behind us on the
southeast, and turned our boat around to get to her. I imagine the
boats must have spread themselves over the ocean fanwise as they
escaped from the Titanic: those on the starboard and port sides
forward being almost dead ahead of her and the stern boats being
broadside from her; this explains why the port boats were so much
longer in reaching the Carpathia--as late as 8.30 A.M.--while some of
the starboard boats came up as early as 4.10 A.M. Some of the port
boats had to row across the place where the Titanic sank to get to the
Carpathia, through the debris of chairs and wreckage of all kinds.

None of the other three boats near us had a light--and we missed
lights badly: we could not see each other in the darkness; we could
not signal to ships which might be rushing up full speed from any
quarter to the Titanic's rescue; and now we had been through so much
it would seem hard to have to encounter the additional danger of being
in the line of a rescuing ship. We felt again for the lantern beneath
our feet, along the sides, and I managed this time to get down to the
locker below the tiller platform and open it in front by removing a
board, to find nothing but the zinc airtank which renders the boat
unsinkable when upset. I do not think there was a light in the boat.
We felt also for food and water, and found none, and came to the
conclusion that none had been put in; but here we were mistaken. I
have a letter from Second Officer Lightoller in which he assures me
that he and Fourth Officer Pitman examined every lifeboat from the
Titanic as they lay on the Carpathia's deck afterwards and found
biscuits and water in each. Not that we wanted any food or water then:
we thought of the time that might elapse before the Olympic picked us
up in the afternoon.

Towards 3 A.M. we saw a faint glow in the sky ahead on the starboard
quarter, the first gleams, we thought, of the coming dawn. We were not
certain of the time and were eager perhaps to accept too readily any
relief from darkness--only too glad to be able to look each other in
the face and see who were our companions in good fortune; to be free
from the hazard of lying in a steamer's track, invisible in the
darkness. But we were doomed to disappointment: the soft light
increased for a time, and died away a little; glowed again, and then
remained stationary for some minutes! "The Northern Lights"! It
suddenly came to me, and so it was: presently the light arched fanwise
across the northern sky, with faint streamers reaching towards the
Pole-star. I had seen them of about the same intensity in England some
years ago and knew them again. A sigh of disappointment went through
the boat as we realized that the day was not yet; but had we known it,
something more comforting even than the day was in store for us. All
night long we had watched the horizon with eager eyes for signs of a
steamer's lights; we heard from the captain-stoker that the first
appearance would be a single light on the horizon, the masthead light,
followed shortly by a second one, lower down, on the deck; if these
two remained in vertical alignment and the distance between them
increased as the lights drew nearer, we might be certain it was a
steamer. But what a night to see that first light on the horizon! We
saw it many times as the earth revolved, and some stars rose on the
clear horizon and others sank down to it: there were "lights" on every
quarter. Some we watched and followed until we saw the deception and
grew wiser; some were lights from those of our boats that were
fortunate enough to have lanterns, but these were generally easily
detected, as they rose and fell in the near distance. Once they raised
our hopes, only to sink them to zero again. Near what seemed to be the
horizon on the port quarter we saw two lights close together, and
thought this must be our double light; but as we gazed across the
miles that separated us, the lights slowly drew apart and we realized
that they were two boats' lanterns at different distances from us, in
line, one behind the other. They were probably the forward port boats
that had to return so many miles next morning across the Titanic's
graveyard.

But notwithstanding these hopes and disappointments, the absence of
lights, food and water (as we thought), and the bitter cold, it would
not be correct to say we were unhappy in those early morning hours:
the cold that settled down on us like a garment that wraps close
around was the only real discomfort, and that we could keep at bay by
not thinking too much about it as well as by vigorous friction and
gentle stamping on the floor (it made too much noise to stamp hard!).
I never heard that any one in boat B had any after effects from the
cold--even the stoker who was so thinly clad came through without
harm. After all, there were many things to be thankful for: so many
that they made insignificant the temporary inconvenience of the cold,
the crowded boat, the darkness and the hundred and one things that in
the ordinary way we might regard as unpleasant. The quiet sea, the
beautiful night (how different from two nights later when flashes of
lightning and peals of thunder broke the sleep of many on board the
Carpathia!), and above all the fact of being in a boat at all when so
many of our fellow-passengers and crew--whose cries no longer moaned
across the water to us--were silent in the water. Gratitude was the
dominant note in our feelings then. But grateful as we were, our
gratitude was soon to be increased a hundred fold. About 3:30 A.M., as
nearly as I can judge, some one in the bow called our attention to a
faint far-away gleam in the southeast. We all turned quickly to look
and there it was certainly: streaming up from behind the horizon like
a distant flash of a warship's searchlight; then a faint boom like
guns afar off, and the light died away again. The stoker who had lain
all night under the tiller sat up suddenly as if from a dream, the
overcoat hanging from his shoulders. I can see him now, staring out
across the sea, to where the sound had come from, and hear him shout,
"That was a cannon!" But it was not: it was the Carpathia's rocket,
though we did not know it until later. But we did know now that
something was not far away, racing up to our help and signalling to us
a preliminary message to cheer our hearts until she arrived.

With every sense alert, eyes gazing intently at the horizon and ears
open for the least sound, we waited in absolute silence in the quiet
night. And then, creeping over the edge of the sea where the flash had
been, we saw a single light, and presently a second below it, and in a
few minutes they were well above the horizon and they remained in
line! But we had been deceived before, and we waited a little longer
before we allowed ourselves to say we were safe. The lights came up
rapidly: so rapidly it seemed only a few minutes (though it must have
been longer) between first seeing them and finding them well above the
horizon and bearing down rapidly on us. We did not know what sort of a
vessel was coming, but we knew she was coming quickly, and we searched
for paper, rags,--anything that would burn (we were quite prepared to
burn our coats if necessary). A hasty paper torch was twisted out of
letters found in some one's pocket, lighted, and held aloft by the
stoker standing on the tiller platform. The little light shone in
flickers on the faces of the occupants of the boat, ran in broken
lines for a few yards along the black oily sea (where for the first
time I saw the presence of that awful thing which had caused the whole
terrible disaster--ice--in little chunks the size of one's fist,
bobbing harmlessly up and down), and spluttered away to blackness
again as the stoker threw the burning remnants of paper overboard. But
had we known it, the danger of being run down was already over, one
reason being that the Carpathia had already seen the lifeboat which
all night long had shown a green light, the first indication the
Carpathia had of our position. But the real reason is to be found in
the Carpathia's log:--"Went full speed ahead during the night; stopped
at 4 A.M. with an iceberg dead ahead." It was a good reason.

With our torch burnt and in darkness again we saw the headlights stop,
and realized that the rescuer had hove to. A sigh of relief went up
when we thought no hurried scramble had to be made to get out of her
way, with a chance of just being missed by her, and having to meet the
wash of her screws as she tore by us. We waited and she slowly swung
round and revealed herself to us as a large steamer with all her
portholes alight. I think the way those lights came slowly into view
was one of the most wonderful things we shall ever see. It meant
deliverance at once: that was the amazing thing to us all. We had
thought of the afternoon as our time of rescue, and here only a few
hours after the Titanic sank, before it was yet light, we were to be
taken aboard. It seemed almost too good to be true, and I think
everyone's eyes filled with tears, men's as well as women's, as they
saw again the rows of lights one above the other shining kindly to
them across the water, and "Thank God!" was murmured in heartfelt
tones round the boat. The boat swung round and the crew began their
long row to the steamer; the captain called for a song and led off
with "Pull for the shore, boys." The crew took it up quaveringly and
the passengers joined in, but I think one verse was all they sang. It
was too early yet, gratitude was too deep and sudden in its
overwhelming intensity, for us to sing very steadily. Presently,
finding the song had not gone very well, we tried a cheer, and that
went better. It was more easy to relieve our feelings with a noise,
and time and tune were not necessary ingredients in a cheer.

In the midst of our thankfulness for deliverance, one name was
mentioned with the deepest feeling of gratitude: that of Marconi. I
wish that he had been there to hear the chorus of gratitude that went
out to him for the wonderful invention that spared us many hours, and
perhaps many days, of wandering about the sea in hunger and storm and
cold. Perhaps our gratitude was sufficiently intense and vivid to
"Marconi" some of it to him that night.

All around we saw boats making for the Carpathia and heard their
shouts and cheers. Our crew rowed hard in friendly rivalry with other
boats to be among the first home, but we must have been eighth or
ninth at the side. We had a heavy load aboard, and had to row round a
huge iceberg on the way.

And then, as if to make everything complete for our happiness, came
the dawn. First a beautiful, quiet shimmer away in the east, then a
soft golden glow that crept up stealthily from behind the sky-line as
if it were trying not to be noticed as it stole over the sea and
spread itself quietly in every direction--so quietly, as if to make us
believe it had been there all the time and we had not observed it.
Then the sky turned faintly pink and in the distance the thinnest,
fleeciest clouds stretched in thin bands across the horizon and close
down to it, becoming every moment more and more pink. And next the
stars died, slowly,--save one which remained long after the others
just above the horizon; and near by, with the crescent turned to the
north, and the lower horn just touching the horizon, the thinnest,
palest of moons.

And with the dawn came a faint breeze from the west, the first breath
of wind we had felt since the Titanic stopped her engines.
Anticipating a few hours,--as the day drew on to 8 A.M., the time the
last boats came up,--this breeze increased to a fresh wind which
whipped up the sea, so that the last boat laden with people had an
anxious time in the choppy waves before they reached the Carpathia. An
officer remarked that one of the boats could not have stayed afloat
another hour: the wind had held off just long enough.

The captain shouted along our boat to the crew, as they strained at
the oars,--two pulling and an extra one facing them and pushing to try
to keep pace with the other boats,--"A new moon! Turn your money over,
boys! That is, if you have any!" We laughed at him for the quaint
superstition at such a time, and it was good to laugh again, but he
showed his disbelief in another superstition when he added, "Well, I
shall never say again that 13 is an unlucky number. Boat 13 is the
best friend we ever had."