Titanic - Filson Young (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

“We left him on the cabin floor of the wireless room, and he wasn’t moving.”

Phillips left the cabin, running aft, and Bride never saw him alive again. He himself came out and found the water covering the bridge and coming aft over the boat deck.

There is one other separate point of view from which we may look at the ship during this fateful hour before all points of view become merged in one common experience. Mr. Boxhall, the Fourth Officer, who had been on the bridge at the moment of the impact, had been busy sending up rockets and signals in the effort to attract the attention of a ship whose lights could be seen some ten miles away; a mysterious ship which cannot be traced, but whose lights appear to have been seen by many independent witnesses on the Titanic. So sure was he of her position that Mr. Boxhall spent almost all his time on the bridge signalling to her with rockets and flashes; but no answer was received. He had, however, also been on a rapid tour of inspection of the ship immediately after she had struck. He went down to the steerage quarters forward and aft, and he was also down in the deep forward compartment where the Post Office men were working with the mails, and he had at that time found nothing wrong, and his information contributed much to the sense of security that was spread amongst the passengers.

Mr. Pitman, the Third Officer, was in his bunk at the time of the collision, having been on duty on the bridge from six to eight, when the Captain had also been on the bridge. There had been talk of ice among the officers on Sunday, and they had expected to meet with it just before midnight, at the very time, in fact, when they had met with it. But very little ice had been seen, and the speed of the ship had not been reduced. Mr. Pitman says that when he awoke he heard a sound which seemed to him to be the sound of the ship coming to anchor. He was not actually awake then, but he had the sensation of the ship halting, and heard a sound like that of chains whirling round the windlass and running through the hawseholes into the water. He lay in bed for three or four minutes wondering in a sleepy sort of way where they could have anchored. Then, becoming more awake, he got up, and without dressing went out on deck; he saw nothing remarkable, but he went back and dressed, suspecting that something was the matter. While he was dressing Mr. Boxhall looked in and said: “We have struck an iceberg, old man; hurry up!”

He also went down below to make an inspection and find out what damage had been done. He went to the forward well deck, where ice was lying, and into the fo’c’s’le, but found nothing wrong there. The actual damage was farther aft, and at that time the water had not come into the bows of the ship. As he was going back he met a number of firemen coming up the gangway with their bags of clothing; they told him that water was coming into their place. They were firemen off duty, who afterwards were up on the boat deck helping to man the boats. Then Mr. Pitman went down lower into the ship and looked into No. 1 hatch, where he could plainly see water. All this took time; and when he came back he found that the men were beginning to get the boats ready, a task at which he helped under Mr. Murdoch’s orders. Presently Mr. Murdoch ordered him to take command of a boat and hang about aft of the gangway. Pitman had very little relish for leaving the ship at that time, and in spite of the fact that she was taking in water, every one was convinced that the Titanic was a much safer place than the open sea. He had about forty passengers and six of the crew in his boat, and as it was about to be lowered, Mr. Murdoch leant over to him and shook him heartily by the hand: “Good-bye, old man, and good luck,” he said, in tones which rather surprised Pitman, for they seemed to imply that the good-bye might be for a long time. His boat was lowered down into the water, unhooked, and shoved off, and joined the gradually increasing fleet of other boats that were cruising about in the starlight.

There was one man walking about that upper deck whose point of view was quite different from that of anyone else. Mr. Bruce Ismay, like so many others, was awakened from sleep by the stopping of the engines; like so many others, also, he lay still for a few moments, and then got up and went into the passage-way, where he met a steward and asked him what was the matter. The steward knew nothing, and Mr. Ismay went back to his state-room, put on a dressing-gown and slippers, and went up to the bridge, where he saw the Captain. “What has happened?” he asked. “We have struck ice,” was the answer. “Is the injury serious?” “I think so,” said the Captain. Then Mr. Ismay came down in search of the Chief Engineer, whom he met coming up to the bridge; he asked him the same question, and he also said he thought the injury serious. He understood from them that the ship was certainly in danger, but that there was hope that if the pumps could be kept going there would be no difficulty in keeping her afloat quite long enough for help to come and for the passengers to be taken off. Whatever was to be the result, it was a terrible moment for Mr. Ismay, a terrible blow to the pride and record of the Company, that this, their greatest and most invulnerable ship, should be at least disabled, and possibly lost, on her maiden voyage. But like a sensible man, he did not stand wringing his hands at the inevitable; he did what he could to reassure the passengers, repeating, perhaps with a slight quaver of doubt in his voice, the old word—unsinkable. When the boats began to be launched he went and tried to help, apparently in his anxiety getting rather in the way. In this endeavour he encountered the wrath of Mr. Lowe, the Fifth Officer, who was superintending the launching of boat No. 5. Mr. Lowe did not know the identity of the nervous, excited figure standing by the davits, nor recognize the voice which kept saying nervously, “Lower away! lower away!” and it was therefore with no misgivings that he ordered him away from the boat, saying brusquely, “If you will kindly get to hell out of this perhaps I’ll be able to do something!”—a trifling incident, but evidence that Mr. Ismay made no use of his position for his own personal ends. He said nothing, and went away to another boat, where he succeeded in being more useful, and it was not till afterwards that an awe-stricken steward told the Fifth Officer who it was that he had chased away with such language. But after that Mr. Ismay was among the foremost in helping to sort out the women and children and get them expeditiously packed into the boats, with a burden of misery and responsibility on his heart that we cannot measure.

One can imagine a great bustle and excitement while the boats were being sent away; but when they had all gone, and there was nothing more to be done, those who were left began to look about them and realize their position. There was no doubt about it, the Titanic was sinking, not with any plunging or violent movement, but steadily settling down, as a rock seems to settle into the water when the tide rises about it.

Down in the engine-room and stokeholds, in conditions which can hardly be imagined by the ordinary landsman, men were still working with a grim and stoic heroism. The forward stokeholds had been flooded probably an hour after the collision; but it is practically certain that the bulkheads forward of No. 5 held until the last. The doors in those aft of No. 4 had been opened by hand after they had been closed from the bridge, in order to facilitate the passage of the engineering staff about their business; and they remained open, and the principal bulkhead protecting the main engine-room, held until the last. Water thus found its way into some compartments, and gradually rose; but long after those in charge had given up all hope of saving the ship, the stokehold watch were kept hard at work drawing the fires from under the boilers, so that when the water reached them there should be no steam. The duty of the engine-room staff was to keep the pumps going as long as possible and to run the dynamos that supplied the current for the light and the Marconi installation. This they did, as the black water rose stage by stage upon them. At least twenty minutes before the ship sank the machinery must have been flooded, and the current for the lights and the wireless supplied from the storage plant. No member of the engine-room staff was ever seen alive again, but, when the water finally flooded the stokeholds, the watch were released and told to get up and save themselves if they could.

And up on deck a chilly conviction of doom was slowly but certainly taking the place of that bland confidence in the unsinkable ship in which the previous hour had been lightly passed. That confidence had been dreadfully overdone, so much so that the stewards had found the greatest difficulty in persuading the passengers to dress themselves and come up on deck, and some who had done so had returned to their state-rooms and locked themselves in. The last twenty minutes, however, must have shown everyone on deck that there was not a chance left. On a ship as vast and solid as the Titanic there is no sensation of actual sinking or settling. She still seemed as immovable as ever, but the water was climbing higher and higher up her black sides. The sensation was not that of the ship sinking, but of the water rising about her. And the last picture we have of her, while still visible, still a firm refuge amid the waters, is of the band still playing and a throng of people looking out from the lamplit upper decks after the disappearing boats, bracing themselves as best they might for the terrible plunge and shock which they knew was coming. Here and there men who were determined still to make a fight for life climbed over the rail and jumped over; it was not a seventy foot drop now—perhaps under twenty, but it was a formidable jump. Some were stunned, and some were drowned at once before the eyes of those who waited; and the dull splashes they made were probably the first visible demonstration of the death that was coming. Duties were still being performed; an old deck steward, who had charge of the chairs, was busily continuing to work, adapting his duties to the emergency that had arisen and lashing chairs together. In this he was helped by Mr. Andrews, who was last seen engaged on this strangely ironic task of throwing chairs overboard—frail rafts thrown upon the waters that might or might not avail some struggling soul when the moment should arrive, and the great ship of his