How to Survive the Titanic Read online

  The 700 Carpathia passengers, mostly American tourists taking their spring break, watched from the rails as the Titanic survivors were hoisted up. Ropes were tied to the waists of the adults to support them as they climbed the Jacob’s ladder, the sick and wounded were lifted up on a makeshift chair swing, and the babies and small children were carried in canvas ash bags. Captain Rostron noted the extraordinary silence of them all, the marked absence of any excitement or response. The Carpathia was soon joined by the Californian, which had stopped her engines in the midst of an ice field the night before, eight miles from where the Titanic would sink. When the Californian had sent an ice warning earlier in the evening, Jack Philips, one of the Titanic’s two overworked wireless operators, told them to ‘shut up’ and ‘keep out’ as he had urgent messages to deal with, most of them cheerful Marconigrams which the passengers were sending home. The Californian’s disgruntled wireless operator therefore took off his headphones and went to sleep, and the crew on the night watch wondered why the Titanic was firing rockets at regular intervals.

  At 8.30 a.m., when the lifeboats had all been accounted for, there was a roll call and the names of the missing became known. The expressions of grief were class-dependant: the women in first-class held themselves together with decorum while those in steerage wept. ‘When it seemed sure that we should not find any more persons alive,’ one of the Carpathia’s stewards told the press, ‘the bedlam came. I hope never to go through it again. The way those women took on for the folk they had lost was awful. We could not do anything to quiet them until they had cried themselves out.’3 Captain Rostron turned the Carpathia back in the direction of New York while the Californian stayed behind to search for bodies. One survivor told a reporter that: ‘While we were on the Carpathia we passed through a school of about a dozen whales and later on we passed a seal that was floating on a cake of ice. A little farther on we passed a big floe of ice on which there was a big white polar bear prowling around.’4

  Ismay’s first action on board, according to one of the ship’s officers, was to take himself to the dining room and announce ‘I’m Ismay, for God’s sake get me something to eat.’ Having eaten, he then reportedly tried to pay the steward $2 before demanding a stateroom in which to rest. Mrs Lucien P. Smith, one of eleven brides to be widowed on her honeymoon, described him stepping onto the Carpathia shouting: ‘I’m Ismay! I’m Ismay! Get me a stateroom!’ ‘I know many women who slept on the floor in the smoking room,’ Mrs Smith said, ‘while Mr Ismay occupied the best room… being in the centre of the boat, with every attention, and a sign on the door, “Please do not knock”.’ But far from drawing attention to himself, Ismay wanted to get away from the others as quickly as possible. As hellish to deal with as the sinking of his ship was the expectation that he blend in with the brotherhood of Titanic survivors on the Carpathia. He disappeared long before the 8.30 roll call would have alerted anyone to his presence. At 7.30 that morning, Captain Haddock, commander of the Titanic’s twin sister the Olympic, currently also crossing the North Atlantic, received a Marconigram from Captain Rostron informing him that ‘Mr Bruce Ismay is under an opiate’.

  In a statement given to the US Senate inquiry, the longest and most detailed account of his actions he would make, Ismay gave his own version of what happened when he boarded the Carpathia.

  I understand that my behaviour on board the Titanic and subsequently on board the Carpathia has been very severely criticised… So far as the Carpathia is concerned, Sir, when I got on board the ship I stood with my back against the bulkhead, and somebody came up to me and said, ‘Will you not go into the saloon and get some soup or something to drink?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I really do not want anything at all.’ He said, ‘Do go and get something.’ I said, ‘No. If you will get me in some room where I can be quiet, I wish you would.’ He said, ‘Please go into the saloon and get something hot.’ I said, ‘ I would rather not.’ Then he took me and put me into a room. I did not know whose room the room was, at all. The man proved to be the doctor of the Carpathia. I was in that room until I left the ship. I was never outside the door of that room. During the whole of the time I was in this room, I never had anything of a solid nature at all; I lived on soup. I did not want very much of anything. The room was constantly being entered by people asking for the doctor. The doctor did not sleep in the room the first night. The doctor slept in the room the other nights that I was on board that ship.5

  His defence of the privileged treatment he received — that his small room had not been sufficiently private and that he was continually interrupted — did little to soften the mood of the American public. ‘Ismay crawls through unspeakable disgrace to his own safety,’ wrote the New York American when the news reached land that the owner of the ship had survived. He ‘seizes hold of the best accommodation in the Carpathia to hold communion with his own unapproachable conduct’. Except that Ismay did not see his conduct as unapproachable. He did not feel, as he lay in his stateroom, that he had betrayed his better self or that a hairline crack in his character had appeared when he jumped into the lifeboat: As I lay in my stateroom on board the Carpathia, he said in the later inquiry, I went over every detail of the affair. There was nothing that I did that I am sorry for. I can truthfully say that my conscience is clear!6

  Ismay cut himself off from company at the best of times; it was his instinct to escape from a crowd. His father, who founded the White Star Line, had been a congenial man who, when on board his own ships, spent his days with the Captain on the bridge and his evenings with the better class of passenger. But when Ismay crossed the Atlantic he preferred to be alone in his cabin looking over papers and reports. He felt no common ties; he was disconnected from whatever it was that bound people to one another. On the Carpathia he did not ensure that a list of the surviving crew was sent to their increasingly desperate families in Southampton (90 per cent of the ship’s crew were born or lived in the port), or inquire after the comfort and welfare of the surviving passengers. In an article in the National Magazine which appeared the following October, Marie Young, a first-class American passenger, described how ‘the President of the White Star Line — hidden in the English physician’s comfortable room… voyaged to New York as heedlessly indifferent to the discomfort of his Company’s passengers as he had been to the deadly peril that had menaced them’. On the Titanic, Ismay was the only man, apart from the Captain, the ship’s designer, Thomas Andrews, and the Chief Engineer, Joseph Bell, who knew that the ship would be at the bottom of the sea within two hours and that the available lifeboats could carry less than half of those on board, but he did not warn, or even try to find, Dr O’Loughlin, who had been his dining companion that evening, or Charles M. Hays, who was travelling as his guest, or Richard Fry, his valet of ten years, or George Dodd, his family’s former butler, now working as a steward in first-class, or Arthur Hayter, who had been his steward throughout the journey, or William Harrison, his secretary, all of whom were to die (‘How my husband loved his work,’ Harrison’s grieving widow later wrote to Ismay; ‘he was so proud of his position as a private help to you.’7) Other people held no reality for Ismay. It was only Marian Thayer, standing with her husband and son, who was told by him that the ship had an hour to live.8

  In The Loss of the SS Titanic: Its Story and Its Lessons, published later that year, Lawrence Beesley, a thirty-five-year-old Cambridge graduate, widower, and former science teacher at Dulwich College in London, described his own jump which took place, he explained, ‘under very similar circumstances’ to those of Ismay. Lifeboat 13 was in the process of being lowered and the call for women and children had been repeated. ‘Just then one of the crew looked up and saw me looking over. “Any more ladies on your deck?” he said. “No,” I replied. “Then you had better jump”.’

  Beesley, a Christian Scientist who was on his way to ‘study the greater work in New York’, felt no guilt about leaving the ship; the moment of his escape rather served as an epiphany which left him
with a visionary sense of purpose. In an article for the New York Times, which appeared on 29 April, he defended Ismay’s actions and described how ‘the moment I realised there was any danger I turned at once to the method and habit which are incumbent on a Christian Scientist — the attempt to eliminate fear from the human mind’. This enabled him, Beesley believed, to ‘stand quietly on the deck and watch boats being lowered until the moment came when I was able to get a place… without depriving anyone of room’. In another article written in December that year for the Christian Science Sentinel, Beesley described how he recalled, as the ship was sinking, ‘the spiritual sense of the ninety-first psalm — to “be still, and know that I am with God”’. In his stillness, Beesley expanded to absorb what he called ‘the magnitude of the whole thing’, soaking it up like a sponge. Not having lost any friends or family and fully covered by an insurance policy he took out at the last minute, Beesley’s most dominant emotion was gratitude; watching the Titanic go down he was overwhelmed by the ‘many things to be thankful for’, and he renewed his pact with his maker. He became attuned to being alive; from now on he resolved to live with increased intensity. He also resolved to record the experience. While he was on the Carpathia, Beesley wrote a letter to the London Times ‘urging the taking of immediate steps to insure safety of passengers and pointing out as dispassionately as possible the reasons for the disaster’. Hearing about the document from Officer Lightoller, Ismay asked to see it. ‘I hesitated,’ Beesley recalled, ‘knowing that while it did not seek to affix blame, the deduction would be that there was blame attachable somewhere — where I did not know and I did not wish Mr Ismay to think we were planning to criticise either his officers or his company.’ Ismay read and returned the letter without ‘raising the slightest objection to it’.

  Five weeks after the wreck, while at a lunch party in Boston, Beesley was persuaded by the editor of the Boston Herald to try his hand at writing something longer and the publisher Houghlin Mifflin provided him with a room in a residential club in order to get it done. It took Beesley six weeks to produce his masterpiece. A man raised on adventure stories and tales of the sea, Beesley, discarding his journalistic voice, described in novelistic detail the romance of ship life: ‘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 skyline, red and pink and fading from pink to white.’ He watches from the top deck ‘the swell of the sea extending outwards from the ship in an unbroken circle until it [meets] the skyline with its hint of infinity’.9 On board, Beesley is as calm and contained as a babe in his mother’s arms. Even after the ship has struck the iceberg, he explains that ‘to feel her so steady and still was like standing on a large rock in the middle of the ocean’.10 In order to help his readers to imagine the vertiginous experience of being lowered in a lifeboat, he asked them to measure seventy-five feet of a tall building and then look down.

  It is when he describes the Titanic’s final moments that Beesley reaches the limits of what can be expressed. ‘I realise how totally inadequate language is to convey to some other person who was not there any real impression of what we saw,’ and he returns again and again to the inadequacy of language when faced with extremities on this scale. ‘No novelist would dare to picture such an array of beautiful climatic conditions,’ he says of the sunrise over the icebergs on the morning after the wreck. ‘No artist could have conceived such a picture.’ His subject, Beesley realises, is no longer the ‘lessons’ to be learned from the loss of the Titanic; he is now writing about inexpressibility. More than this: his subject has become inexpressible; to describe the ‘high drama’ of what he experienced ‘borders’, as he puts it, ‘on the impossible’. Beesley’s book is not only about the Titanic; it is about everything. But his story could also, he says, be contained in ‘a single paragraph’ and he gives us that paragraph on his opening page: ‘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 2,208 passengers and crew, on her maiden voyage to New York.’11

  Beesley wants to produce a work of literature and not a catalogue of facts. But there is a sense in which the experience of the Titanic is best expressed not in sentences but as a list. It is as a list that the story first began to shape itself: the passenger list provided the most popular reading on board, after which the list of survivors became the most widely read document in the world. Columns analysing the percentages of deaths in first-, second- and third-class have been pored over for a century, and we continue to be staggered by the quantities of employees and objects on board the ship. The story of the Titanic could be written as an inventory. The kitchen and dining-room staff alone included butchers, bakers, night bakers, Vienna bakers, the passenger cook, grill cook, fish cook, sauce cook, soup cooks, the larder cook, the roast cook, Hebrew cook, pastry cook, vegetable cook, the cook and stewards’ messmen, the coffee men, the assistant confectioner, chefs, the entree cook, the iceman, the scullions, the plate-warmers, kitchen porters, carvers, scullery men, the kitchen clerk, wine butler, dining saloon steward, pantry stewards, plate steward, reception room steward, lounge attendant, smoke room steward, verandah cafe steward, ä la carte restaurant manager, maitre d’, assistant waiters, and the ship’s bugler who summoned the passengers to table. The ship’s pantry carried 500 breakfast cups, 3,000 teacups, 1,500 coffee cups, 3,000 beef tea cups, 1,000 cream jugs, 2,500 breakfast plates, 2,500 dessert plates, 12,000 dinner plates, 4,500 soup plates, 1,200 coffee pots, 1,200 teapots, 4,500 breakfast saucers, 3,000 tea saucers and 1,500 coffee saucers.

  But there is also a sense in which the facts and figures tell us nothing at all, and Beesley duly arranges his version of the loss of the Titanic into nine rich and layered narrative chapters and a hundred tightly written pages. Despite his desire to tell a story, Beesley’s account pivots and stalls around a handful of words whose floating meanings he cannot pin down. The word ‘beauty’ particularly bothers him, because beauty has now aligned itself to death. He repeats the word again and again, as though trying to fix it into place: ‘the beauty of the night, the beauty of the ship’s lines, and the beauty of the lights, all these things in themselves were intensely beautiful’.12 He also returns to ‘motion’ and ‘motionless’, which terms seem to have lost their moorings. ‘The Titanic lay peacefully on the surface of the sea — motionless, quiet, not even rocking to the roll of the sea… 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? In Beesley’s hands ‘motionless’ also describes movement. The sea is at the same time swelling and motionless; the ship is motionless when she is both steaming ahead and sinking — ‘and there she remained — motionless!’ The sky, the floating bodies, the air, the stars, the lifeboats are all motionless — ‘the oarsmen lay on their oars, and all in the lifeboat were motionless’ — as is the cold, ‘if one can imagine “cold” being motionless and still’.13

  At his desk in the Boston club, Beesley — who has previously written only letters, university essays and school reports — cannot stop writing. He is pouring out page after page of rapt prose: ‘The complete absence of haze’, he says of the night,

  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.14

  Beesley
’s rhetoric recalls that of the master-mariner Joseph Conrad, and these pages in particular are reminiscent of the first part of Lord Jim, in which Jim’s pilgrim ship, the Patna, moves ‘so smoothly that her onward motion was imperceptible to the senses of men, as though she had been a crowded planet speeding through the dark spaces of ether behind the swarm of suns’.15 At times Beesley’s descriptions mirror those of Conrad with such uncanniness as to suggest he was using Lord Jim as his model. Beesley writes of being aboard the Titanic: ‘To stand on the deck many feet above the water lapping idly against her sides, and looking much further off than it really was because of the darkness, gave one a sense of wonderful security.’16 Conrad writes of Jim on the Patna: A marvellous stillness pervaded the world, and the stars, together with the serenity of their rays, seemed to shed on earth the assurance of everlasting security.’17

  Lawrence Beesley, who based his experience of the Titanic on adventure stories (and became father-in-law to the novelist Dodie Smith, who wrote One Hundred and One Dalmatians) was later turned into a literary figure himself. Julian Barnes describes in A History of the World in ioV2 Chapters how, when Pinewood Studios filmed A Night to Remember on a pond in Elstree Studios, Beesley asked to be an extra in the scene where the ship goes down. Not having the necessary actor’s union card, permission was denied. But so determined was he to repeat the pivotal experience of his lifetime that, dressed as an Edwardian, he slipped unnoticed onto the set. ‘Right at the last minute,’ writes Barnes, ‘as the cameras were due to roll, the director spotted that Beesley had managed to insinuate himself to the ship’s rail; picking up his megaphone, he instructed the amateur imposter kindly to disembark. And so, for the second time in his life, Lawrence Beesley found himself leaving the Titanic just before it went down.’