A Night to Remember

8. ‘It Reminds Me of a Bloomin’ Picnic’

The cries in the night meant one thing to lively, impulsive Fifth Officer Lowe—row back and help.

He was in a good position to do something. After leaving the Titanic in No. 14, he had rounded up boats 10, 12, 4 and D, and all five were tied together like a string of beads 150 yards away.

‘Consider yourselves under my command,’ he ordered, and now he organized his flotilla for rescue work. It was suicide for all the boats to go—they were too undermanned to face the bedlam—but one boat with a hand-picked crew might do some good. So Lowe divided his fifty-five passengers among the other four boats and picked volunteers from each to give No. 14 some expert oarsmen.

It was nerve-racking work, playing musical chairs with rowboats at 2.30 a.m. in the middle of the Atlantic—almost more than Lowe could stand. ‘Jump, God damn you, jump!’ he shouted impatiently at Miss Daisy Minahan. On the other hand, an old lady in a shawl seemed much too agile; Lowe ripped it off and looked into the frightened face of a young man—eyes white with terror. This time nothing was said, but he pitched the man into boat No. 10 as hard as he could.

It took time to make the transfer. Then more time while Lowe waited for the swimmers to thin out enough to make the expedition safe. Then still more time to get there. It was after three o’clock—nearly an hour since the sinking—when boat 14 edged into the wreckage and the people.

There was little left—steward John Stewart… first-class passenger W. F. Hoyt… a Japanese steerage passenger, who had lashed himself to a door. For nearly an hour boat 14 played a hopeless blind-man’s-buff, chasing after shouts and calls in the darkness, never quite able to reach whoever was shouting.

They got only four, and Mr Hoyt died in an hour. Lowe had miscalculated how long it took to row to the scene… how long to locate a voice in the dark… most of all, how long a man could live in water at twenty-eight degrees. There was, he learned, no need to wait until the crowd ‘thinned out’. But at least Lowe went back.

Third Officer Pitman in No. 5 also heard the cries. He turned the boat around and shouted, ‘Now, men, we will pull towards the wreck!’

‘Appeal to the officer not to go back,’ a lady begged steward Etches as he tugged at his oar. ‘Why should we lose all our lives in a useless attempt to save others from the ship?’

Other women protested too. Pitman was torn by the dilemma. Finally he reversed his orders and told his men to lay on their oars. For the next hour No. 5—forty people in a boat that held sixty-five—heaved gently in the calm Atlantic swell, while its passengers listened to the swimmers three hundred yards away.

In No. 2, Steward Johnson recalled Fourth Officer Boxhall asking the ladies, ‘Shall we go back?’ They said no; so boat 2—about sixty per cent full—also drifted while her people listened.

The ladies in boat 6 were different. Mrs Lucien Smith, stung that she had fallen for the white lie her husband used to get her in the boat; Mrs Churchill Candee, moved by the gallantry of her self-appointed protectors; Mrs J. J. Brown, naturally brave and lusty for adventure—all begged Quartermaster Hitchens to return to the scene. Hitchens refused. He painted a vivid picture of swimmers grappling at the boat, of No. 6 swamping and capsizing. The women still pleaded, while the cries grew fainter. Boat No. 6—capacity sixty-five; occupants twenty-eight—went no closer to the scene.

In No. 1, fireman Charles Hendrickson sang out, ‘It’s up to us to go back and pick up anyone in the water.’

Nobody answered. Lookout George Symons, in charge of the boat, made no move. Then, when the suggestion came again, Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon announced he didn’t think they should try; it would be dangerous; the boat would be swamped. With that, the subject was dropped. No. 1—twelve people in a boat made for forty—rowed on aimlessly in the dark.

In boat after boat the story was the same: a timid suggestion, a stronger refusal, nothing done. Of 1,600 people who went down on the Titanic, only thirteen were picked up by the eighteen boats that hovered nearby. Boat D hauled in Mr Frederick Hoyt because he planned it that way. Boat 4 rescued eight—not because it rowed back but because it was within reach. Only No. 14 returned to the scene. Why the others didn’t is part of the mystery of why trained men in identical situations should react so differently.

As the cries died away, the night became strangely peaceful. The Titanic, the agonizing suspense, was gone. The shock of what had happened, the confusion and excitement ahead, the realization that close friends were lost for ever had not yet sunk in. A curiously tranquil feeling came over many of those in the boats.

With the feeling of calm came loneliness. Lawrence Beesley wondered why the Titanic, even when mortally wounded, gave everyone a feeling of companionship and security that no lifeboat could replace. In No. 3, Elizabeth Shutes watched the shooting stars and thought to herself how insignificant the Titanic’s rockets must have looked, competing against nature. She tried to bury her loneliness by pretending she was back in Japan. Twice she had left there at night too, lonely and afraid, but everything came out all right in the end.

In boat 4, Miss Jean Gertrude Hippach also watched the shooting stars—she had never seen so many. She recalled a legend that every time there’s a shooting star, somebody dies.

Slowly—very slowly—life in the boats picked up again. Fourth Officer Boxhall started firing off green flares from boat 2. Somehow this brought people out of their trance, cheered them up too. It was hard to judge distance, and some thought the green flares were being fired by rescue ships on the horizon.

Oars squealed and splashed in the water, voices sang out as the boats hailed one another in the dark. Nos. 5 and 7 tied up together; so did Nos. 6 and 16. Boat 6 borrowed a stoker for extra rowing power. Other boats were drifting apart. Over a radius of four or five miles, eighteen little boats wandered about through the night or drifted together on a sea flat as a reservoir. A stoker in No. 13 thought of times he had spent on the Regent’s Park lake and blurted out, ‘It reminds me of a bloomin’ picnic!’

At times it did seem like a picnic—the small talk, the children under foot. Lawrence Beesley tried to tuck a blanket under the toes of a crying baby, and discovered that he and the lady holding the baby had close mutual friends in Clonmel, Ireland. Edith Russell amused another baby with her toy pig that played the ‘Maxixe’ whenever its tail was twisted. Hugh Woolner found himself feeding cookies to four-year-old Louis Navatril. Mrs John Jacob Astor lent a steerage woman a shawl to comfort her little daughter whimpering from the cold. The woman thanked Mrs Astor in Swedish, and wrapped the shawl around her little girl.

About this time Marguerite Frolicher was introduced to an important piece of picnic equipment. Still deathly seasick, she was noticed by a kindly gentleman sitting nearby. He pulled out a silver flask with a cup top and suggested a drink of brandy might help. She took the suggestion and was instantly cured. Perhaps it was the brandy, perhaps the novel experience—in all her twenty-two years, she had never seen a flask before, and she was fascinated.

But no picnic was ever so cold. Mrs Crosby shivered so hard in No. 5 that Third Officer Pitman wrapped a sail around her. A stoker in No. 6 sat beside Mrs Brown, his teeth chattering with the cold. Finally she wrapped her sable stole about his legs, tying the tails around his ankles. In No. 16 a man in white pyjamas looked so cold he reminded the other passengers of a snowman. Mrs Charlotte Collyer was so numb she toppled over in No. 14; her hair caught in an oarlock and a big tuft came out by the roots.

The crew did their best to make the women more comfortable. In No. 5 a sailor took off his stockings and gave them to Mrs Washington Dodge. When she looked up in startled gratitude, he explained, ‘I assure you, ma’am, they are perfectly clean, I just put them on this morning.’

In No. 13, fireman Beauchamp shivered in his thin jumpers, but he refused to take an extra coat offered him by an elderly lady, insisting it go to a young Irish girl instead. For the people in this boat there was additional relief from an unexpected quarter. When steward Ray left his cabin for the last time, he picked up six handkerchiefs lying in his trunk. Now he gave them out, telling people to tie a knot in each corner and turn them into caps. As a result, he recalls with pride, ‘six heads were crowned’.

Besides the cold, the number of lady oarsmen dispelled the picnic illusion. In No. 4, Mrs John B. Thayer rowed for five hours in water up to her shins. In No. 6 the irrepressible Mrs Brown organized the women, two to an oar. One held the oar in place, while the second did the pulling. In this way Mrs Brown, Mrs Meyer, Mrs Candee and others propelled the boat some three or four miles, in a hopeless effort to overtake the light that twinkled on the horizon most of the night.

Mrs Walter Douglas handled the tiller of boat 2. Boxhall, who was in charge, pulled an oar and helped to fire the green flares. Mrs J. Stuart White didn’t help to row No. 8, but she appointed herself a sort of signalman. She had a cane with a built-in electric light, and during most of the night she waved it fiercely about, alternately helping and confusing everyone.

In No. 8, Marie Young, Gladys Cherry, Mrs F. Joel Swift and others pulled at the oars. Mrs William R. Bucknell noted with pride that as she rowed next to the Countess of Rothes, further down the boat her maid was rowing next to the countess’s maid. Most of the night the countess handled the tiller. Seaman Jones, in charge, later explained to the Sphere why he put her there: ‘There was a woman in my boat as was a woman… When I saw the way she was carrying herself and heard the quiet determined way she spoke to the others, I knew she was more of a man than any we had on board.’ At the American investigation, perhaps lacking the guidance of the Press, Jones phrased it a little less elegantly: ‘She had a lot to say, so I put her to steering the boat.’

But there was no doubt how he felt. After the rescue Jones removed the numeral ‘8’ from the lifeboat, had it framed, and sent it to the countess to show his admiration.

As the night wore on, the early composure began to give way. In No. 3, Mrs Charles Hays hailed the boats that came near, searching for her husband. ‘Charles Hays, are you there?’ she would call over and over again. In No. 8 Señora de Satode Penasco screamed for her husband Victor, until the Countess of Rothes couldn’t stand it any longer. Turning the tiller over to her cousin Gladys Cherry, she slipped down beside the señora and spent the rest of the night rowing beside her, trying to cheer her up. In No. 6, Madame de Villiers constantly called for her son, who wasn’t even on the Titanic.

Gradually a good deal of squabbling broke out. The women in No. 3 bickered about trifles, while their husbands sat in embarrassed silence. Mrs Washington Dodge—who wanted to row back against the wishes of nearly everyone else in No. 5—grew so bitter that when No. 7 came by, she switched boats in mid-ocean. Maud Slocombe, the Titanic’s irrepressible masseuse, helped to bawl out a woman who kept setting off, of all things, an alarm clock in No. 11. Seaman Diamond, a tough ex-boxer in charge of No. 15, swore oaths that turned the night air even bluer.

Many of the arguments revolved around smoking. In 1912 tobacco was not yet the American cure-all for easing strain and tension, and the women in the boats were shocked. Miss Elizabeth Shutes begged two men sitting near her in No. 3 to stop smoking, but they kept on. To Mrs J. Stuart White it was a matter that still rankled at the investigation. When Senator Smith asked if she wished to mention anything bearing on the crew’s discipline, she exploded, ‘As we cut loose from the ship these stewards took out cigarettes and lighted them. On an occasion like that!’

In the more casual intimacy of boat 1, smoking was no problem. When Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon gave fireman Hendrickson a good cigar, neither of the women in the boat could very well object. Miss Francatelli was employed by Sir Cosmo’s wife, and Lady Duff Gordon was too sick to care. With her head down upon the oars and tackle, she vomited away the night.

But No. 1 had its squabbles too. Sir Cosmo and Mr C. E. Henry Stengel of Newark, New Jersey, didn’t get along very well. This might not have mattered in a crowded boat, but with only twelve people it was rather grating. According to Sir Cosmo, Mr Stengel kept shouting, ‘Boat ahoy!’ He also gave lookout Symons conflicting advice on where to steer. Nobody paid any attention, but he irritated Sir Cosmo so much that he finally asked Mr Stengel to keep quiet. Sir Cosmo was doubly annoyed when Mr Stengel later testified that ‘between Sir Cosmo and myself we decided which way to go’.

Meanwhile fireman Pusey was smouldering over Lady Duff Gordon’s remark to Miss Francatelli on the loss of her nightgown. At the time he told her, ‘Never mind, you have saved your lives; but we have lost our kit.’

Half an hour later, still smouldering, Pusey turned to Sir Cosmo, ‘I suppose you have lost everything?’

‘Of course.’

‘But you can get more?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, we have lost our kit, and the company won’t give us any more. And what’s more, our pay stops from tonight.’

Sir Cosmo had had enough: ‘Very well, I will give you a fiver each to start a new kit.’

He did, too, but lived to regret it. The Duff Gordons’ near monopoly of boat 1, its failure to row back, gave the gift the look of a payoff that Sir Cosmo had a hard time living down.

Nor did subsequent events help his case. When Lady Duff Gordon reassembled the men in life jackets for a group picture after the rescue, they looked more and more like the Duff Gordons’ personal crew. Still later, when it came out that lookout Symons, nominally in charge of the boat, spent the day with Sir Cosmo’s lawyer just before he testified at the British inquiry, it looked as though Sir Cosmo even had his personal coxswain.

There’s no evidence that Sir Cosmo was guilty of more than extreme bad taste.

Drinking caused some trouble too. When No. 4 plucked a member of the crew out of the water, he had a bottle of brandy in his pocket. It was then thrown away because, as he explained it a few weeks later to the Press, ‘it was feared that if any hysterical person in the boat touched it, the result might be bad’. Miss Eustis has a somewhat different version: ‘One man was drunk and had a bottle of brandy in his pocket, which the quartermaster promptly threw overboard, and the drunken man was thrown into the bottom of the boat …’

There was a different kind of trouble in boat 6. Friction erupted from the moment Major Peuchen slid down the line to fill out the crew. Peuchen, used to giving orders, couldn’t resist trying to take command. Quartermaster Hitchens had other ideas. As they rowed away from the Titanic, Peuchen was pulling an oar and Hitchens was at the tiller, but within ten minutes Peuchen asked Hitchens to let a lady steer and join him in rowing. The Quartermaster answered that he was in charge and Peuchen’s job was to row and keep quiet.

Painfully the boat struggled away, with just Peuchen and lookout Fleet rowing. Under Mrs Brown’s leadership, most of the women gradually joined in, but Hitchens remained glued to the tiller, shouting at them to row harder or all would be sucked under when the Titanic sank.

Then women began shouting back, and as the boat splashed along in the dark, the night echoed with bitter repartee. Most of the time No. 6 was heading towards the elusive light on the horizon, and when it became clear they could never reach it, Hitchens announced that all was lost; they had neither water nor food nor compass nor charts; they were hundreds of miles from land and didn’t even know which way they were heading.

Major Peuchen had given up by now, but the women tore into him. Mrs Candee grimly showed him the North Star. Mrs Brown told him to shut up and row. Mrs Meyer jeered at his courage.

Then they tied up with boat 16, and Hitchens ordered them to drift. But the women couldn’t stand the cold and insisted on rowing to keep warm. Mrs Brown gave an oar to a grimy stoker transferred from No. 16, and told everyone to row. Hitchens moved to stop her, and Mrs Brown told him if he came any closer, she would throw him overboard.

He sank back under a blanket and began shouting insults. Mrs Meyer answered back—accused him of taking all the blankets and drinking all the whisky. Hitchens hotly denied it. The transferred stoker, wondering what on earth he had run into, called out, ‘I say, don’t you know you’re talking to a lady.’

Hitchens yelled back, ‘I know whom I’m speaking to, and I’m commanding this boat!’

But the stoker’s rebuke worked. The quartermaster lapsed into silence. Boat 6 rowed on through the night with Hitchens subdued, Peuchen out of the picture, and Mrs Brown virtually in charge.

Even among the men clinging desperately to overturned boat B, there was time for petty bickering. Colonel Gracie—his teeth chattering, his matted hair now frozen stiff—noticed the man beside him wore a dry outing cap. The colonel asked to borrow the cap to warm his head for a minute. ‘And what would I do?’ the man shot back.

Nerves on boat B were understandably frayed. The air was leaking out from the hull, and every minute it sank a little lower in the water. The sea occasionally washed over the keel, and one impulsive move might pitch everybody into the sea. They needed cool leadership badly.

At this point Gracie was relieved to hear the deep, rich voice of Second Officer Lightoller, and even more relieved when a somewhat tipsy crewman on the boat called out, ‘We will all obey what the officer orders.’

Lightoller quickly responded. Feeling that only concerted, organized action would keep the boat balanced, he had all thirty men stand up. He arranged them in a double column, facing the bow. Then as the boat lurched with the sea, he shouted, ‘Lean to the right’… ‘Stand upright’… ‘Lean to the left’—whatever was necessary to counteract the swell.

As they threw their weight this way and that, for a while they yelled, ‘Boat ahoy! Boat ahoy!’ Lightoller finally stopped them, urging them to save their strength.

It grew still colder, and the colonel complained again about his head, this time to Lightoller. Another man offered them both a pull from his flask. They turned him down but pointed out Walter Hurst, shivering nearby. Hurst thought it was brandy and took a big swig. He almost choked—it was essence of peppermint.

They talked a surprising amount. Assistant cook John Maynard told how Captain Smith swam alongside the boat just before the Titanic took her last plunge. They pulled him on, but he slipped off again. Later fireman Harry Senior claimed the captain let go on purpose, saying ‘I will follow the ship!’ It may have been true, but Hurst is sure the captain never reached the boat. Besides, Senior was one of the last to arrive—probably too late to have seen the captain himself.

Most of all they all talked of getting rescued. Lightoller soon discovered Harold Bride, the junior wireless operator, at the stern of the boat, and from his position in the bow he asked what ships were on the way. Bride shouted back: the Baltic, the Olympic, the Carpathia. Lightoller figured the Carpathia should arrive at daybreak… passed the word around, to buck up sagging spirits.

From then on they scanned the horizon searching for any sign. From time to time they were cheered by the green flares lit by Boxhall in boat 2. Even Lightoller thought they must come from another ship.

Slowly the night passed. Towards dawn a slight breeze sprang up. The air seemed even more frigid. The sea grew choppy. Bitter-cold waves splashed over the feet, the shins, the knees of the men on boat B. The spray stabbed their bodies and blinded their eyes. One man, then another, then another rolled off the stern and disappeared from sight. The rest fell silent, completely absorbed in the battle to stay alive.

The sea was silent too. No one saw a trace of life in the waves that rippled the smooth Atlantic as the first light of dawn streaked the sky.

But one man still lived—thanks to a remarkable combination of initiative, luck and alcohol. Four hours earlier, chief baker Charles Joughin was awakened, like so many on the Titanic, by that strange, grinding jar. And like many others he heard the call to general quarters a little after midnight.

But Joughin didn’t merely report to the boat deck. He reasoned that if boats were needed, provisions were needed too; so on his own initiative he mustered his staff of thirteen bakers and ransacked the Titanic’s larder of all spare bread. The bakers then trooped topside carrying four loaves apiece.

This done, Joughin retired to his cabin on E deck, port side, for a nip of whisky.

About 12.30 he felt sufficiently fortified to reascend the stairs to his boat, No. 10. At this stage it was still difficult to persuade the women to go; so Joughin resorted to stronger methods. He went down to the promenade deck and hauled some up by force. Then, to use his own word, he ‘threw’ them into the boat. Rough but effective.

Joughin was assigned to No. 10 as skipper, but he thought there were enough men to handle the boat; so he jumped out and helped launch it instead. To go with it, he explained, ‘would have set a bad example’.

It was now 1.20. He scampered down the slanting stairs again to his cabin on E deck and poured himself another drink. He sat down on his bunk and nursed it along—aware but not particularly caring that the water now rippled through the cabin doorway, swilled across the chequered linoleum, and rose to the top of his shoes.

About 1.45 he saw, of all people, gentle old Dr O’Loughlin poking around. It never occurred to Joughin to wonder what the old gentleman was doing way down here, but the proximity of the pantry suggests that Joughin and the doctor were thinking along similar lines.

In any case, Joughin greeted him briefly, then went back up to the boat deck. None too soon, for the Titanic was listing heavily now, and the slant was much steeper. Any longer, and the stairs might have been impossible.

Though all the boats were gone, Joughin was anything but discouraged. He went down to B deck and began throwing deck chairs through the windows of the enclosed promenade. Others watched him, but they didn’t help. Altogether he pitched about fifty chairs overboard.

It was tiring work; so after he lugged the last chair to the edge and squeezed it through the window (it was a little like threading a needle), Joughin retired to the pantry on the starboard side of A deck. It was 2.10.

As he quenched his thirst—this time it was water—he heard a kind of crash, as though something had buckled. The pantry cups and saucers flew about him, the lights glowed red, and overhead he heard the pounding of feet running aft.

He bolted out of the pantry towards the stern end of A deck, just behind a swarm of people, running the same way and clambering down from the boat deck above. He kept out of the crush as much as possible and ran along in the rear of the crowd. He vaulted down the steps to B deck, then to the well deck. Just as he got there, the Titanic gave a sickening twist to port, throwing most of the people into a huge heap along the port rail.

Only Joughin kept his balance. Alert but relaxed, his equilibrium was marvellous, as the stern rose higher and corkscrewed to port. The deck was now listing too steeply to stand on, and Joughin slipped over the starboard rail and stood on the actual side of the ship. He worked his way up the side, still holding on to the rail—but from the outside—until he reached the white-painted steel plates of the poop deck. He now stood on the rounded stern end of the ship, which had swung high in the air some 150 feet above the water.

Joughin casually tightened his lifebelt. Then he glanced at his watch—it said 2.15. As an afterthought, he took it off and stuck it into his hip pocket. He was beginning to puzzle over his position when he felt the stern beginning to drop under his feet—it was like taking an elevator. As the sea closed over the stern, Joughin stepped off into the water. He didn’t even get his head wet.

He paddled off into the night, little bothered by the freezing water. For over an hour he bobbed about, moving his arms and legs just enough to keep upright. ‘No trick at all,’ he explains cheerfully today.

It was four o’clock when he saw what he thought was wreckage in the first grey light of day. He swam over and discovered it was the upturned collapsible B.

The keel was crowded and he couldn’t climb on, so he hung around for a while until he spied an old friend from the kitchen—entrée chef John Maynard. Blood proved thicker than water; Maynard held out his hand and Joughin hung on, treading water, still thoroughly insulated.

The others didn’t notice him… partly because they were too numb to care, partly because all eyes now scanned the south-east horizon. It was just after 3.30 when they first saw it—a distant flash followed by a far-off boom. In boat 6, Miss Norton cried, ‘There’s a flash of lightning!’ while Hitchens growled, ‘It’s a falling star!’ In No. 13 a stoker lying in the bottom, almost unconscious from the cold, bolted up, shouting, ‘That was cannon!’

In No. 8, seaman Jones hardly dared believe his eyes. Turning to the Countess of Rothes, rowing next to him, he whispered, ‘Can you see any lights? Look on the next wave we top, but don’t say anything in case I am wrong.’

As the boat heaved up on the next swell, the countess scanned the horizon. Far off, she saw a dim light. A few moments later there was no doubt about it, and they told the others.

The single light grew brighter; then another appeared; then row after row. A big steamer was pounding up, firing rockets to reassure the Titanic’s people that help was on the way. In No. 9, deck hand Paddy McGough suddenly thundered, ‘Let us all pray to God, for there is a ship on the horizon and it’s making for us!’

The men in boat B let out a yelp of joy and started babbling again. Someone lit a newspaper in No. 3 and waved it wildly, then Mrs Davidson’s straw hat—it would burn longer. In Mrs A. S. Jerwan’s boat they dipped handkerchiefs in kerosene and lit them as signals. In No. 13 they twisted a paper torch out of letters. Boxhall burned a last green flare in boat 2. In No. 8, Mrs White swung her electric cane as never before.

Over the water floated cheers and yells of relief. Even nature seemed pleased, as the dreary night gave way to the mauve and coral of a beautiful dawn.

Not everyone saw it. In half-swamped boat A, Olaus Abelseth tried to kindle the will to live in a half-frozen man lying beside him. As day broke, he took the man’s shoulder and raised him up, so that he was sitting on the floorboards. ‘Look!’ pleaded Abelseth, ‘we can see a ship now; brace up!’

He took one of the man’s hands and raised it. Then he shook the man’s shoulder. But the man only said, ‘Who are you?’ And a minute later, ‘Let me be… who are you?’

Abelseth held him up for a while; but it was such a strain, he finally had to use a board as a prop. Half an hour later the sky blazed with thrilling, warm shades of pink and gold, but now it was too late for the man to know.