Watchman, what is left of the night?
Isaiah 21:11
WHILE HIS SON HUDDLED ON AN OVERTURNED LIFEBOAT, shivering and nearly losing consciousness, John Thayer moved with hundreds of others towards the stern.[1] A passenger who had made it to the lifeboats told his mother three days later, ‘It was a terrible sight. It would make stones cry to hear those on board shrieking.’[2] The Titanic added her own screams to those of her passengers and crew, as nearly everything movable within her came free, sliding and shattering, ‘partly a roar, partly a groan, partly a rattle and partly a smash … It was stupefying, stupendous … It was as if all the heavy things one could think of had been thrown downstairs from the top of a house, smashing over each other, and the stairs and everything in the way.’[3]
She rose until her stern was completely clear of the water and pointing into the night at a 30 degree angle. Those scrambling to the Poop Deck struggled to maintain their footing. A second-class passenger in one of the nearby lifeboats was, as Jack Thayer had been in the water, transfixed by ‘the terrible beauty of the Titanic at that moment … To me she looked like an enormous glow worm, for she was alight from the rising water line to the stern – electric lights blazing in every cabin on all the decks and lights at her mast heads.’[4] Two minutes before she disappeared, the Titanic’s lights flickered, then went out for the last time, plunging those on board into darkness. A few seconds later, the liner buckled and ruptured from her superstructure to her keel. Either at that point or shortly before, John Thayer jumped into water with a temperature of just under minus 2 degrees.[5]
That the Titanic shattered as she sank was confirmed only by the discovery of her wreck. Between 1912 and 1985, the standard account of her final moments, agreed on at both the American and British inquiries into the disaster, had the Titanic sinking intact, with no greater damage to her superstructure than the two collapsed forward funnels and none to the hull beyond the punctures inflicted by the iceberg. This version of events was stated by the ship’s three most senior surviving officers – Charles Lightoller, Herbert Pitman and Joseph Boxhall – and in Lightoller’s case forcefully so. In answer to a question from Lord Mersey, head of the British inquiry, whether the Titanic had broken in two as she sank, Lightoller answered: ‘That is not true, my lord. I was watching her the whole time.’[6] Another crew member, a sailor called Thomas Dillon, and a surviving passenger Hugh Woolner likewise testified to the respective inquiries that they had seen the ship disappear in one piece. Newspaper interviews given by two American survivors, Elisabeth Allen and Caroline Bonnell, expressed the same belief, which received widespread, and enduring, corroboration from two of the most thorough and eloquent accounts published by survivors – The Loss of the S.S. Titanic: Its Story and its Lessons (1912), a memoir by Lawrence Beesley, a British school teacher who travelled in Second Class and left in Lifeboat 13, and Colonel Gracie’s The Truth about the Titanic (1913), both of which argued ‘that the Titanic’s decks were intact at the time she sank’.[7]
This was thus understandably the version presented to millions of viewers in the numerous dramatisations of the disaster filmed between 1912 and 1985, including Titanic (1953) and A Night to Remember (1958), both of which were watched by various survivors who praised the painful authenticity of the sinking scenes and, in the latter’s case, received the endorsement and advice of the Titanic’s by then two most senior surviving officers, Herbert Pitman and Joseph Boxhall, the latter of whom served as a consultant for the filmmakers.[8] This orthodoxy was overturned by the discovery that the Titanic’s bow and stern lie nearly 2,000 feet away from each other on the ocean floor, with a debris field scattered between them like some horrible trail, extensive enough to contain the rotting, rusted form of five of the boilers. In 1997, the celluloid imagining of James Cameron’s Titanic, one of the most commercially successful movies on record, offered the world a new finale for the Titanic that saw the on-screen liner tear between her third and her fourth funnel, down from the Boat Deck to the double bottom, which temporarily survived to link the two sections, enabling the bow to drag the stern into a vertical position before they fully detached from one another.[9]
In the years since his film’s release, James Cameron has retained his fascination with the Titanic and he was part of several subsequent dives to the wreck site, which eventually led to his participation with marine forensic experts in a new computer simulation of the sinking, which posited that the break had originated further forward, between the second and third funnels. In a macabre way, extensive analysis of the wreck site and, crucially, the debris field has confirmed that Tommy Andrews’ and Captain Smith’s quip to passengers about the Titanic breaking into three did, in some way, transpire at about 2.18 a.m. on Monday the 15th. The ship seems to have snapped twice, more or less simultaneously, on either side of her third funnel. The section immediately impacted by that tear fell separately to the seabed, itself rebreaking into multiple pieces around and over the debris field. Its subsequent absence from either of the largest remaining pieces of the bow or stern explains the difficulty until recently of pinpointing where the Titanic fell apart.
With no moon and the ship in darkness as her electricity failed, passengers struggled to see what happened. Yet remarkably, of the 149 extant survivors’ testimonies that specifically mention the final plunge, only seven stated categorically that the ship did not shatter. It was because those seven included three of her officers and two astute, meticulous authors that their version acquired its longevity and influence. Nine of the 149 said that due to the darkness they could not be sure what happened, twenty-four, including Dorothy Gibson, mentioned terrifying if non-specific sounds, fifty-one did not specify whether it did or did not tear, while fifty-three stated that they saw the Titanic when she ‘broke in two pieces’.[10] A second-class passenger, Nellie Becker, was subsequently proved to have been one of the most eagle-eyed eyewitnesses when she told a colonial newspaper how the Titanic ‘seemed to break right down the middle, and the middle to fall in. It was terrible beyond words.’[11] From their vantage point in Lifeboat 8, Lady Rothes was convinced she saw the Titanic snap in two with a roar that Gladys compared to ‘an earthquake or a distant battle’.[12]
Identifying where the tears started and finished enables us to see which rooms they shredded as the Titanic fell apart. They cut through the Smoking Room and the Lounge on A-Deck, the ruins of which jut out from the brutalised bow. The Lounge’s mantelpiece statue of Artemis settled into the silt of the debris field. It then shattered some of the B-Deck suites before rupturing the C-Deck first-class cabins, including the Countess of Rothes’, where Gladys had left her photograph in the mistaken belief that they would be back before breakfast in the Dining Saloon, itself breaking at its final section, while its Pantry where first- and second-class meals were prepared was destroyed entirely. It then hit Scotland Road and a section of the E-Deck cabins, before completing its journey in the third-class Dining Saloon, store rooms, crew quarters and one of the boiler rooms.
Although his account of the split was rubbished for years, one of the most accurate interpretations by a survivor was Jack Thayer’s. He had jumped from the ship only a few moments beforehand and saw the shattering of the Titanic from the close quarters of an upended lifeboat. Five days after the sinking, he gave a statement describing how ‘it seemed to me that she broke in two just in front of the third funnel … The stern seemed to rise in the air and stopped at an angle of about 60 degrees. It seemed to hold there for a time and then with a hissing sound it shot right down out of sight with people jumping from the stern. The stern either pivoted around towards our boat, or we were sucked toward it, and as we only had one oar we could not keep away.’[13]
The ‘hissing sound’ he heard were pockets of air expelled by the advancing seawater. The last of the first-class public rooms to go under was the Verandah Café, its roof apparently exploding from the force of the air that tried to escape during the plunge and the descent to the seafloor. The last room to fill with water was the General Room, a lounge and meeting space for third-class passengers, located below the Poop Deck, on to which the majority of those trapped on board after the lifeboats had been lowered and from where they continued to jump until the stern disappeared. Last to sink was the Titanic’s name, inscribed on the hull above the word ‘Liverpool’ denoting the home of White Star’s headquarters and thus their vessels’ port of registry. The sea’s seemingly preternatural calmness and the smooth yacht-like lines given to the Olympic-class liners worked together to dissipate the drag feared by so many in the nearby boats. Apart from Jack Thayer’s collapsible being briefly pulled in towards the vanishing ship, there ‘did not seem to be very much suction’.[14] Then came ‘the anguished cries of many hundreds of people’.[15]
*
On his overturned raft, which within minutes of the sinking physically did not have any more room if it wanted to avoid capsizing, Jack Thayer thought, incongruously, that the noise of so many voices in the darkness reminded him of locusts at home in Pennsylvania.[16] Shivering in her lifeboat, her feet still in agony in her soaked pumps, Dorothy Gibson temporarily forgot her own discomfort as the Titanic vanished. She later told a New York newspaper, ‘I will never forget that terrible cry that rang out from people who were thrown into the sea and others who were afraid for their loved ones.’[17] At one point, Dorothy saw a green silk cushion floating past their lifeboat. It was from the Lounge where she had played bridge three hours earlier and which had spilled its contents into the ocean as it ripped apart with the Titanic.[18] But her terror and heartache did not induce her, or hundreds of people like her, to go back to help the survivors. Dorothy, when pressed later for the reason why her lifeboat did not return to rescue people from the water, could not explain it adequately. She told the Morning Telegraph that the Titanic ‘disappeared, leaving nothing behind her on the face of the sea but a swirl of water, bobbing heads and lifeboats that were threatened by the suction of the waters. After the vessel had disappeared, the officer [sic] in charge of our boat wanted to return, saying that there was room for several more passengers and pointing out the possibility of being able to rescue some of those who might be swimming. But immediately behind us was another lifeboat carrying forty people and as no one could be seen in the water some of the passengers in the other boat were transferred to ours.’[19]
It is an incomplete timeline, light on detail and portraying events separated by hours as happening side by side. Dorothy’s lifeboat did not take on more passengers from a fuller companion craft until at least an hour after the sinking and George Hogg, a lookout rather than an officer in charge of number 7, said afterwards that almost no one supported him in going back. Dorothy seems to have carried a sincere sense of guilt with her for their failure to go back, even though it was an action mimicked by nearly every other lifeboat in the vicinity. While in her interviews with journalists she appears deliberately to have exaggerated the pull of the Titanic’s almost non-existent suction as she vanished, Dorothy nonetheless conveyed how much that suction had been dreaded before the event itself, which gave way to the fear of being swamped by panicked swimmers. Something of the tortured mentality of those in the lifeboats was caught at the subsequent British inquiry when survivor Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon mentioned that, assailed by the ‘noise’, some survivors had objected to rowing back to help, in case they were swamped. The Attorney-General, Sir Rufus Isaacs, representing the Board of Trade, asked him, ‘We do not want unnecessarily to prolong the discussion of it, but they were the cries of people who were drowning?’ There was a momentary pause before Sir Cosmo’s answer, ‘Yes.’[20]