13

The 46th Psalm

In boat C, Ismay's boat, forty-year-old Shaneene Abi-Saab Wahabe, like the other Lebanese women huddled with her, had seen America as a beacon of freedom from religious persecution. She would not have been in the boat at all if her cousin Gerios and the other men had not physically lifted her and thrown her in, along with at least three other women. Amid the scuffle, an officer had fired shots into the air, ending the dropping of third-class women into a boat in which twenty empty seats could still plainly be seen.

Like the other women of boat C, Wahabe knew she would never see her husband again. Her adult son was also lost, but neither her husband nor her son were about to become casualties of the Titanic. Both had died recently from common infections. Living by a creed of never giving up, no matter what cross life forced her to bear, and determined to begin again, she would soon arrive in the United States under the temporary care of New York's Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

On the sidewalks of New York, street vendors of the early twentieth century were selling increasingly popular ice cream treats served in glass cups. Wahabe would never touch the stuff—at least, not the way it was being served. The lessons of her own recent family history ran too deep. The cone-shaped cups, after being licked clean by customers, were rinsed hastily in what often appeared to be dirty water, then reused, customer to customer. Wahabe knew that there had to be a better, more hygienic way, such as serving the ice cream in a single-use, sweet pastry cone.

Soon, as the Ismay family's fortune waned and the Titanic began melting into the bed of the Atlantic, the obscure middle-aged survivor from boat C would establish the Joy Cone Company. By word of mouth and then by newspaper ads and the wire services, Joy Cone would spread, entering the twenty-first century as the world's largest ice cream cone manufacturer.

David Vartanian bore a different sort of cross, having lost more family members to the approach of World War I than to infection. He had booked a third-class cabin aboard the Titanic and was traveling to America ahead of his wife, Mary, hoping to build a new beginning and then to bring his life's one true love as quickly as possible out of their increasingly dangerous homeland. Putting his entire life's savings into the trip, he seemed to have stepped out of the winds of war into Armageddon at sea.

Corralled below the decks in the stern, Vartanian and the other steerage men found their path upward to the boat deck blocked by a gate. Days later, passenger Eugene Daly would report to Dr. Frank Blackmar of the rescue ship Carpathia that steerage men trying to ascend the stairs were beaten back by members of the crew, and he saw two passengers (whom he derisively referred to as “dagos”) shot.

“But the yelling and screaming above,” Vartanian's daughter Rose would tell historian Philip Dattilo in 1999, “drove several of the men to tear the gate down.” In the final half hour, some of the gate crashers had weapons in their hands, but their escape route was only an illusion. All of the lifeboats appeared to be in the process of casting away or were already gone, and Vartanian found himself trapped with hundreds of other frightened souls on the stern's well deck.

Anna Sjoblom was a third-class passenger en route to join her father at a logging camp in the Pacific Northwest. She too found the stairways to the upper decks closed against the third class, and it seemed to her that the crew really did not care whether the foreign immigrants lived or died. Fortunately, a Swedish friend of hers discovered an unguarded emergency stairway leading to the higher decks, and they were able to sneak up through the banquet halls and toward the lifeboats.

By then, hundreds of feet of empty lifeboat ropes were strewn along the boat deck. There were only two or three boats left on the davits, and they were already mostly filled and in the early stages of lowering and casting away.

“I tried to get into one boat and was pushed back,” Sjoblom would report bitterly. Women and children first, indeed. It was her eighteenth birthday. The desperation she saw at this point in the foundering of the ship was increasing to such a level that under the Lightoller protocol, even a girl who had just turned eighteen that day could be barred from the lifeboats. She watched in a state of detached disbelief as a Swedish couple and their five children kissed one another and then leaped together over the side, never to be seen again.

After this, Sjoblom forced her way onto one of the last boats going down, shortly before Lawrence Beesley made his book deal–generating leap into the stern of the same boat. During the leap, he crashed down on Sjoblom's head and nearly crushed her neck. But this was not the cruelest thing she saw or felt before boat 13 reached the water.

“I remember watching a little boy about thirteen years old whose parent had gone off in one of the lifeboats,” she would write later. “He slipped into a boat and was thrown back on deck by a sailor. He crept into another boat, and again [the sailors] threw him back to the deck. The third time he slid down into the bottom of a boat and was saved.”

Both horrified and strangely transfixed—“fascinated,” wrote Violet Jessop—“my eyes never left the ship, as if by looking I could have kept [the Titanic] afloat. I reflected that [only] four days ago I had wished to see her from afar, to be able to admire her under way; now there she was—my Titanic . . . her splendid lines [standing] against the night, every light twinkling. I started unconsciously to count the decks by the rows of lights [forward]. One, two, three, four, five; then again—one, two, three, four. I stopped. Surely I had miscounted.”

Jessop counted them again more carefully, gently hushing the whimpering baby that William Murdoch had tossed into her arms. “No,” she realized. She had made no mistake. “There were only four decks now,” Jessop would recall. She started her count again. Only three decks now.

“No,” she told herself, trying not to imagine the people she had just left—who would be warm and alive, as she and the baby were, for only a little while longer. Jessop tried to busy herself with the baby; but she could not refrain from looking up again. Only two decks now.

From the same vantage point, Lily Futrelle, the wife of mystery writer Jacques Futrelle, watched the ship's bow burying itself deeper and deeper into a dead calm sea. As she stared, the calm began to unravel. The strait of water between the forecastle and the superstructure of the bridge grew increasingly turbulent. Then the submergence of the forecastle and the rise of the propellers became a clear and present irritant to the biolumes. In death, the Titanic was creating exactly the sort of flashing display that would have illuminated the base of the iceberg and saved the ship from this fate.

“We could see the last of the two collapsible [rafts, on davits] putting away from the steamer,” Futrelle would write. “The water by this time was so close to the upper deck that it was hardly necessary to lower the raft. I tried to shut my eyes but I could not. There was a horrible fascination about it. The ocean was aflame with the glowing phosphorous, which looked like a million little spirits of light dancing their way to the horizon.”

• • •

Charlotte Collier had known from the start that the ship was in a desperate situation, but she lingered on the deck with her husband and her daughter near boat 14, as Charles Joughin and Murdoch tossed children across the portside gap and persuaded their mothers to follow and as Harold Lowe forced a schoolboy out of the same boat at gunpoint.

Eight-year-old Marjorie Collier cried and begged Lowe not to shoot the boy. Marjorie thought she had seen enough horrors for one night, beginning with the stoker who had come running onto the deck with all five fingers severed from one hand and the blood running shockingly bright against the black coal dust that carpeted his face and clothes. The stoker had assured her father, Harvey Collier, that the ship would sink. Despite his obvious state of physical distress, Murdoch commanded the fingerless man and his fellow stokers to stand back from the boat and allow passengers to be loaded aboard.

“How many unhappy men were shut off in that way I do not know,” Charlotte would write a month later. “But Mr. Murdoch was probably right.” To Charlotte, Murdoch was “a bulldog of a man who would not be afraid of anything. This proved to be true. He kept order to the last, and died at his post. They say he shot himself. I do not know.”

Joughin, Lowe, or one of the other men assisting Murdoch grabbed little Marjorie from Charlotte's arms and flung her into boat 14. Before Charlotte had time to react, a crewman grabbed her by an arm, yelling, “You too! Take a seat in that boat or it will be too late.” Charlotte tried to cling to her husband, but he broke her grip on him as a second man threw both arms around her waist and dragged her down toward her daughter and the boat.

“Go, Lotty,” Harvey shouted, as Lowe jumped in and took command of the lowering. “For God's sake, be brave and go!”

Charlotte obeyed and stayed in boat 14; on a seat plank nearby, Madeline Mellinger clung to the side of her mother's coat.

After Lowe unhooked the ropes and the boat had rowed off a short distance, Charlotte saw an iceberg looming into view, staying close to the Titanic like a faithful dog. She at first believed it must be the same berg that had caused the present calamity; then she realized that this “dog” belonged to a very large pack. Two more mountains of ice drifted out of the starlight toward her. When she looked away from the bergs, the Titanic suddenly appeared to be both horrible and beautiful at the same time, somehow taking on the qualities of “an enormous glowworm.”

Charlotte watched, hoping to recognize her husband's face up there near the davits, but all she could distinguish were shadowy groups of human figures on every deck. “They were,” she would recall, “standing with arms crossed upon their chests and with lowered heads. I am sure that they were in prayer. On the boat deck that I had just left, perhaps fifty men had come together. In the midst of them was a tall figure. This man had climbed upon a coil of rope [or other chair-high object] so that he was raised far above the rest. His hands were stretched out as if he were pronouncing a blessing.”

Moment by moment, the Titanic (which now added belches of foam and black smoke to the stirring of the biolumes) was transforming into a vision that was simultaneously volcanic and biblical—with mountains carried into the midst of the sea, the waters thereof being troubled, and the works of humanity broken and melting into the earth.

More than two hundred feet nearer than Charlotte Collier and Madeline Mellinger, boat 2 was in trouble. Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall—the navigator whose 11:40 p.m. walk toward the bridge would forever memorialize the scant seconds between the warning bells and the impact—discovered that the lifeboat was being drawn closer to the ship, despite the best efforts of his rowers. Boxhall's initial plan to find an open gangway door and take at least three more people down Jacob's ladders into boat 2 was being thwarted as much by a growing sense of time running out as by an inability to find the now submerged D-deck shell door—or any other open door. He would recall for the American examiners that the developing suction, against which he now ordered the crew and the passengers to row in full retreat, was strongest while the broad flat regions of the forecastle and the well deck were slowly gliding down.

As the forecastle and other major deck structures finally relinquished their grip on the surface and slipped underwater, they created powerful eddies accompanied by sudden gulps, by the hollow thuds of imploding compartments, and by the wholesale release of trapped air. Aroused by the developing maelstrom, Lily Futrelle's million bioluminescent points of light blazed even more strongly to life. The people of boat 14 beheld, in the boundary layer of turbulence that completely enveloped the ship's submerged head, a far brighter pixelation effect than had ever been created by a mere pod of lightning dolphins. Little Marjorie Collier and her mother looked down and could see, near the place where Georgyj Vinogradov's gorgon would take root, the image of the Titanic's prow, as clearly as one could see a pebble in a pond on a sunny day.

• • •

Between 2:00 and 2:05 a.m., just about forty minutes after the last distress rocket showered white flares over the bridge, the sea was up to Daniel Buckley's closed gate at the top of the bow section's well-deck stairs. The foremast stood out of the water like a lone sequoia tree, tilting over toward the port side.

B deck and most of the superstructure from Buckley's gate up to the bridge were still above water, but with every boat except the last collapsible having cast off from the davits, Joe Loring and George Rheims knew that the final horror would soon be approaching from the direction of the mast.

Loring took his brother-in-law's hands in his own and said, “George, if you survive, look after my babies.”

Rheims promised that if he lived, Loring would not have to worry about his family. He then told Loring to wait for a minute while he ran down two decks to his stateroom on B deck, which was still standing high and dry under the starboard side of the first smokestack. Expecting for himself nothing except death and wishing only that the one object in the world most precious to him would be found clutched close to his body, Rheims stayed in his room just long enough to pull his wife's picture from its frame and stuff it under his clothes. As he bolted up the grand stairway, the water was rising at least to the top of the stairway's D deck and onto C deck, but the greater mass of the oaken tower was still pressing down on the E deck landing with just enough force to keep the entire structure stable—for at least a few minutes longer.

When he rejoined his brother-in-law on the starboard boat deck, Rheims seemed to have developed a sense that their best chance for survival would be to jump over the side and swim as fast as they could toward one of the departing lifeboats. He understood that during a leap into the water from a height of two or three stories, the cork-filled and loose-fitting shoulder-strapped life jackets, which appeared to have been perfectly designed to parachute upward upon impact, would transform instantly into hangmen's nooses. Under “man overboard” conditions, the life jackets seemed to be a means of committing suicide by hanging oneself to avoid drowning.

Evidently, Rheims did not consider freezing to death. All he wanted to consider was how a faster, more streamlined swim toward the lifeboats might increase his chances, if only slightly, of reaching one of the boats alive, before they rowed too far away. Decreasing the weight he had to carry would shave critical seconds off his swim time, so he dropped his gold-filled money belt to the deck next to his life jacket, along with the heavy warm coat he had put on earlier. He shed his shoes and his long pants (along with the increased drag force inherent in pockets), keeping only his wife's photo tucked under the strap of his undershorts. Loring followed his example, stripping down to his shirt and undershorts and throwing his clothes to the boat deck.

The best bet they had, Rheims decided, was to walk down toward the approaching danger, jump from as low a height as possible into the water, and swim like Olympic competitors toward the nearest lifeboat. Loring hesitated, openly questioning his own swimming ability and looking pleadingly in the direction opposite the descending bow, toward the rising stern and the illusory safety of higher ground.

“There,” Loring said. “We should go all the way up to the rear of the ship.”

“That would be sure death, and you should come with me,” Rheims insisted, as the water drew nearer the front of the boat deck and the white-painted sides of the lifeboats receded deeper into the night.

On the same side of the boat deck, Jack Thayer, the seventeen-year-old whose open C-deck porthole must by now be contributing to the accelerating rate of the Titanic's sinking, was having essentially the same argument as the two men who had stripped themselves nearly naked outside the grand stairway entrance.

Thayer briefly debated with a friend whether they should attempt to fight their way toward the last boat on the front davits or slide down one of the ropes dangling from the nearest set of davits and swim after one of the partly filled lifeboats, which they could both plainly see reflected in the Titanic's lights. The chances of actually seeing the lifeboats (much less reaching them) were diminishing fast, as the electric lights began fading from whitish-yellow to red and from red toward a ruddy brown glow. Thayer's friend dissuaded him from jumping—at least for a little while. Indecisiveness maintained a powerful and often contagious grip on people.

The ship itself had been behaving with a sort of mechanical indecision since about the time the last rocket had detonated. For a few minutes—probably as the Harper stateroom and other open C-deck ports dunked under along the starboard side—the Titanic seemed to have come gradually out of its list to port and developed a slight list to starboard. Soon, however, something along Scotland Road must have given way, like an arterial wall rupturing, and allowed a new, deep interior hemorrhage to bring the list to port into full control again.

By the time water had mounted the grand stairway's C deck and commenced its climb toward the next landing, the increasing pressure on the wooden tower to float free must already have begun generating loud, visible, and undeniably frightening stress fractures along the perimeter of the stairwell.

Thayer was suddenly aware of a large crowd surging onto the front of the boat deck, shortly before Purser McElroy fired two warning shots into the air. Along with the commotion of the crowd, jostling backward from the gunshots, came a series of loud noises from inside the ship. The noises, which made Thayer think of bulkheads snapping, seemed to be herding even greater masses of people onto the deck.

When first-class passenger Hugh Woolner saw Officer Murdoch fire two warning shots into the air, he decided with his friend Bjornstrom Steffansen that running to the port side and jumping overboard might be the better part of valor. They reached boat D along with Joseph Duquemin, who was eventually branded a “steerage foreigner stowaway” by Colonel Archibald Gracie.

On the starboard side, Colonel Gracie was working with First Officer Murdoch at the boat 1 davits, helping to crank the davit heads inboard again in the hope of being able to launch one of the collapsible boats, stowed upside down on the roof behind a cat's cradle of smokestack stays. A century later, the front davit would still be standing guard in its final, cranked-in position.

Somewhere amid the cranking in of davits and the jostling and the increasing confusions of the night, Second Officer Lightoller fired off a warning shot from the roof to prevent a rush by “steerage passengers.”

During the last minutes before the ship tilted into position for the final plunge, collapsible boat A came crashing down from the roof, perfectly horizontal. On the way down, it broke most of the oars someone had leaned against the side of the officers' quarters, meaning to give the boat a smooth incline down to the deck. Gracie gave up any thoughts of trying to get away in the collapsible. Too many people were crowding around, so he decided to leave boat A to Murdoch, climb uphill toward the stern, and take his chances with what would surely be the last part of the ship going down.

During his ascent along the starboard boat deck, Gracie passed seventeen-year-old apprentice chef John Collins running downhill toward boat A with a baby in his arms and the mother trotting behind with a second child. Of this small group, only Collins would ever be seen again.

Murdoch continued to struggle with his team to pull boat A over the side on the davits, hoping to save the women standing nearby and to somehow keep a hundred people from swamping an emergency raft built to hold, at most, only sixty passengers. None of the women or children who stood near boat A's davits at this moment lived to tell what happened next, but in an evidently desperate bid to save them, Murdoch was required to fire more warning shots—which would escalate quickly into something worse.

Tennis champion Richard Norris Williams II was standing with his father outside the perimeter of the boat A crowd just before the final shots rang out. Richard's father had insisted, despite all of the signs before his eyes, that the Titanic's design principle of compartmentalization would allow the ship to settle only so far into the water and then stop sinking. Not until Captain Smith sent a crewman running and shoving a path uphill from the wheelhouse, and they saw water sweeping across the floor of the bridge from its port side, did the elder Williams express a sense of fear and begin running uphill, toward the stern. Richard followed. As he turned, the sounds of gunfire erupted behind him. He quickened his pace, choosing not to look back.

The electric lights continued to dim until they were barely, if at all, brighter than embers and coals in a campfire, but most people's eyes adapted, to one degree or another. The Titanic's lamps no longer drowned out the starlight. The stars themselves now stood out in the night like grains of bright dust as, uphill, the distant deckhouses and people gradually became vaguely outlined shapes.

Against this backbone of encroaching black, passenger Eugene Daly was near enough to the side of boat A to see what Richard Norris Williams II had heard. An officer was attempting to save the women behind him in the collapsible raft—first with warning shots into the air, then by pointing his revolver at a group of men and threatening to shoot if they dared rush toward the raft, and finally by actually shooting two of them. The crowd scrambled toward the stern, and there followed a third gunshot. When Daly looked back, he saw the officer himself lying on the deck. Passenger Carl Olof Jansen could not tell whether any passengers had been shot, but he glanced to one side just in time to see the officer in charge of boat A's launch putting the revolver to his own head and pulling the trigger.

Rheims witnessed the shooting of at least one passenger by a discharge from an officer's revolver, and while everyone around the mostly naked Rheims either fled or stood in shock, providing the people in boat A with just a few seconds more in which to attempt a safe launch, Rheims saw the officer give a military salute and shoot himself.

Moments later, boat A's davits began to slip beneath the surface, its ropes pulling the boat down with them in a sudden upsurge of icy black water that washed everyone who had been standing behind Murdoch out of the boat. Seconds after that, Rheims too went under, and he never did see his brother-in-law Joe Loring again.

Apprentice chef Collins did not get near enough to boat A to even attempt saving the mother and children he was escorting toward Murdoch. As boat A went under, he was struck by a wall of water glutted with people and debris. It taught him the incomparable horror of having a child torn out of one's arms.

Deep below, the bulkhead at the front of boiler room number 4 had resisted twice the height of water that broke the damaged bulkhead between boiler room numbers 5 and 6. The dam had by now taken all the pressure it could hold.

The rupture—the probable cause of the boat-deck wave—occurred about 2:10 a.m. Once boiler room number 4 was filled, the final stage in the cascade effect took command of the night. The boilers in room numbers 4 and 3 shared all of their vents, joined in an upside-down branching pattern, inside the second smokestack. Once boiler room number 4 collapsed and overflowed, water spilled over the branch at the E-deck junction into the boilers in the next compartment back, and out the boilers' mouths.

If the watertight doors had by then been used to seal the bulkhead between boiler room numbers 3 and 4, the doors were, against the multiple geysers in boiler room number 3, as ineffective as valves against a major arterial rip. The only event that could now slow the bleeding toward the stern, albeit only slightly, was the tendency of water that had already pooled behind the second funnel to rush forward as the bow section suddenly angled down more steeply.

Thayer had heard what sounded and felt to him like a deep interior thud, a seemingly explosive force muffled by many intervening decks. The thud and the wave were consistent with the implosion of an entire boiler room, manifested as a sudden loss of buoyancy that pitched the deck down toward the flooded chambers of the bow, initially to an angle of about fifteen degrees.

Thayer also believed, during this final phase of the sinking, that the list to port briefly began to even out—intensifying the strength and volume of water being drawn onto the starboard deck. The wave gave Thayer the false impression of a ship that had suddenly started moving forward, and from above him came a rumbling roar that gave him the further and all too realistic impression of “standing under a steel railway bridge while an express train passes overhead, mingled with the noise of a pressed steel factory and wholesale breakage of china.”

Not very far from where he stood, the breaking of glass and steel overhead would have been precisely the sounds guaranteed to accompany the grand stairway's breaking free, coming apart, and beginning to push upward through the crystal dome.

When Thayer finally leaped over the starboard side, the sea was almost level with the roof of the bridge and the crow's nest. Water was only seconds away from the base of the first smokestack. Watching from boat D, quartermaster Arthur Bright noticed that even though the lights along the stern were still blazing, the windows, portholes, and deck lamps had all but faded from existence in the front half of the ship, leaving Thayer with little more than shadows by which to interpret what he saw happening between the first and second smokestacks.

From at least as far back as the third smokestack, the Titanic seemed to be surrounded by a glare that stood out in the night as though the stern were coming alive with St. Elmo's fire tinted red. The contrast between the heavenly glow aft and the shadows it threw across the forward part of the ship stopped Thayer from swimming away and held him transfixed to the spot. The piercing cold of the water had suddenly lost its power to shock or frighten him.

He was now more fascinated than afraid. The Titanic had been transforming before his eyes into a horror, yet it was now also, paradoxically, spellbinding. Thayer could no more look away from the ship than he could turn from the stare of a cobra.

As boat A tore free from its davits and popped to the surface, the rumble and roar of parting steel, breaking glass, and cracking wood became louder and more distinct. In the shadowy front of the ship, between the first two smokestacks, Thayer believed he saw the superstructure break. Something buckled and blew upward near the first smokestack. A huge dark shape seemed to be rising on its haunches, like a volcanic island trying to be born. What Thayer probably witnessed was the emergence of the grand stairway.

Thayer's friend Richard Williams was still moving uphill along the boat deck with his father, having managed to slow the elder Williams's panicked pace, just before the ship began its sudden lurch downward and swept them up in a wave. “I turned toward the bow,” Williams would write later. “I saw nothing but water with a mast sticking out of it. I don't remember the shock of the cold water. I only remember thinking, ‘suction,' and my efforts to swim in the direction of the starboard rail to get away from the ship.”

Before he could move more than five breaststrokes from the starboard boat deck, Williams believed he felt the deck rushing forward and rising up beneath him. What he believed was all a matter of relative perspective. What he actually felt was a rush of water and debris carrying him backward and dropping him onto the deck somewhere behind the second or third smokestack.

Williams and his father were suddenly able to stand—suddenly high and dry. He would later record, “My father was not more than twelve or fifteen feet away from me.”

Underfoot, the flood within the ship was forcing bursts of trapped air up to the surface along with great masses of cracked oak. Every grain of coal dust that had clung inside the vents from the first four chambers of boilers appeared to be breaking loose—either to be jetted out through the tops of the stacks or to be sent gurgling up through the intake vents at their bases. The dust and the black mist spread out horizontally in distinct layers over the sea, breaking the glare from astern into eerie red streamers of light and shadow.

One of the two forward smokestacks buckled at its base and leaned suddenly to one side just as Richard Williams recognized his father among the shadows and began moving toward him.

At precisely that moment, Williams would record for historians, “I saw one of the four great funnels come crashing down on top of him. Just for one instant, I stood there transfixed—not because it had only missed me by a few feet; curiously enough not because it had killed my father, for whom I had more than a normal feeling of love and attachment; but there I was transfixed, wondering at the enormous size of this funnel, still belching smoke.”