14

The Truth about William Murdoch

SEPTEMBER 2001
RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH
EXPEDITION TITANIC XIII

During an April 1962 lunch with Walter Lord, Richard Norris Williams II said that he had more of a grandstand view than he'd have wanted of the Titanic's last minutes. Finally, he struck out swimming, kicking off his shoes and trying to shed his thick overcoat to gain speed, and he came to believe that he had traveled nearly a mile from the starboard side.

Yet when he turned around, he saw that for all his efforts, he had actually put no more than a hundred feet between himself and the monster. Despite the horror and the peril, he could not help feeling that the Titanic was a majestic sight. The bow continued to angle down, seeming to pivot around a center of rotation behind the place where the second smokestack had been. For every one degree down that the bow angled, the glowing stern angled up one degree, raising the golden propellers into the air, the equivalent of nearly four city blocks away.

Eventually, Williams saw a large, shadowy figure up ahead: collapsible boat A, with its canvas sides torn. Others approached the floating shadow. They kicked and fought to climb aboard. Williams was among the stronger ones. He managed to scramble inside with Carl Olof Jansen and George Rheims, both of whom had been rather closer to boat A minutes earlier, when it was filled with women and children and Williams had heard the crack of a revolver shot.

Among the people who scrambled aboard the risen wreck of the last boat, there seemed to be a certain historic significance in the fact that the three who reported those final minutes of pandemonium and gunfire at the forward davits—Williams, Jansen, and Rheims—were able to prove their proximity to the event by actually being found aboard boat A. A fourth witness, Eugene Daly, was found aboard the upside-down wreck of boat B, and he too had been near William Murdoch in the end.

Walter Lord and I believed it most significant that the Daly and Rheims accounts were memorialized in letters to wives and sisters before the rescue ship Carpathia landed in New York; these were not sensationalistic newspaper reports based on hearsay. The witnesses were consistent in their stories about an officer who shot men attempting to lead a rush on the last starboard lifeboat and who afterward demonstrated that he would not take a space of his own in the boat by shooting himself. It seemed to Lord most revealing of all that the Daly letter was penned by a third-class passenger—“describing exactly the same incident” yet coming from a man who would not have personally known the first-class passenger, Rheims. Partly as a result of our narrow focus on the last three minutes of Murdoch's life—a focus that continued through the 1996 expedition—Jim Cameron had incorporated the Rheims and Daly accounts into his 1997 film, Titanic. The evidence was historically sound, but it told only a small part of the story—and in such manner that I had committed a grievous wrong against Murdoch.

Shortly before the thirteenth Titanic expedition, historian Paul Quinn completed the much overdue and much required homework of following, through an exhaustive study of the British and American Titanic inquiries of 1912, Murdoch's movements throughout the night. The first officer was seen front and starboard, launching boats and making sure they were filled to capacity, and he was also seen rear and starboard and rear and portside doing the same thing.

In contrast to the injunctions that separated women from their adolescent sons and their husbands, creating the heartbreaking gridlock that John Astor had tried to stop, and that caused Celiney Yasbeck's boat to be lowered hurriedly and half empty, Murdoch made repeated efforts to fill the boats and prevent gridlock by any means necessary. Charles Joughin and a small crew of cooks and stewards helped Murdoch to literally hurl women and children into the boats—along with the husbands and fathers.

Jim Cameron and Don Lynch were impressed with the Quinn analysis of Murdoch's efficiency, especially compared to the half-empty boats launched from the front port side under the Lightoller/Lowe injunctions. “And here's Murdoch,” Cameron said, reviewing dive video of the boat A davit head. “Here's Murdoch, getting the boats in the water as quick as he can, shoving men in, women, children—first class, third class—he didn't care. Almost two-thirds of everyone who [got away in the boats and] survived had Murdoch to thank for it.” And I should have known better had I looked deeper.

In 1995, Susanne Stormer published her biography of First Officer William Murdoch. The Titanic was not Murdoch's first encounter with disaster, and he had a history of holding up selflessly in the worst of times, putting the many others aboard a ship ahead of himself without regard for the personal consequences.

Nine years before the Titanic, Murdoch was second officer aboard the White Star Line's Arabic. Charles Lightoller was on the bridge when Murdoch and one of the Arabic's lookouts sighted the light of another vessel, ahead on the port side. Murdoch ran onto the bridge just as the chief officer commanded the bow to be turned hard to the starboard side, but Murdoch saw, looming out of the dark, the expanding dimensions of a much larger sailing vessel than had originally been presumed. So he countermanded the order. Simultaneously, he pushed a quartermaster away from the ship's wheel and took the helm himself.

“According to Lightoller,” Stormer wrote, “everyone on the bridge was looking for a safe place, because the sailing ship came closer and closer—and there was the danger of the yards crashing on the bridge of the Arabic—while Murdoch stood at the helm, completely cool, and not moving the wheel or even himself an inch.” The Arabic missed the other vessel by what witnesses on the bridge called “a very close thing,” but there was general agreement that Murdoch had prevented the White Star Line's newest ship from smashing its bow straight into a multimasted sailing ship.

In spite of his direct disobedience of a senior officer (which in those days was next of kin to mutiny), Murdoch was only temporarily transferred to a less prestigious ship, the Celtic. It was clear that management appreciated the significance of Murdoch's lifesaving action. They saw in him a man who, even if he feared responsibility, did not shirk it. He was quick to react and could be counted on to handle himself very well when havoc threatened.

Only in the last few sentences of her book did Stormer focus on Murdoch's last three minutes of life. “He had to fight a personal fight,” she wrote. “He had to suppress his will to stay alive. He had to go down with the Titanic like countless other people, among them many old shipmates and friends. Murdoch had been senior officer of the watch when the collision occurred, and his desperate maneuver to avoid an accident [had] failed. With this, he had a part of the responsibility, and this meant he had to stay with the ship. There was no other way and there was no escape for him. If hell really did exist, Murdoch must have gone right through it during the last two hours and forty minutes of the Titanic.”

And so, on a September evening in 2001, I crouched inside the steel shell of the Mir-2, looking out across time to a cold April night, toward the cranked-in davit where Murdoch had made his stand. Everything marine archaeologist John Broadwater, pilot Victor Nescheta, and I were doing was (from Murdoch's point in time) far beyond the science fiction of Jules Verne.

From Murdoch's point in time, we of the Keldysh were living and breathing somewhere between fantasy and the shape of things to come, descending in contraptions of steel, Plexiglas, and blazing light. Lifting off from the boat deck and landing on the roof of the officers' quarters, we watched the Mir-1 dispatch the robot Jake, which glided down into the grand stairwell. Viewed through imaginations that lived in two time frames, Jake seemed to pass with contemptuous indifference through spaces once occupied by people, on its way to more important concerns in the reception rooms and the rusticle caverns.

It was dinnertime aboard the Keldysh when we came to rest on a ragged patch of deck where hermit crabs now roamed toward the grand stairway crater. In my mind's eye, the specter of Murdoch was still out there, eighty-nine years earlier, doing whatever was necessary, as the deck began to slip away, to give the women at his back a few seconds more to get the ropes undone and push themselves away in the last lifeboat. There were, at that moment, barely more than fifty seats at Murdoch's back for fifteen hundred people still aboard.

In this replay of history, the decks still seemed alive as I turned away from the viewport and penned a promise on the title page of Stormer's book.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2001
ON BOARD RMS TITANIC

To First Officer William Murdoch:

A wise archaeologist named Trude Dothan once told me that we (we who stroll through the cellars of time) are the biggest storytellers in the world—that we have become speakers for the dead; simply that. Nothing more. Nothing less. But we are more than that, and I believe [my friends] and I have done you wrong, William McMaster Murdoch—done you wrong by focusing on the last [three] minutes of your life without realizing that [nearly] 75% of the people who got away from this place owed their lives to you. I, especially [committed a wrong against you]—for I painted less than half of your face and asked the world to guess from that the measure of the whole man. [Someday,] I will correct this picture. Trude was wrong. [Archaeology] is not so simple as telling stories about the dead. We must keep a faith with the dead—and I've a faith to keep with you, Mr. Murdoch.

Your friend, in time. C. R. P.

Earlier that day, during our flight over the port side of the stern, the terrain below lay so flattened and distorted that we found it difficult to distinguish between the launch points of boats 14 and 16. What we could discern and what we did understand was that some ten meters (almost 11 yards) below us, at the top of a portside wall of steel that was now stretched out almost perfectly horizontal across the sea floor, Annie Robinson, Violet Jessop, and the baby thrown into Violet's arms had been among the many who were saved by Murdock's actions.

From a vantage point equivalent to two or three city blocks away, in boat 16, it seemed to Jessop that the ship was taking “a sudden lurch forward,” an inevitable illusion created by the dipping of the bow, the simultaneous rising of the stern, and the wave running back along the boat deck. The sudden motion gave the liner the false appearance that it had come alive again and was driving ahead, trying (unsuccessfully) to shunt great quantities of seawater off to the starboard and port sides. Before Jessop could even begin to interpret the illusion, one of the smokestacks toppled off as though it had been nothing more than a huge cardboard model, “falling into the water with a fearful roar.”

Sauce chef George Harris, another person saved by Murdoch, sat in boat 11 with Maude Slocomb, who tried to comfort the baby someone had put into her arms, but Slocomb's nerves were becoming increasingly frayed by the dying ship and by the constant ringing of an alarm clock some woman had judged important enough to bring aboard the lifeboat.

“Shut it off!” Slocomb hollered, adding, “You old bitch.”

The woman was neither old nor a bitch, and the alarm clock was not an alarm clock. Boat 11 had more children aboard than most of the others, and Edith Russell was sitting on the gunwale, winding the tail of her musical toy pig, playing the Maxisie and trying to keep the children's attention diverted from the ship.

A mile away, in boat 13, nine-week-old Millvina Dean had started to cry when her bare feet were exposed from beneath the blanket in which she had been wrapped. Ellen Phillips, the daughter of Kate Phillips and Henry Morley (“the Marshalls”) was almost nine months away from being born on the night her mother took her turn among the women who cradled and comforted baby Millvina.

Unlike Millvina, Ellen was destined for a life of neglect by a mother who was to become increasingly unbalanced and (in the best of times) distant. For Ellen, the saddest cut of all was to learn one day that Millvina was cradled and cared for by “Mrs. Marshall”—and by almost every other woman in boat 13. Ellen would eventually grow up to resent the tiniest Titanic survivor, unable to understand how her mother treated a stranger's child, however briefly, like her own adored infant but then treated her own daughter like a stranger.