18

Frailty

Sooner or later it was bound to happen: the convergence of improbable events compounded by a series of improbable errors. Almost without exception, no single improbable error or event causes complex systems to fail, and that is the frightening part.

In 1995 a U.S. exploratory satellite, launched into the aurora borealis over the North Pole, dropped booster stages and probes of just the right size and in just the right sequence to give Russian radar the precise impression that a first-strike high-altitude missile had dropped multiple intercontinental reentry vehicles (resembling hydrogen bomb capsules), including the inevitable EMP (electromagnetic pulse) precursor weapon, which is meant to knock out Russian electronics. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had notified the Russian space agency far in advance of the launch, but no one had passed the word along from the space agency to the Russian military, and no one at NASA had requested confirmation that the word had been passed along.

Russian military analysts, watching what appeared to be the signature of an American MIRV, knew that their country might be crippled in a matter of minutes and then incinerated if they did not act quickly. Russian president Boris Yeltsin was informed and was shown the tracking data. He declined to order a counter nuclear strike. Yeltsin had been around long enough to know that complex systems, and especially chains of communication, failed. During this latter part of civilization's nuclear adolescence, an iceberg for all humanity was seen in a perfectly aligned trajectory, the deuterium-tipped weapons in the earth were the worst approximations of open portholes and shell doors, and a civilization's last bulkhead was primed for collapse. But the iceberg was seen and avoided—that time.

Practically the very last chance the Titanic had was a warning from the Californian, almost directly ahead and surrounded by ice. Wireless operator Jack Phillips had cut the Californian's Marconi operator off, and he neither took the message nor passed it along to the bridge. The Californian's Marconi operator—near exhaustion in the first place and obeying the Titanic's order to “shut up” in the second place—shut down his wireless apparatus, went to sleep, and missed the distress calls that shortly followed.

The Titanic would have needed to cross the Atlantic for more than a century and perhaps for as long as a thousand years before the lining up of so many low-probability events became a mathematical inevitability. What the ship's builders and officers did not understand was that the odds of drawing two royal flushes in a row are the same in the first two hands of poker as in any two hands in the next two million. The maiden voyage was a lesson in risk assessment, demonstrating the frailty of civilization itself, written in microcosm.

• • •

In his 1936 account, Charles Lightoller wrote that during the very last minute leading up to the final plunge, he and several men working beside him were trying to push one of the collapsible boats off the roof of the officers' quarters and down to the port side deck when he heard the familiar voice of lamp trimmer Samuel Hemming. Lightoller had ordered Hemming away more than an hour earlier, in command of Molly Brown's and Celiney Yasbeck's boat 6. By now, the entire forward part of the ship had become too dark to recognize Hemming by anything other than his voice.

“Hello, is that you, Hemming?” Lightoller asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Why haven't you gone?”

With a perplexing tone of cheer and optimism, Hemming replied, “Oh, plenty of time yet, sir,” seconds before a sudden surge of water reached the roof and sent him racing both the sea and the eruption of the grand stairway toward a safe jumping-off point, where he could swim toward boat 4. Evidently, Hemming decided that burying himself in work and denial could serve him only so much before it became necessary to admit that there really was not plenty of time after all.

• • •

Lightoller noticed that the crow's nest was descending to a point almost level with the sea when the roof of the bridge slipped under and sent Hemming racing aft. In that moment, the ship took a slight but definitely steeper plunge down toward the bow—“and the sea came rolling up in a wave.”

Lightoller's description of the relative depths of the bridge and the crow's nest during the 2:10 a.m. surge was a key observation, setting in place a critical time marker for the sequence of the Titanic's final plunge and providing the angle of the entire ship at this moment—as a line drawn through the base of the crow's nest and the submerging bridge.

Lightoller was now in water so cold that it stung like the tips of a thousand knives digging in at once. Stunned, he began swimming instinctively toward the abandoned crow's nest with the thought of hauling himself out of the freezing water and into what he soon realized was only the illusory safety of a cage riveted to the descending foremast.

Reminding himself about the futility of climbing aboard and clinging to anything attached to the Titanic's bow, Lightoller turned right as the crow's nest gulped under. He tried to swim toward the starboard side of the now vanished well deck and forecastle, but something appeared to be dragging him down, making it increasingly difficult for the second officer to even keep his head above water. He thought of the heavy revolver still at his side, withdrew it, and dropped it down toward the well deck. The loss of weight did not seem to help very much.

Every stroke and kick away from the ship was canceled by a force drawing him two or three strokes back toward it and trying to pull him down. In what seemed almost no time at all, he was swimming over his starting point, the submerged bridge.

Behind the bridge, at the front of the first smokestack's base, a twenty-foot-wide air intake—which had been designed to face forward in the Titanic's direction of motion (into the wind)—was now scooping down tons of rushing water instead of air. It scooped Lightoller down as well, holding him against a wire grating originally installed only to prevent airborne bits of paper, the occasional bird, or a wayward child about Alfred Rush's size from finding ingress.

Lightoller feared a failure of the grating; he, along with the tons of inrushing water, was far beyond anything for which the barrier had been designed. He imagined a sheer drop all the way down to the front boiler rooms, but by now the decks below had been flooding steadily for more than two hours, and only the upper two or three stories of the shaft were flooding, in a torrent not likely to have been capable of lasting more than a minute. Lightoller kicked and struggled but was dragged back again against the grating for what understandably seemed to him a very long time. A stall in the flow allowed a tremendous surge of air to blast up through the shaft, more or less “burping” the second officer to the surface.

A final inflow of water drew him down against another grating, abreast of the smokestack, about the time the two forward smokestacks began to cave in at their bases and fall. Again a burst of escaping air seemed to blow him free, “coughing” him up along the starboard side, next to the overturned boat B, which he and Hemming had launched from the port side and which had somehow come over with Lightoller to the starboard side, near one of the front funnels (possibly number 2, the funnel that fell to starboard and killed Richard Williams's father).

“Then the forward funnel fell down,” Lightoller would tell Senator Smith. “It fell alongside the lifeboat,” he would explain; it fell seemingly only inches clear of the boat and right among the people struggling in the water, between boat B and the submerged bridge.

“Injure any of them seriously?” Senator Smith asked, in what Lightoller supposed, under less tragic circumstances, would have been a question designed to provoke laughter.

One effect of the smokestack crashing down so near to the overturned boat was to generate a wave that washed over and pushed the raft, as Lightoller clung to one of its ropes a full 150 feet away from the sinking ship.

Jack Thayer was also in the water with Lightoller, near boat B, when a smokestack fell. He believed it was the second smokestack that fell toward him, while structures much farther back, including the last two smokestacks, continued to stand. Thayer would recall that the fall of the second smokestack was preceded by the loudest wrenching and tearing he had heard yet; the superstructure (the upper deck, the gymnasium, and the region around the grand stairway) became deformed before his eyes into large, dark shapes that seemed to “blow or buckle upward.” The lights in front of the second smokestack were dead or dying by this time. What he probably saw was the approximately synchronous collapse of the first smokestack—off toward the port side—and the rise of the grand stairway amid the turbulence and gushes of air that blew Lightoller to the surface.

Eugene Daly, the passenger from third class who had witnessed shootings on the boat deck, was swept overboard, disoriented and in a state of disbelief. Like Lightoller, having spent part of the first two minutes of the Titanic's final plunge with his head underwater, Daly would recall for Dr. Blackmar of the rescue ship Capathia, “Everything I touched seemed to be women's hair.” Whenever his head broke the surface, he heard children crying. “Women screaming,” he told the doctor, “and their hair in my face.

“My God,” he lamented, “if I could only forget those hands and faces that I touched.”

The only thing worse than the screaming and crying, the hair, and the hands and faces, was what Daly saw when he reached Lightoller's position at the overturned boat B. He looked back toward the Titanic's starboard profile in bewilderment, trying to interpret what his eyes were seeing. Between the moment Daly entered the water and the moment he reached boat B, the second smokestack had fallen nearby, and the reinforced cylindrical rim at its base must have already begun descending with the Titanic like an express elevator. Daly looked back to see people swimming away from where the crystal dome and the second smokestack's base had been. He saw them dragged backward and sucked down into the two forward cavities.

• • •

By the time Lightoller climbed atop the upturned keel of boat B, the sea had already reached the compass tower and eaten the roof of the first-class lounge. The stern section was still alight like a giant glowworm, its rudder and bronze propellers pivoting high above a center of mass located just in front of the third smokestack.

Almost two decades later, Lightoller would tell young Walter Lord that the people clinging to the high ground near and beyond the third smokestack started crying out to one another and to the sea. The bow had now completely submerged below him, and the rising stern was fifty yards away from boat B. He could hear some of the cries quite clearly. What Lightoller could never forget, he told the historian, were the cries of “I love you.”

Almost eighty years after that, another emerging historian named Anthony El-Khouri, reading about Lightoller's words to Lord, felt a profound sadness for Lightoller. “It's even more upsetting when you consider that Lightoller was the one who forced couples apart that night,” he wrote. “I wonder how it affected him, to hear people say that. I cannot imagine his sorrow, on the receiving end of a call like that.”

• • •

Climbing atop the same piece of wreckage that was about to become Lightoller's command, Thayer looked back and discovered that there was still something violently entrancing and dreadfully beautiful about the monster. Boat B was fifty to sixty yards away when Thayer reached it, but a current seemed to be drawing the two men nearer the stern, which lifted at a slow and stately pace, “seemingly in no hurry,” Thayer would write later. It amazed him that the rear funnel, leaning forward at an increasingly crazy angle, was still being held in place and did not fall.

Now, with its tip standing nearly two hundred feet overhead, the funnel held, but not all of the people did. Thayer saw them clinging in clusters of dozens and hundreds, “like swarming bees,” only to begin jumping from the sides or sliding down the deck in pairs or singly—then increasingly in masses, as the angle steepened beyond twenty-five degrees (an angle at which standing became impossible, unless one happened to be clinging to a rail or a bollard).

Third-class passenger August Wennerstrom was amid the swarm that Thayer observed from boat B. Unable to maintain his balance, Wennerstrom slid all the way into the water. Shocked by a painfully cold sea and surprised not to have skidded into an obstruction and broken half the bones in his body, Wennerstrom swam forward, toward the place where the bow had been. He wanted only to put some distance between himself and the debris and the people spilling toward him from astern, like tons of coal down a chute. Somewhere among ascending planks, the descending compass tower, the avalanche from astern, and the bursts of air from below, an eddy brought him alongside the half-sunken wreck of boat A, which seemed, at that moment, to be bumping precariously against the curved hull of a capsized ship that turned out to be the last visible remnant of a collapsed and sinking forward funnel.

Within sight of Wennerstrom and boat A, George Rheims had managed to free himself from a mass of deck chairs entangled in ropes—more than three hundred feet of rope that had been unfurled onto the deck from each lifeboat lowered on the davits. Rheims hauled himself into the wreck of boat A in only his underwear and a thin shirt, then stood knee-deep in water that was 28 degrees Fahrenheit and looked around. He never saw his brother-in-law again.

Tennis star Richard Williams, whose father was most likely beneath the smokestack August Wennerstrom had watched descending beneath boat A, followed Wennerstrom and Rheims into boat A. They were joined by two women, evidently mother and daughter. Wennerstrom soon discovered that all sense of feeling was leaving his legs, and as a cold-induced delirium spread through him, he started reaching down obsessively into the water to make sure he still had legs. The delirium became contagious, and the other men began searching for their feet. The young girl who had climbed aboard died—whether from her injuries, the shocking cold, or a combination of both, there seemed no way of knowing. Then the mother gave up, and they were both dead, clutched in each other's arms.

• • •

Albert Moss had long ago accepted the fact that this was indeed turning out to be his second shipwreck in four months. The reality that the Titanic would be far worse than the sinking of the Hebe dawned a bit more slowly, and he did not completely accept it until he slid into the water and struck out in the general direction of Thayer and Lightoller, toward boat B.

Behind Moss, on the last funnel—which vented fumes from the kitchen stoves and other auxiliary equipment but had otherwise merely been added to give the ship a more powerful, streamlined appearance—equipment oiler Alfred White emerged through a door onto a small platform, on what was known to the crew as “the dummy funnel.” White's journey was already among the rarest and most eventful of the night. About the time that coal trimmer Thomas Patrick Dillon was instructed to leave the engine room and save his own life, chief electricial engineer William Parr told White, “We are going to start one more engine,” and he sent White to the main electrical switch box to assist with the switch-over.

The switch-over was probably accomplished by about 1:30 a.m. If water was entering through an extension of the crack chief baker Joughin had seen and heard developing on E deck about that same time, it had not reached White's region of the engine compartments when he made the switch-over. White would recall in a letter to Parr's brother-in-law that his team continued to work and to provide power for the generators, as though nothing was particularly out of the ordinary. They simply locked the collision out of conscious thought—“as if nothing had happened.”

One of the enduring enigmas of the night would become the steam source for the generator engines mentioned by White. All of the boiler rooms, from number 6 all the way back to number 2, had been shut down, with most of their steam already vented by the time Parr sent White to the switch box. The only power that should have been available for the electric turbines was residual steam in the rear boilers.

When Jim Cameron filmed the exposed furnace end caps in the bow section's boiler room number 2, he found, as expected, that they did not crack under exposure to freezing water but bent slowly inward under increasing water pressure—in a manner consistent with boilers that had been emptied of steam, hot water, and coal and that had been dead cold for more than an hour.

Marine engineer Parks Stephenson, when he turned Cameron's high-definition cameras on the single-ended boilers that had spilled out of boiler room number 1, discovered that at least one of three furnace faces on each boiler was fractured and bent outward—suggestive of hot steel that cracked when cold water was first poured upon it, near the surface. Unlike boiler room number 2, he observed, the end caps on the single-ended boilers appeared normal, as though sudden cracking had pierced the thick steel and allowed water to enter and equalize the pressure before deeper waters could squeeze and deform the cylinder from the outside. “The fractured furnace fronts on the single-ended boilers, then [though exposed to essentially the same physical destruction as the boilers in boiler room number 2], might contradict our conventional wisdom that the boilers in boiler room number 1 were cold iron when the ship sank. If they were lit [and active] at the time boiler room number 1 was torn apart [along with the aft end of boiler room number 2], then they were either lit before the collision (which would contradict eyewitness testimony) or possibly brought up afterward with the intention of supplying service steam.” White's instructions from Parr to start one more generator very late in the sinking would prove consistent with what Stephenson observed nearly a century later.

White continued to work closely with Parr and two other men, named Peter Sloan and Archie Frost, until the entire engineering team felt the ship angle down suddenly, as though the Titanic had started moving again, and lurch strongly enough to throw them off their feet.

Lightoller was probably beginning his swim toward the sinking crow's nest when Parr and Sloan decided that the equipment would continue functioning for as long as the Titanic lasted without needing any oiling or maintenance from White. “It looks like we'll be putting in a little extra time on this one,” someone joked, and then Parr said, “Alfred, go up and see how things are going on, then come and tell us.”

The slant of the deck had increased so quickly that White encountered difficulty simply in climbing up the turbine room ladder. Near the third-class quarters he found the path to the boat deck blocked by a closed gate. Passengers were gathered on the other side in prayer. He watched for a moment, trying to figure out what he should do, then decided that the only way to carry out Parr's request was to continue upward—and the only way up was through a ladder in the dummy funnel.

About the same time that Lightoller reached the overturned boat B, White threw open the doorway and looked down from the fourth smokestack. The first thing he noticed was that all of the lifeboats were gone and that the second funnel was sinking. He should never have been aware of the second funnel's condition, much less be able to see it, if in fact it was still standing. From a perspective halfway up the centerline of the fourth smokestack, the second one would have been blocked completely from view by the third. What White probably witnessed was the final crumpling and sinking, to starboard, of the second smokestack.

From the moment Robert Ballard's team began mapping the wreck site, there would be little doubt about what White believed he witnessed next. A crevice opened up below him, spanning port and starboard in an instant, between his perch and the third smokestack. The lights snapped off, then flicked on again, revealing to him what appeared to be a clean cut—“as if by a butcher's blade”—and revealing to him also, by even the briefest return of the lights, that Parr and the other engineers were still working at their stations. “And so would I have been,” White told himself, “if they had not sent me up.”

His impression was that the front half of the ship was being cut loose. He saw people below, surging together as shadowy masses over the tops of deck structures or clinging in groups of twos and threes to ropes and davits. Disintegration was upon them all. The third funnel began to crash forward, and the fourth funnel—his funnel—crumpled at its base and swung suddenly back.

• • •

Chief baker Charles Joughin had continued to follow “doctor's orders” to drink himself unconscious after he saw the last lifeboat safely away on the davits. In the pantry of the Café Parisian, he again encountered old Dr. Will O'Loughlin, who likewise never expected to get through this night alive and seemed to be rummaging around for something with which to “fortify” himself. Joughin found whiskey. He never did learn what the doctor found.

In future decades, historian Walter Lord would come to regard Joughin as “sort of like the horse-and-carriage cab drivers of San Francisco” in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake. A number of people who survived the quake, including Martha (Eustis) Stephenson of the Titanic, told the historian how the cab drivers, on their own initiative, had organized much of the rescue operation that safely evacuated people from the spreading fires, whereas those in positions of authority generally failed in their leadership abilities when havoc struck.

Here too, Lord observed, whereas the manager ducked into a lifeboat and the men in command of all but two of the lifeboats refused to row back to the Titanic and rescue people struggling in the water, Parr's crewmen stayed at their posts until survival became an impossibility; the ship's two doctors, architect Thomas Andrews, and Joughin also “came to the fore, helped people into the lifeboats, and refused seats for themselves even though they were offered space repeatedly.”

Shortly before White ascended the dummy funnel, Joughin locked the bakery's iron pantry door and stuffed the heavy iron keys into his pocket alongside two cakes of hard tobacco. In later years he would look back with curiosity at what he had done and what he had chosen to save in his pockets during what he truly believed would be his final minutes of life. “It made no sense,” he would say later. “But that was because God made the Irish perfect. And then he gave us whiskey.”

In the end, after the work of warning and rescue was, for all practical purposes, finished, Joughin leaned against a pantry wall that was tilting more and more steeply toward the bow, and he used the increasing tilt to help him tip his last drink, “bottoms up.” Then, without warning, the whole progression of the tilt appeared to be interrupted by a crash, as though the ship had just run into (and through) a giant brick wall, started to buckle, or both. Drunk as Joughin was, he could clearly distinguish the sound of large masses of iron parting and even cracking and granulating. Immediately, the sound was accompanied by hundreds of people stampeding toward the rear, as though trying to get away from something they had seen happening in front. The floor seemed no longer to be angling down toward a final plunge; it was instead being levered backward, to become an almost level floor again.

Joughin ran outside to see what was happening. He was surprised most of all to discover that there was still a ruddy orange glow of light by which to see—bright enough to read the dials on his watch, ticking just beyond a quarter past two. The growing herd of panic-driven humanity became so alarming to the baker that all he could think of was to steer clear of them and try to pull himself outboard along the starboard rail. This was when the Titanic's severed stern section suddenly keeled over onto its port side and threw everybody downhill and away from the baker. Then, unbelievably, the base of the fourth smokestack crumpled, and the entire structure seemed about to follow after the sliding crowds, threatening to pull the stern even more forcefully over to port.

Looking backward in time, Walter Lord would conclude, “Charles Joughin possessed a marvelous sense of balance”—which even an attempt to drink himself into a painkilling stupor before the final plunge could not diminish. As everyone else slid down toward the port side and into the sea, Joughin hauled himself over the starboard rail and began alternately strolling and crab-walking along the actual side of the severed stern.

• • •

Thomas Patrick Dillon, who had been working deep below the third and fourth smokestacks, among the four-story reciprocating engines at 11:40 p.m., and who had assisted with the opening of watertight doors all the way forward to boiler room number 4, was by now completely disoriented. First, the Titanic seemed to have been taking the coal trimmer and everyone who stood near him on the stern section's well deck down into an accelerating, nose-first plunge. Then the deck seemed to have stalled and righted itself again, but before Dillon could exhale a sigh of relief or grab onto a slim hope that compartmentalization was going to work after all, the funnel on which Alfred White was perched lurched toward him.

From that moment onward, Dillon's whole world tilted irrationally, and he was dragged down beneath what he believed to be at least two fathoms (twelve feet) of water. When he surfaced and looked around, Dillon thought he was seeing the whole Titanic coming up again, but it was only the stern's starboard side rising near him. Then the front part of the wreck began to rattle and shift downward, hoisting the after-bridge and the propellers against a night sky. There were no longer any brightly lit masts and deck spaces, only starlight against stark blackness.

Swimming near Dillon, or clinging somewhere above him on the silhouette of the stern, Henry Sutehall Jr. must have been wondering, like Joe Loring, how he came to be anywhere near this disaster in the first place. A major victory in a contest of musical skills had allowed Sutehall and his friend Howard Irwin to complete the rest of their around-the-world adventure more or less “in style.” Both men were musicians who had begun their journey in 1910, from Buffalo, New York.

Irwin, however, often fell prey to a tendency to get distracted at quick notice by one political movement or another. And so, typically, while Sutehall developed his musical skills and found his first true love in Australia, Irwin diverged north and, as his diaries recorded, became involved with the revolutionary leader whom Henry Sleeper Harper's dog was named after—Sun Yat Sen—giving whatever assistance he could to Chinese forces in the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty and ultimately the downfall of the last emperor.

Sutehall, meanwhile, won a sweepstakes in Australia. The money was more than enough for them to meet again in England and complete the trip homeward aboard the Titanic. More important, the winnings were enough for Sutehall to complete his musical training, then follow through with his plan to return to Australia, get married, and start a career as a successful concert violinist. After a brief stay in New York, he intended to travel back again across the Atlantic to take up a scholarship and an invitation to practice with the symphony orchestra.

Irwin, as was his nature, had become distracted again by the time he reached Durban, South Africa—this time by a young and charismatic lawyer from India who was hoping to reclaim his country from British rule, using the novel concept of peaceful resistance. His name was Mohandas Gandhi.

Even after Irwin and Sutehall met again in England, Irwin continued, according to his diary, to have an odd tendency to fumble his way through history, by chance to be in the middle of everything and to get away alive by the skin of his teeth. During their last night together in Southampton, Irwin had expressed reservations about heading home with Sutehall aboard the Titanic. What he really wanted to do was join his new Russian expatriate friends, led by a man named Vladimir Lenin, in a revolution to free the people Masabumi Hosono had seen so mistreated that many of them were rendered incapable of surviving the Siberian winters.

• • •

Not quite one week earlier, on the night of April 9, 1912, Irwin told Sutehall he was going out for a short walk to settle his mind on whether to continue to New York or detour with Lenin's forces in Russia. In the morning, Sutehall awoke to find Irwin missing—presumably either still walking about Southampton, trying to figure out which path to take, or having already made a decision to join the revolution and leave all of his belongings behind.

Sutehall clearly doubted the latter to be the case, so he closed Irwin's steamer trunk—full of sheet music, clothing, playing cards, and an assortment of precious items that included a boxed toy airplane, musical instruments, a carefully wrapped bundle of letters from a girl named Pearl Shuttle, and a diary. Sutehall then traveled to the dock with all of Irwin's treasures, saw them loaded with his own belongings into the Titanic's third-class luggage compartment, then boarded himself, probably expecting that Irwin would arrive at any moment. What Sutehall could not know, from then through the moment the ship began to come apart around him, was that someone had rendered his friend unconscious in a Southampton pub and that Irwin was presently serving as a forced-labor coal trimmer aboard a tramp steamer bound for Egypt.

Fireman George Kemish, who in the end had half slid down and half dropped down a dangling davit rope and was now swimming toward boat 9 amid what sounded to him like thousands of fans shouting together at a World Cup final, swam with such vigor as to overtake the rowers of boat 9. He was quite familiar with the source of a separate catastrophe that had simultaneously disrupted Irwin's life and diverted him from Kemish's fate.

“There was a shortage of labor,” Kemish would record for future historians. “Very often, ashore [men] were invited to have a drink in the saloons, by strangers who eventually turned out to be employment agents. They were doped [or knocked out]—and they came to their senses well on their way to Buffalo, the Great Lakes, and other places where labor was short.” This sort of activity was so widespread in 1912 that there was a common name for it: being shanghaied.

Lamp trimmer Hemming was probably wishing he had more of Irwin's “luck” as he and Dillon were plucked out of the water by boat 4, each so cold that he thought he might die. In the same boat, Martha Stephenson, who remembered the cab drivers coming to the forefront of the San Francisco rescue operation six years earlier, was equally impressed by the young quartermaster Walter Perkins. He ordered the occupants of boat 4 to row toward the Titanic's stern even as the majority of the passengers—including Stephenson herself—implored him to steer them away from the danger, especially after the air around the broken stern became filled with screams.

In boat 14, the men in charge tried to tell thirteen-year-old Madeline Mellinger that the people in the water were singing, but she knew they were screaming.

In boat 16, able seaman Ernest Archer estimated that they had rowed a quarter of a mile away when the Titanic broke. In the same boat, Lily Futrelle had watched the lights fade as a terrible creaking noise came to her across the sea, followed by what sounded like a tremendous, rattling explosion. Somehow, still alight, the stern rose into the sky.

In boat 2, able seaman Frank Osman could not keep his eyes away from the scene; he could not stop trying to figure out the physical mechanics and the causes of what he saw. Scarcely more than the equivalent of a city block away, Osman had watched the stern fall away, spilling heavy dark objects into what had to be either the bow section's disappearing after end, or a compact black cloud of disintegrating hull and deck sections. In the region of the breakup, everything appeared to be exploding apart, sometimes flying into the air and granulating down to fragments as small as lumps of coal.

Quartermaster Arthur Bright was also located only about three hundred feet away from the breakup. He watched the Titanic's stern from the side opposite Osman, aboard boat D. He was certain of having just witnessed the stern section breaking away and settling back again on an almost even keel. What astonished him was how the stern's portside lights—after initially snapping off and leaving the Titanic all but invisible against the darkness—came on again. He could see them glowing through portholes and rows of windows.

“All the lights on the ship were not out then?” Senator Fletcher asked twelve days later.

“No,” Bright replied. “It was only the after section, though, that was burning. The after part of the boat had her lights burning.”

“After she broke in two?” Senator Jonathan Bourne asked.

Bright affirmed, “Until she went down in the water; yes sir.”

More than a hundred feet nearer, and also from a portside perspective, in boat 4, oiler Thomas Ranger likewise believed that some of the ship's lights had stayed on after the breakaway. One of the last things he had noticed before being sent away from the engine rooms, only slightly ahead of Alfred White, was that the emergency light dynamo was still running under the dummy funnel. Ranger suspected that it might have continued running even after the stern leveled out and began to roll. Just abeam of the place where the fourth funnel had been, the smoking-room windows stayed alight—and some of the portholes continued to glow even after the severed stern tilted nearly vertical. They burned all the way to the rear, going out only gradually as the stern began its slow, stately descent.

The examiners who questioned Ranger and Bright could not understand how the emergency dynamo kept the electric lights burning in the smoking room and behind it, beyond a point in time at which water should have reached the dynamo or at least shorted out the fuses. Briefly, questions focused on how many oil-fueled lanterns Hemming had been handing around to Bright and others who were launching the Titanic's lifeboats. It was reasonable to expect that those who stayed behind knew that the electricity would not last and therefore kept the oil lamps nearby. Toward the end, a great percentage of those lamps would have been concentrated in the stern, where most of the people were. Emergency oil lamps must have come increasingly into use as the electric lights gradually dimmed from yellow-white to a reddish-brown glow.

There were many possible sources for the “ghost lights” at the portholes. On a very cold night in which service steam through the pipes had been cut off for nearly two hours, the fireplaces in the first- and second-class smoking rooms were more likely to have been refueled than put out by people taking shelter indoors. The fireplaces would have spilled hot coals across the carpeted floors and against the wood-paneled walls as the stern moved through extraordinary angles.

Groups of people trapped below the decks, including a prayer group White observed during his climb toward the fourth smokestack, probably gathered around oil lamps as the electric lights variously winked out and dimmed. If even only some small percentage of those lamps slid forward and broke, oil fires should have been burning behind the portholes. Such fires, had they occurred, were likely barely distinguishable from the fading and sometimes flickering red glow of the electric lights as the power failed sector by sector up to the moment of breakup.

In boat 10, able seaman Edward Buley was no less puzzled than Ranger and Bright by the persistence of the portside lights. He knew that when the final plunge began, there must have been little if any steam left in the Titanic's rear boilers—which he determined to be where the ship had broken apart. Yet Buley was certain of seeing lights still burning dimly from within the parted stern. He concurred with Ranger that they went out only gradually as the ship began to disappear.

Masabumi Hosono was also seated in boat 10, some two hundred feet away from the wreck. In a letter to his wife, he would describe
having heard the cries from the decks above prior to the breakup.
The entire ship had reached an angle he perceived to be in excess of forty-five degrees; after this, “extraordinary sounds” came to Hosono that seemed to him like four distinct explosions. He would never describe the details of what he saw afterward; indeed, until his death in 1939, the mention of the name Titanic would be forbidden in his home.

Compared to what Buley was to tell the world about Hosono, Colonel Archibald Gracie's wrongful listing of him as a boat 10 “stowaway” was generous. Describing Hosono and another foreigner who survived aboard boat 10 as “a couple of Japanese,” Buley would swear before Senator Fletcher that they could never have entered the lifeboat unless they had sneaked in among the women—that is, “dressed up as women.”

Although he was to live through the night, Hosono would never truly be allowed to live again. He would forever keep buried inside himself, unspoken, what able seaman Frank O. Evans, only a few seats away, saw unfolding before his (and everyone's) eyes. It was plain to Evans that the center of chaos was located somewhere just ahead of the fourth funnel. The third funnel had disappeared in a gush of granulating debris that seemed to include the tops of the first two reciprocating engines pitching forward from inside the Titanic. After only a few seconds, the last funnel had shown signs of weakening, and the entire stern section had begun to follow.

Many hundreds of people were still struggling on and in the stern. Joughin and White would be among the very last of them, if not the last, to leave the Titanic alive.

Once the severed stern attained its final, vertical position, seemingly as tall and straight as a twenty-story skyscraper, the tower's base spilled an unusual assortment of artifacts. The undersea hailstorm was a slice through the first-class dining areas and the quarters of the stewards who served the passengers; it continued through the quarters of the immigrants and the men who served the Titanic's machines—heralding, as though for real, the “leisured class versus working class” fable of the Eloi and the Morlocks in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine.

From bottom to top, the artifacts included wrenches, ladders, and catwalks from the engine room, mattresses from third and second class, the steel door Joughin had locked before pocketing the pantry keys, Sutehall's carefully packed violin, and Irwin's trunk. There were cases of wine and Bass Ale, an electric dishwashing machine, a grand piano, Charlotte Cardeza's ninety-one pairs of gloves, a workman's toolbox, and necklaces with women's names spelled out in diamonds.

From boat 10, Juliette Laroche and Hosono watched silently as the tower on the sea began to descend, dousing its last lights one by one. At a radius of only two hundred feet, night-adjusted eyes could easily see stars rising above the knife-edge shadow of the six-story rudder—first by twos and threes, then by half dozens, then by scores of stars all at once.

The Titanic's final, stubborn grip on the surface was loosening with increasing speed. Its towering silhouette diminished from being a partly lit skyscraper to being the shape of a large black rock on the ocean, then to being an outcrop of coral. Finally the stern was completely submerged, accelerating toward fifty knots or more into the realm of the white worm and the Mirs.