6

‘To See How the Sea Flap-Dragoned It’

 

Back in Illinois, William and Fannie Caldwell were worrying about their son and daughter-in-law and the grandchild they had never met. They knew, no doubt, that Sylvia was struggling with her health and that she suffered from seasickness. That evening, as they were getting ready for bed, William and Fannie got down on their knees for their regular evening devotions and prayed for the safe return of their son and his family. Albert was not wearing his missionary hat on the night of the sinking, and so, he always thought, it was his parents’ prayers that caused what happened next.

As Sylvia and Albert were wavering over whether to put Sylvia and Alden into a lifeboat, a cluster of stokers appeared at the deck where the Caldwells now were. Sweaty, covered in black grime, some of them wet with seawater, the men looked like they had been toiling in hell. But for the Caldwells, one of these men was surely their guardian angel, sent, as Albert saw it later, by his parents’ anxious prayers.

Albert was surprised when one of the stokers, perhaps Frederick Barrett, George Beauchamp, James Crimmins, or William Major, looked firmly at him and addressed him by name. “Mr. Caldwell!” It was one of the stokers he had met the day he had taken the photographs at the great ship’s furnaces. The stoker approached, clearly giving Albert an order. “If you value your life, get off this ship,” he said. “I’ve been below, and this ship is going to sink. The ocean is pouring in much faster than the pump can keep up.” The other stokers seconded him by adding, “This boat’s gonna sink. There’s the water rushing in the hold below.”

These were startling warnings. The deck was still solid beneath their feet. The Titanic was still unsinkable. The watertight doors were still open in nonchalant tribute to the lack of danger—at least, Albert thought they were. But there was the unmistakable and worrisome truth that women and children were indeed off in the lifeboats. And crewmen who ought to know the truth were insisting that they get off. Albert had been below where these stokers worked, and he could picture the hold that they said was now filling with water.

One deck above, Lawrence Beesley was looking down to the Caldwells’ deck. Like the Reverend Caldwell back in Illinois, Beesley was praying. He had been awake when the ship hit the iceberg. Although it didn’t feel like a heavy collision, the circumstances that followed had frightened him enough that he hurried to his cabin and got out his Bible, reading the 91st Psalm over and over until he calmed down. He was much comforted by its soothing message about guardian angels: “For He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.” A former agnostic who had become a Christian Scientist, he turned next to the denomination’s textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and its poetic interpretation of the 23rd Psalm: “divine love is my shepherd; I shall not want . . . love leadeth me beside the still waters . . .” He was getting to the part about the protection of God, Divine Love, as he walked through the valley of the shadow of death, when he heard the final call to get out on deck. He grabbed his dressing gown and ran out, sticking the Bible and the Science and Health in his pocket.

While the Caldwells were relatively unconcerned a deck below, Beesley and a bunch of men who were congregated on the top deck were concerned as they watched the starboard boats being filled with women and children, lowered, and then “rowed away into the darkness.” A rumor—it turned out to be unfounded—went around that men were being allowed on lifeboats on the port side. Most of the men, but not Beesley, rushed off in an attempt to find a seat on a lifeboat. Beesley had been looking for his own guardian angel, too, as Christian Science defined angels: “God’s thoughts passing to man; spiritual intuitions, pure and perfect.” Indeed, Beesley recognized just that sort of guardian angel—a thought, a strong and clear intuition. He felt absolutely certain that he should not follow the other men to the port side. He felt that the divine hand was holding him in place, leading him beside the still waters. It seemed like he was exactly where he was supposed to be. He stayed put.

 

 

The dapper Reverend William E. Caldwell, Albert’s father.

 

Meanwhile, Washington Dodge, a first class passenger, was also watching the crew load women and children onto the lifeboats. He had seen his wife and five-year-old son off on Lifeboat 3, but he had stayed behind, obeying the order for women and children to go first. The fact that he had not gotten off the Titanic with Mrs. Dodge and little Washington was upsetting to Frederick D. Ray, one of the Titanic’s stewards. He was a favorite of the well-traveled Dodge family—so much so that the Dodges had agreed to take the Titanic at Ray’s urging, specifically to have Ray wait on them. Ray was worried about the Dodges, especially since they were there on his account. Perhaps by now he realized the ship was in serious trouble, which Dodge did not yet really believe. Finally the crew began to launch Lifeboat 13. According to Ray, “They said, ‘A few of you men get in here.’ There were about nine to a dozen men there, passengers and crew. I saw Mr. Washington Dodge there.” Ray asked where Mrs. Dodge and the little boy were, and was relieved to hear they were already on a lifeboat. “He was standing well back from the boat, and I said, ‘You had better get in here, then.’ I got behind him and pushed him and I followed,” Ray recounted before the U.S. Senate Inquiry following the disaster. Ray, who had for so long been something of a guardian angel to the Dodges as they traveled, genuinely became Dodge’s guardian angel at that moment, saving his life.

From above, Beesley was still stationed where he thought he ought to be, gazing over the side railing onto the deck below. The sailor loading Lifeboat 13 called for more ladies three times. Seeing none, he looked up and spotted Beesley. “Any ladies on your deck?” he called. Beesley looked around.

“No,” he replied. “They were all sent down half an hour ago.”

“Then you had better jump,” the crewman called. Beesley climbed out on the rail and pushed off, tumbling into Lifeboat 13. He joined Washington Dodge in the boat. There were other men, too, snatched from around the world, including second class men from America and England, plus third class men from Sweden, Ireland, England, Norway, Turkey, and Hong Kong. There was an abundant majority of ladies on the lifeboat, too, who also hailed from various parts of the world, including India, Poland, England, Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, and Canada; and with them were a good number of children.

Meanwhile, Albert was trying to balance the dire picture the stokers painted against the sturdy deck beneath him. Albert apparently protested to one of the stokers that the Titanic was so much safer than a lifeboat. It was “so big, and so strongly constructed” that he didn’t believe she would sink. Surely she would float for hours, even days. The stoker doggedly offered an alternative, “Get your family off the boat. If it is still here in the morning, you can get back on.” Suddenly that made sense to Albert. Many years later, he would look back on that moment and say, “I don’t know why I believed him.” Then he’d pause and add, “I’ll always be thankful for praying parents.”

The stoker pointed out Lifeboat 13 right at hand. He sprinted to the gangway door and saw that the boat still had room. He called to the men above who were lowering the boat to hold it. Sylvia and Albert reacted instinctively—the lifeboat had stopped specifically for them, so they dropped all their questions and hurried to it. “And the stokers, about a dozen of ’em, a few other men passengers, my wife, and myself got in boat number 13,” Albert summarized years later, thus adding Siam to the worldwide sprinkling of nations represented on Lifeboat 13.

As Beesley recounted in 1912, two latecoming women “tumbled in, [and] the crew shouted, ‘Lower away’; but before the order was obeyed, a man with his wife and a baby came quickly to the side: the baby was handed to the lady in the stern, the mother got in near the middle and the father at the last moment dropped in as the boat began its journey down to the sea many feet below.” That was Albert, Sylvia, and little Alden.

As Albert told it a few days after the shipwreck to a reporter who accosted the family en route home to Illinois, “Lifeboat No. 13 was about to be lowered and Mrs. Caldwell was put into it. She was the last woman left in the group, and I was about to lower the baby down to her when she said, ‘Can’t my husband come, too?’ There being ample room I was put into the boat with the baby, and then some other men followed.” This account and others like it were important in Albert’s story of survival. So many people, for years to come, would hold male survivors in contempt. But accounts of Albert’s rescue all depicted him being invited or encouraged by the crew to get onto Lifeboat 13.

Of course, some news stories embellished the scene. A colorful account was printed in the New York Sun, enhanced by the reporter’s imagination. According to this story, the Titanic’s lights went out as the Caldwells made ready to leave their cabin, and they had to feel their way by hearing “shouts and sounds of running. The deck all was chaos. He [Albert] remembers that Mrs. Caldwell got into a lifeboat and he stood by with the baby, crowded away by a swirl of humanity. ‘Can’t he put the baby in the boat?’ his wife shrieked and when he reached over with it some one pushed him and he landed at his wife’s feet inside, two other men on top of him.” The competing New York Herald tried to one-up the rival Sun by saying (wrongly) that the Caldwells were thrown from their beds from the “fearful shock” of the collision, and Sylvia, in darkness and confusion that ensued was “suddenly taken and placed into one of the lifeboats.” Luckily Albert was somehow able to follow and was trying to hand Alden to her, when she called out, “Can’t my husband come aboard with the baby?” The Herald said, “Some one behind him shouted ‘Sure!’ and he was shoved into the boat beside his wife, a couple of other men jumping in on top of him.”

The Washington Post featured an imaginative scene, worthy of the cover of any modern romance novel. In that account, Sylvia was “one of the prettiest girls in Colorado” and was “said to have been the last woman to leave the sinking Titanic.” She was indeed pretty, but she wasn’t the last woman off, only the last on Lifeboat 13. However, it made for a dramatic story, showcased by a theatrical subheadline: “Mrs. A. F. Caldwell Carried by Husband From Titanic.” Albert was holding the baby along with his wife in the fanciful story. Albert’s romantic gesture, the newspaper said, saved his life because it won him a spot in the lifeboat. In fact, the newspaper’s headline set forth the myth that Albert and all male survivors would fight the rest of their lives by suggesting that men were not normally allowed off the ship. The headline blared dramatically, “Wife as his Passport.”

Significantly, the Caldwells’ exit from the Titanic seemed to vindicate Dr. Walker’s diagnosis of Sylvia many months earlier. Some of the missionaries thought Sylvia was merely suffering from the aftermath of pregnancy or even hypochondria, or was not suffering from anything except a bought-and-paid-for diagnosis. However, the Titanic belied that condemnation. If you read between the lines, you can guess that Sylvia had a condition that was apparent to the naked eye—such as weakened arms, a bent back, or limping legs—and that prevented her from holding Alden.

A visible symptom is suggested in the account by Hilda Slayter of the steward who tried to take Alden out of Albert’s arms. Hilda told the steward there were no more women coming, and the man then let Albert go through the checkpoint. Given that some of the policemen-like bedroom stewards reportedly “let out their fists at one or two men who attempted to get into the boats,” Hilda’s request was not necessarily one that they would have approved. Why would the crewman break the “women and children” rule that he was striving so hard to enforce, to the point of grabbing the baby by force from his father? Perhaps Hilda was just that persuasive. Or perhaps it was obvious to the steward, when Hilda directed his attention to the problem, that Albert was indeed needed to hold the baby because something was visibly wrong with Sylvia.

Over many years, Sylvia and Albert were remarkably consistent in admitting that Albert had to hold the baby, a fact they made neither apology nor explanation for. Over the next couple of decades, this unusual reversal of parenting duties (especially in regards to the “women and children first” atmosphere on the Titanic) was featured in their descriptions of that awful night, again hinting that something was wrong with Sylvia.

Albert described it this way in the Park College Alumniad magazine in April, 1912: “I owe my life to my baby boy or rather to God who used him to save me. The fact that I had him in my arms gave me precedence to take a vacant place in the life-boat after the women and children were loaded.” About two weeks after that, a reporter said that Sylvia got into the lifeboat, and then, “seeing no other ladies, Mr. Caldwell with babe in arms stepped into the boat . . . He says his life was saved because of the child in his arms.” Both accounts implied that he was needed to hold the baby; the thought of handing the baby to Sylvia just didn’t seem to occur to her, him, or officials standing by.

Interestingly, the Washington Post said outright that Sylvia was ill. The article intoned dramatically in bold type, “Her Illness Saved Mate,” following that with, “She was ill on board the Titanic at the time of the disaster, and to her indisposition and weakness her husband, who was accompanying her home, owes his life, for he was allowed to take her and the child in his arms into the last lifeboat.”

Although Albert was safely now in the lifeboat, “safe” was no one’s adjective of choice at the moment. As Sylvia told it, “It seemed that fate toyed with our lives all thru that awful night, a succession of narrow escapes from death coming in rapid sequences.” The lifeboat jerked down toward the water at uneven angles, tipping forward and then backward. Sylvia said dramatically that they had to hold onto the sides of the boat to keep from being pitched out. Then they had to contend with water pouring from the Titanic’s condenser pumps, gushing in a forceful stream three or four feet in diameter right in the path of Lifeboat 13. Washington Dodge was sure they would be swamped by it. Everyone began screaming to the crew to stop lowering, and they frantically tried to locate the oars to push the boat away from the ship. The oars were lashed tightly to the lifeboat’s side with twine—and people were sitting on them besides—so the task was none too easy. The cascading water created a freezing spray. By the time Lifeboat 13 struck the Atlantic, at least some of the passengers were quite wet. Given the nearly unbearable temperature, it was a miracle, Sylvia thought, that the Caldwells didn’t so much as catch cold.

And then the confounded mechanical parts of the lifeboat did not work as expected. As Albert described it many years later, “When we got down to the water, we couldn’t get loose from the block and tackle. There was a lever at the center of the boat that was supposed to pull to loosen the block and tackle, but it was all gummed up with paint.” Beesley described a pin to be released, rather than a lever. Whether lever or pin, Albert indicated paint as the culprit in jamming the equipment. As he recalled it, a thickened layer of red paint paralyzed the apparatus. The Titanic was a new ship, after all, and the paint had not had time to wear down. And clearly no one had bothered to test the lifesaving equipment. Walter Williams, a second class steward who wound up on Lifeboat 13, had been surprised during the all-too-short voyage that there had been no lifeboat drill, and he could confirm the paint issue. When he came aboard, the paint was so new that it was still wet on his locker. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that paint had pooled where it was not meant to.

Meanwhile, Lifeboat 15 was being lowered, and Lifeboat 13 was directly beneath it, having been pushed under it in the frenzied effort to avoid the roaring water from the condenser pumps. This was quite alarming. Everyone on 13 was yelling for the men lowering the boats to stop, but 15 kept coming. No one could hear them over the roar of the water. Fifteen “would have crushed us and all would have been lost,” Sylvia said, recalling the terror of seeing the bottom of 15 coming far too close. People reached up with their hands on the bottom of 15 in a futile gesture to stop it as others tried frantically to release 13 by the jammed mechanism. At first the crewmen lowering 15 were “heedless of our shrieks and terror,” as Albert put it. But then, thankfully, “the men above realized what was happening, and they held the boat over our heads,” he recalled.

For the second time that night, a stoker played guardian angel to the Caldwell family—and this time, to everyone on Lifeboat 13. Stoker Frederick Barrett and an able seaman, Robert Hopkins, took out knives—Sylvia thought one of the knives was handed down from 15—and sawed away at the ropes that still stubbornly bound 13 to the Titanic. Barrett had to tread across several women in the boat to get to the ropes, but in the moment of crisis, no one complained. At last, 13 was set free. Relieved, Sylvia noted that the boat “slid away in the nick of time, another perilous escape.”

No one was officially designated to be in charge, but the people on Lifeboat 13 felt they needed a leader. “We elected one of the stokers to be our captain,” Albert said, recalling him as a “jolly” man. The stoker was Barrett, who had already meant so much to the Caldwells. He had possibly helped Albert get his photo shoveling coal (the camera, alas, having been left behind ); he may well have been the one who pleaded with Albert to get off the ship; he had severed the stuck ropes that tied 13 hazardously to the Titanic. Now Barrett apparently tried to keep everyone’s spirits up with a cheerful demeanor. He didn’t know what else to do; this sudden promotion to captain of this tiny vessel under the most horrible of circumstances might be his first and last command. He was doing his best to make the catastrophe bearable. “He gave direction to us men as we rowed about, trying to keep up with the other boats,” Albert said.

The crewmen aboard Lifeboat 13 had been directed to row toward the lights of the ship they could see in the distance, and seaman Hopkins reported that they earnestly tried to get there, but the light moved away and disappeared. Despite the crewmen’s well-meaning efforts at rowing, Dodge observed that they weren’t too good at it. “Those who undertook to handle the oars were poor oarsmen, almost without exception, and our progress was extremely slow,” he said. Mary Hewlett, also on 13, agreed. She criticized later, “Then we pulled out from the Titanic somehow as the men at the oars did not know how to row—could not keep time & did not know starboard from port!!!” As Beesley put it, “All night long their oars crossed and clashed; if our safety had depended on speed or accuracy in keeping time it would have gone hard with us.” Perhaps the stokers who were rowing could be forgiven that shortcoming. They were dressed lightly to work amongst the hot furnaces, and some had gotten wet as the Titanic flooded below. In their damp condition in the excruciating cold, they were freezing. Ruth Becker, the twelve-year-old daughter of a missionary family leaving India, came to their rescue. As the Titanic’s lifeboats were being loaded, Ruth clutched blankets meant for her siblings. Crewmen put the younger Beckers onto Lifeboat 11 and announced it was full. Mrs. Becker pleaded to go with them. The crew let her on, but began lowering the lifeboat without Ruth. Mrs. Becker called out to Ruth to get another boat, and she was relieved to witness Ruth placed into Lifeboat 13. Throughout all of this trauma, Ruth had not let go of the blankets. “Stokers were rowing the boats and they just had sleeveless shirts and shorts, because it’s so hot down there in the engine room,” Ruth recalled. “The officer asked if I would give up my blankets to put around the stokers to keep them halfway warm, and then of course rowing the boat, now that kept them warm too.” She passed the blankets out to the half-frozen men. Hilda Slayter, who had extra coats with her, gave those out as well. Steward Frederick Ray passed out handkerchiefs to six shivering people, and they twisted the corners into knots to warm their bare heads. Numbed through but warming up at last in Ruth’s blanket, Barrett turned the tiller over to someone else and fell asleep.

To help relieve the troubled rowers, Albert took one of the six oars. It was not until they had rowed a good distance from the ship—maybe half a mile, to avoid the suction that the ship would generate if it sank —that Albert looked up and was startled to see that the Titanic really was going down. The rows of portholes, which should have been parallel to the water, slid in a sickening procession into the Atlantic, burning onward in a horrible glow underneath the surface. “That was the first time I believed she would sink,” Albert admitted. Others on 13 were just as startled to realize the Titanic really was sinking. As the still-blazing portholes settled lower, the ocean swallowed them whole, like a drinker of flaming raisins in flap-dragon, the cruel game used as a metaphor for a shipwreck in the lines spoken by Albert’s character, the Clown, in Park College’s performance of The Winter’s Tale. Shakespeare’s picture was eerily prescient. As the Atlantic played out its sinister version of flap-dragon, the Titanic had by then about half an hour left, and this was the first Albert was aware of it. There had been no panic, no stumbling on a sloping deck, no reason to believe the ship was so fatally wounded until now. Had the stoker not warned him about the danger, he and his family would still be aboard. Had Albert not been posing for a picture with the stokers earlier in the voyage, the stoker would not have singled him out to convince him to get off the ship.

The occupants of Lifeboat 13 watched the Titanic as she settled lower and lower into the water, a chilling, surreal spectacle. By now Alden was in the arms of Hilda Slayter, whose quick thinking had gotten Albert past the grim bedroom stewards. Alden had slept quietly in her arms for some time, when he woke up and began to cry. It was too dark to see anything and too tight to move around to maneuver the baby. Hilda asked Lawrence Beesley, whom she could just make out in the dark beside her, “Will you feel down and see if the baby’s feet are out of the blanket? I don’t know much about babies but I think their feet must be kept warm.”

Beesley was startled to recognize her voice. He had sat at dinner with her on the voyage. He asked, “Surely you are Miss Slayter?” She responded, “Yes, and you must be Mr. Beesley; how curious we should find ourselves on the same boat!”

Beesley wriggled around and found Alden’s “toes exposed to the air and wrapped them well up, when it ceased crying at once; it was evidently a successful diagnosis!” If Alden had indeed been wearing his soft little baby shoes off the ship, he had kicked them off. The blanket satisfied him, and he blissfully fell back to sleep, warm in Hilda’s arms and keeping Hilda toasty as well.

Interestingly, Albert and Sylvia avoided mentioning in newspaper interviews that strangers held their beloved infant on the lifeboat. Sylvia did refer to it in a private letter to Titanic historian Walter Lord in his research for the book A Night to Remember in 1955, saying that Lawrence Beesley held the baby. She mentioned Alden crying about his cold feet in a Colorado interview in 1912, but she didn’t add that she wasn’t holding him. For her part on April 15, 1912, probably Sylvia was too weak or too seasick to care who was holding Alden—she was probably grateful that someone was keeping him out of harm’s way, as she was not up to it. It seems likely, in fact, that Alden was passed hand to hand. In a speech right after the disaster, Albert said that he got into 13, hugging Alden tightly. He ducked to the bottom of the lifeboat to keep the baby warm and out of the wind. In a different version, Steward Ray told of a bundle thrown “about 2 or 3 feet to me, and I caught it, and unrolled the blankets, and found that it was a little baby.” According to one source, Ray called out, “Who’ll take this babby?” and passed “babby” Alden to a young woman who volunteered—but not to his mother.

That volunteer may well have passed the baby back to Albert after he was in place. Albert was soon asked to row, and he would have passed the baby to someone else—probably to Hilda Slayter. The various nannies to Alden once again vindicated Dr. Walker’s opinion on Sylvia’s condition. Ray, in catching “babby” Alden, did not hesitate to ask for volunteers to hold the baby, even though he said outright that he saw the mother approach. Apparently, he could tell something was wrong with Sylvia and deemed her unable to hold Alden. Hilda Slayter, when she finally wound up with Alden, evidently didn’t question holding him or call out to locate the mother. She apparently already knew the mother was not able to hold him. If members of the Foreign Missions Board needed convincing that Sylvia was truly unwell, they should have been on Lifeboat 13 that night.

But the Caldwells’ troubles with the Foreign Missions Board seemed remote and unimportant as 13 struggled farther away from the injured Titanic. The refugees in the lifeboat all had their eyes on the ship. Her lights burned until a few minutes before she sank—about ten minutes, Albert guessed. Suddenly there was a horrible noise. “We distinctly heard the sound of the boilers exploding” on the Titanic, Albert said, “and then the bow of the steamer sank from view.” Without electricity and without her bow, the Titanic was only a wounded blot standing at about 45 degrees against the brightly unconcerned stars. The last Albert saw of the Titanic was “the stern of the boat outlined against the starry sky. And then with a gentle swish, she disappeared from sight.”

Everyone was stunned that the Titanic was really gone. Sylvia described the moment as “fantastic with horror.” There they sat in the terrible flatness of the sea, a “vast waste of water,” as Albert saw it, without the majestic Titanic to compete with the incongruously cheerful starlight. For a minute everything was quiet, holding its collective breath in ghastly silence. And then the cries started. As Sylvia described it, “The huge, almost defying [defying God, that is] work of man had dived to it’s grave. There was no sound but the dip of the oars in the water. When suddenly there arose upon the stillness, the weirdest, most appalling, heart rending noise that ever mortal might hear—the cry of hundreds of human souls for help.” It was awful. “Pity them who could not be saved,” she mourned, and then added herself and Albert and all the other survivors into the sad equation: “Aye and pity those who heard them and could not save them.” A man in Lifeboat 13 suggested that the people in the water were singing, “but who could be deceived?” Sylvia said sorrowfully.

Others on 13 wanted to be deceived. They asserted that people in various lifeboats were merely calling to each other. But it was not so. Indeed, as Sylvia said, who could be deceived by such wishful thinking? Sylvia herself believed with anguish that many of the Titanic’s victims “drowned like rats in a trap,” having never been awakened from their beds. “Icy water soon benumbed those who were left behind and they sank, to rise no more,” she said.

Albert would say in later years, “You just have to forget the screams, or you’d go crazy.”

But there was no forgetting them now. Someone in the dark lifeboat suggested that they sing, and a quavering female voice started a song. Sylvia recalled it as a hymn, but Elizabeth Dowdell on their boat remembered it as “We Parted on the Shore,” a shanty with despondent lyrics that mourned, in part:

Now it’s years and years . . .

Since I left my bonny lassie on the shore.

I never will forget that day; she cried so many tears.

I’d never seen so many tears before!

. . . And when I saw that, we parted on the shore.

To Sylvia, it was the ultimate bravery. “In her effort to comfort and keep from our ears those pitiful cries, she offered her mite of cheer,” Sylvia said. “Can you picture the scene? In the middle of the Atlantic ocean, in the darkness of the night, out in that mighty deep, in a boat that a wave could crush; one woman’s voice going up in song while the poor quavering voice was almost drowned by the voice of the perishing.”

Albert thought of the church service they had attended only a short time earlier in the Titanic’s second class dining room. “How little did those who were worshipping God at that time realize that, within a few hours, the majority of them would meet Him,” he reflected.

Albert was aghast about that watertight door that had not been closed. For years he would believe that the watertight doors had not been closed at all, and had the captain closed them, the ship would not have sunk. He didn’t realize that the Titanic was so badly damaged by the iceberg that she never really had a chance. At that moment in 1912, it appeared to him and the other survivors that the watertight doors had tragically not performed in the way they had been hyped. “We all thought the boat non-sinkable and I believe that the poor fellows who were lost had hope to the end that she would not sink for many hours,” he told his college alumni magazine half a month later. Indeed, that stoker’s insistence that the Titanic would sink had truly meant the world to the Caldwells.

The catastrophic outcome of that overconfidence in technology spread bleak and cold before them. The bitter air nipped sharply at exposed faces, hands, Alden’s toes. As Albert noted drearily, “We didn’t know when help would come.” If it would come, he might have said. They couldn’t find a light on their lifeboat, nor could they find any water to drink nor food to eat. It was a stark, terrifying contrast from the lavish Titanic, where they had chosen from the huge menu of delicacies just a few hours earlier.

The gnawing cold particularly mocked the Caldwells. Sylvia had suffered so in the tropics. They had fled from the sultry, health-sucking heat of Siam in hopes that a cooler climate would restore Sylvia’s health. They had risked their good names and their carefully secreted savings to get to that fresher, more northerly climate against the wishes of many important people whom they worked with and respected, the people who had been their friends and colleagues their entire married life. And now Albert and Sylvia found the stark opposite of Siam, a cold so dense that it was killing people right there as they listened, torturing the living with the fact that they could not help—and with the fact that the lack of help was fatal.

The Caldwells had weighed their options and had deemed it worthwhile to risk their reputations and their life savings in an effort to save Sylvia’s bodily health and sanity. Now their life savings were gone and their lives were grimly at risk. Just six inches from the water in a nearly swamped rowboat, they were only one mishap removed from joining the poor, freezing souls clinging to floating pieces of the wreckage, whose cries were growing thinner and rarer as they lapsed into unconsciousness and then froze. After about an hour, the cries died out altogether in a chilling, finalized silence.

It was easy to see that their own lot was nearly as dire. If no one knew they were out there on the Atlantic, how would they ever be found? No food, no fresh water, freezing temperatures—and Alden dressed so scantily in a sleeper and surely by now a very wet diaper, with his little shoes (if he had been wearing them) kicked off in the wet bottom of the lifeboat—and no real sense of whether rescue was at hand. There was nothing to do but wait in agonizing worry. Someone on Lifeboat 13 said grimly, “This is no joke; we may knock about here days before we are picked up, if at all.” Washington Dodge thought everyone was depressed. At one point they were startled to spot a sailing ship close at hand. Could they be saved? As they rowed closer, they found that it was a small iceberg.

There were so many stars that night—constellations twinkled in their blazing glory, unobscured in the otherwise black world. It would have been pretty had the circumstances been different. Possibly Albert’s thoughts wandered to his high school graduation oration, “Night Brings Forth the Stars.” It was discouragingly paradoxical that his launch into the world, heralded with his self-chosen metaphor of stars, might end so appallingly here under them.

One of the evacuees on 13 was one of the Titanic’s lookouts, Reginald Lee. He told Sylvia that he had seen mist in the ship’s path and had warned the bridge that he thought they were heading into ice. Not that he had any binoculars to check the mist better, as he wished he did. The bridge disregarded his warning. In fact, he said, he had warned the bridge three times about ice, and finally on the third warning the first officer, who had the bridge, at last changed course. The revelation was shocking. Albert associated the information with the Titanic’s goal of a fast crossing and would afterward complain that the boat sank because of sheer carelessness, which included speeding through the ice field. As one reporter summed up Albert’s comments later, “No heed was given to the warning, and the big ocean greyhound plunged ahead to her doom simply to gratify the demand that she break all records.”

Now they were out in the North Atlantic with a miserable truth tyrannizing them: chances seemed quite good, as had been the case for millennia, that they had only prolonged an inevitable death by managing to escape on a lifeboat. The tiny lifeboat fleet, all that remained of the biggest ship on the ocean, was alone and very small in the dark.

Would any ship ever be able to find them?