Monday, April 15, 1912
Boat number four, in Quartermaster Perkis’s charge, rowed back. They pulled five crewmen from the water. The men were shivering and terrified. One gasped that his friend had died in the water. Another, nearly frozen to death, had a bottle of brandy in his pocket. Perkis grabbed it and threw it into the sea.
“That mighta been useful,” Paddy protested. “Brandy’s a help when people are freezin’.’’
But the brandy was gone, floating in the sea amid other debris.
The men pulled from the water looked so near death, Katie feared they would not survive. Only one of them was conscious, and without the brandy, there was nothing in the boat with which to warm their frozen bodies.
It was the most horrifying scene Katie had ever been witness to. The water around them was filled with thrashing swimmers, fighting to reach two of the canvas boats closest to where the ship had disappeared from sight. She could almost feel the frigid water paralyzing their bodies. One of the collapsibles had overturned, but people were climbing aboard. Katie heard warnings of swamping being shouted from one of the boats. Still, the overturned collapsible continued to fill with men standing, sitting, or kneeling. She prayed that Brian might be among them.
When the cries for help ended, Quartermaster Perkis ordered the rowing to resume. But they had made little progress when Fifth Officer Lowe, in lifeboat number fourteen, came upon them with a tiny cluster made up of boats ten, twelve, and collapsible D. He had gathered them all together, believing that a rescue ship would be more likely to see a larger object. Now his goal, he explained, was to empty his boat, distributing the passengers he was carrying among the other boats, and then take his empty boat back to pick up any survivors.
Katie couldn’t believe that anyone could still be alive in that water. It had been at least half an hour since the Titanic went down, and there were no more cries for help. The passengers they had picked up within minutes were near death. Could someone really survive this long in a sea as cold as the iceberg that had dealt a death blow to the great ship?
But Brian had stayed behind on the Titanic, and if there was any chance at all that he might still be alive, she was willing to do whatever it took to find him.
“Are there any seamen here?” Lowe called out as he reached boat number four.
“Yes, sir,” a crewman replied. Paddy, too, nodded. Katie could see that he was anxious to help.
“All right, then. You will have to distribute these passengers among these boats. Tie the boats together and then come with me. We’re going into the wreckage to pick up anyone who is still alive.”
Some people objected, fearing a swamping of one boat or another. The thought terrified Katie, since she couldn’t swim. But Lowe persisted. When the exchange, with great difficulty, had been made, he ordered his crewmen to row to the scene of the disaster.
The action forced people in the boat to rouse themselves from their stupefied shock.
“They’ll never find a soul alive out there,” someone in boat four muttered. “Waste of time, if you ask me.”
But Katie reminded herself that Brian was a strong swimmer, and young and healthy. Perhaps he had already climbed aboard one of those collapsible canvas boats. Impossible to see in this pitch-black darkness. But he might have.
It was only then that she realized, to her horror, that Paddy was no longer with her. In the confusion of the transfer, with people awkwardly, carefully climbing from one boat into another, she hadn’t even noticed that Paddy was one of the passengers who had left. She knew why he had switched to boat fourteen. Because it was returning to the scene to look for survivors. He wanted to do everything he could to find his brother.
The shock of finding Paddy gone was almost too much for Katie to bear. Although she understood, she felt abandoned. Without him, the numbing cold and the utter darkness seemed far more terrifying. And without Paddy’s body heat close beside her, she was quickly frozen to the bone. She couldn’t imagine ever being warm again. The life vest protected her chest, but her face felt as if it were coated with a fine sheen of ice. She tried to take comfort in the fact that at least she was safe in a boat and not in the water like so many others, and the thought helped some. If it was this cold in a boat, what must it be like to be in the ocean, your body soaked to the skin and freezing? How could anyone survive that?
One of the lifeboats sent up a green flare from time to time. When the first one went up, Katie thought it was a ship approaching. Through frozen lips, she said so aloud. A crewman said it was no such thing, dashing her hopes.
The act of rearranging the passengers had stirred some people into speech. The atmosphere in the boat ranged from optimistic about the chance of rescue to pessimistic. Some said the sea would be full of ships by morning, others said it could be days before help arrived. One woman said she could never take the bitter cold for that long and would rather be dead, and was promptly scolded for expressing such a dark thought.
But it was a thought that was on most of the despairing, frightened minds.
In boat six, Elizabeth’s mother had stopped crying. But she had sunk once again into her silent depression, her head on her chest, her eyes closed to everything around her. Elizabeth felt totally alone. Everyone was in shock. Some women had lost both a husband and a son. Lives had been shattered as well as ended. And those who had lost no one were frightened half out of their minds by the vast, black sea around them, the bitter cold, and the sense of isolation they were all feeling.
Then there was Quartermaster Hichens, who did nothing to inspire hope. Instead, he seemed determined to undermine the confidence of everyone at the oars. “Here, you on the starboard side,” he yelled at Lookout Frederick Fleet, “your oar is not being put in the water at the right angle.” And when the women tried to persuade him to help row, he refused, saying he was in command and would be giving the orders.
His negative attitude incensed Elizabeth. He was in charge. Shouldn’t he be trying to lift their spirits, keep them going? Instead, he railed that they were likely to be at sea for days. He complained that they were hundreds of miles from land, they had no food, no water, no protection from the elements. He said everything that they didn’t need to hear, and nothing that they did.
When he noticed that one of the ladies held a flask, he asked for a drink and for one of her wraps. While she passed him an extra blanket, she refused him the liquor, and a woman sitting beside her murmured, “Maybe you should give it to him. It might improve his disposition.”
At some point during the night, another boat, number sixteen, drew near, and the two were lashed together. But they knocked against one another, creating a racket that got on everyone’s nerves, until Major Peuchen suggested they pillow the sound with a couple of life preservers. That done, silence reigned again and everyone settled in to wait until morning. Some anticipated rescue. Others, like Elizabeth’s mother, anticipated nothing.
When she had made certain that neither her father nor Max was in boat sixteen, and had dealt as best she could with her bitter disappointment, Elizabeth tried to sleep. Morning, when it came, could bring great difficulty, and she would need rest to get through the day. But sleep wouldn’t come. Images of utter horror played over and over again in her mind. Her father, struggling in the icy sea, freezing to death…Max, doing the same…all those people, being torn off the deck and plunged into the deep, icy, dark water.…She could scarcely bear to think about it. Just a few hours earlier, they had all felt safe and protected and warm and secure. No one had dreamed this terrible thing could ever happen. Now that it had, nothing in their lives would ever be the same again.
Needing to face the truth, she told herself, My father can’t swim. He is dead. I will never see him or talk to him again. When that brought no reaction beyond a dull pain, she tested further. Max, too, is dead. I was just beginning to fall in love with him, and now he’s gone. Still she felt nothing. It was as if the frigid air had frozen not only her limbs and face, but her emotions as well.
She sat up and glanced around her. No one was weeping, no one was screaming, no one was tearing at her hair or clothes. The faces of those who were still awake all wore the same blank expression. We must look like a boat filled with china dolls, Elizabeth thought, a wave of sadness overwhelming her. Identical blank expressions painted on each face, as if there were nothing inside.
Still, she knew why no one was willing to feel anything. Because if we did, she told herself as she settled back into her seat, if we really let ourselves feel, we would start screaming and we would never be able to stop.
“Oh, no,” Margaret Martin cried out suddenly. “I just saw a flash of lightning!”
Elizabeth realized why that alarmed the woman. Just as Hichens had said, they had no protection from the elements. If a storm should come up, they would all become soaked within seconds, and with the temperature so low, they would freeze instantly in wet clothes. And they had no way of bailing out any rainwater that collected in their boat. Too much of it would sink them.
She realized just as quickly that it was much too cold and the sky too clear for an electrical storm. The light that Margaret had seen couldn’t be lightning. It had to be something else. Perhaps a shooting star.
As if she had spoken aloud, Quartermaster Hichens said, “That’s a falling star, not lightning.”
Then a slight boom sounded in the distance, and Margaret said, “There, did you hear that? Thunder, I warrant.”
Hichens disagreed again, but could come up with no theory as to what the sound might have been.
Elizabeth, suddenly exhausted, leaned back against the gunwale, closing her eyes. She didn’t care what happened, she decided. What difference did it make now? Everything was ruined, anyway. Her mother was right to give up.
Max’s voice sounded in her head: “Cut it out, Elizabeth. If you want to be that dramatic, go on the stage, like Lily. Otherwise, sit up and pay attention and do anything you can to save yourself. Don’t disappoint me.”
Angry that he had the nerve to tell her what to do, Elizabeth sat bolt upright, her eyes flying open.
The first thing she saw was a light on the horizon. Then she saw another, and moments after that a green running light.
“It’s a steamer!” Major Peuchen shouted. “Look, there, all of you, it’s a steamer, and it’s heading this way!”
A rocket shot up into the air over the oncoming ship. As a second rocket went up, the steamer seemed to slow in the water. Elizabeth held her breath. Perhaps it didn’t see them. How visible could the boats sitting low in the water be from such a distance? If the steamer didn’t see them, it would sail away, taking every last ounce of hope with it.
At the same moment, she realized with a shock that the stars overhead were slowly fading, and a faint buttery glow was appearing off to the east. Dawn. She glanced down at the watch still hanging around her neck. It wasn’t five A.M. yet. Morning dawned early in the frozen north.
Now she could see the outline of the approaching ship, one dark funnel spitting smoke into the air. Smaller by far than the great Titanic, but far more beautiful, as well, because it promised rescue.
The sea was dotted with huge icebergs, shining pink and white under the rising sun, like giant chunks of peppermint candy. Elizabeth suddenly feared for the oncoming ship. Suppose it hit one and met the same fate as the larger, sturdier Titanic?
Careful, she silently warned the captain of the unidentified ship, careful…
Everyone in boats number six and sixteen, still lashed together, sat upright, eyes and ears alert.
“Has it come to rescue us, then?” someone asked Hichens.
“No,” he answered. “She is not going to pick us up. She’s only here to pick up bodies.”
Elizabeth found that answer not only ridiculous, but macabre as well. As if any ship’s captain would pick up only the dead and abandon the living! Surely no one in the boats believed that.
If she had had in her possession a large piece of tape, she would have fastened it over the quartermaster’s mouth.
She needn’t have worried. None of the women in the boat had any intention of allowing their pessimistic leader to keep them from rescue. A man in boat sixteen was wearing nothing but pajamas. He was so cold, his teeth were chattering, and although Hichens had ordered them to drift, Mrs. Brown now told the man to start rowing in order to keep warm. She ignored the quartermaster’s protest as she gave the order.
Other women in the boat took up her cry, demanding that they, too, be allowed to row to keep warm.
A stoker, still covered with the coal dust from working on board the Titanic, manned an oar on the starboard side. He was shaking with cold. Mrs. Brown scooped up a fat, brown sable stole lying in the bottom of the boat and wrapped it around his legs, fastening it around his ankles. Then she directed the man wearing pajamas to cut the two boats apart.
Hichens, furious, shouted a protest, and made a move to stop her.
“I will throw you overboard if you interfere,’’ she told him with great authority. Other women nodded in agreement.
Hichens had no choice. He gave in to the mutiny. He sank back under his blanket as the boats were pulled apart, but he began shouting insults at the Denver millionairess who had thwarted him.
“I say,” the stoker called out, “is that any way to talk to a lady?”
Undaunted, Hichens retorted, “I know who I’m speaking to, and I am commanding this boat!”
No one believed that for a second now, and the women continued to row.
As the sun rose higher in the sky, lifeboat number six, manned almost solely by women, made its way slowly toward the steamer on the horizon.