Leaving the ship was a fearful experience even for those who found a place in the boats. It was unimaginably terrifying for those who jumped or were swept overboard. For most survivors, though, the hours still ahead were to bring the most horrific moments of all. During that time, some of them faced character tests they failed to pass.
Few of the lifeboats got away smoothly. Falls jammed; the lights required by Board of Trade regulations in all boats were found in some cases to be missing; so were plugs. As Lowe blithely explained to the American inquiry, not every seaman member of a liner’s crew was competent to handle a 30-foot lifeboat, or had even set foot in one. True all-around seamen were rare aboard the Titanic. “Many of the sailors could not row,” said Lowe. Mrs. Thayer concluded that the man in charge of her lifeboat could not be a quartermaster, as he claimed, because he was so “absolutely inefficient.” She was mistaken, however; he was Quartermaster Perkis.
Besides Mrs. Thayer and the quartermaster, No. 4 lifeboat contained Martha Stevenson and her sister; Mrs. Astor and her trained nurse and maid; Mrs. Thayer’s maid; Mrs. Widener and her maid; Mrs. Carter, her two children, and her maid; Mrs. Arthur Ryerson, her boy, two daughters, governess, and maid; and many women and children from second and third class—some forty-five in all.
Martha Stevenson described what happened after the boat was in the water:
When we reached the sea we found the ship badly listed, her nose well in so that there was water to the D Deck, which we could plainly see as the ship was lighted and the ports on D Deck were square instead of round. No lights could be found in our boat and the men had great difficulty in casting off the blocks as they did not know how they worked. My fear here was great, as she [the Titanic] seemed to be going faster and faster and I dreaded lest we be drawn in before we could cast off.
When we were finally ready to move on, the order was called from the deck to go to the stern hatch and take off some men [this was the Lightoller plan that failed because the bosun’s mate and the party sent to execute it disappeared]. There was no hatch open and we could see no men, but our crew obeyed orders, much to our alarm, for they were throwing wreckage over and we could hear a noise resembling china breaking, which we learned later was the cracking of the boiler plates. We implored the men to pull away from the ship but they refused, and we pulled three men into the boat who had dropped off the ship and were swimming toward us. One man was drunk and had a bottle of brandy in his pocket which the quartermaster promptly threw overboard and the drunk was thrown into the bottom of the boat and a blanket thrown over him. After getting in these three men they told how fast she was going and we all implored them to pull for our lives to get out from the suction when she should go down.
One of the luckiest men that night was Belfast fireman Thomas (Paddy) Dillon. He went down with the ship, but managed to reach the surface. Taken into lifeboat 4, he collapsed, but recovered to find two dead shipmates sprawled on top of him. Beesley was also lucky. He was young and wide-eyed enough to experience the lowering of himself and sixty others down the liner’s black hull as “a great adventure.” If anyone wanted to know what the sensation was like, he recommended them to measure seventy-five feet from a tall house or block of flats, look down on the ground, and then imagine themselves being crammed into a boat and descending in a continuous series of jerks. When his boat was in the water no one knew how to release the falls. It was carried parallel to the ship until it was directly underneath another boat being lowered. The crew on the boat deck could not hear the shouts from the Beesley boat, nor the subsequent shouts from the boat being lowered, and Beesley and his sixty companions were about to be crushed when at the last moment a sailor found a knife and cut the falls. The crew members in Beesley’s boat were useless:
I do not think they can have had any practice in rowing, for 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. Shouting began from one end of the boat to the other as to what we should do, where we should go, and no one seemed to have any knowledge how to act. At last we asked, “Who is in charge of this boat?” but there was no reply.
Beesley could not be sure exactly who was in his boat, because in the darkness he could see only a few feet, but he thought the list was as follows: no first class; three women, one baby, and two men from second class; and the other passengers steerage—mostly women; a total of about thirty-five passengers. The rest, about twenty-five or possibly more, were crew, including stokers. A stoker, by common consent, was appointed captain. How such a comparatively large number of crew got away is obscure. Of the 891 crew on board nearly a quarter were saved, in comparison with the 16 percent saved of male passengers.
Beesley’s boat was launched, he reckoned, about an hour and a half before the Titanic sank; yet it contained almost as many crew as passengers. One stoker told him he had been at work in the stokehole when the collision occurred. The whole side of a compartment had caved in and the inrushing sea had thrown him off his feet. He went on deck, but was ordered down again with others to draw the fires from under the boilers; that done, they were allowed back on deck. He must thus have been one of the first to know the extent of the damage, and one of the first to get away; perhaps the facts were linked. The stoker got away because he knew early on that the ship was doomed; many steerage passengers died because they did not know until too late.
The stoker had been safely in his lifeboat for at least an hour, possibly much longer, when John Thayer jumped. Thayer thought later that pure chance, a matter of five seconds, saved him from the same fate as Long, his new friend. Long did not jump but let go of the rail and slid down the side of the ship. Thayer jumped outward, feet first. “I am afraid that the few seconds elapsing between our going, meant the difference between being sucked into the deck below, as I believe he was, or pushed out by the backwash. I was pushed out and then sucked down.”
The shock of the cold water, he said, took the breath out of his lungs. Down and down he went, spinning. Fortunately he was a good swimmer. Under water, he swam as hard as he could in the direction he thought to be away from the ship, and finally came up with his lungs bursting, but without having swallowed any water. Facing him, about forty yards distant, was the Titanic. “I don’t know why I didn’t keep swimming away. Fascinated, I seemed tied to the spot.” The ship appeared to be surrounded by a glare, the water was over the base of the first funnel, and the people massed on the stern were still edging backward. As the ship rumbled and roared, a funnel lifted off among a cloud of sparks and fell, missing Thayer by thirty or forty feet. Again he was sucked down, struggling and trying to swim, but “spent.” As he came up for the second time he felt some obstruction near his head and, putting up his hand to push it away, found it to be the cork fender of a collapsible lifeboat, floating beside him bottom up. Four or five men pulled him aboard. Although it seemed like hours, he had probably been in the water for no more than four minutes, if that. His watch had stopped at 2:22 a.m.
Lightoller spent his last moments on board freeing this same collapsible, borrowing Colonel Gracie’s pocket knife to cut the lashings. That was the last boat on the port side. Lightoller then made sure that all boats on the starboard side had also been got away and, with nothing further to be done that could be of the slightest help to those remaining, took a header into the sea from the top of the wheelhouse. First he was sucked up against the wire grating over the immense airshaft at the base of the forward funnel and was glued there by the force of water rushing down to the decks below. He began to sink with the ship. Blown away from what he thought was certain death by a sudden blast of hot air at his back, he surfaced briefly among floating bodies before he was again dragged down by water pouring into a second grating. He could not remember afterward how he escaped from there. When he recovered his wits, he realized he was alongside the collapsible he had just freed. He was clinging to a length of rope attached to it when the Titanic’s forward funnel went. As it crashed into the sea nearby, the “terrific wash” picked up both the boat and Lightoller and flung them clear.
Gracie’s experience was comparable. By the time his useful pocket knife had done its work, Gracie was trapped between the massed crowds astern and the advancing water forward. He tried to climb onto the roof of the officers’ quarters, but as he did so the ship took the sudden dive that everyone noticed and a wall of water came at him. He had been hanging onto a rail, but soon let go. He found himself in a whirlpool, under water, terrified that he might be boiled in the hot water coming up from the boilers. However, swimming with what seemed to him to be “unusual strength,” he surfaced, got clear, and clambered onto the same upturned boat as the stalwart officer whose conduct in the crisis he had much admired, Lightoller.
The time now, two hours and forty minutes after the iceberg had struck, was about twenty past two in the morning. In the immediate vicinity of the Titanic, this was the situation: The ship herself was rapidly foundering. Nobody except the most ignorant or the most credulous can have believed at this stage in the possibility of her survival as a floating hulk and haven. It is probable that the engineers were dead. Almost fifteen hundred people, mainly men but some women, crowded the stern. Many wore lifejackets. An English priest, Father Byles, moved among them, hearing confessions. The last well-attested glimpses of Captain Smith describe him using his megaphone to hurry people into the last boats, telling the crew in the final minutes that it was every man for himself, and then finally taking up a stand on the bridge to await the end.
Near the ship, the sea was strewn with steamer chairs and other wooden debris, thrown down in the desperate hope that it might give someone something to cling to. Further off floated sixteen lifeboats, some full, some half empty. A few of the boats had pulled away from the Titanic under the impression, given them by Captain Smith himself, that they would be transferred immediately to another ship that had been seen—many thought—no more than a few miles away. That expectation had proved false. None of the boats, even those under competent leadership, had a clear idea of what should be done next. There seemed no reason to try to head in any particular direction. In many of the boats, the oars were manned not by crew but by women. The night continued to be spectacular; stars of a brilliance that nobody had seen before, the visibility so clear that when a star sank below the horizon, the horizon bisected the star, with half of it shining above and half of it below the water. The sea was still as calm as a backwater of the Thames, but it was bitterly cold, with the temperature of the water 4 degrees below freezing.
“It Was Sad When the Great Ship Went Down” is the first line of a ballad still sung at American summer camps. The line scarcely does the moment justice.
Lightoller was standing on the upturned collapsible:
I could now see the massive outline of the Titanic silhouetted against the starlit sky, her blackness emphasized by row upon row of lights still burning. But only for a matter of minutes. With her attaining an angle of about 60 degrees all the lights suddenly went out, and, with a roar, every one of the gigantic boilers left their beds and went crashing down through bulkheads and everything that stood in their way.
Crowds of people were still on the after deck and at the stern, but the end was near. Slowly and almost majestically, the immense stern reared itself up, with propellers and rudder clear of the water, till at last she assumed the exact perpendicular. Then with an ever-quickening glide, she slid beneath the water of the cold Atlantic.
Despite our own danger, every one of us had been held spellbound by the sight, and like a prayer as she disappeared, the words were breathed, “She’s gone.”
John Thayer wrote:
Her deck was turned slightly towards us. We could see groups of the almost fifteen hundred people still aboard, clinging in clusters or bunches, like swarming bees; only to fall in masses, pairs or singly, as the great after part of the ship, two hundred and fifty feet of it, rose into the sky, till it reached a sixty-five or seventy-degree angle. Here it seemed to pause, and just hung, for what felt like minutes. Gradually she turned her deck away from us, as though to hide from our sight the awful spectacle.
We had an oar on our upturned boat. In spite of several men working on it, amid our cries and prayers, we were being gradually sucked in towards the great pivoting mass. I looked upwards—we were right underneath the three enormous propellers. For an instant, I thought they were sure to come right down on top of us. Then, with the deadening noise of the bursting of her last few gallant bulkheads, she slid quietly away from us into the sea.
There was no final apparent suction, and practically no wreckage that we could see.
I don’t remember all the wild talk and calls that were going on in our boat, but there was one concerted sigh or sob as she went from view.
The description by John Thayer’s mother was a formal statement, made under oath:
All the lights were burning up to the very time the ship sank, as I saw tier upon tier of lights disappear beneath the water as the forward part of the ship slid down as though being launched—at the same time there was a sound as of drawing a boat over a pebbly beach. Then there was a rumbling noise, and a red glare of cinders in the air, and the forward part of the ship sank out of view. The after part of the ship then reared in the air, with the stern upwards, until it assumed an almost vertical position. It seemed to remain stationary in this position for many seconds (perhaps twenty), then suddenly dove straight down out of sight.
The time was 2:20 a.m., according to a wrist watch worn by one of the passengers in Mrs. Thayer’s boat.
Martha Stevenson tried not to look. “When the call came that she was going I covered my face and then heard someone call, ‘She’s broken.’ After what seemed a long time I turned my head only to see the stern almost perpendicular in the air so that the full outline of the blades of the propeller showed above the water. She then gave her final plunge.”
As the ship went down, Mr. August Wennerström, in collapsible A with George Rheims, Richard Williams, and Rhoda Abbott, saw a man lowering himself down the logline beside the enormous rudder.
“At the last,” said one onlooker, “the end of the world. A smooth, slow chute.” “She tilted slowly up, revolving apparently about a centre of gravity just astern of midship,” Beesley wrote, “until she attained a vertically upright position; and there she remained—motionless! As she swung up, her lights, which had shone without a flicker all night, went out suddenly, came on again for a single flash, then went out altogether.”
Then came the noise, described as partly a groan, and partly a smash, that some thought was an explosion, and some, including Lightoller and Beesley, the sound of engines and machinery and boilers coming adrift and crashing their way through the bulkheads. No one, said Beesley, had ever heard anything like it before, and no one wanted to hear anything like it again. “When the noise was over the Titanic was still upright like a column: we could see her only as the stern and some 150 feet of her stood outlined against the star-specked sky, looming black in the darkness, and in this position she continued for some minutes—I think as much as five minutes, but it may have been less. Then, first sinking back a little at the stern, I thought, she slid slowly forwards through the water and dived slantingly down; the sea closed over her.…”
Many survivors long remembered the sequence of sounds that night: the “tearing calico” when the iceberg struck; the hiss of the boilers that made speech impossible when they were shut down by the engineers; the detonation of the rockets; the stupendous noise from inside the ship as she tipped on end. The silences were remembered, too: the silence after the hiss of the boilers ceased; the silence as the survivors climbed aboard the Carpathia. Nobody forgot the most terrible sound of all, the cries of hundreds that came from the Titanic after she sank; nor did anyone forget the unearthly silence that eventually followed. Beesley, for one, was taken unawares. He did not know how many boats the Titanic carried, nor how many people were still on board. He would not have been surprised to learn that everyone was safe. “Unprepared as we were for such a thing, the cries of the drowning floating across the quiet sea filled us with stupefaction.” John Thayer remembered “one continuous wailing chant … It sounded like locusts on a midsummer night, in the woods of Pennsylvania. This terrible continuing cry lasted for twenty or thirty minutes, gradually dying away, as one after another could no longer withstand the cold and exposure. Practically no one was drowned, as no water was found in the lungs of those later recovered. Everyone had on a life preserver.”
Then Thayer posed the question that had troubled him for twenty-eight years:
The partially filled lifeboats standing by, only a few hundred yards away, never came back. Why on earth they did not come back is a mystery. How could any human being fail to heed those cries?
The most heart-rending part of the whole tragedy was the failure, right after the Titanic sank, of those boats which were only partially loaded, to pick up the poor souls in the water. There they were, only four or five hundred yards away, listening to the cries, and still they did not come back. If they had turned back, several more hundred would have been saved. No one can explain it. It was not satisfactorily explained in any investigation.
Some boats did their best. On Thayer’s overturned boat, people were helped aboard “until we were packed like sardines. Then out of self-preservation we had to turn some away.” No. 4 boat went back. “We rowed back and pulled in five more men from the sea,” wrote Martha Stevenson. “Their suffering from the icy water was intense and two men who had been pulled into the stern afterwards died, but we kept their bodies with us.” Mrs. Thayer, despite her disapproval of the “disagreeable” and allegedly incompetent Quartermaster Perkis, helped to row No. 4; and it was Perkis who decided to go back. They rescued another four or five who were standing up on a capsized collapsible boat, until they were so full that there was nowhere to sit except on the gunwales and they were taking in water.
Fifth Officer Lowe made a valiant attempt to organize a rescue in a seamanlike manner. His lifeboat, No. 14, was virtually full. Assembling four emptier boats, he redistributed the passengers among them, picked a crew of seamen to join him in No. 14, and took it back among the wreckage, turning over bodies for signs of life. Many were dead, apparently frozen rather than drowned. Lowe and his men rescued four people alive, including one “Japanese or Chinese young fellow.” Passenger William Hoyt died in the boat shortly after being picked up.
One officer who did not go back was the third officer, Herbert John Pitman. He was thirty-four, from Castle Cary in Somerset, and appears in contemporary photographs wearing a walrus moustache. He had served a four-year apprenticeship, then spent three years with James Nourse Ltd., a year with Blue Anchor running to Australia, six months running to Japan, and five years with White Star.
After the collision, he had worked on the starboard side under First Officer Murdoch, uncovering and swinging out No. 5 lifeboat and helping women climb aboard. He had been impressed by the modern davits, a great improvement on the old-fashioned kind. “I thought what a jolly fine idea they were, because with the old-fashioned davits it would require about a dozen men to lift her, a dozen men at each end.” With five or six men, he swung out No. 5 in two or three minutes. When there were “no more ladies,” he allowed a few male passengers aboard, and then five male crew. (On the port side, Lightoller was adopting a more rigorous policy; no male passengers, and only two crew to each boat.) When the boat was, as he thought, reasonably full, with forty-five people aboard, Pitman jumped back on deck, whereupon Murdoch told him, “You go in charge.” He obeyed with some reluctance, thinking he would be better off on the ship. Once in the water, he told the crew to row to the north and then to lie on their oars, “awaiting further developments.” An hour and a half later the Titanic went down.
Nine days later he was in Washington before the Senate committee of inquiry, where Senator Smith, like John Thayer twenty-eight years later, was wondering why some lifeboats, though not full, had failed to go to the help of the drowning. There followed this verbatim exchange between Smith and Pitman, as set down in the official Senate record.
SENATOR SMITH: Did you hear any cries of distress?
A: Oh, yes.
Q: What were they, cries for help?
A: Crying, shouting, moaning.
Q: From the ship, or from the water?
A: From the water, after the ship disappeared; no noises before.
Q: There were no noises from the ship’s crew, or officers, or passengers, just preceding the sinking?
A: None.
Q: Immediately following the sinking of the ship you heard these cries of distress?
A: Yes.
Q: But, as I understand you, you were not in close proximity to those uttering the cries?
A: I may have been three or four hundred yards away; four or five hundred yards away.
Q: Did you attempt to get near them?
A: As soon as she disappeared I said, “Now, men, we will pull towards the wreck.” Everyone in my boat said it was a mad idea, because we had far better save what few we had in my boat than go back to the scene of the wreck and be swamped by the crowds that were there.
Q: As a matter of fact, do you now know your boat would have accommodated twenty or twenty-five more people?
A: My boat would have accommodated a few more, yes; certainly.
Q: According to the testimony of your fellow officers—
A: My boat would have held more.
Q: Your boat would have held about sixty or sixty-five people.
A: About sixty.
Q: Tell us about your fellow passengers on that lifeboat. You say they discouraged you from returning or going in the direction of these cries?
A: They did. I told my men to get their oars out, and pull toward the wreck—the scene of the wreck.
Q: Yes.
A: I said, “We may be able to pick up a few more.”
Q: Who demurred to that?
A: The whole crowd in my boat. A great number of them did.
Q: Women?
A: I could not discriminate whether women or men. They said it was rather a mad idea.
Q: I ask you if any woman in your boat appealed to you to return to the direction from which the cries came?
A: No one.
Q: You say that no woman passenger in your boat urged you to return? A: None.
MR. BURLINGHAM (APPEARING FOR WHITE STAR): It would have capsized the boat, Senator.
SENATOR SMITH: Pardon me, I am not drawing any unfair conclusion from this. One of the officers told us that a woman in his boat urged him to return to the site of the ship. I want to be very sure that this officer heard no woman asking the same thing. (To the witness) Who demurred, now, that you can specifically recall?
A: I could not name any one in particular.
Q: The men with the oars?
A: No. They did not; no. They started to obey my orders.
Q: You were in command. They ought to have obeyed your orders?
A: So they did.
Q: They did not, if you told them to pull toward the ship.
A: They commenced pulling toward the ship, and the passengers in my boat said it was a mad idea on my part to pull back to the ship, because if I did, we should be swamped with the crowd that was in the water, and it would add another forty to the list of drowned, and I decided I would not pull back.
Q: Officer, you really turned this No. 5 boat around to go in the direction from which these cries came?
A: I did.
Q: And were dissuaded from your purpose by your crew—
A: No, not crew; passengers.
Q: One moment; by your crew and by the passengers in your boat?
A: Certainly.
Q: Then did you turn the boat toward the sea again?
A: No; just simply took our oars in and lay quiet.
Q: You mean you drifted?
A: We may have gone a little bit.
Q: Drifted on your oars?
A: We may have drifted along. We just simply lay there doing nothing.
Q: How many of these cries were there? Was it a chorus, or was it—
A: I would rather you did not speak about that.
Q: I would like to know how you were impressed by it.
A: Well, I can not very well describe it. I would rather you would not speak of it.
Q: I realize that it is not a pleasant theme, and yet I would like to know whether these cries were general and in chorus, or desultory and occasional?
A: There was a continual moan for about an hour.
Q: And you lay in the vicinity of that scene for about an hour?
A: Oh, yes; we were in the vicinity of the wreck the whole time.
Q: And drifted or lay on your oars during that time?
A: We drifted toward daylight, as a little breeze sprang up.
Q: Did this anguish or these cries of distress die away?
A: Yes; they died away gradually.
Q: Did they continue during most of the hour?
A: Oh, yes; I think so. It may have been a shorter time. Of course I did not watch every five minutes—
Q: I understand that and I am not trying to ask about a question of five minutes. Is that all you care to say?
A: I would rather that you would have left that out altogether.
Q: I know you would; but I must know what efforts you made to save the lives of passengers and crew under your charge. If that is all the effort you made, say so—
A: That is all, sir.
Q: And I will stop that branch of my questioning.
A: That is all, sir; that is all the effort I made.
Pitman’s conduct did not concern the British inquiry. On the whole, Lord Mersey and his commissioners avoided matters of individual behavior except when they bore on the reasons for the wreck. Rather against the will of Lord Mersey, however, the British court was inadvertently driven to look into the actions of one first-class passenger and his wife after they had been described in an unfavorable light by a member of the crew.
Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, Bart., was of Scottish descent. One of his ancestors, James Duff, was British consul in Cadiz during the Peninsular War and kept Wellington’s armies so efficiently supplied that at the end of the campaign he was given a baronetcy. As consul, he had a finger in every pie; he went into the sherry business, which remained in the family for much of the nineteenth century. He never married, however; and at his death the title passed to his nephew William Gordon, a grandson of an earl of Aberdeen (and a cousin of Lord Aberdeen the prime minister of the 1850s), who added “Duff” by special license to his surname of Gordon. Sir Cosmo, the fifth baronet, was a tall, fine-looking man remembered in the family circle as someone who could be difficult. He was a good bridge player and had fenced for England in the now unofficial 1906 Olympics.
His wife, Lucy, was better known than he was: a sister of Elinor Glyn, the novelist and mistress of Lord Curzon. Lady Duff Gordon was a brilliant and sought-after dress designer with a very successful salon, Madame Lucile, in Hanover Square, where she was the first dress designer to require her models to move about. She taught Molyneux. She owned other establishments in Paris and New York, and the purpose of the trip to the United States was for Lady Duff Gordon, traveling with her secretary, Miss Laura Mabel Francatelli, to conduct business in Chicago. Sir Cosmo was her second husband.
The Duff Gordons’ names came up in the British inquiry as a result of a decision to question one person from each lifeboat. For No. 1 emergency boat the choice fell on a leading fireman, Charles Hendrickson of Southampton.
Hendrickson’s story was that after finishing his duties below he had gone on deck and, without particularly being ordered to do so, had started to help clear away and lower lifeboats on the starboard side.
He had spent an hour or an hour and a half at this work when he was told to get into No. 1 emergency boat. Two emergency boats were kept swung out and ready to be lowered at all times; they were smaller than the other lifeboats, with a capacity of forty as against sixty-five. The No. 1 boat went away, however, with one of the lookout men, Symons, in charge as coxswain, and only eleven others: six crew (five firemen and trimmers, and one seaman) and five passengers, of whom only two were women. The women were Lady Duff Gordon and her secretary; one of the three male passengers was Sir Cosmo.
The arresting point about Hendrickson’s story was that “there was plenty of room for another dozen in the boat,” despite the space taken up by four oars and a mast, yet no one except himself had proposed going back after the Titanic sank to pick up other people. Once in the water, with members of the crew at the oars, the boat had pulled away about two hundred yards from the ship and had been at that distance when she went down. When they heard the cries, Hendrickson had made a general appeal, he said, not addressed to anyone in particular, that they should look for survivors. “I proposed in the boat that we should go back, and they would not listen to me,” he said. He never heard anyone else propose going back. But who was it, he was asked, who objected? “Well, the passengers,” he said. “I think it was the women objected.” There were only two women in the boat: Lady Duff Gordon and her secretary.
The force of Hendrickson’s allegations came out most sharply when he was questioned by Harbinson, the counsel representing the third-class passengers. Hendrickson had said that the coxswain had not paid any attention to his proposal to go back.
Q: You say that that attitude of his [the coxswain’s] was due to the protests of the Duff Gordons?
A: Yes.
Q: You say you heard cries?
A: Yes.
Q: Agonizing cries?
A: Yes, terrible cries.
Q: At what distance?
A: About two hundred yards.
And later:
Q: They said it would be too dangerous to go back, we might get swamped. Who said that?
A: Sir Duff Gordon.
The original objection to going back had been made by Lady Duff Gordon, Hendrickson said, and her husband had backed her up. Hendrickson had been sitting close to them. “Duff Gordon asked me if I wanted a smoke, and he gave me a cigar.”
That was not the only thing Duff Gordon had given him. “In the early hours of the morning before we were picked up he said he would do something for us”—“us” being the members of the crew. After they had been picked up by the Carpathia, Duff Gordon gave them all “an order for £5.” (Lady Duff Gordon had asked them to sign their names on her life-preserver.) Here was a sensational piece of news. Had Duff Gordon bribed the crew not to go back?
Hendrickson did not shift his position under cross-examination, although he was caught out on one minor point. He said there had been no sea anchor in the boat but admitted under questioning that he had never looked for one, nor had anyone else.
The burden of his story, however, was supported by another member of the crew, Taylor, also a fireman, who said he had been sitting on a thwart next to a man he later found out to be Sir Cosmo. He had heard Hendrickson’s proposal about going back; he had also heard a woman whom he later found out to be Lady Duff Gordon say that the boat would be swamped if it did.
The coxswain, Symons, denied hearing any proposal or any protests. Symons in the witness box sounded extremely self-important, constantly using two phrases about being “master of the situation” and “using my discretion.” He was not in a very easy position himself. For one thing he had told the U.S. inquiry that there had been between fourteen and twenty people in the boat, whereas in London he was forced to admit that there had been only twelve. Why had he given a wrong figure to the Senate, the attorney general asked him. “I think myself, sir, that the mistake I made then was through the way they muddle you about there.”
Symons claimed that the boat was much farther than 200 yards away from the Titanic when she went down, and that he had in fact started to head in the direction of the cries; but they had stopped and so had he.
From the Duff Gordons’ standpoint, Symons’s most damaging assertion concerned the way they had gotten into the boat in the first place. According to him, the two women had come running down the deck and jumped in, rapidly followed by Duff Gordon and two Americans.
A further allegation damaging to Sir Cosmo came from one of these Americans, a Mr. C. E. H. Stengel. He had been asked at the American inquiry whether he knew who was giving directions in the boat. “I think between Sir Duff Gordon and myself we decided which way to go.” (“Duff” was widely supposed to be Sir Cosmo’s first name, not part of his surname.)
There was one more awkwardness. Lady Duff Gordon, as part of her professional life, had written articles for a Hearst newspaper, the Sunday American. The morning after the Carpathia arrived in New York, the paper’s stable-mate, the New York American, had printed an article about the disaster signed by her. Immediately syndicated to England, as elsewhere, it said, among other things: “We watched her—we were 200 yards away—go down slowly, almost peacefully.” It also said: “Women and men were clinging to bits of wreckage in the icy water.… And it was at least an hour before the awful chorus of shrieks ceased, gradually dying in a moan of despair.”
Thus the behavior of the Duff Gordons—together with the conduct of J. Bruce Ismay, which we shall come to later—became the focus of rumor and scandal, all the more so since it appeared to contrast shamefully with the courage and self-sacrifice displayed by others: the musicians, playing on as the ship went down; the engineers, who had given their lives to keep the ship afloat and the lights burning as long as possible; Captain Smith, who had gone down with his ship; the Strauses, who had refused special treatment; the bravery of the Marconi operator Phillips; the stoicism and sang-froid of the American millionaires. The list of heroes was long. Had a British baronet let down the side?
On May 20 the Duff Gordons appeared before the British inquiry at their own request. Fashionable London turned out for the occasion. Sir Cosmo, represented by Henry Duke, K.C., M.P., faced three troublesome questions. How had he, as a man of honor, found a place in a lifeboat when women were still on board? Why had the lifeboat he was in not gone back to rescue others? What inspired him, alone of all the passenger survivors, to hand out money to the crew?
Sir Cosmo was first examined by the attorney general, Sir Rufus Isaacs. Sir Cosmo explained that his wife had awakened him just after the impact with the iceberg; he had not at first gotten up, but when he did so he went to the top deck, where the noise was “perfectly indescribable,” and spoke to Colonel Astor. “Who went down with the vessel?” “Yes.” The attorney general had made a point.
Sir Cosmo next described how he had watched men stripping down a lifeboat, had gone below again to fetch his wife and her secretary, and how they had all watched three further lifeboats being filled, almost entirely with women, and lowered. His wife and Miss Francatelli had been asked two or three times to go but had refused. Once, “some men got hold of her [Lady Duff Gordon] and tried to pull her away,” but she still would not go. Then, after the three lifeboats they had all been watching had left, when the deck seemed deserted, and the rockets started going up, his wife said to him, “Ought not we to do something?” and he replied, “No, we have to wait for orders.” Then an officer had told a group of crew to “man the emergency boat,” at which Sir Cosmo had asked him, “May we get into the boat?” “and he said, ‘Yes, I wish you would’ or ‘Very glad if you would’ or some expression like that.” The officer put the ladies in and helped Sir Cosmo aboard as well. There were no other passengers at all near, said Sir Cosmo. Finally two Americans came running up, and the officer allowed them in, told two or three firemen that they might as well go too, and put a seaman—Symons—in charge.
The attorney general soon persuaded Sir Cosmo to concede that “of course there was room for more people.” In that case, the attorney general asked, exaggerating slightly, how did he explain the contrast with the other lifeboats, which had been filled with as many as they could possibly carry? No one else was visible, said Sir Cosmo; no one else on that side of the deck. He knew there were people still aboard, but he “certainly thought all the women had got off.”
And where had the lifeboat been when the Titanic went down? Sir Cosmo’s impression was that Symons had been ordered by the officer to row as fast as he could for the first two hundred yards; they had then proceeded by fits and starts, rowing and resting, until by the time the ship went down he thought they were about a thousand yards away. He had only one eye and was “presumed not to be a judge of distance”; however, he felt confident that the figure was about a thousand yards.
Had he heard the cries? “Yes, I heard the explosion first, and I heard, I will not say the cries, but a wail—one confused sound.”
SIR RUFUS ISAACS: We do not want unnecessarily to prolong the discussion of it, but they were cries of people who were drowning?
A: Yes.
Q: There is no doubt about that?
A: Yes, I think so without a doubt.
Q: Did it occur to you that with the room in your boat, if you could get to these people you could save some?
A: It is difficult to say what occurred to me. Again, I was minding my wife, and we were rather in an abnormal condition, you know. There were many things to think about, but of course it quite well occurred to one that people in the water could be saved by a boat, yes.
Q: And that there was room in your boat; that they could have got into your boat and been saved?
A: Yes, it is possible.
Sir Cosmo had heard no suggestion that the boat should go back to the place the cries were coming from. The men had begun to row again immediately after the cries. “In my opinion it was to stop the sound.” He was asked once more if at the time he had thought about whether or not his boat would have been able to save any of the people in the water. “I do not know; it might have been possible; but it would have been very difficult to get back, the distance we were, and in the darkness, to find anything.” He was not thinking about it; he was attending to his wife; “we had had rather a serious evening, you know.” He had said nothing about the danger of being swamped. No notice was taken in the boat of the cries from the drowning people, and there had been no conversation on the subject.
The attorney general kept probing the failure of the boat to go back.
Q: I understand from what you said, and correct it if it is wrong, that no thought entered into your mind that you ought to go back and try to save some of these people?
A: No, I suppose not.
LORD MERSEY: The last witness [Hendrickson] told us that in his opinion it would have been quite safe to have gone back. What do you say to that?
A: I do not know, my lord, whether it would have been safe. I do not know. I think it would have been hardly possible.
ATTORNEY GENERAL: Why not possible?
A: I do not know which way we should have gone.
LORD MERSEY: When I say “gone back” I mean towards where the cries came from.
A: I do not know about that. I could not speculate.
It was put to Sir Cosmo that two witnesses had said that a suggestion was made that the boat should go back. Sir Cosmo replied that he could only say that he himself had not heard any such suggestion.
The attorney general asked his final questions on this theme.
Q: You know now, do you not, that you might have saved a good many if you had gone back?
A: I do not know that.
Q: You know that your boat would have carried a good many more?
A: Yes, I know that is so, but it is not a lifeboat, you must remember; there are no air-tanks.
Later, Sir Cosmo was asked about Symons’s evidence. Symons had said they did not go back when they heard the cries but did go back later; however, he had strained his ears and heard nothing. Had Sir Cosmo heard Symons give that order to the men rowing in the boat? No, he had not.
Next came the money.
There was a man sitting next to me [Sir Cosmo said] and of course in the dark I could see nothing of him. I never did see him, and I do not know who he is. I suppose it would be some time when they rested on their oars, 20 minutes or half an hour after the Titanic had sunk, a man said to me, “I suppose you have lost everything,” and I said, “Of course.” He said, “But you can get some more,” and I said “Yes.” “Well,” he said, “we have lost all our kit and the company won’t give us any more, and what is more our pay stops from tonight. All they will do is to send us back to London.” So I said to them, “You fellows need not worry about that; I will give you a fiver each to start a new kit.” That is the whole of that £5-note story.
Aboard the Carpathia, he asked Hendrickson to give him a list of the men’s names, which he did. It was Sir Cosmo’s usual practice to draw checks on his bankers, Coutts, on notepaper, and he told Miss Francatelli to make out checks in this way to all the men. He saw Hendrickson, asked him to assemble the men, “and just gave them each their cheque, asking each fellow what his name was.… I said, ‘I am sorry I cannot give you money; but if you had it you would probably spend it all in New York, so it is just as well it should be in a cheque which will enable you to start your kit again.’ ”
Lady Duff Gordon followed her husband to the witness box, after her counsel had told the Court that she insisted on doing so. She took the Court from the moment of impact and into the boats in a single answer.
I had quite made up my mind that I was going to be drowned, and then suddenly we saw this little boat in front of us—this little thing (pointing to a model)—and we saw some sailors and an officer apparently giving them orders and I said to my husband, “Ought we not to be doing something?” and he said, “Oh, we must wait for orders,” and we stood there for quite some time while these men were fixing up things and then my husband went forward and said, “Might we get into this boat?” and the officer said in a very polite way indeed, “Oh certainly; do; I will be very pleased.” … They hitched us up in this sort of way into the boat and after we had been in a little while the boat was started to be lowered and one American gentleman got pitched in and one American gentleman was pitched in while the boat was being lowered down.
She was “awfully sick” and very hazy about what happened thereafter, but she saw the Titanic sink. She heard “terrible cries” before the ship sank, and afterward her impression was that there had been “absolute silence.” She certainly had never said it would be dangerous to go back.
As for the article in the New York American, what happened was that the night they reached New York and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel she and Sir Cosmo had had dinner with six ladies and a “great friend of ours,” Mr. Merrett, the editor of the Sunday American. “After he had left us about half an hour he telephoned to me and he said, ‘Mr. Hearst has just rung me up, and must have your story of the Titanic wreck for tomorrow’s newspaper.’ He said, ‘May I tell your story as I have heard it?’ … I said ‘Yes,’ and he tells me afterwards he telephoned to their head office all he knew about it, and then a clever reporter put all that into words and it appeared next morning in the New York American.” It had been, she said, “rather inventive,” and much of it “quite untrue,” including the statements about being only 200 yards away when the ship went down and the shrieks lasting an hour.
Mr. Harbinson had no questions for her.
What is one to make of the Duff Gordon episode? The lawyer Harbinson asked Sir Cosmo whether he would be stating the position accurately if he summed it up by saying that “You considered when you were safe yourselves that all the others might perish.” Harbinson did his best to make it sound as if Sir Cosmo had promised the crew five-pound notes in order to induce them to row away from the drowning people. A whiff of class antagonism was in the air; Lord Mersey thought so, at any rate. He told Harbinson it was his duty to assist him, Lord Mersey, in arriving at the truth, “not to try to make out a case for this class or that class or another class,” or to make out a case against one person or another. Harbinson, before this intervention, had been suggesting to Sir Cosmo that his promises of financial help to the crew had coincided with the audible “harrowing cries” of the drowning.
One interesting point about Lady Duff Gordon’s testimony is that she denied telling the New York American that the lifeboat had been only 200 yards away when the Titanic sank—a figure that would have been in sharp contrast to her husband’s, and Symons’s, estimate of 1,000 yards. But whatever else the “clever reporter” invented, would he have invented 200 yards? It was at the least a strange coincidence that his invention agreed with Hendrickson’s estimate.
Seventy-two years later, I learned from Sotheby’s, the auctioneers, of a remarkable and apparently unrecorded letter that came up for sale. It was written in pencil by Miss Francatelli on Ritz-Carlton Hotel writing paper and dated April 28, 1912, thirteen days after the sinking. Miss Francatelli was writing to a Miss Marion Taylor in London, and the salient points, interspersed in the original with emotional comments on her ordeal, are as follows:
I was just getting into bed. Madame, & Sir Cosmo … were up on A deck the top, and I on E, the bottom deck for saloon Passengers.… two Gentlemen came up … and told me … we had run into an iceberg, but we were quite safe.… I still stood there quite 20 minutes … the water was on my deck, coming along the corridor.… I found all the people, running up, & down the stairs … Oh Marion that was a sickening moment, I felt myself go like Marble.… Sir Cosmo then took us up on top deck. Crowds were up there … several lifeboats had been lowered, they were preparing the last two, on that side of the ship, the Starboard side, they cried out, Any more women, saw us, & came to try & drag Madame & I away from Sir Cosmo, but Madame clung to Sir Cosmo … after all the lifeboats had gone, everybody seemed to rush to the other side of the boat, & leave ours vacant, but we still stood there, as Sir Cosmo said, we must wait for orders, presently. An officer started to swing off a little boat called the “Emergency” boat … he saw us, & ordered us in, they were then firing the last rockets beside us … two other American gentlemen jumped in, & seven stokers … The dear officer gave orders to row away from the sinking boat at least two hundred yards.… We saw the whole thing, and watched that tremendous thing quickly sink, there was then terrible, terrible, explosions, and all darkness, then followed the Awful cries & screams of the 1,600 dear souls, fighting for their lives in the water. Oh never shall I forget that awful night.…
The letter in general bears out the Duff Gordons’ statements that they got into the boat under an officer’s auspices and did not come running down the deck as alleged by Symons. But it tends to weaken the assertions that the boat was a thousand yards away from the sinking Titanic; it sounds as if Miss Francatelli was nearer than that to the explosions and the cries.
Lord Mersey in his report found any suggestion of bribery by Sir Cosmo “unfounded.” But he added: “I think, that if he had encouraged the men to return to the position where the Titanic had foundered they would probably have made an effort to do so and could have saved some lives.”
The verdict sounds just. Other boats went back and did their best.
Sir Cosmo died in 1931. He was deeply distressed by the aftermath of the sinking and spent much of his time abroad, some of it in Cairo. Otherwise, he stayed in Scotland.
The present, eighth baronet, Sir Andrew Cosmo Lewis Duff Gordon, said not long ago in defense of his great-uncle that any man who survived that nightmare ordeal by getting away in a lifeboat, when so many others perished, was likely to be regarded with suspicion. The slur on the fifth baronet’s name notwithstanding, the ninth baronet will be another Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon.