CHAPTER 16 Over the Top Together

One by one her port lights, that still burnt row above row in dreadful sloping lines, sank slowly into darkness. Soon the lights would tilt upright, then flash out and flash bright again; then, as the engines crashed down through the bulkheads, go out once more, and leave that awful form standing up against the sky, motionless, black, preparing for the final plunge. But that time was not yet. Some fifteen minutes were left.…

Shan Bullock, Thomas Andrews: Shipbuilder (1912)

GEORGE HOGG HAD BEEN DUE to start his next shift as one of the Titanic’s lookouts twenty minutes after she struck the iceberg. The shift would have lasted, as did all the lookouts’, for two hours.¹ At about 2:00 a.m. on Monday the 15th, instead of climbing down the interior stairs from the Crow’s Nest, Hogg was ordering the lifeboat he had been put in charge of by First Officer Murdoch to row energetically from the Titanic’s vicinity. Since leaving the liner eighty minutes earlier, Dorothy Gibson and the other occupants of Hogg’s Lifeboat 7 had watched the unfolding drama from the distance of about twenty yards, from where Hogg was waiting for Murdoch or another officer to order them to return once the damage had been repaired.² By 2 a.m., he had surrendered that as a false hope and now wanted to get the lifeboat safely away from any suction that might catch them when the Titanic went under.

William Sloper, rowing in obedience to Hogg’s commands, had found himself becoming progressively more irritated by Dorothy’s behavior since he had escorted her into the lifeboat. Sloper wrote later that, as it became clear that the Titanic would sink, “every passenger seemed to have taken a firm grip on his nerves. [Except] Dorothy Gibson… who had become quite hysterical.” In the course of their affair, Jules Brulatour had given Dorothy a small gray motorcar with a pastel chintz interior.³ Watching the Titanic settle into the sea, Dorothy “kept repeating over and over again,” loudly and frequently enough for others in the boat to hear clearly what she was saying, “I’ll never ride in my little gray car again.” Sloper was mortified that people might think he was related to Dorothy or sympathetic to her self-absorbed jeremiad.⁴ She was also in pain from the icy water that had spilled up to her ankles when the lifeboat was first lowered, and, as did several survivors, Dorothy remembered the suffocating weight of that chill for the rest of her life: “I never knew one could be so cold and live. I ached from head to foot.”⁵

The band was still playing as Tommy Andrews made his way through the crowds to the Bridge, where he talked with Captain Smith.⁶ Nearby, Jack Thayer and Milton Long stood by one of the deck rails and discussed whether or not they should jump. Jack, an experienced swimmer, changed his mind three or four times. He was afraid of being stunned when he hit the water, and Long intermittently convinced him that “she might possibly stay afloat.”⁷ While they considered what to do next, Long sat down and Jack continued to stand, staring at a nearby empty davit, where he “got a sight on a rope between the davits and a star and noticed that she was gradually sinking.”⁸

The ship’s boilers in a storeroom in Belfast, before installation; for scale, a man can be seen halfway down the photograph on the right.

A trainee steward, Cecil Fitzpatrick, twenty-one years old and from Kilkenny in Ireland, decided to cut across the Bridge to reach the other side of the deck. He heard the Captain tell Andrews to save himself, as the time had come for the last of those in command to abandon ship. Fitzpatrick could not remember Smith’s precise choice of words to Andrews, although it was something to the effect of “We cannot stay any longer, she is going!”⁹ He was right. One of the most memorably horrifying things about the Titanic’s sinking was not just that she lasted over an hour longer than her designer expected, but that the end, when it came, came with terrifying speed. Two hours and forty minutes, considerably longer than Andrews’s original prediction, elapsed between the collision with the iceberg and the Titanic’s disappearance. Two and a half hours after the impact, her bow had settled forward by eight degrees and the water had still not reached the Bridge or the base of her first funnel. She had held up remarkably well in the wake of a blow from which few ships, then or now, could survive. Then, at about 2:10 a.m., those in the lifeboats heard several roars from within the hull, which sounded like the boilers exploding but which were in fact the bulkheads finally giving way. Cecil Fitzpatrick, standing near to Andrews and Smith, felt the “ship suddenly dipping, and the waves rushing up and engulfing me.”¹⁰ The young steward saved himself by grabbing onto the empty lifeboat davit and dragging himself to a still dry part of the Boat Deck, from where he scrambled to help Colonel Gracie, Second Officer Lightoller, and those still attempting to free the collapsible. The lurch had knocked one of the collapsibles off the roof, onto the deck below, upside down. As the ship slid under, water again covered Fitzpatrick, floating the lifeboat away from him and taking Gracie, Lightoller, and their companions off the Titanic. The same “slight but definite plunge” caught Tommy Andrews and Captain Smith, either carrying them from the Bridge or compelling them to jump.¹¹ It also hit Ida and Isidor Straus, washing them overboard.¹² The band members were caught in that wave or fled, like Jack Thayer and Milton Long, who ran out of its way and only stopped “by the rail about even with the second funnel.”¹³

Water filled the Bridge and the abandoned Wireless Room. It swept over the roof of the Officers’ Quarters and up to the Grand Staircase, spilling in through the open doors leading from the deck and then shattering its glass dome, from where it reached the Writing Room and Tommy Andrews’s cabin.¹⁴ Survivors recalled hearing “a sickening roar like hundreds of lions” as four of the Titanic’s ninety-one-ton boilers broke free and crashed through the ship.¹⁵ As the bow disappeared, the stern rose. The ship’s propellers edged out of the water and more people began to leap overboard. Others used the hanging lifeboat ropes to lower themselves into the ocean, where they tried to swim in the direction of the lifeboats. Still debating if it was safe to jump, Jack Thayer and Milton Long were nearly toppled over by a man who lurched past them, swigging from a bottle of Gordon’s gin.^I Surrounded by “a mass of hopeless, dazed humanity,” Jack did not want to be knocked into the darkness, and he tried to impress upon Milton the need to jump before they were sucked under or accidentally pushed.¹⁶ Milton, who unlike Jack did not know how to swim, kept trying to find an alternative, but the awful groans coming from the bowels of the ship and the terror seizing the people “pushing, towards the floating stern and keeping in from the rail as far as they could” persuaded him that Jack was correct and they needed to go.¹⁷ The two friends had agreed to stick together throughout the ordeal and Jack promised they would jump together too. In case only one of them should make it, they “sent message through each other to our families.”¹⁸ The two young men climbed onto the rail, shook hands, wished one another good luck, and swung their legs out. Milton nervously asked, “You are coming, old boy, aren’t you?” “Of course,” Jack replied. Hoping to avoid becoming entangled or landing on Milton, he then said, “Go ahead. I’ll be with you in a minute.”¹⁹

Milton jumped and then, a second after him, Jack hurled himself from the side of the Titanic. It is hard, with hindsight, not to see in this leap some horrible pre-echo of the millions of young men who would go over the top of the trenches, side by side, most of them unprepared for what they were about to face. Jack swam to the surface and came up “facing the ship,” from where he heard a “rumbling roar, mixed with more muffled explosions. It was like standing under a railway bridge while an express train passes overhead, mingled with the noise of a pressed steel factory and wholesale breakage of china.”²⁰ He looked around for Milton for a few seconds until the Titanic’s first funnel collapsed “with a mass of sparks and steam” into the sea full of people who had just been swept, or had jumped, overboard.²¹ The wave created by the funnel’s collapse, “right amongst the struggling mass of humanity already in the water,” most likely killed Milton Long, who did not resurface.²² Jack, caught but not submerged in the wash from the funnel, was struggling to breathe. Despite its temperature, he trod water, fixated by the sight of the Titanic:

The ship seemed to be surrounded with a glare, and stood out of the night as though she were on fire. I watched her. I don’t know why I didn’t keep swimming away. Fascinated, I seemed tied to the spot. Already I was tired out with the cold and struggling, although the life preserver held me head and shoulders above the water. She continued to make the same forward progress as when I left her. The water was over the base of the first funnel. The mass of people on board were surging back, always back toward the floating stern. The rumble and roar continued, with even louder distinct wrenchings and tearings of boilers and engines from their beds.²³

The second funnel likewise shattered, pulverizing more swimmers and then disappearing. Its wake sucked Jack under, twice. He tried to cover his head to shield himself from the “great deal of small wreckage” spilling from the Titanic, and as he did so, “my hand touched the cork fender of an overturned life boat. I looked up and saw some men on top and asked them to give me a hand. One of them, a stoker, helped me up.”²⁴ From there, with the four or five other men who had made it to the flipped collapsible, Jack, “holding on for dear life” and sitting on his haunches, again turned to face the Titanic.

It seemed as though hours had passed since I left the ship; yet it was probably no more than four minutes, if that long. There was the gigantic mass, about fifty or sixty yards away.… Her stern was gradually rising into the air, seemingly in no hurry, just slowly and deliberately.… 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.…²⁵

I. This man was probably one of the ship’s bakers. His blood alcohol level was so high that he insulated himself to the point that he survived in the waters far longer than any of the others who jumped from the Titanic. He died in New Jersey in 1956.