How to Survive the Titanic

so much as setting foot on American soil?

Lightoller was called to the stand after lunch. Described by the papers as ‘strong and powerfully built’ with a ‘virile sea-worn face’, he told the inquiry in a clear, deep voice how he had retired to bed and was dropping off to sleep when he heard ‘a slight shock and a grinding sound. That was all there was to it. There was no listing, no plunging, diving, or anything else.’ He then left his room in his pyjamas and went to the bridge where he found the Captain and First Officer Murdoch motionless, looking ahead. The ship was still moving and so he assumed all was well. Lightoller then returned to his room. ‘What for?’ asked Smith.

‘There was no call for me to be on deck,’ replied Lightoller.

‘No call, or no cause?’ corrected Smith.

‘As far as I could see,’ said Lightoller, ‘neither call nor cause… I did not think it was a serious accident.’ As he walked back, Lightoller saw no one except the Third Officer, ‘who left his berth shortly after I did’. The two men briefly conferred about the incident and concluded that ‘nothing much’ had happened.

‘Did you go back to your room under the impression that the boat had not been injured?’ asked Smith.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Lightoller.

‘Didn’t you’, wondered Smith, ‘tell Mr Ismay that?’

Lightoller answered that he had not yet seen Ismay; that he would only see Ismay once, about twenty minutes later, and that he ‘really could not say’ whether he had or had not then told him there was no cause for concern. Lightoller went back to bed for ‘ten minutes’. When he was roused by Fourth Officer Boxhall he put some clothes on top of his pyjamas and went out on deck. Ismay, when Lightoller saw him, was standing stock-still and alone. According to Lightoller the entire evening had been conducted in silence; he appears in his account like a man in a dream, sleepwalking to the bridge and then back to bed where he wakes with a start, realising that everyone is going to die.

Nor did Lightoller recall seeing any passengers on the deck when the ship was going down. ‘I ask you again,’ Smith persisted: ‘There must have been a great number of passengers and crew still on the boat, the part of the boat that was not submerged, probably on the high point, so far as possible. Were they huddled together?’

‘They did not seem to be,’ said Lightoller. ‘I could not say, sir; I did not notice; there were a great many of them, I know, but as to what condition they were in, huddled or not, I do not know.’ However, in his memoirs, written twenty-three years later, Lightoller remembered the crowds and what condition they were in. They were washed back in a ‘dreadful huddled mass… It came home to me very clearly how fatal it would be to get amongst those hundreds and hundreds of people who would shortly be struggling for their lives in that deadly cold water.’

Lightoller explained how the Captain gave him no order to load the lifeboats on the port side, how he had placed twenty-five people into the first boat because he was unconfident about filling it with more, how he had personally tested all the lifeboats when the ship was in Southampton (in his memoirs, he admitted to testing only ‘some of them’), and how it was only as she began to list that he realised there was a genuine emergency. There had been no confusion amongst the passengers, who ‘could not have stood quieter had they been in church’, and no restraint on the movement of those in steerage. No other man had tried to join them on the upturned lifeboat because everyone else was ‘some distance away’.

As for the question of whether he had seen any ice warnings, Lightoller did not know they were in ‘the vicinity of icebergs’, he ‘could not say’ whether he saw the ‘individual message’ sent by the Amerika on Sunday evening or heard of it even though it was received during his shift. (This particular Marconigram, which never reached the bridge of the Titanic from the communications room, had been intercepted and sent to Washington where it ended up on Senator’s Smith’s desk.) Would it not, asked Smith, ‘have been the duty of the person receiving this message to communicate it to you, for you were in charge of the ship?’ Lightoller replied only ‘under the commander’s orders, sir’ and that while he did not know about that particular message he ‘knew that a communication had come from some ship; I can not say that it was the Amerika… speaking of the icebergs and naming their longitude… the message contained information that there was ice from 49 to 51’.

‘How do you know it came?’ asked Smith.

‘Because I saw it,’ replied Lightoller. At one o’clock on Sunday, the Captain had shown it to him.

Lightoller’s cocky responses during the five hours he was questioned were designed to ridicule Smith’s pretence at authority. He thought the inquiry, as he put it in his memoirs, a ‘complete farce wherein all the traditions and customs of the sea were continuously and persistently flouted’. It was an outrage that professional seamen should answer, before their clothes had even dried, to what he called ‘an armchair judge’ who had never himself ‘been called upon to make a life-and-death decision in a sudden emergency’.⁵

What mattered to Lightoller was the forthcoming British inquiry; this American affair was an amateur theatrical which had to be endured. Asked at what time he left the ship, Lightoller replied that he didn’t leave it, that the ship had left him. He kept a straight face when, in an account of how the ship’s forward funnel had fallen on top of a group of struggling swimmers, Smith inquired whether any of them were injured (one of the passengers probably killed by the funnel was John Jacob Astor, whose body, when it was found by the recovery ship, Mackay-Bennett, floating in the Atlantic, was so crushed and charred that it could be identified only by the $2,440 in notes in his pocket and the diamond ring on his finger).

In a remark which was then hard for him to live down, Smith suggested to Lightoller that some of the passengers might, as a ‘last resort’, have tried to keep dry in the Titanic’s watertight compartments. ‘Is that at all likely?’ Smith asked.

‘No sir,’ said Lightoller. ‘Very unlikely.’

William Alden, who had by no means finished with Lightoller, was afterwards known by the British press as Watertight Smith.

After Lightoller’s testimony, Ismay left the room and paced the corridors of the Waldorf-Astoria smoking cigarettes. He was joined by journalists who badgered him as to whether he had left a ship filled with women and children. The inquiry, Ismay responded in a rage of indignation, was ‘horribly, horribly unfair. I cannot understand it.’ He spoke to the press — whom he knew to be conducting a trial of their own — as he had been unable to speak to Smith. Ismay, who had never before made a speech, was now fighting for his life:

What sort of man do you think I am? Do you believe I’m the sort who would have left the ship as long as there were any women and children aboard her? I think it was the last boat that was lowered I went into. I did then what any other passenger would do. And tell me how I was different from any other passengers? I was not running the ship. If they say I was the president of the company that owns the ship then I want to know where you will draw the line. As I lay in my stateroom on board the Carpathia I went over every detail of the affair. I have searched my mind with deepest care. I have thought over each single incident that I could recall of the wreck. I am sure that nothing wrong was done — that I did nothing I should not have done. My conscience is clear, and I have not been a lenient judge of my own acts. I took the chance when it came to me… Why, I cannot even protect myself by having my counsel ask questions. Don’t misunderstand me by thinking I mean questions calculated to twist the witnesses up. On the contrary, I mean questions intended to simplify involved meanings. A glaring example of this happened this morning when I was asked about rowing the boat and I said I had been at one of the oars, but had not seen the ship go down. At once I was asked how I could have failed to see her since, if rowing, I must have been facing her. It would have been easy for my counsel to show that I was pushing at an oar which was being handled by two or three of us. There was no room to sit down in the proper oarsman’s position.⁶

Various versions of these words appeared in newspapers around the world, and Ismay would never again speak to a journalist in so unguarded a fashion. It was unlike him to be this voluble; he had acted out of character. He had wanted, as he put it, to ‘simplify’ his own ‘involved meanings’. He needed to talk, to unravel the knots which were tying inside him; he needed to be understood.

The press were relying on the fact that those survivors who were not called as witnesses, or those who had been called and consequently felt misrepresented by Senator Smith, were keen to tell their story; the construction of a stable narrative was a way of dealing with the chaos of the experience. So while the inquiry was making criminals of some survivors, the press were turning others into heroes. That evening’s papers carried an interview