During the week, Ismay had listened as the inquiry span itself away. He seemed like a spider trapped in an enormous web; his simple story now had sidetracks which led nowhere, cross tracks which started back and began anew. He was entangled, but he could also see more clearly. He gained a fuller sense than ever before of the world inside his ships; he got to know his employees, his passengers and the names of the crew who had died; he heard how the firemen, engineers and Marconi operators had never left their posts; he learned how wireless worked, how on the port side Lightoller was operating a ‘women and children only’ policy while on starboard they were loading women and children first, and he was forced to imagine what the ship had looked like when she went down. He heard that the Californian, a fellow ship in the IMM combine, had been eight miles away all night with her wireless turned off. He heard accounts of miraculous survivals, and he re-imagined his own death again and again. Did the hundreds who died see, as drowning figures are meant to do, their lives pass before them? Would that not have been a better fate than a survival with no future? Had he gone down with the ship, what would the papers be saying about him now? Who then would be their scapegoat? Ismay understood that every person saved was seen to be taking the place of someone else who had more right to a life. He learned that no one, not even women and children, was allowed to survive the Titanic.
What constituted a child anyway? Lightoller had ordered Emily Ryerson’s son, a boy of thirteen, to stay on board with the men; the child only joined his mother in the lifeboat when his father, a powerful steel magnate, intervened. ‘No more boys’, a frustrated Lightoller was heard to mutter. Some men felt that the women who owed their lives to male gallantry were hypocrites, and witness after witness described how wives and mothers in the lifeboats had refused to return to their dying husbands and sons. Real wives were those like Ida Straus, who remained on board with her husband of fifty years, the owner of Macy’s department store. ‘Where you go, I go,’ Mrs Straus reportedly said. But Mrs Stuart White, a first-class passenger who lived at the Waldorf-Astoria, believed the women in the lifeboats had been braver than the ‘heroes’ who only stayed on the ship because they thought it was the safer option. ‘I do not think that there was any particular bravery,’ Mrs White told the inquiry, ‘because none of the men thought it was going down.’
By the end of the inquiry, Ismay knew more about those final hours than anyone else who had been unlucky enough to survive the Titanic.
The crewmen were finally released on 29 April, but Ismay was not. The next day the Mackay Bennett, contracted by the White Star Line to search for bodies, returned to Halifax. They had found 306 of the 1,500 dead. In the opinion of the surgeon who accompanied the ‘funeral ship’, most had lived for four hours in the water before freezing to death. Those who could not be identified were buried at sea, and 190 others, including the body of John Jacob Astor, were brought home.
When Ismay was finally called to the stand for the second time on 30 April, Senator Smith found himself addressing an apparently contrite and more responsive man. Perhaps Ismay was relieved: no one else from Collapsible C had been cross-examined, not even William Carter, who had left the ship with him, or Quartermaster Rowe, who had taken charge of the boat and knew whether or not Ismay had been rowing; nor had Dr McGhee been called to answer questions about Ismay’s state of mind while on the Carpathia. The inquiry was drawing to a close and apart from the claims that Emily Ryerson had made in the press, which she was due to swear in an affidavit the following day, Senator Smith had not been able to pin a thing on Ismay. He understood that speed was of less importance to the White Star Line than luxury, that Ismay did what he could to lower and load the boats on the starboard side, and that whether he jumped into Collapsible C or was pushed, he was in one of the last boats to leave. It was tacitly agreed by the Senate Committee that Ismay had done his duty, without anyone’s knowing quite what that duty was.
Most of what Smith now asked him mirrored what he had asked before. Having questioned Ismay about the structure of the IMM, the relationship of the White Star Line with the Morgan combine and Harland & Wolff, and their arrangement with the British government to deliver the mail, Smith asked Ismay to explain once again his role on the Titanic. Was he there officially for the purpose of inspecting? Ismay replied that he had not yet made any inspection of the ship at all, that during the voyage, he was never outside the first-class passenger accommodation on the ship. Ismay repeated that he had not dined with the Captain on Sunday night, that the Captain had been at a dinner for the ship’s most prominent figures organised by the Wideners (to which Ismay, despite knowing George Widener, was not invited). He explained that the ship was insured for $5 million and expressed horror at the suggestion that an attempt might have been made by him to reinsure the vessel on Monday 15 April. It was a horrible accusation and Ismay would have considered any such action entirely dishonourable. He was asked to read aloud the same Yamsi messages read by Franklin the week before, and to give the time and context of each. He was asked to confirm the speed of the ship, and to say whether ‘anyone had urged the Captain to greater speed’ than seventy revolutions. It is really impossible, said Ismay with disgust, to imagine such a thing on board ship. He replied, when asked if he did not ‘regard it as an exercise of proper precaution and care to lessen the speed of a ship crossing the Atlantic when she had been warned of the presence of ice ahead’ that it was a question I cannot give any opinion on. We employ the very best men we possibly can to take command of these ships, and it is a matter entirely in their discretion.
Ismay told the inquiry that following the collision Captain Smith gave no report as to the extent of the damage and, as far as he was aware, raised no alarm. The information Ismay received — that the ship had thirty- five or forty minutes to live — came from Joseph Bell, the Chief Engineer, after he had seen the Captain on the bridge. However, Ismay stressed that Captain Smith was a man with a very very clear record. I should think very few commanders crossing the Atlantic have as good a record as Captain Smith had, until he had the unfortunate incident with the Hawke. Had the Olympic’s earlier collision with HMS Hawke shaken Ismay’s confidence in the Captain? He replied that it had not and that he had no reason to doubt that Captain Smith had quite got over the mishap. As to when the Captain gave Ismay the Marconigram from the Baltic, he stated I do not know whether it was in the afternoon or immediately before lunch; I am not certain. I did not pay any particular attention. How did it happen that the Titanic had only twenty lifeboats? That was a matter for the builders, sir, and I presume that they were fulfilling all the requirements of the Board of Trade. Ismay agreed that the Board of Trade requirements were out of date, but when asked to confirm whether ‘the davits they had on the Titanic were capable of handling three boats instead of one and that there was no question about those davits being able to handle twice the number of boats they did handle’, Ismay refused to answer. I could not express an opinion in regard to that. I do not know anything about it. As to whether the lesson of the Titanic showed that it was ‘impossible to construct a non-sinkable ship’, he said that he would not like to say that, because I have not sufficient knowledge. This time when Ismay was asked whether his lifeboat was filled to its capacity, he replied that it was not, that the full capacity of one of those boats is about sixty to sixty-five. Who told him to enter that lifeboat? No one, sir. Why did he enter it? Because there was room in the boat. She was being lowered away. I felt the ship was going down, and I got into the boat.
Ismay was released and there were expressions of courtesy all around. Should he be needed by Senator Smith in the near future, he would be quite glad to come back from the other side. In the audience that day had been John Galsworthy. ‘A queer, jumbled business,’ Galsworthy wrote in his diary. ‘We heard the unfortunate Ismay give his evidence very quietly and well. The system and public is to blame for the miserable calamity; and of course the same public is all agog to fix the blame on some unhappy shoulders.’ Now that the inquiry was drawing to a close, the life of the city was resuming. ‘To the Trovatore at the Opera,’ Galsworthy continued. ‘Phew! What a rococo!’ Unable to return on the Titanic as planned, Galsworthy sailed to England five days later on the White Star liner the Baltic, whose ice warning Ismay had carried around in his pocket all day. ‘Reading; Talking; Eating; Sleeping,’ he wrote of the voyage back. ‘Nothing eventful happened.’ 24
Ismay caught the train to New York, ignoring summonses issued by the District Supreme Court to testify in an action brought by Mrs Louise Robins, the widow of John Jacob Astor’s valet. When Ismay did not appear, the hearing was abandoned.
