How to Survive the Titanic

Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

Till the Spinner of the Years
Said ‘Now!’And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

Thomas Hardy, ‘The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the Loss of the Titanic)’

Chapter 5 THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN

I had jumped… it seems…

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

If we each have an author who is perfectly equipped to tell our tale, Joseph Conrad would be Ismay’s, and for a brief moment he was. Surrounded by newspapers in his house near Ashford in Kent, Conrad watched ‘the luckless Yamsi’, as he called him, begin his long descent. ‘This affair of the Titanic has upset me,’ he told his agent, ‘on general grounds, but also personally. I am not doing well.’ Conrad loathed the ‘festive’ air of the press as they celebrated the ‘heroism’ of the dead, and the satisfaction of the Americans that ‘this fatal mishap should strike the prestige of the greatest Merchant Service of the world’. But, with the loss of the manuscript of his story ‘Karain: A Memory’, which he was selling to John Quinn, the American collector of modernist writing, part of Conrad’s own life too had gone down with the ship. Because he had not insured the package, Conrad was now ?40 out of pocket. ‘I depended on that sum,’ he complained.¹

Twelve years earlier in October 1899 — the month before Ismay took over the chairmanship of White Star Line — Conrad had written a despairing letter to Ted Sanderson, the son of the Reverend Lancelot Sanderson, Ismay’s former headmaster at Elstree.

My dear Ted, You have much to forgive me: but try to imagine yourself trying your hardest to save the School (God forefend) from downfall, annihilation, and disaster: and the thing going on and on endlessly. That’s exactly how I am situated: and the worst is that the menace (in my case) does not seem to come from outside but from within: that the menace and danger or weakness are in me — in myself alone… I fear! I fear!… I am now trying to finish a story which began in the Oct. No. of Blackwood. I am at it day after day, and I want all day, every minute of a day, to produce a beggarly tale of words or perhaps to produce nothing at all. And when that is finished… I must go on, even go on at once and drag out of myself another 20,000 words, if the boy is to have his milk and I my beer (this is a figure of speech — I don’t drink beer, I drink weak tea, and yearn after dry champagne) and if the world is not absolutely to come to an end.²

Being menaced by an internal danger or weakness — they are the same thing for Conrad — is his recurring theme, and again and again his writing reduces him to this condition of anguish. What he is forcing out of himself is a tale of a man who jumps from a sinking ship and lives on with ‘the acute consciousness of lost honour’.

Jim, the son of a country parson, has a sense of maritime heroism born from ‘a course of light holiday literature’. He immerses himself in yarns of pirates and poop decks, crow’s nests and compasses, sailing ships and savages. He dreams of the ancient chivalry of the sea, he yearns for the endlessness of the horizon. He joins the Mercantile Marine where he proves himself ‘gentlemanly, steady, tractable’, and then takes a berth as chief mate on the Patna, a rusty Chinese-owned, Arab-chartered steamer, ‘worse than a condemned water tank’, carrying 800 pilgrims across the Indian Ocean from Singapore to Mecca.

Jim’s world has become a ship, and he is the hero of his own adventure. Standing on the bridge of the Patna he watches the night descend ‘like a benediction’; he marvels at the ‘assurance of everlasting security’, the unbounded safety and peace shed from the rays of the stars. In the excess of his wellbeing, he knows there is no noble deed he will not do, no challenge he cannot face. Then, inexplicably, there is an accident of some sort. A faint noise, less than a sound, no more than a vibration, passes slowly beneath the steamer like a rumble of distant thunder and the ship quivers in response: ‘suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably insecure in their immobility, as if poised on the brink of yawning destruction.’ At the subsequent inquiry Jim will say, ‘She went over whatever it was as easy as a snake crawling over a stick.’

The Patna begins to lean; 800 passengers are sleeping: on mats, on prayer carpets, on rough blankets, on bare planks, on decks, in dark corners all over the ship which the crew now believe will sink. There are only seven lifeboats; it is not possible to save everyone and so the Captain, a vulgar and obese German, decides to abandon ship with three of his equally shoddy officers, leaving the human cargo to their fate. The sea is as ‘still as a pond, deadly still, more still than ever sea was before’; the conditions are ‘rare enough to resemble a special arrangement of malevolent providence’ and the crew are struggling like lunatics to release the lifeboat without waking the pilgrims.

Standing apart from them all, Jim has not yet been tested ‘by those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man’. The crew are animals, he has always known that — ‘those men did not belong to the world of heroic adventure’. Jim has always seen himself as separate, as singular; he recognises his superiority. The time has now come to prove himself the man of predestined courage he feels himself to be. This is the moment he has been preparing for since he was a child. But instead of rising to the well-rehearsed occasion, instead of taking the situation in hand, Jim does nothing, says nothing, he has no idea what to do: instead he stands stock-still in a daze on the starboard side of the bridge while the crew struggle with the lifeboat on the port side, expecting at any moment the sea to submerge them all. Should he cut down the other lifeboats so they can float off the ship when she eventually founders, giving some of the passengers a chance to live? Should he wake the pilgrims to tell them that they are about to die? ‘Where was the kindness in making crazy with fright all those people I could not save single-handed — that nothing could save?’ he reasons. Jim delays acting; he is paralysed: all he can think is ‘eight hundred people, seven boats and not enough time, eight hundred people, seven boats and not enough time’. ‘You think me a cur for standing there, but what would you have done?’ he later asks.

The renegade lifeboat is dropping down to the water and the absconding crew, in their sleep suits, are shouting up not for Jim, but for their friend George to join them. George, on the deck, falls down dead from a heart attack. The men in the boat below are calling ‘Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!’ It is pitch black, there is a squall approaching; the Patna starts to plunge, and suddenly Jim moves. ‘Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low.’ What happens next is against his conscious volition. ‘I had jumped… it seems,’ he recalls. He jumps from a height he can never scale again, he jumps into ‘an everlasting deep hole’, and as he jumps he begins to unravel.

Whatever pushes him off the Patna, Jim now knows that he is not and never will be the man who ‘saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming