How to Survive the Titanic

months

Mrs Catherine Joseph, aged twenty-four, returning to her husband in Detroit with her four-year-old son, Michael (who was placed in another lifeboat), and her two-year-old daughter, Anna

Mrs Darwis Touma, aged twenty-three, returning to her husband in Michigan with her children, Maria and Georges

Mrs Omine Moubarek, emigrating to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with her two sons, Gerios, aged seven and Halim, aged four

Banoura Ayorb Daher, aged fifteen, emigrating to Canada

Adele Najib Kiamie, aged fifteen, travelling from Lebanon to be married

Fatima Mousselmani, aged twenty-two, travelling from Lebanon to be married

Jamilia Nicola-Yarred, aged fourteen, and her eleven-year-old brother, Elias, travelling to meet their father

Hilda Hellstrom, aged twenty-two , travelling from Sweden

Velin Ohman, aged twenty-two, travelling from Sweden

Sarah Roth, aged twenty-six, a tailor from Southampton

Anna Salkjelsvik, aged twenty-one, travelling from Norway

John Goldsmith, aged ten

Lee Bing, Chang Chip, Ling Hee, Ali Lam: Chinese employees of the Donaldson Line. Thought by Ismay to be stowaways, they had boarded the ship, along with four other men, on one third-class ticket.

At forty-nine, Ismay was the oldest person there and the oldest man by ten years. Six foot four with a waxed moustache and the handsome face of a matinee idol, he sat amongst Lebanese, Chinese and Swedish passengers in his pyjamas, coat and slippers and spoke to no one. It is unlikely that anyone, apart from William Carter, had any idea who he was.

The Titanic went down two hours and forty minutes after she hit the iceberg — the same length of time, it has been noted, as a performance in the theatre. For one passenger at least, the events of the night seemed ‘like a play, like a drama that was being enacted for entertainment’, and for Ismay the drama would continue before a variety of audiences and on a number of different stages.

In her bowels the ship carried 3,500 mailbags containing 200,000 letters and packages. One of them was the manuscript of a story by Joseph Conrad called ‘Karain: A Memory’, which he was sending to New York. ‘Karain’ is the tale of a man who impulsively betrays a code of honour and lives on under the strain of intolerable guilt.

Ismay said he was pushing an oar with his back to the ship when the Titanic made her final plunge. I did not wish to see her go down, he told the US inquiry, adding, I am glad I did not. He was one of few survivors not to have looked. ‘I will never forget the terrible beauty of the Titanic at that moment,’ wrote Charlotte Collyer, in anticipation of Yeats’s phrase in ‘Easter 1916’. ‘She was tilted forward, head down, with her first funnel partly under water. To me she looked like an enormous glow worm: for she was alight from the rising water line, clear to her stern — electric lights blazing in every cabin, lights on all the decks and lights at her mast heads.’⁷ The glow worm carried Charlotte Collyer’s young husband and all the money and possessions they had in the world. ‘Fascinated’, wrote Jack Thayer, who had jumped into the sea and was swimming away. ‘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 water.’ ‘Fascinated’, wrote Elizabeth Shutes, a governess travelling first-class with her charge, ‘I watched that black outline until the end.’⁸ ‘Fascinated’, repeated Violet Jessop, one of the ship’s stewardesses, who was in a lifeboat; ‘my eyes never left the ship, as if by looking I could keep her afloat… I sat paralysed with cold and misery as I watched Titanic give a lurch forward. One of the huge funnels toppled off like a cardboard model, falling into the sea with a fearful roar. A few cries came to us across the water, then silence, as the ship seemed to right herself like a hurt animal with a broken back.’⁹ The Titanic went down ‘like a stricken animal’, agreed Lawrence Beesley, a second-class passenger travelling to a Christian Science gathering. ‘We had no eyes for anything but the ship we had just left. As the oarsmen pulled slowly away we all turned and took a long look at the mighty vessel towering high above our midget boat, and I know it must have been the most extraordinary sight I shall ever be called upon to witness.’ With her lights ablaze, the Titanic resembled, until her final plunge, a living, breathing thing.

When the Titanic had melted away, those on the moonless water gazed with disbelief at the great ship’s disappearance. She was, they now realised, a boat and not a palace; it is as though they had expected to see her crumble to the ground. In the midst of horror (‘the horror, the helpless horror’, said Elizabeth Shutes, echoing the famous last words of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) they found themselves caught in contemplation. Second Officer Lightoller, who was swept overboard and blown across the sea by a rush of steam towards an upside-down lifeboat onto which he clung and which was itself thrown from the site of the ship by a falling funnel, described watching the ‘terrible awe-inspiring sight’ of ‘this unparalleled tragedy that was being enacted before our very eyes… the huge ship slowly but surely reared herself on end and brought rudder and propellers clear of the water, till at last, she assumed an absolute perpendicular position. In this amazing attitude she remained for the space of half a minute. Then with impressive majesty and ever-increasing momentum, she silently took her last tragic dive to seek a final resting place in the unfathomable depths of the cold grey Atlantic…’ ‘I realise’, Lawrence Beesley said, ‘how totally inadequate language is to convey to some other person who was not there any real impression of what we saw…’¹⁰ But those who watched, from the unlettered to the urban sophisticates, each described the same experience of romantic awe and dread fascination. The sinking of the Titanic seemed to Edith Russell, a thirty-four-year-old first-class passenger who worked as a fashion buyer and a reporter for Womens Wear Daily, like the collapse of a ‘skyscraper’. But in her death throes, the Titanic also became Excalibur, the sword of the mortally wounded King Arthur which was thrown back into the lake and caught by a mysterious hand. Her glittering scabbard sparkled and flashed one last time before the surface of the water closed over her, erasing all trace.

The Titanic left behind a level sea, undisturbed apart from a reddish stain and a tangle of flotsam consisting mainly of deck-chairs, the cork of lifejackets and the bodies of the dead and dying. Hanging over the water, ‘like a pall’, was what Colonel Archibald Gracie — an American first-class passenger saved by climbing onto the upturned Collapsible B — described as ‘a thin, light-grey smoky vapour’ which ‘produced a supernatural effect, and the pictures I had seen by Dante and the description I had read in my Virgil of the infernal regions, of Charon, and the River Lethe, were then uppermost in my thoughts’.¹¹

While many of those in the lifeboats had not realised until the very end that the Titanic would sink, only Ismay and the surviving officers were prepared for what came next. There rose from the wreckage what Colonel Gracie called ‘the most horrible sounds ever heard. The agonising cries of death from over a thousand throats, the wails and groans of the suffering, the shrieks of the terror-stricken and the awful gaspings for breath of those in the last throes of drowning, none of us will ever forget to our dying day.’ In his account of the birth and death of the Titanic, the Irish journalist Filson Young had described the noise of the Belfast shipyard at Harland & Wolff when the ‘monster’ was under construction as ‘a low sonorous murmuring like the sound of bees in a giant hive’. In his memoirs, Second Officer Lightoller described the Titanic while she was being prepared as ‘a nest of bees’ which became on sailing day ‘a hive about to swarm’.¹² With the ship’s disappearance the sound returned. ‘The Titanic was like a swarming bee-hive,’ recalled Charlotte Collyer, ‘but the bees were men… Cries more terrible than I had ever heard rang in my ears.’

‘We could see groups of almost fifteen hundred people still aboard,’ recalled Jack Thayer, ‘clinging in clusters or bunches, like swarming bees.’ The image recalls the journey made by Aeneas to the underworld in Dante’s Inferno, where he passes a valley in which he hears what he thinks are bees in a summer meadow. The humming, Aeneas is told, comes not from bees but from the souls of the dead drinking from the River Lethe, in order to forget their previous lives before returning to live for a second time on land. The cries also recall the passage in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, where the feasting passengers aboard a ship are terrified to hear the voices of people talking in the air. ‘Let us fly,’ they say, ‘Larboard! Starboard!