How to Survive the Titanic

returning to his studies at the Admiralty bar. Both men had wanted to encounter Robert Louis Stevenson, now living in Samoa, whose novel Treasure Island they had read as teenagers. Published ten years earlier, Treasure Island told the story of another Jim who was faced with a jump:

‘Jump’, the Doctor orders Jim Hawkins. ‘One jump, and we’re out, and we’ll run for it like antelopes.’

‘No,’ Jim replies. ‘You know right well you wouldn’t do the thing yourself — neither you nor squire nor captain: and no more will I.’

Jim Hawkins is one of the heroes Conrad’s Lord Jim dreamed of becoming when, as a boy in his country parsonage, he was reading himself into ruin.

Galsworthy and Sanderson missed meeting Stevenson, but met Conrad instead. The Pole’s ‘rare personality attracted us at once’, Ted Sanderson wrote, ‘and a friendship was begun which lasted unbroken until death’. For Galsworthy, the experience of talking to Conrad ‘outweighed… all the other experiences of that voyage’. He remembered Conrad as ‘tanned, with a peaked brown beard, almost black hair, and dark brown eyes, over which the lids were deeply folded. He was thin, not tall, his arms very long, his shoulders broad, his head set rather forward. He spoke to me with a strong foreign accent. He seemed to me strange on an English ship. For fifty-six days I sailed in his company… Many evening watches in fine weather we spent on the poop. Ever the great teller of a tale, he had already nearly twenty years of tales to tell.’ During the evening watches, Conrad told tales of his own ‘romantic history’: Poland, the South Seas, gun-running in Spain. He was, Ted Sanderson said, ‘a fascinating talker on almost any subject’. Conrad’s great characteristic, Galsworthy concluded, was ‘fascination’.¹⁴

Neither Conrad nor Galsworthy had yet become writers, but the manuscript of Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly, currently in the locker of his cabin on the Torrens, would be finished later that year at Elstree School. Here Conrad stayed for ten days as a guest of the Sanderson family, who immediately took to him. Elstree was Conrad’s ‘dear place’. ‘I have been made at home in Elstree,’ Conrad wrote to Agnes, one of Ted’s sisters, ‘by so much kindness; I am often there in my thoughts.’¹⁵ The Sanderson household gave Conrad his first experience of family life, and he later dedicated The Mirror of the Sea to Katherine Sanderson, Ismay’s Mrs Kitty; his second novel, An Outcast of the Islands, about a man on the run from a scandal, he dedicated to Ted Sanderson. After Conrad married and started a family of his own, Sanderson promised his friend’s five-year-old son, John, a place at Elstree, but the boy went instead to Ferox Hall at Tonbridge, run by Ted Sanderson’s sister, Agnes. So by curious coincidence, the spot in which Ismay had been least happy, Conrad was most happy; the place where Ismay had first felt homesick, Conrad first felt truly at home.

This voyage on the Torrens was to be Conrad’s last. In no other kind of life, he said in Lord Jim, than that of the sailor ‘is the illusion more wide of reality — in no other is the beginning all illusion — the disenchantment more swift — the subjugation more complete’. Aged thirty-seven and already an exile, he made another standing jump, leaving his world of ships for life at a desk. It was now that Konradek transformed himself into Joseph Conrad, and began the process of extracting from his years at sea every drop of meaning, every ounce of significance, as though meaning and significance were what he feared these years may have lacked.

Chapter 6 THE SECRET SHARER

A man always has two reasons for the things he does: a good reason — and the real reason.

J. Pierpont Morgan

A man’s most open actions have a secret side to them.

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Florence Ismay and the children were on a motoring holiday in Wales when they heard that the Titanic had sunk. They returned to Liverpool straight away and on Wednesday 17 April, Florence wrote her husband a letter.

My darling Bruce,

It seems an eternity since last Monday night when I first heard that the Titanic had met with an accident. We reached Fishguard about 6.30 and there got telegrams from the Office and from Margaret [their eldest daughter] saying that there was a report that the ship had struck an iceberg, but no lives lost, and that she was proceeding with two other liners to Halifax. Of course I was full of sorrow at the thought of the splendid vessel but felt no real anxiety until the next wire about 10.30. That was followed by another at 3.30 which made me terrified for your safety. Words fail to describe the horror and anxiety of the hours that followed. It seemed an eternity.

Oh darling, what that time must have been like to you. When I think of the anguish you must have been through it makes me tremble even now. Thank God. Thank God that you have been spared to us. My life would have been over if you had not been saved. For me there never has been and never could be any man but you and I feel I can never express the gratitude and thankfulness that fills me for your escape… I have wished many times since Monday night that I had gone with you, I might have helped you in this awful hour. I know so well what bitterness of spirit you must be feeling for the loss of so many precious lives and that thing itself that you loved like a living thing. It must have been ordained by Providence as every precaution human skill and care could devise had been done. We have both been spared to each other, let us try to make our lives of use in the world. My dearest, if I have you I feel no trouble or sorrow can be unbearable, and that these last 48 hours that we can never forget may yet in some unknown way be turned into good…¹

This is possibly the first love letter that Florence has ever sent, and she reveals her feelings for her husband as though they are a secret she has harboured for years. She can hardly bear what he has been through; it is pure providence that he is still alive, that their marriage has been given a second chance. Bruce, who has never before shared anything with his wife, will now need her to help carry his load. She has forgiven him the errors of the past; they will start their lives together again and this time do it differently; they will make themselves of use to the world and approach each day with gratitude and generosity. Most of all, they will now talk to one another, the decades of silence are over. Bruce is due to retire soon anyway: he will leave the sea for good, they will no longer need to be apart. And this might indeed have been their story, had Ismay not found a secret sharer in Mrs Thayer.

The Titanic’s maiden voyage has always conjured up images of ill-fated lovers. Whether it is the ship and the iceberg in Thomas Hardy’s poem, or Jack and Rose in James Cameron’s film, the story is one of convergence. When Ismay and Marian Thayer first encountered one another we don’t know; they may have met through friends in New York but it is more likely that they met at sea and consolidated their relationship on board the Titanic. Ismay was at his most relaxed on his ships and the Thayers frequently crossed the Atlantic on White Star liners. In his account of the wreck, Marian’s son, Jack Thayer, said that he and his father spent a good deal of time talking to Ismay on the Titanic, that during the voyage they got to know him ‘well’. Friendships which would never form on land blossom on board ships where the usual bounds and restrictions are suspended and passengers and crew exist in a zone between time and place. Conrad’s talk on board the Torrens ‘fascinated’ Galsworthy and Sanderson; his ‘rare personality attracted us at once’; Ismay’s attraction to Mrs Thayer’s talk and rare personality was also immediate. She was the most sympathetic woman he had ever met.

Marian Thayer belonged, like the Astors and the Guggenheims, to Scott Fitzgerald’s enchanted world of East