8.
15 From Sylvia Lightoller to Walter Lord, LMQ/2/4/i53. I am grateful to Louise Patten for drawing my attention to these letters.
1 The Titanic was a tale of fatal convergence for other writers as well. Unknown to Hardy, on the day that his poem was being read by mourners in London, Helen Candee, who had been on board the Titanic, had the account of her experience, ‘Sealed Orders’, published in the American weekly Collier’s. Mrs Candee began: ‘When all the lands were thrilling with the blossomed month of shower and sun, three widely differing craft spread out upon the sea. One sailed from the New World’s city of Towers, plowing east. Another coquetted with three near ports of Europe and then sailed West. The third slipped down unnoticed from the glacial North.’ The first was the Carpathia, the second the Titanic, and the third the iceberg. All three were given ‘sealed orders’, and the meeting of the ‘greatest ship on earth’ and the ‘sinister’ iceberg is described as a ‘tryst’. ‘Across the starlit sea’, the frozen groom awaits his ‘virgin’ bride: ‘it was nearly midnight when she shuddered with horror in the embrace of the northern ice’. The same image had been used sixteen years earlier in a little-known poem called ‘A Tryst’, by the American writer Celia Thaxter. A ‘fair ship’ and ‘an iceberg pale’ are drawn together on a moonless night. The iceberg arrives at the appointed spot, ‘Like some imperial creature, moving slow’, and the ‘stately ship’ meanwhile, ‘with matchless grace’ and ‘unconscious of her foe,/ Drew near the trysting place.’
The best sources of information about Ismay and the sinking of the Titanic are contemporary newspaper reports. Those consulted for this book are:
Newspapers Atlanta Constitution
Boston Globe
Daily Graphic
Daily Mirror
Daily News
Daily Sketch
Daily Telegraph
Denver Post
Emporia Weekly Gazette
Frankfurter Zeitung
Glasgow Evening Times
Guernsey Press
Illustrated London News
Jersey Journal
John Bull
Liverpool Daily Post
Lloyd’s Weekly News
London Evening News
New York American
New York Evening Post
New York Globe
New York Herald
New York Post
New York Times
New York Tribune
New York World Telegram
Northern Whig
Orleans American
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
San Francisco Examiner
Sharon Herald
St Louis Post Dispatch
The Chronicle
The Ogden Standard
The Sphere
The Times
The Times Democrat
Uttoxeter Advertiser
Washington Post
Journals Blackwood’s
Christian Science Journal
Christian Science Sentinel
Country Life
Engineering
The English Review
Fairplay
Financier
International Marine Engineering
Journal of Commerce
National Magazine
New York Times Book Review
Pall Mall Gazette
The Critic
The Review of Reviews
The Semi-Monthly Magazine
The Syren
The Titanic Commutator
The World’s Work
The Woman’s Protest
Witness Accounts Barratt, Nick, Lost Voices from the Titanic: The Definitive Oral History (Arrow Books, 2009)
Beesley, Lawrence, The Loss of the SS Titanic: Its Story and Lessons (Heinemann, 1912)
Behe, George, On Board the RMS Titanic: Memories of the Maiden
