There is something peculiar in a small boat upon the wide sea. Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim The small boats drifted through the ice. Above them hung a sky of spectacular brilliance: what looked at first like the lights of ships turned out to be falling stars whose reflections shot across the water like cat’s eyes. With the morning sun icebergs the size of islands became glittering gems; some were shades of pink and blue, others were gleaming pyramids of beaten gold. Their ‘awful beauty’, wrote Lawrence Beesley, ‘could not be overlooked’. It was only now that those inside the boats were able to see one another’s faces. A spirited American first-class passenger, who became known as the ‘unsinkable’ Molly Brown, described the morning of 15 April as the ‘most wonderful’ she had ever seen. ‘I have just returned from Egypt. I have been all over the world, but I have never seen anything like this. First the gray and then the flood of light. Then the sun came up in a ball of red fire. For the first time we saw where we were. Near us was open water, but on every side was ice. Ice ten feet high was everywhere, and to the right and left and back and front were icebergs. Some of them were mountain-high. This sea of ice was forty miles wide, they told me.’ Ismay did not remember the sunrise that day.
When the distress call from the Titanic came in, Harold Cottam, the twenty-one- year-old wireless officer on the Cunard Line’s Carpathia, bound from New York to Gibraltar, was preparing for bed but happened to still have the telephone to his ear. Had the message arrived a few minutes later, the Marconi machine would have been turned off. Cottam informed the Captain, Arthur Rostron, who headed to the spot where the Titanic was reported wounded. Rostron had no idea how many passengers he was to pick up, how many other ships would be on the scene, or in what state he would find the great liner. As the Carpathia steamed ahead he prepared a list of orders for his crew:
English doctor, with assistants, to remain in first-class dining room.
Italian doctor, with assistants, to remain in second-class dining room.
Hungarian doctor, with assistants, to remain in third-class dining room.
Each doctor to have supplies of restoratives, stimulants, and everything to hand for immediate needs of probable wounded or sick.
Purser, with assistant purser and chief-steward, to receive the passengers etc., at different gangways, controlling our own stewards in assisting Titanic passengers to the dining rooms, etc.; also to get Christian and surnames of all survivors as soon as possible to send by wireless.
Inspector, steerage stewards, and Master at Arms to control our own steerage passengers and keep them out of the third-class dining hall, and also to keep them out of the way and off the deck to prevent confusion.
Chief Steward: that all hands would be called and to have coffee, tea, soup, etc., in each saloon, blankets in saloons, at the gangways, and some for the boats.
To see all rescued cared for and immediate wants attended to.
My cabin and all officials’ cabins to be given up. Smoke rooms, library etc. dining rooms, would be utilised for Titanic’s passengers, and get all our own steerage passengers grouped together.1
When the Carpathia arrived at 4.30 a.m. there was nothing to see but ‘boxes and coats and what looked like oil on the water’.2 The lifeboats, scattered across a five-mile radius, slowly gathered around the rescue ship and at six that morning Ismay was picked up. He said that he had been rowing continuously, but his emotional state when he left the Titanic suggests that he was incapable of doing anything physical, while his frozen condition when the Carpathia arrived implies that he had not moved a muscle for hours. In an interview with the Guernsey Press, a Titanic first-class stewardess called Annie Martin said that she recalled Ismay ‘sitting on his haunches on the stern of the boat that was cleared by the Carpathia just before ours. He sat there like a statue, blue with cold, and neither said a word nor looked at us. He was nearly dead when taken on board, for he was wearing only his nightclothes and an overcoat.’
The 700 Carpathia passengers, mostly American tourists taking their spring break, watched from the rails as the Titanic survivors were hoisted up. Ropes were tied to the waists of the adults to support them as they climbed the Jacob’s ladder, the sick and wounded were lifted up on a makeshift chair swing, and the babies and small children were carried in canvas ash bags. Captain Rostron noted the extraordinary silence of them all, the marked absence of any excitement or response. The Carpathia was soon joined by the Californian, which had stopped her engines in the midst of an ice field the night before, eight miles from where the Titanic would sink. When the Californian had sent an ice warning earlier in the evening, Jack Philips, one of the Titanic’s two overworked wireless operators, told them to ‘shut up’ and ‘keep out’ as he had urgent messages to deal with, most of them cheerful Marconigrams which the passengers were sending home. The Californian’s disgruntled wireless operator therefore took off his headphones and went to sleep, and the crew on the night watch wondered why the Titanic was firing rockets at regular intervals.
At 8.30 a.m., when the lifeboats had all been accounted for, there was a roll call and the names of the missing became known. The expressions of grief were class-dependant: the women in first-class held themselves together with decorum while those in steerage wept. ‘When it seemed sure that we should not find any more persons alive,’ one of the Carpathia’s stewards told the press, ‘the bedlam came. I hope never to go through it again. The way those women took on for the folk they had lost was awful. We could not do anything to quiet them until they had cried themselves out.’3 Captain Rostron turned the Carpathia back in the direction of New York while the Californian stayed behind to search for bodies. One survivor told a reporter that: ‘While we were on the Carpathia we passed through a school of about a dozen whales and later on we passed a seal that was floating on a cake of ice. A little farther on we passed a big floe of ice on which there was a big white polar bear prowling around.’4
Ismay’s first action on board, according to one of the ship’s officers, was to take himself to the dining room and announce ‘I’m Ismay, for God’s sake get me something to eat.’ Having eaten, he then reportedly tried to pay the steward $2 before demanding a stateroom in which to rest. Mrs Lucien P. Smith, one of eleven brides to be widowed on her honeymoon, described him stepping onto the Carpathia shouting: ‘I’m Ismay! I’m Ismay! Get me a stateroom!’ ‘I know many women who slept on the floor in the smoking room,’ Mrs Smith said, ‘while Mr Ismay occupied the best room… being in the centre of the boat, with every attention, and a sign on the door, “Please do not knock”.’ But far from drawing attention to himself, Ismay wanted to get away from the others as quickly as possible. As hellish to deal with as the sinking of his ship was the expectation that he blend in with the brotherhood of Titanic survivors on the Carpathia. He disappeared long before the 8.30 roll call would have alerted anyone to his presence. At 7.30 that morning, Captain Haddock, commander of the Titanic’s twin sister the Olympic, currently also crossing the North Atlantic, received a Marconigram from Captain Rostron informing him that ‘Mr Bruce Ismay is under an opiate’.
In a statement given to the US Senate inquiry, the longest and most detailed account of his actions he would make, Ismay gave his own version of what happened when he boarded the Carpathia.
I understand that my behaviour on board the Titanic and subsequently on board
