myself we decided which way to go’.
Meanwhile fireman Pusey was smouldering over Lady Duff Gordon’s remark to Miss Francatelli on the loss of her nightgown. At the time he told her, ‘Never mind, you have saved your lives; but we have lost our kit.’
Half an hour later, still smouldering, Pusey turned to Sir Cosmo, ‘I suppose you have lost everything?’
‘Of course.’
‘But you can get more?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, we have lost our kit, and the company won’t give us any more. And what’s more, our pay stops from tonight.’
Sir Cosmo had had enough: ‘Very well, I will give you a fiver each to start a new kit.’
He did, too, but lived to regret it. The Duff Gordons’ near monopoly of boat 1, its failure to row back, gave the gift the look of a payoff that Sir Cosmo had a hard time living down.
Nor did subsequent events help his case. When Lady Duff Gordon reassembled the men in life jackets for a group picture after the rescue, they looked more and more like the Duff Gordons’ personal crew. Still later, when it came out that lookout Symons, nominally in charge of the boat, spent the day with Sir Cosmo’s lawyer just before he testified at the British inquiry, it looked as though Sir Cosmo even had his personal coxswain.
There’s no evidence that Sir Cosmo was guilty of more than extreme bad taste.
Drinking caused some trouble too. When No. 4 plucked a member of the crew out of the water, he had a bottle of brandy in his pocket. It was then thrown away because, as he explained it a few weeks later to the Press, ‘it was feared that if any hysterical person in the boat touched it, the result might be bad’. Miss Eustis has a somewhat different version: ‘One man was drunk and had a bottle of brandy in his pocket, which the quartermaster promptly threw overboard, and the drunken man was thrown into the bottom of the boat …’
There was a different kind of trouble in boat 6. Friction erupted from the moment Major Peuchen slid down the line to fill out the crew. Peuchen, used to giving orders, couldn’t resist trying to take command. Quartermaster Hitchens had other ideas. As they rowed away from the
Painfully the boat struggled away, with just Peuchen and lookout Fleet rowing. Under Mrs Brown’s leadership, most of the women gradually joined in, but Hitchens remained glued to the tiller, shouting at them to row harder or all would be sucked under when the
Then women began shouting back, and as the boat splashed along in the dark, the night echoed with bitter repartee. Most of the time No. 6 was heading towards the elusive light on the horizon, and when it became clear they could never reach it, Hitchens announced that all was lost; they had neither water nor food nor compass nor charts; they were hundreds of miles from land and didn’t even know which way they were heading.
Major Peuchen had given up by now, but the women tore into him. Mrs Candee grimly showed him the North Star. Mrs Brown told him to shut up and row. Mrs Meyer jeered at his courage.
Then they tied up with boat 16, and Hitchens ordered them to drift. But the women couldn’t stand the cold and insisted on rowing to keep warm. Mrs Brown gave an oar to a grimy stoker transferred from No. 16, and told everyone to row. Hitchens moved to stop her, and Mrs Brown told him if he came any closer, she would throw him overboard.
He sank back under a blanket and began shouting insults. Mrs Meyer answered back—accused him of taking all the blankets and drinking all the whisky. Hitchens hotly denied it. The transferred stoker, wondering what on earth he had run into, called out, ‘I say, don’t you know you’re talking to a lady.’
Hitchens yelled back, ‘I know whom I’m speaking to, and I’m commanding this boat!’
But the stoker’s rebuke worked. The quartermaster lapsed into silence. Boat 6 rowed on through the night with Hitchens subdued, Peuchen out of the picture, and Mrs Brown virtually in charge.
Even among the men clinging desperately to overturned boat B, there was time for petty bickering. Colonel Gracie—his teeth chattering, his matted hair now frozen stiff—noticed the man beside him wore a dry outing cap. The colonel asked to borrow the cap to warm his head for a minute. ‘And what would I do?’ the man shot back.
Nerves on boat B were understandably frayed. The air was leaking out from the hull, and every minute it sank a little lower in the water. The sea occasionally washed over the keel, and one impulsive move might pitch everybody into the sea. They needed cool leadership badly.
At this point Gracie was relieved to hear the deep, rich voice of Second Officer Lightoller, and even more relieved when a somewhat tipsy crewman on the boat called out, ‘We will all obey what the officer orders.’
Lightoller quickly responded. Feeling that only concerted, organized action would keep the boat balanced, he had all thirty men stand up. He arranged them in a double column, facing the bow. Then as the boat lurched with the sea, he shouted, ‘Lean to the right’… ‘Stand upright’… ‘Lean to the left’—whatever was necessary to counteract the swell.
As they threw their weight this way and that, for a while they yelled, ‘Boat ahoy! Boat ahoy!’ Lightoller finally stopped them, urging them to save their strength.
It grew still colder, and the colonel complained again about his head, this time to Lightoller. Another man offered them both a pull from his flask. They turned him down but pointed out Walter Hurst, shivering nearby. Hurst thought it was brandy and took a big swig. He almost choked—it was essence of peppermint.
They talked a surprising amount. Assistant cook John Maynard told how Captain Smith swam alongside the boat just before the
Most of all they all talked of getting rescued. Lightoller soon discovered Harold Bride, the junior wireless operator, at the stern of the boat, and from his position in the bow he asked what ships were on the way. Bride shouted back: the
From then on they scanned the horizon searching for any sign. From time to time they were cheered by the green flares lit by Boxhall in boat 2. Even Lightoller thought they must come from another ship.
Slowly the night passed. Towards dawn a slight breeze sprang up. The air seemed even more frigid. The sea grew choppy. Bitter-cold waves splashed over the feet, the shins, the knees of the men on boat B. The spray stabbed their bodies and blinded their eyes. One man, then another, then another rolled off the stern and disappeared from sight. The rest fell silent, completely absorbed in the battle to stay alive.
The sea was silent too. No one saw a trace of life in the waves that rippled the smooth Atlantic as the first light of dawn streaked the sky.
But one man still lived—thanks to a remarkable combination of initiative, luck and alcohol. Four hours earlier, chief baker Charles Joughin was awakened, like so many on the
But Joughin didn’t merely report to the boat deck. He reasoned that if boats were needed, provisions were needed too; so on his own initiative he mustered his staff of thirteen bakers and ransacked the
This done, Joughin retired to his cabin on E deck, port side, for a nip of whisky.
About 12.30 he felt sufficiently fortified to reascend the stairs to his boat, No. 10. At this stage it was still difficult to persuade the women to go; so Joughin resorted to stronger methods. He went down to the promenade deck and hauled some up by force. Then, to use his own word, he ‘threw’ them into the boat. Rough but effective.
Joughin was assigned to No. 10 as skipper, but he thought there were enough men to handle the boat; so he jumped out and helped launch it instead. To go with it, he explained, ‘would have set a bad example’.
It was now 1.20. He scampered down the slanting stairs again to his cabin on E deck and poured himself another drink. He sat down on his bunk and nursed it along—aware but not particularly caring that the water now rippled through the cabin doorway, swilled across the chequered linoleum, and rose to the top of his shoes.
