A Night to Remember

and now came the hardest part of all—waiting. Near him stood Second Officer James Bisset, up forward with extra lookouts. All strained for any sign of ice, any sign of the Titanic. But so far there was nothing—just the glassy sea, the blazing stars, the sharp, clear, empty horizon.

At 2.35 Dr McGhee climbed the ladder to the bridge, told Rostron that everything was ready below. As he talked, Rostron suddenly saw the glow of a green flare on the horizon, about half a point off the port bow.

‘There’s his light!’ he shouted. ‘He must be still afloat!’ It certainly looked that way. The flare was clearly a long way off. To see it at all, it must be high out of the water. It was only 2.40, and they were already in sight— perhaps the Carpathia would be in time after all.

Then at 2.45 Second Officer Bisset sighted a tiny shaft of light glistening two points off the port bow. It was the first iceberg—revealed by, of all things, the mirrored light of a star.

Then another berg, then another. Twisting and turning, the Carpathia now dodged icebergs on all sides, never slackening speed. On they surged, as the men breathlessly watched for the next berg and from time to time spotted more green flares in the distance.

Now that everything was ready, the stewards had a little free time. Robert Vaughan and his mates went to the afterdeck. Like boxers warming up for a fight, they danced about and playfully rough-housed to keep warm. Once a huge iceberg passed close to starboard, and a man cried, ‘Hey fellows! Look at the polar bear scratching himself with a chunk of ice!’

A weak joke perhaps, but the men roared with laughter as the Carpathia lunged on.

She was firing rockets now. One every fifteen minutes, with Cunard Roman candles in between. Word spread below that they were in sight. In the main dining-saloon the stewards took up their posts. In the engine room, the stokers shovelled harder than ever. At the gangways and boat stations the men stood ready. Everyone was wild with excitement, and the Carpathia herself trembled all over. A sailor later remarked, ‘The old boat was as excited as any of us.’

But Rostron’s heart was sinking. By 3.35 they were drawing near the Titanic’s position, and still no sign of her. He decided the green flare couldn’t have been so high after all. It was just the sparkling-clear night that let him see it from so far off. At 3.50 he put the engines on ‘stand by’—they were almost at the spot. At 4.00 he stopped the ship—they were there.

Just then another green flare blazed up. It was directly ahead, low in the water. The flickering light showed the outline of a lifeboat perhaps 300 yards away. Rostron started up his engines, began to manoeuvre the Carpathia to starboard so as to pick up the lifeboat on his port side, which was leeward. An instant later he spotted a huge iceberg directly ahead and had to swing the other way to keep from hitting it.

The lifeboat was now to windward, and as he edged towards it, a breeze sprang up and the sea grew choppy. A voice from the dark hailed him, ‘We have only one seaman and can’t work very well.’

‘All right,’ Rostron shouted back, and he gently nudged the Carpathia closer, until the voice called again, ‘Stop your engines!’

It was Fourth Officer Boxhall in boat 2. Sitting beside him, Mrs Walter Douglas of Minneapolis was near hysterics. ‘The Titanic,’ she cried, ‘has gone down with everyone on board.’

Boxhall told her to ‘shut up’, and his sharpness cut her off instantly. She quickly pulled herself together and afterwards always agreed the rebuke was justified.

On the Carpathia no one heard her anyhow. All eyes were glued on the lifeboat bobbing towards the gangway. Mrs Ogden noticed the White Star emblem painted on its side, the lifebelts that made everybody look dressed in white. Mrs Crain wondered about the pale, strained faces looking up at the decks. The only sound was a wailing baby somewhere in the boat.

Lines were dropped, and now the boat was fast. A moment’s hesitation, then at 4.10 Miss Elizabeth Allen climbed slowly up the swinging ladder and tumbled into the arms of Purser Brown. He asked her where the Titanic was, and she replied it had gone down.

Up on the bridge Rostron knew without asking—yet he felt he had to go through with the formalities. He sent for Boxhall, and as the Fourth Officer stood shivering before him, he put it to him: ‘The Titanic has gone down?’

‘Yes’—Boxhall’s voice broke as he said it—‘she went down at about 2.30.’

It was half-day now, and the people on deck could make out other lifeboats on all sides. They were scattered over a four-mile area, and in the grey light of dawn they were hard to distinguish from scores of small icebergs that covered the sea. Mixed with the small bergs were three or four towering monsters, 150 to 200 feet high. To the north and west, about five miles away, stretched a flat, unbroken field of ice as far as the eye could see. The floe was studded here and there with other big bergs that rose against the horizon. ‘When I saw the ice I had steamed through during the night,’ Rostron later told a friend, ‘I shuddered and could only think that some other hand than mine was on that helm during the night.’

The sight was so astonishing, so incredible, that those who had slept through everything until now couldn’t grasp it at all. Mrs Wallace Bradford of San Francisco looked out of her porthole and blinked in disbelief—half a mile away loomed a huge, jagged peak like a rock offshore. It was not white, and she wondered, ‘How in the world can we be near a rock when we are four days out from New York in a southerly direction and in mid- ocean?’

Miss Sue Eva Rule of St Louis was equally puzzled. When she first saw one of the lifeboats splashing through the early dawn, it looked like the gondola of an airship, and the huge grey mound behind it looked like a frame. She was sure they were picking up the crew of a fallen dirigible.

Another bewildered passenger hunted up his stewardess in the corridor. But she stopped him before he said a word. Pointing to some women tottering into the main dining-saloon she sobbed, ‘From the Titanic. She’s at the bottom of the ocean.’

Ten miles away, with the coming of dawn, life was beginning to stir again on the Californian. At 4.00 Chief Officer George Frederick Stewart climbed to the bridge and relieved Second Officer Stone.

Stone brought him up to date—told him about the strange ship, the rockets, the way the stranger disappeared. He added that around 3.40 he saw still another rocket, this time directly south and clearly not from the same ship that fired the first eight. Dead tired, Stone dropped down the ladder and turned in—from now on it was Stewart’s headache.

At 4.30 Stewart woke up Captain Lord and began to repeat Stone’s story.

‘Yes, I know,’ interrupted the captain, ‘he’s been telling me.’ Lord had never taken off his uniform, so he now went straight to the bridge and began discussing the best way to work out of the ice field and get on to Boston. Stewart broke in and asked if he wasn’t going to check on a ship that was now in sight directly to the south. Lord said, ‘No, I don’t think so; she’s not making any signals now.’

Stewart dropped the matter—he didn’t mention that Stone, on his way below, said he was sure the ship to the south couldn’t be the same one that fired the first eight rockets.

But he must have thought a good deal more about it, because at 5.40 he woke up wireless operator Evans, who recalled his saying, ‘There’s a ship been firing rockets. Will you see if you can find out if anything is the matter?’

Evans fumbled in the half-light of day, found the headphones and tuned in.

Two minutes later Stewart rocketed up the steps to the bridge calling, ‘There’s a ship sunk!’ Then he ran back down to the wireless shack… back up again… then to Captain Lord with the shattering news: ‘The Titanic has hit a berg and sunk!’

Captain Lord did just what a good skipper should do. He immediately started his engines and headed for the Titanic’s last position.

10. ‘Go Away—We Have Just Seen Our Husbands Drown’

‘Oh, Muddie, look at the beautiful North Pole with no Santa Claus on it,’ little Douglas Spedden said to his