It was classic Titanic damage, a fourteen-foot rent through her side,
twelve feet below the Plinisoll line, shearing two of her watertight
compartments, one of which was her main engine room section.
They had held the water easily until the electrical explosion, and since
then, the Master had battled to keep her afloat. Slowly, step by step,
fighting all the way, he had yielded to the sea. All the bilge pumps
were running still, but the water was steadily gaining.
Three days ago he had brought all his passengers up from below the main
deck, and he had battened down all the watertight bulkheads. The crew
and passengers were accommodated now in the lounges and smoking rooms.
The ship's luxury and opulence had been transformed into the crowded,
unhygienic and deteriorating conditions of a city under siege.
It reminded him of the catacombs of the London under ground converted to
air-raid shelters during the blitz. He had been a lieutenant on
shore-leave and he had passed one night there that he would remember for
the rest of his life.
There was the same atmosphere on board now. The sanitary arrangements
were inadequate. Fourteen toilet bowls for six hundred, many of them
seasick and suffering from diarrhoea. There were no baths nor showers,
and insufficient power for the heating of water in the hand basins. The
emergency generators delivered barely sufficient power to work the ship,
to run the pumps, to supply minimal lighting, and to keep the
communicational and navigational equipment running. There was no
heating in the ship and the outside air temperature had fallen to minus
twenty degrees now.
The cold in the spacious public lounges was brutal. The passengers
huddled in their fur coats and bulky life-jackets under mounds of
blankets. There were limited cooking facilities on the gas stoves
usually reserved for adventure tours ashore. There was no baking or
grilling, and most of the food was eaten cold and congealed from cans;
only the soup and beverages steamed in the cold clammy air, like the
breaths of the waiting and helpless multitude.
The desalination plants had not been in use since the ice collision and
now the supply of fresh water was critical; even hot drinks were
rationed.
Of the 368 paying passengers, only forty-eight were below the age of
fifty, and yet the morale was extraordinary. Men and women who before
the emergency could and did complain bitterly at a dress shirt not
ironed to crisp perfection or a wine served a few degrees too cold, now
accepted a mug of beef tea as though it were a vintage ChAteau Margaux,
and laughed and chatted animatedly in the cold, shaming with their
fortitude the few that might have complained. These were an unusual
sample of humanity, men and women of achievement and resilience, who had
come here to this outlandish corner of the globe in search of new
experience. They were mentally prepared for adventure and even danger,
and seemed almost to welcome this as part of the entertainment provided
by the tour.
Yet, standing on his bridge, the Master was under no illusion as to the
gravity of their situation. Peering through the streaming glass, he
