Lifeboat No. 8

to her parents, the Countess echoed what must have been the sentiments of every Titanic survivor. “At last I am safe and sound. Am resting, I am so tired. Thank God I am here.”

Two days after the Carpathia docked, the steamship Bremen was advancing through the North Atlantic Ocean when passengers were told they were within a few miles of the Titanic’s last position. Soon an iceberg was sighted off the bow to starboard. It was, said the Bremen’s officers, most probably the iceberg that had doomed the great ship, so everyone ran to see the luminescent, intractable mountain of ice beaming absurdly in the late-day sun.

As the Bremen moved on, it passed through the southernmost drift of the wreckage, and the excited, chattering passengers looked down into the water and fell silent.

Floating near them was the corpse of a woman in her nightdress clasping a baby to her breast. Nearby were the bodies of three men clinging to a steamer chair, and the body of another woman holding tight to one of the many dogs that had been brought aboard the Titanic. This one, it appeared, was a Saint Bernard.

Further away, they could see white cork-filled life belts bobbing on the water. There were bodies in them: the frozen human detritus of what was now—officially—history’s most devastating maritime disaster.

Epilogue

When the passengers of Lifeboat No. 8 returned to land, their story did not end. For as long as there were survivors their saga would continue. The difference was that on the sea they had been subject to a common fate, while on land each would become enmeshed in private grief, in private narratives.

Mollie Wick refused to believe that her husband, George, was dead, and she remained in New York City waiting for him, unable to accept that hope had long since expired. Ellen Bird sought out Ida Straus’s eldest daughter, seeking to return to her the fur coat she had been given to wear in the lifeboat. “You must keep it,” she was told. “Mother wanted you to have it.” The body of Ella White’s manservant was recovered and tagged Body No. 232; Mrs. White paid to have his remains shipped to his widow for burial.

Maria Penasco’s husband, Victor, was never found. Because there was no death certificate, Maria was precluded from inheriting his fortune. Victor’s mother, who had warned her son not to sail on the Titanic, had a fake certificate made so that Maria could claim her inheritance.

It took two days for word of the sinking to reach Roberta Maoini’s family in Surrey. Her mother fainted when she heard the news. Three weeks later, long after she knew that Roberta had arrived safely in New York, a cable arrived at the Maioni home from the White Star Line: “Replying to your favour of the 17th. We are pleased to inform you that amongst the lists of those saved appears the name of Miss Maioni, which is no doubt your daughter, and we congratulate you on the fact of her safety.”

The steward Alfred Crawford and Able Seaman Tom Jones were summoned to testify at inquiries into the disaster, first in New York and then in London. The Countess of Rothes sent each a note of support and, as an expression of gratitude, gave them each a silver pocket watch engraved with her name and the date of the sinking. She and Seaman Jones maintained a friendship throughout the years, and he expressed his admiration for her by giving her the brass number plate from Lifeboat No. 8.

Gladys Cherry sent a letter to Jones that read, in part, “I feel I must write and tell you how splendidly you took charge of our boat on the fatal night… I think you were wonderful.”

In May 1912, Marie Grice Young wrote to President William Howard Taft. She was disturbed about a story, said to have come from an interview with her, about how the president’s favorite military aide, Major Archibald Butt, had helped her into Lifeboat No. 8, tucked a blanket around her, and said, “Good-bye, Miss Young. Good luck to you and don’t forget to remember me to the folks back home.”

It was a lovely story, so chivalrous and ennobling that the secretary of war had recounted it at the major’s memorial service. But it was apocryphal.

“When I last saw Major Butt,” Miss Young wrote the president, “he was walking on deck… on Sunday afternoon. The alleged ‘interview’ is entirely an invention, by some officious reporter who thereby brought much distress to many of Major Butt’s near relatives and friends… for when they wrote me of what a comfort the story was to them, I had to tell them it was untrue.”

Yet the story was retold in many accounts of the Titanic’s sinking because it buttressed one of the few redeeming features of that horror-filled night: that the men who chose to stay on board were brave not, as some suggested, because they did not know they were going to die, but because they did know and had determined to meet death with the obdurate courage of battling knights and the inherent grace of gentlemen.

But for the Titanic’s survivors, that sense of horror would never be assuaged. “It was the stillest night possible,” Gladys Cherry would recall, “not a ripple on the water, and the stars were wonderful. That icy air and stars I never want to see or feel again.”

A year after the sinking, the Countess was at dinner when she suddenly felt cold and overtaken by bottomless dread. She could not understand why until she realized that the band was playing “The Tales of Hoffman,” which had been the final piece of music played in the grand dining saloon on that April night.

The Countess and her husband returned to England, having dispensed with their rather quixotic plan to grow oranges in the American West. The Countess went on to do many good works. She joined the Red Cross during World War I and gave time and money to countless charities. But she never made peace with the fact that Lifeboat No. 8 had not returned to look for survivors. Unable to reconcile herself to such an important failure, she was intent on making it clear that it had not been her choice. When the inaction of those on Lifeboat No. 8 was mentioned at the British inquiry into the sinking, she had an affidavit drawn up stating that she, her cousin Gladys, an American lady, and Seaman Jones had wanted to return but were overruled by the others.

In fact, only two of the lifeboats had gone back, picking up between them eight passengers, two of whom died shortly thereafter. But there was no comfort for the Countess in knowing that her boat was not the only one to row away from the dying and the dead. Her guilt never abated and would occasion what her grandson later called “the great sadness of her life.”

Her father sought to assuage that sorrow when he purchased a lifeboat as a gift for the Royal Navy and christened it the Lady Rothes. At the launch ceremony in 1915, he said it was “a thanks offering to Almighty God for the safety of my only child from the wreck of the Titanic.”

Within a week, the Countess was thrilled to learn, volunteers manning the Lady Rothes had saved fourteen crew members of a Belfast steamer. But it, too, was ill-fated, and in 1918, the year the Carpathia was sunk by German torpedoes, the Lady Rothes also went down, taking two crew members with her.

In the days immediately after the Titanic’s sinking, Roberta Maioni stayed with the Countess and Gladys at the Plaza Hotel, overlooking New York’s Central Park. There, the romantically inclined young woman spent much of her days writing a poem about that wretched night. And in 1927, on the fifteenth anniversary of the sinking, she wrote about the voyage for a British newspaper. By then she had married, but she had never forgotten Jack Phillips, the only person she mentioned in her article by name. The manner in which she did so laid bare her enduring admiration for him and her enduring bitterness about his fate. He was, she wrote, “the heroic wireless operator of the Titanic, Mr. Phillips, whom we left behind to perish.”

By then a monument to Jack had been erected in his hometown, Godalming, Surrey. It was designed by the architect Hugh Thackeray Turner, whose son-in-law, George Mallory, had led the early British expeditions to Mount Everest.