“WE have struck an iceberg. Badly damaged. Rush aid.”
Seaward and landward, J. G. Phillips, the Titanic’s wireless man, had hurled the appeal for help. By fits and starts—for the wireless was working unevenly and blurringly—Phillips reached out to the world, crying the Titanic’s peril. A word or two, scattered phrases, now and then a connected sentence, made up the message that sent a thrill of apprehension for a thousand miles east, west and south of the doomed liner.
The early despatches from St. John’s, Cape Race, and Montreal, told graphic tales of the race to reach the Titanic, the wireless appeals for help, the interruption of the calls, then what appeared to be a successful conclusion of the race when the Virginian was reported as having reached the giant liner.
Other rushing liners besides the Virginian heard the call and became on the instant something more than cargo carriers and passenger greyhounds. The big Baltic, 200 miles to the eastward and westbound, turned again to save life, as she did when her sister of the White Star fleet, the Republic, was cut down in a fog in January, 1909. The Titanic’s mate, the Olympic, the mightiest of the seagoers save the Titanic herself, turned in her tracks. All along the northern lane the miracle of the wireless worked for the distressed and sinking White Star ship. The Hamburg-American Cincinnati, the Parisian from Glasgow, the North German Lloyd Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm, the Hamburg-American liners Prinz Adelbert and Amerika, all heard the C. Q. D. and the rapid, condensed explanation of what had happened.
But the Virginian was nearest, barely 170 miles away, and was the first to know of the Titanic’s danger. She went about and headed under forced draught for the spot indicated in one of the last of Phillips’ messages—latitude 41.46 N. and longitude 50.14 W. She is a fast ship, the Allan liner, and her wireless has told the story of how she stretched through the night to get up to the Titanic in time. There was need for all the power of her engines and all the experience and skill of her captain. The final fluttering Marconigrams that were released from the Titanic made it certain that the great ship with 2340 souls aboard was filling and in desperate peril.
Further out at sea was the Cunarder, Carpathia, which left New York for the Mediterranean on April 13th. Round she went and plunged back westward to take a hand in saving life. And the third steamship within short sailing of the Titanic was the Allan liner Parisian away to the eastward, on her way from Glasgow to Halifax.
While they sped in the night with all the drive that steam could give them, the Titanic’s call reached to Cape Race and the startled operator there heard at midnight a message which quickly reached New York:
“Have struck an iceberg. We are badly damaged. Titanic latitude 41.46 N., 50.14 W.”
Cape Race threw the appeal broadcast wherever his apparatus could carry.
Then for hours, while the world waited for a crumb of news as to the safety of the great ship’s people, not one thing more was known save that she was drifting, broken and helpless and alone in the midst of a waste of ice. And it was not until seventeen hours after the Titanic had sunk that the words came out of the air as to her fate. There was a confusion and tangle of messages—a jumble of rumors. Good tidings were trodden upon by evil. And no man knew clearly what was taking place in that stretch of waters where the giant icebergs were making a mock of all that the world knew best in ship-building.
It was at 12.17 A. M., while the Virginian was still plunging eastward, that all communication from the Titanic ceased. The Virginian’s operator, with the Virginian’s captain at his elbow, fed the air with blue flashes in a desperate effort to know what was happening to the crippled liner, but no message came back. The last word from the Titanic was that she was sinking. Then the sparking became fainter. The call was dying to nothing. The Virginian’s operator labored over a blur of signals. It was hopeless. So the Allan ship strove on, fearing that the worst had happened.
It was this ominous silence that so alarmed the other vessels hurrying to the Titanic and that caused so much suspense here.
CHAPTER IX. IN THE DRIFTING LIFE-BOATS
SIXTEEN boats were in the procession which entered on the terrible hours of rowing, drifting and suspense. Women wept for lost husbands and sons, sailors sobbed for the ship which had been their pride. Men choked back tears and sought to comfort the widowed. Perhaps, they said, other boats might have put off in another direction. They strove, though none too sure themselves, to convince the women of the certainty that a rescue ship would appear.
In the distance the Titanic looked an enormous length, her great bulk outlined in black against the starry sky, every port-hole and saloon blazing with light. It was impossible to think anything could be wrong with such a leviathan, were it not for that ominous tilt downwards in the bows, where the water was now up to the lowest row of port-holes. Presently, about 2 A. M., as near as can be determined, those in the life-boats observed her settling very rapidly with the bows and the bridge completely under water, and concluded it was now only a question of minutes before she went. So it proved She slowly tilted straight on end with the stern vertically upwards, and as she did, the lights in the cabins and saloons, which until then had not flickered for a moment, died out, came on again for a single flash, and finally went altogether. At the same time the machinery roared down through the vessel with a rattle and a groaning that could be heard for miles, the weirdest sound surely that could be heard in the middle of the ocean, a thousand miles away from land. But this was not yet quite the end.
To the amazement of the awed watchers in the life-boats, the doomed vessel remained in that upright position for a time estimated at five minutes; some in the boat say less, but it was certainly some minutes that at least 150 feet of the Titanic towered up above the level of the sea and loomed black against the sky.
Then with a quiet, slanting dive she disappeared beneath the waters, and the eyes of the helpless spectators had looked for the last time upon the gigantic vessel on which they had set out from Southampton. And there was left to the survivors only the gently heaving sea, the life-boats filled with men and women in every conceivable condition of dress and undress, above the perfect sky of brilliant stars with not a cloud, all tempered with a bitter cold that made each man and woman long to be one of the crew who toiled away with the oars and kept themselves warm thereby—a curious, deadening; bitter cold unlike anything they had felt before.
And then with all these there fell on the ear the most appalling noise that human being has ever listened to —the cries of hundreds of fellow-beings struggling in the icy cold water, crying for help with a cry that could not be answered.
Third Officer Herbert John Pitman, in charge of one of the boats, described this cry of agony in his testimony before the Senatorial Investigating Committee, under the questioning of Senator Smith:
“I heard no cries of distress until after the ship went down,” he said.
“How far away were the cries from your life-boat?”
“Several hundred yards, probably, some of them.”
“Describe the screams.”
“Don’t, sir, please! I’d rather not talk about it.”
“I’m sorry to press it, but what was it like? Were the screams spasmodic?”
“It was one long continuous moan.”
The witness said the moans and cries continued an hour.
Those in the life-boats longed to return and pick up some of the poor drowning souls, but they feared this would mean swamping the boats and a further loss of life.
Some of the men tried to sing to keep the women from hearing the cries, and rowed hard to get away from
