The Loss of the S.S. Titanic, Lawrence Beesley [best romantic novels to read TXT] 📗
- Author: Lawrence Beesley
- Performer: -
Book online «The Loss of the S.S. Titanic, Lawrence Beesley [best romantic novels to read TXT] 📗». Author Lawrence Beesley
contained few people: a few were transferred from number 5, but it
would have held many more.
Fifth Officer Lowe was in charge of boat 14, with fifty-five women and
children, and some of the crew. So full was the boat that as she went
down Mr. Lowe had to fire his revolver along the ship’s side to
prevent any more climbing in and causing her to buckle. This boat,
like boat 13, was difficult to release from the lowering tackle, and
had to be cut away after reaching the sea. Mr. Lowe took in charge
four other boats, tied them together with lines, found some of them
not full, and transferred all his passengers to these, distributing
them in the darkness as well as he could. Then returning to the place
where the Titanic had sunk, he picked up some of those swimming in the
water and went back to the four boats. On the way to the Carpathia he
encountered one of the collapsible boats, and took aboard all those in
her, as she seemed to be sinking.
Boat 12 was one of the four tied together, and the seaman in charge
testified that he tried to row to the drowning, but with forty women
and children and only one other man to row, it was not possible to
pull such a heavy boat to the scene of the wreck.
Boat 2 was a small ship’s boat and had four or five passengers and
seven of the crew. Boat 4 was one of the last to leave on the port
side, and by this time there was such a list that deck chairs had to
bridge the gap between the boat and the deck. When lowered, it
remained for some time still attached to the ropes, and as the Titanic
was rapidly sinking it seemed she would be pulled under. The boat was
full of women, who besought the sailors to leave the ship, but in
obedience to orders from the captain to stand by the cargo port, they
remained near; so near, in fact, that they heard china falling and
smashing as the ship went down by the head, and were nearly hit by
wreckage thrown overboard by some of the officers and crew and
intended to serve as rafts. They got clear finally, and were only a
short distance away when the ship sank, so that they were able to pull
some men aboard as they came to the surface.
This boat had an unpleasant experience in the night with icebergs;
many were seen and avoided with difficulty.
Quartermaster Hickens was in charge of boat 6, and in the absence of
sailors Major Peuchen was sent to help to man her. They were told to
make for the light of the steamer seen on the port side, and followed
it until it disappeared. There were forty women and children here.
Boat 8 had only one seaman, and as Captain Smith had enforced the rule
of “Women and children only,” ladies had to row. Later in the night,
when little progress had been made, the seaman took an oar and put a
lady in charge of the tiller. This boat again was in the midst of
icebergs.
Of the four collapsible boats—although collapsible is not really the
correct term, for only a small portion collapses, the canvas edge;
“surf boats” is really their name—one was launched at the last moment
by being pushed over as the sea rose to the edge of the deck, and was
never righted. This is the one twenty men climbed on. Another was
caught up by Mr. Lowe and the passengers transferred, with the
exception of three men who had perished from the effects of immersion.
The boat was allowed to drift away and was found more than a month
later by the Celtic in just the same condition. It is interesting to
note how long this boat had remained afloat after she was supposed to
be no longer seaworthy. A curious coincidence arose from the fact that
one of my brothers happened to be travelling on the Celtic, and
looking over the side, saw adrift on the sea a boat belonging to the
Titanic in which I had been wrecked.
The two other collapsible boats came to the Carpathia carrying full
loads of passengers: in one, the forward starboard boat and one of the
last to leave, was Mr. Ismay. Here four Chinamen were concealed under
the feet of the passengers. How they got there no one knew—or indeed
how they happened to be on the Titanic, for by the immigration laws of
the United States they are not allowed to enter her ports.
It must be said, in conclusion, that there is the greatest cause for
gratitude that all the boats launched carried their passengers safely
to the rescue ship. It would not be right to accept this fact without
calling attention to it: it would be easy to enumerate many things
which might have been present as elements of danger.
THE CARPATHIA’S RETURN TO NEW YORK
The journey of the Carpathia from the time she caught the “C.Q.D.”
from the Titanic at about 12.30 A.M. on Monday morning and turned
swiftly about to her rescue, until she arrived at New York on the
following Thursday at 8.30 P.M. was one that demanded of the captain,
officers and crew of the vessel the most exact knowledge of
navigation, the utmost vigilance in every department both before and
after the rescue, and a capacity for organization that must sometimes
have been taxed to the breaking point.
The extent to which all these qualities were found present and the
manner in which they were exercised stands to the everlasting credit
of the Cunard Line and those of its servants who were in charge of the
Carpathia. Captain Rostron’s part in all this is a great one, and
wrapped up though his action is in a modesty that is conspicuous in
its nobility, it stands out even in his own account as a piece of work
well and courageously done.
As soon as the Titanic called for help and gave her position, the
Carpathia was turned and headed north: all hands were called on duty,
a new watch of stokers was put on, and the highest speed of which she
was capable was demanded of the engineers, with the result that the
distance of fifty-eight miles between the two ships was covered in
three and a half hours, a speed well beyond her normal capacity. The
three doctors on board each took charge of a saloon, in readiness to
render help to any who needed their services, the stewards and
catering staff were hard at work preparing hot drinks and meals, and
the purser’s staff ready with blankets and berths for the shipwrecked
passengers as soon as they got on board. On deck the sailors got ready
lifeboats, swung them out on the davits, and stood by, prepared to
lower away their crews if necessary; fixed rope-ladders,
cradle-chairs, nooses, and bags for the children at the hatches, to
haul the rescued up the side. On the bridge was the captain with his
officers, peering into the darkness eagerly to catch the first signs
of the crippled Titanic, hoping, in spite of her last despairing
message of “Sinking by the head,” to find her still afloat when her
position was reached. A double watch of lookout men was set, for there
were other things as well as the Titanic to look for that night, and
soon they found them. As Captain Rostron said in his evidence, they
saw icebergs on either side of them between 2.45 and 4 A.M., passing
twenty large ones, one hundred to two hundred feet high, and many
smaller ones, and “frequently had to manoeuvre the ship to avoid
them.” It was a time when every faculty was called upon for the
highest use of which it was capable. With the knowledge before them
that the enormous Titanic, the supposedly unsinkable ship, had struck
ice and was sinking rapidly; with the lookout constantly calling to
the bridge, as he must have done, “Icebergs on the starboard,”
“Icebergs on the port,” it required courage and judgment beyond the
ordinary to drive the ship ahead through that lane of icebergs and
“manoeuvre round them.” As he himself said, he “took the risk of full
speed in his desire to save life, and probably some people might blame
him for taking such a risk.” But the Senate Committee assured him that
they, at any rate, would not, and we of the lifeboats have certainly
no desire to do so.
The ship was finally stopped at 4 A.M., with an iceberg reported dead
ahead (the same no doubt we had to row around in boat 13 as we
approached the Carpathia), and about the same time the first lifeboat
was sighted. Again she had to be manoeuvred round the iceberg to pick
up the boat, which was the one in charge of Mr. Boxhall. From him the
captain learned that the Titanic had gone down, and that he was too
late to save any one but those in lifeboats, which he could now see
drawing up from every part of the horizon. Meanwhile, the passengers
of the Carpathia, some of them aroused by the unusual vibration of the
screw, some by sailors tramping overhead as they swung away the
lifeboats and got ropes and lowering tackle ready, were beginning to
come on deck just as day broke; and here an extraordinary sight met
their eyes. As far as the eye could reach to the north and west lay an
unbroken stretch of field ice, with icebergs still attached to the
floe and rearing aloft their mass as a hill might suddenly rise from a
level plain. Ahead and to the south and east huge floating monsters
were showing up through the waning darkness, their number added to
moment by moment as the dawn broke and flushed the horizon pink. It is
remarkable how “busy” all those icebergs made the sea look: to have
gone to bed with nothing but sea and sky and to come on deck to find
so many objects in sight made quite a change in the character of the
sea: it looked quite crowded; and a lifeboat alongside and people
clambering aboard, mostly women, in nightdresses and dressing-gowns,
in cloaks and shawls, in anything but ordinary clothes! Out ahead and
on all sides little torches glittered faintly for a few moments and
then guttered out—and shouts and cheers floated across the quiet sea.
It would be difficult to imagine a more unexpected sight than this
that lay before the Carpathia’s passengers as they lined the sides
that morning in the early dawn.
No novelist would dare to picture such an array of beautiful climatic
conditions,—the rosy dawn, the morning star, the moon on the horizon,
the sea stretching in level beauty to the skyline,—and on this sea
to place an ice-field like the Arctic regions and icebergs in numbers
everywhere,—white and turning pink and deadly cold,—and near them,
rowing round the icebergs to avoid them, little boats coming suddenly
out of mid-ocean, with passengers rescued from the most wonderful ship
the world has known. No artist would have conceived such a picture: it
would have seemed so highly dramatic as to border on the impossible,
and would not have been attempted. Such a combination of events would
pass the limit permitted the imagination of both author and artist.
The passengers crowded the rails and looked down at us as we rowed up
in the early morning; stood quietly aside while the crew at the
gangways below took us aboard, and watched us as if the ship
Comments (0)