Titanic Passengers Quotes

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That summer, Titanic fever gripped Kabul. People smuggled pirated copies of the film from Pakistan- sometimes in their underwear. After curfew, everyone locked their doors, turned out the lights, turned down the volume, and reaped tears for Jack and Rose and the passengers of the doomed ship. If there was electrical power, Mariam, Laila, and the children watched it too. A dozen times or more, they unearthed the TV from behind the tool-shed, late at night, with the lights out and quilts pinned over the windows. At the Kabul River, vendors moved into the parched riverbed. Soon, from the river's sunbaked hollows, it was possible to buy Titanic carpets, and Titanic cloth, from bolts arranged in wheelbarrows. There was Titanic deodorant, Titanic toothpaste, Titanic perfume, Titanic pakora, even Titanic burqas. A particularly persistent beggar began calling himself "Titanic Beggar." "Titanic City" was born. It's the song, they said. No, the sea. The luxury. The ship. It's the sex, they whispered. Leo, said Aziza sheepishly. It's all about Leo. "Everybody wants Jack," Laila said to Mariam. "That's what it is. Everybody wants Jack to rescue them from disaster. But there is no Jack. Jack is not coming back. Jack is dead.
Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
I was born Katie O’Reilly,” she began. “Poor Irish, but proud of it. I boarded the Titanic at Queenstown as a third class passenger with nothing more than the clothes on my back. And the law at my heels.” Titanic Rhapsody
Jina Bacarr
The first chap we said was loafing, until he died. That's nearly always the verdict on a sailing ship, anyway. A man is invariably 'mouching' until he dies, and then we say, "Oh, he must have been bad after all." --Charles Lightoller
Richard Davenport-Hines (Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From)
Today, in what Harvey Mansfield calls our "gender-neutral" society," there are no social norms. Eight decades after the Titanic, a German-built ferry en route from Estonia to Sweden sank in the Baltic Sea. Of the 1,051 passengers, only 139 lived to tell the tale. But the distribution of the survivors was very different from that of the Titanic. Women and children first? No female under fifteen or over sixty-five made it. Only 5 percent of all women passengers lived. The bulk of the survivors were young men. Forty-three percent of men aged 20 to 24 made it.
Mark Steyn (After America: Get Ready for Armageddon)
Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where.
Richard Davenport-Hines (Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From)
Late at night, on April 14, 1912, an English ocean liner was making her first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. She was going to New York City. Carrying 2,200 passengers, the ship was four city blocks long. Most people believed the ship was unsinkable
Mary Pope Osborne (Tonight on the Titanic (Magic Tree House, #17))
I have often perplexed myself over what I saw in Nelle Snyder's aged face at that moment. It was no look of paranoia. It was a look of waiting. Perpetual waiting. That look was to come back to me sixteen years later when I heard Rose's narration at the end of James Cameron's Titanic, with its line about survivors "waiting for an absolution that never came." Yet the waiting I saw in Nelle Snyder's face seemed larger even than a waiting for absolution. It seemed vaster even than Titanic herself. Call it the waiting of the Mother of all Perished Vessels. Or of a Ship of Honeymoon Dreams perchance, with a passenger list spanning all humanity, that once proudly sailed but was lost, aeons ago, and sank to a dark, unreachable abode where nothing whatsoever can be grasped about her except her perplexing power still to haunt us.
James Glaeg
On the Titanic, there were 20 lifeboats. To save all the passengers, the ship needed twice as many. But with all the confusion on board, a number of the lifeboats were not even full when they left the ship. Many third-class passengers did not have a chance to get into any of the lifeboats because they were on the lower decks and didn’t know where to go.
Mary Pope Osborne (Tonight on the Titanic (Magic Tree House, #17))
He made the mistake of booking first-class passage on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. When that liner struck an iceberg, the crew asked him, because of his sailing expertise, to row a lifeboat full of passengers to safety. He was an honorable man—the president of the Standard Chemical Company and a major in the Queen’s Own Rifles—and he was doing a heroic deed.
Robert J. Sawyer (Space (Complete Short Fiction Book 2))
1) The Titanic hit the iceberg in the North Atlantic, approximately 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. 2) The Titanic was considered unsinkable because she was built with huge watertight doors to contain any possible leaks. However, when the ship hit the iceberg, six watertight compartments quickly filled up with water, dooming the ship. 3) The signal SOS was chosen as an international distress call because of the simplicity of the three letters in Morse code: three dots, three dashes, and three dots. 4) No one knows for certain exactly how long the musicians played on the Titanic, but legend says they played until the ship went down, and their last song was the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee.” 5) More than 1,500 people perished in the Titanic disaster, while 705 people escaped in lifeboats and were eventually rescued by a ship named the Carpathia. 6) After the sinking of the Titanic, laws were changed so that every ship was required to have enough lifeboats to carryall its passengers. Also, the International Ice Patrol was formed, so that ships would have warning about ice conditions. 7) In 1985, a scientist named Dr. Robert Ballard discovered the undersea wreck of the Titanic.
Mary Pope Osborne (Tonight on the Titanic (Magic Tree House, #17))
Ironically, the third class passengers would be last to reach the lifeboats but first to realize the severity of the situation.
Henry Freeman (Titanic: The Story Of The Unsinkable Ship)
they fired rockets to give hope to the stranded passengers, which were first spotted at 3:30 am. They began picking up lifeboats at 4:10 am. The process took several hours, and in all, 705 people were saved of the 2,223 on board.
Henry Freeman (Titanic: The Story Of The Unsinkable Ship)
The first ship to reach the site of the wreckage was quickly overwhelmed. They preserved the bodies of first class passengers first, justifying their decision by claiming that these would be most likely to have property disputes ensuing from their deaths, and confirmation of death was needed. They wound up burying many crew members and third class passengers at sea. The other ships picked up dozens more bodies, and the last body was retrieved in late May. By then, officials concluded, life vests would have begun to disintegrate, and remaining corpses would have disappeared beneath the waves. In total, only about 300 bodies of the more than 1,500 dead were recovered.
Henry Freeman (Titanic: The Story Of The Unsinkable Ship)
As a result of the tremendous loss of life, international regulations were passed regarding lifeboats, telegraphs and communication, and ice. All ships would be required to carry enough lifeboats, crew would be trained to use them and evacuate, and passengers would have a drill so that they knew where to go and when in the event of a disaster (which anyone who has taken a cruise is well aware). Also, it was mandated that telegraph machines and later, other forms of communication, be manned 24-hours a day (had someone been at the telegraph machine on the California, they would have confirmed the emergency). Finally, patrols were set up to better survey ice fields and warn vessels about dangerous areas.
Henry Freeman (Titanic: The Story Of The Unsinkable Ship)
We were trying to catch a flight to Puerto Rico, but the local Puerto Rican scheduled flight was canceled. The airport terminal was full of stranded passengers. I made a few calls to charter companies, and agreed to charter a plane for $2,000 to Puerto Rico. I divided the price by the number of seats, borrowed a blackboard, and wrote virgin airways: $39 single flight to puerto rico. I walked around the airport terminal and soon filled every seat on the charter plane. As we landed in Puerto Rico, a passenger turned to me and said: ‘Virgin Airways isn’t too bad—smarten up the service a little and you could be in business.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
Sealed Orders”:
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Norris met another survivor on board who told him that he had been bringing home a prized dog on the Titanic and had gone to the kennels and released all the dogs a half hour before the ship went under. Norris described to him how when he was swimming away from the sinking liner he had spied the black face of a French bulldog in the water.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
was told a steerage passenger had been shot while trying to leap into a lifeboat
Alan J. Rockwell (Into the Darkness: The Harrowing True Story of the Titanic Disaster: Riveting First-Hand Accounts of Agony, Sacrifice and Survival)
We positioned Northern Horizon, our command ship, 11 miles off Ireland’s southern coast. We knew where Lusitania lay—that wasn’t the issue. Our goal was to investigate the mystery of what had sent the grand ship to her watery grave, taking the lives of about 1,200 passengers and crew members in May 1915.
Robert D. Ballard (Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic)
thrown snowballs with Edith Rosenbaum only an hour earlier. In all, there were twenty-eight passengers in this lifeboat; apart from three crew members, all of them were from first class. The lifeboat had a capacity to hold sixty-five.
Andrew Wilson (Shadow of the Titanic: The Extraordinary Stories of Those Who Survived)
The impact, while not violent enough to disturb the passengers or crew, or to arrest the ship’s progress, rolled the vessel slightly and tore the steel plating above the turn of the bilge.  
U.S. Senate (The "Titanic" Reports: The Official Conclusions of the 1912 Inquiries by the US Senate and the British Wreck Commissioner)
Mr. Ismay, after rendering assistance to many passengers, found “C” collapsible, the last boat on the starboard side, actually being lowered. No other people were there at the time. There was room for him and he jumped in. (Ismay, 18559) Had he not jumped in he would merely have added one more life, namely, his own, to the number of those lost.
U.S. Senate (The "Titanic" Reports: The Official Conclusions of the 1912 Inquiries by the US Senate and the British Wreck Commissioner)
had gone to work in Worcester’s famous Washburn & Moen barbed wire factory: Swedes were preferred by employers there because, unlike the Irish, they did not tend to get either fighting drunk or unionized.
Richard Davenport-Hines (Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From)
Electric light!” I said. We’d never had electric light at home, just gaslight and candles, and the only taps were in the kitchen and the back scullery. “Well, this is good!” said Ma. “Daisy, when we get to New York I won’t want to get off this ship!” By midday I didn’t know if she’d even get out of her bunk. It was a nice enough day and not a bit stormy, but the rocking of the ship in the water made her queasy before we even started moving. The boys wanted to go on deck so I had to go with them, and we joined the masses of third-class passengers climbing up to the fresh air.
Margi McAllister (Titanic (I Was There))
One of the library occupants was Lawrence Beesley, a Dulwich College science master seeking new chances in America (his small son grew up to marry Dodie Smith, the author of The 101 Dalmatians).
Richard Davenport-Hines (Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From)
a companion at a restaurant along the Chicago River mentioned that a steamship had tipped over nearby in 1915, killing more passengers than had perished on the Titanic.
Michael McCarthy (Ashes Under Water: The SS Eastland and the Shipwreck That Shook America)
It was as though all the passengers on the Titanic were roped together, and the fattest guy had just fallen overboard.
Mitch Feierstein (Planet Ponzi)
longer in extended bad weather. For passengers in steerage—scores
Daniel E. Harmon (On a Sea So Cold & Still: The Titanic-A Centennial Reader)
A “pivot” is supposed to recall a ballerina’s demi détourné, a delicate change of course as graceful as it (hopefully) seems intentional. In reality, a startup’s pivot is a panicked sprint comparable to that of a Titanic passenger who’s spotted the last open life raft.
Antonio García Martínez (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley)
After I found Titanic in 1985, I could have obtained salvage rights if I’d wanted to, according to international maritime law. But I wasn’t interested in retrieving artifacts. I believed we should respect the passengers and crew who had died there and leave their grave site undisturbed. Survivors, like Eva Hart, agreed. She was seven when the ship sank. “I saw all the horror of its sinking,” she told me. “And I heard, even more dreadful, the cries of drowning people.
Robert D. Ballard (Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic)
It is related that on the night of the disaster, right up to the time of the Titanic’s sinking, while the band grouped outside the gymnasium doors played with such supreme courage in face of the water which rose foot by foot before their eyes, the instructor was on duty inside, with passengers on the bicycles and the rowing-machines, still assisting and encouraging to the last. Along with the bandsmen it is fitting that his name, which I do not think has yet been put on record—it is McCawley —should have a place in the honorable list of those who did their duty faithfully to the ship and the line they served.
Jack Winocour (The Story of the Titanic As Told by Its Survivors (Dover Maritime))
One Newport acquaintance who hadn’t snubbed Jack Astor was Margaret Tobin Brown, the estranged wife of Denver millionaire James J. Brown. She was sympathetic to marital woes and escaped her own by traveling. That winter, in fact, Mrs. Brown had joined the Astors on their excursion to North Africa and Egypt. In her pocket as she sat near the Astor party on the Nomadic was a small Egyptian tomb figure that she had bought in a Cairo market as a good luck talisman. The voyage Margaret Brown was about to take would immortalize her in books, movies, and a Broadway musical as “the unsinkable Molly Brown,” a feisty backwoods girl whose husband’s lucky strike at a Leadville, Colorado, gold mine vaults her into a mansion in Denver, where she is rebuffed by Mile High society.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
In America’s Gilded Age palaces the opulence of France’s ancien régime was the style most often simulated. As a result, the first-class lounge on A deck, the showiest of the Titanic’s public rooms, had been designed to emulate Versailles—though with some English coziness added in the patterned carpeting and comfortably upholstered sofas with large green pillows. The walls were paneled in oak with carved rococo detailing, although the use of gilding was restrained, reserved for some details on the plastered ceiling, a gilt ormolu wall clock, and the statuette of the Artemis of Versailles on the marble mantelpiece. At the far end of the room stood a mahogany, glass-fronted bookcase that held the ship’s library, and from its shelves
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
While staying at the Ritz in Paris, she had received word that her first grandchild, four-month-old Lawrence Brown Jr., had fallen seriously ill, and she had immediately booked passage home on the earliest available ship. It would therefore have been a rather subdued “Molly” Brown who waited on the Nomadic for the ship that would propel her into legend.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
As Millet, Archie Butt, and Clarence Moore passed through the dining saloon that Thursday evening, a likely table to have received friendly greetings was the one occupied by Colonel Archibald Gracie IV and his two companions, Edward Austin Kent, a Buffalo architect, and a New York clubman named James Clinch Smith. The affable Gracie was the most outgoing of the three and had the polished manners of a man from an old and distinguished family. His great-grandfather, Archibald Gracie I, was a Scottish-born shipping magnate who in 1799 had built a large Federal-style home in Manhattan overlooking the East River that is now known as Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor of New York.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
6 P.M. on Thursday, April 11, the sound of the Titanic’s bugler was heard on deck, indicating it was time for passengers to dress for dinner. The dress code had been waived on the first night at Cherbourg but from then onward “full dress was always en règle” as the Washington aristocrat and amateur historian Archibald Gracie noted approvingly. For Gracie and the other first-class men, this simply meant donning white tie and tails or a tuxedo, a standard part of any traveling wardrobe. Archie Butt had slightly more sartorial choice since his seven trunks were packed with both his regular and dress uniforms along with civilian evening wear. (At the White House, Archie often changed clothes six times a day.) For this first formal evening he may have simply chosen his regular uniform or even civilian mufti, reserving a show of gold lace for later in the voyage. Most of the women, too, had a different gown packed in tissue paper for each night of the crossing but were saving their most splendid apparel for Sunday or Monday night. The beauty of the women on board “was a subject both of observation and admiration” according to Archibald Gracie.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
This display of loveliness, however, took considerable effort, making the “dressing hour” a stressful time for ladies’ maids. The array of undergarments alone would baffle a modern woman, beginning with the corsets that most upper-class women still wore. The formidable whalebone devices of the Victorian era were a thing of the past, as were the padded S-curve corsets that had pushed the bosom forward and the derrière backward in the style so favored by King Edward VII. After 1907 a longer, slimmer look was in fashion and corsets had elastic gusset inserts that were supposed to make them less constricting.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Yet the New York arrival time was not measured by when the liner docked but by when it passed the Ambrose Lightship, a navigation beacon moored off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, where it marked the main channel into New York harbor. On her maiden voyage the Olympic had passed the Ambrose Lightship at 2:24 a.m. on Wednesday, June 21, 1911. Ismay knew that to beat the Olympic’s maiden crossing record and “arrive on Tuesday,” the Titanic had simply to pass the Ambrose Lightship before midnight and best her sister’s time by only two and a half hours. On her second westbound crossing, the Olympic had, in fact, reached the lightship at 10:08 p.m. on Tuesday, July 18. With the Titanic already achieving average speeds of just under twenty-two knots over the last two days, she was well on her way to making the Tuesday arrival that Ismay had so enthusiastically predicted.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
The steamship Californian had advised at 6:30 p.m. that it had seen three large bergs five miles to the southwest, but this message wasn’t received by the Titanic’s Marconi Room. Junior operator Harold Bride was then writing up the day’s accounts and letting the equipment cool down after a very busy day. An hour later, when the transmitter was operating again, he intercepted the same message being sent from the Californian to the Antillian and delivered it to the bridge. By then Second Officer Lightoller had returned from dinner, and on his arrival, Murdoch had remarked on how the temperature had gone down four degrees, to thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, in the half hour that he had been gone. Within an hour it would drop to just above freezing. The passengers, too, were aware of the plunging temperatures, and according to Margaret Brown, some of the women wore warm wraps over their evening dresses to dinner.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
The Olympic’s Marconi operators were relaying all the messages from the Carpathia to stations onshore, due to the Cunard liner’s limited wireless range. Marconi forms had been distributed to the survivors that morning but many of their messages would not be sent for another day or two—if at all. Captain Rostron had instructed that the first priority was to transmit a list of the survivors. The Carpathia’s chief purser and his assistant were busy compiling the names of passengers while Lightoller worked on the list of the surviving crew and engine room staff and a senior steward gathered the names of the cooks and stewards. The grim tally would come to 712 people rescued from a ship that had held 2,209. Over two-thirds of those on board the Titanic had perished.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
President Taft, too, was preoccupied by the fate of his aide and frustrated by his inability to receive word of whether Archie might be on board the rescue ship. On Tuesday, Taft instructed the secretary of the navy to send out two scout cruisers, the Salem and the Chester, to establish radio contact with the Carpathia.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Helen Bishop, the young newlywed from Dowagiac, Michigan, claimed that she and her husband, Dickinson, were pushed into Boat 7 after an officer took her arm and told her to be very quiet and to get in immediately. Helen had earlier left her lapdog Frou Frou in their room, even though the little dog had tugged at the hem of her dress while she was putting on her life preserver. Thinking it would be inappropriate to take her pet, Helen had closed the stateroom door to the sound of her tiny dog’s high-pitched barks. But another young woman was not going anywhere without her Pomeranian. Twenty-four-year-old Margaret Hays of New York had taken her little dog along on a European tour she had just completed with a school friend and her mother. When the three women decided to dress and go up to the boat deck, Margaret wrapped her pet in a blanket and took it with her. Near the staircase on C deck they were greeted by Gilbert Tucker, a young magazine editor and writer from Albany, New York, who had developed a crush on Margaret. Tucker was holding three lifebelts which he proceeded to help Margaret and the two others to put on. When Jim Smith passed by and saw this, he quipped, “Oh, I suppose we ought to put a life preserver on the little doggie, too!” Tucker and the three women then proceeded to the boat deck, where all four, along with the little doggie, were permitted to enter Lifeboat 7.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
The failure of all but two of the eighteen lifeboats to go to the aid of the dying remains another of the great “if only’s” of the Titanic story. Many of the boats were only half-full and, had they returned quickly, could have saved dozens of lives. In the Duff Gordons’ boat alone, there was room for twenty-eight more passengers. But in Boat 1, as in most of the lifeboats, the fear of being swamped by the panicked throng overruled all other instincts. “It would have been sheer madness to have returned,” harrumphed Hugh Woolner in Collapsible D, only recently pulled into a boat himself.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
After napping for almost an hour behind a stove in the galley, Norris Williams had awakened and gone out on deck just as the Carpathia was departing. But with his legs still feeling very numb and painful, he made his way to the ship’s hospital. A surgeon who was helping Dr. McGee examined Norris and expressed grave concern about the state of his legs. He thought that amputation might be necessary and cheerfully ventured that this could even be done on board before the ship reached New York. But there was a chance, he thought, that the young tennis player might be able to save his legs if he were to exercise them continually. Norris seized on this option and resolved to walk the decks day and night. First, however, he found a change of clothes and steeped himself in a hot bath.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
In New York, the city was in the grip of Titanic fever. Flags flew at half-staff, the Henry Harris theaters were dark, and even Macy’s department store had closed out of respect for Isidor and Ida Straus. Police had been called in to control the crowds in front of the White Star office at 9 Broadway.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
The lights of the Californian did indeed seem tantalizingly close. But the steamer was not responding to the Titanic’s CQD calls because its Marconi operator had turned off his equipment and gone to bed over an hour before, after being told to “Shut up” by Jack Phillips. Fourth Officer Boxhall had tried signaling the ship with a Morse lamp but had received no response. He was relieved when Quartermaster Rowe arrived carrying more distress rockets. Surely the ship would see these and come over. “Fire one, and then fire one every five or six minutes,” Captain Smith ordered. Boxhall continued flashing with his lamp between rocket bursts.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
In Boat 6, Margaret Brown had doffed her sables to free her up for rowing. She had encouraged the other women to row as well, defying the quartermaster who railed at her from the stern. But Robert Hichens had chosen the wrong group of women to bully. In addition to the forceful Mrs. Brown, the plucky Mrs. Candee, and the voluble Berthe Mayné, there were two English suffragettes on board, Elsie Bowerman and her mother, Edith Chibnall. Both were active members of Sylvia Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, the most militant of Britain’s votes-for-women organizations. Edith was one of ten women who had accompanied Mrs. Pankhurst on a 1910 deputation to Parliament that had resulted in arrests after a scuffle with police. She had also donated a banner for a Hyde Park demonstration that read “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” A full-scale rebellion against one male tyrant was soon under way in Boat 6. The women tried to taunt the quartermaster into joining them at the oars, but Hichens refused, preferring to stand at the tiller shouting out rowing instructions and doom-filled warnings that they could be lost for days with no food or water. Eventually Boat 16 came near and the two lifeboats tied up together. Margaret Brown spotted a chilled, thinly clad stoker in the adjoining boat and after he jumped over into Boat 6 to help with the rowing, she wrapped him in her sables, tying the tails around his ankles. She then handed him an oar and instructed Boat 16 to cut them loose so they could row to keep warm. Howling curses in protest, Hichens moved to block this but an enraged Mrs. Brown rose up and threatened to throw him overboard. The fur-enveloped stoker reproached Hichens for his foul language in the broadest of Cockney accents: “Soy, don’t you know you are talking to a loidy!
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
When the sun came up fully, the ice field began to glow in mauves and corals, a breathtaking sight. There was one iceberg with a double peak about two hundred feet high. To Lucy Duff Gordon the illuminated bergs looked like giant opals, and May Futrelle noted how they glistened like rock quartz, though one of them, she thought, was doubtless the murderer. The scene reminded Hugh Woolner of photographs of an Antarctic expedition. Seven-year-old Douglas Spedden raised a few smiles in Boat 3 by exclaiming to his nurse, “Oh Muddie, look at the beautiful North Pole with no Santa Claus on it!” Daisy Spedden recorded in her diary that as their boat was rowed toward rescue, “the tragedy of the situation sank deep into our hearts as we saw the Carpathia standing amidst the few bits of wreckage with the pitifully small number of lifeboats coming up to her from different directions.” After racing through the night to the Titanic’s distress position, the Carpathia had spotted Fourth Officer Boxhall’s green flares and had headed for them. “Shut down your engines and take us aboard,” Boxhall shouted up as the Carpathia drew alongside Boat 2 at 4:10 a.m. “I have only one sailor,” he added, as the boat tossed on the choppy swells. “All right,” came back the voice of the Carpathia’s captain, Arthur Rostron.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
When the next boat forward, Lifeboat 5, was being swung out, Third Officer Herbert Pitman noted how easily the davits worked compared to the older ones he had used on other ships. Thirty-four-year-old “Bert” Pitman, a farmer’s son from Somerset, had been working on ships since he was eighteen. The Titanic’s new Welin davits were indeed state-of-the-art and were actually equipped to carry more than the one boat each held. But outdated British Board of Trade regulations required a ship the size of the Titanic, which could accommodate 3,511 people, to have only sixteen lifeboats, for a maximum of 962 passengers. White Star had actually exceeded the regulations by including four Engelhardt boats with collapsible canvas sides, making room for a total of 1,178. Yet even if all of the Titanic’s boats had been filled to capacity, there would only have been places for slightly more than half of the 2,209 on board. No one had imagined a situation where such a watertight ship would need to be wholly evacuated before help could arrive.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
While the Duff Gordons drank champagne at the Ritz that Thursday night, Margaret Brown was still on the Carpathia, helping out with the steerage passengers. Immigration and health officials had come on board to spare the Titanic’s third-class survivors the customary hiatus at Ellis Island, but it was after eleven o’clock before the first of them began to leave the ship. Still wearing the black velvet suit she had donned after the collision, “Queen Margaret,” as some in first class had dubbed her, worked to organize the disembarkation of the steerage women and help with their travel arrangements. The Countess of Rothes was doing likewise, and one passenger of particular concern for her was Rhoda Abbott, who was unable to walk due to her ordeal in Collapsible A. Although Rhoda assured the countess and Margaret Brown that she would be looked after by the Salvation Army, she was transferred by ambulance to New York Hospital at Noëlle’s expense and later to a hotel room that Mrs. Brown arranged for her. The small, slim countess eventually walked down the gangway and into the arms of her husband Norman, the Earl of Rothes, and before long, she, too, was in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton. But Margaret Brown remained on the ship, where she improvised beds in the lounge for the remaining steerage women and spent the night with them. The next day her brother, who had come from Denver to greet her, came on board and told Margaret that her ailing grandson—the reason she had come home on the Titanic—was recovering well. This encouraged her to stay in New York, where she set up headquarters for the Titanic Survivors’ Committee in her suite at the Ritz-Carlton.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
By early afternoon the Carpathia had passed the last of the ice and could begin to pick up speed, but at 4:00 p.m its engines were stopped. Father Anderson then appeared on deck in his clerical garb, followed by Carpathia crewmen carrying four corpses sewn into canvas bags. These were the bodies of two male passengers, one fireman, and one seaman, that had been brought aboard from the lifeboats. Each of the canvas bags in turn was laid on a wide plank and covered with a flag. As the words “Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the deep” were read aloud, the bodies were tipped into the sea one at a time. A large crowd stood nearby with heads bared. The canvas bags had been weighted so that the bodies would fall feet first but one of them struck the water flat. A Carpathia passenger wrote that he would never forget the sound of that splash. One of those buried at sea was first-class passenger William F. Hoyt, the heavy man who had been pulled into Boat 14 and died shortly thereafter. When May Futrelle learned that a large man had been lifted into one of the lifeboats, she questioned the crew of Boat 14 but soon realized that the man they described could not have been her husband. She also heard that Archibald Gracie had been pulled under with the ship and worked up her courage to ask him if he had suffered as he was being dragged down. Gracie reassured her that if he had never come up, he would have had no more suffering, giving May some comfort that perhaps Jacques had not endured an agonizing death. That afternoon Charles Lightoller had a serious talk with the three other surviving officers, Pitman, Boxhall, and Lowe, about what lay ahead. It was agreed that their best hope for escaping what Lightoller called “the inquisition” that awaited in New York was to immediately board the Cedric, scheduled to sail for Liverpool on Thursday. Their case was taken to Bruce Ismay who sent a message to Philip Franklin suggesting that the Cedric be held for the Titanic’s crew and himself. Ismay also asked that clothes and shoes be put on board for him. The cable was signed “Yamsi,” his coded signature for personal messages.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
In London similar scenes played out as names were posted at Oceanic House, White Star’s London office, near Trafalgar Square. Southampton was the hardest-hit city of all since that was where most of the crew and victualing staff lived—of whom only 212 out of 885 had survived.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Yet there were, in fact, nearly two hundred women and children still on board the Titanic. More than half of them were waiting in the third-class public rooms and corridors or on the decks near the stern. At 1:30 a.m. the gates on the stairs up from third class had been opened for women but many had chosen to remain with their men. Father Thomas Byles circulated among the third-class passengers, hearing confessions and reciting the rosary with them. At 2:00 a.m. the gates were opened for third-class men as well as women, and many more steerage passengers soon crowded the boat deck. As he began loading Collapsible D on the port side, Lightoller was forced to pull his revolver to clear a crowd of what he called “dagoes” out of the boat. He then formed a cordon of crewmen to prevent a rush on the boat. As small knots of steerage women were escorted across the deck toward the last boat, there were still a few women from first class on board as well. Archibald Gracie was shocked to see Caroline Brown and Edith Evans standing by the starboard railing. He had escorted Evans and the three Lamson sisters to the staircase landing below the boat deck over an hour ago and had then gone in search of his other “unprotected” ward, Helen Candee, but discovered that she had already gone up on deck. Caroline Brown began to explain to Gracie how they had become separated from the others, but he and Jim Smith simply hustled them both toward the ring of men surrounding Collapsible D. Once they were let through, Edith Evans said to Caroline Brown, “You go first. You are married and have children.” Brown was then lifted into the lifeboat, but when Evans went to follow, she was unable to clamber over the railing in her tapered skirt. “Never mind,” she called out to Brown, “I will go on a later boat,” and turned and hurried away down the deck. Evans had earlier told Archibald Gracie that she had been told by a fortune-teller to beware of water and that she now knew she would be drowned. Gracie had dismissed this as superstition but Edith Evans would become one of only four women from first class to perish.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
In the afternoon, it was Second Officer Lightoller’s turn to answer questions, the first of nearly two thousand he would be asked by this committee and the British inquiry that followed. Throughout his testimony, Lightoller acquitted himself well and skillfully steered criticism away from Captain Smith and the White Star Line even while he considered the American inquiry to be “nothing but a complete farce.” The second officer came to have particular contempt for Senator Smith, whose ignorance of nautical matters led to him being ridiculed by the English press as “Watertight Smith” for asking whether the watertight compartments were meant to shelter passengers. The London Globe called Smith “a gentleman from the wilds of Michigan” who felt it necessary “to be as insolent as possible to Englishmen.” British resentment toward America’s waxing power was captured by the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who wrote in his diary that if anyone had to drown it was best that it be American millionaires. To the English elites, the U.S. inquiry seemed to be yet another example of American muscle flexing. But a Labor parliamentarian, George Barnes, noted more dispassionately that “it may be humiliating to some to have an [American] inquiry into the loss of a British ship but … the average person realizes that Americans get to work very quickly, and the average person, I think, is rather glad it is so.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Chivalrous or not, there was no denying that of the 1,667 men on board, only 338, or 20.27 percent, had survived as compared with a 74.35 percent survival rate for the 425 women. On April 21 the bodies of the Titanic’s victims began to be pulled out of the north Atlantic by the Mackay-Bennett, a cable ship that had been sent out from Halifax with a hundred tons of ice and 125 coffins on board. The Mackay-Bennett’s captain described the scene as resembling “a flock of sea gulls resting on the water.… All we could see at first would be the top of the life preservers. They were all floating face upwards, apparently standing in the water.” John Jacob Astor’s body was found floating with arms outstretched, his gold pocket watch dangling from its platinum chain. To the ship’s undertaker it looked as if Astor had just glanced at his watch before he took the plunge. It is often written that Astor’s body was found mangled and soot-covered and that he must therefore have been crushed when the forward funnel came down. Yet according to three eyewitnesses, Astor’s body was in good condition and soot-free, and like most of the other floating victims, he appeared to have died of hypothermia. On April 25 the body of the Buffalo architect Edward Kent was recovered. In the pocket of his gray overcoat was the silver flask and ivory miniature given to him by Helen Candee on the grand staircase, and these were later returned to her by Kent’s sister. Frank Millet’s body was found on the same day and identified by the initials F. D. M. on his gold watch. The next evening the Mackay-Bennett left for Halifax with 190 bodies on board, another 116 having been buried at sea. A second ship, the Minia, had arrived on the scene, but after a week’s search it retrieved only seventeen bodies, and two other ships would find only an additional five. The Mackay-Bennett landed in Halifax on April 30 to the tolling of church bells and flags flying at half-staff. Horse-drawn hearses took the bodies from the dock to a temporary morgue set up in a curling rink.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
45 P.M. on that Friday evening a wireless message was received from the captain of the French liner La Touraine saying that they had “crossed [a] thick ice-field” and had then seen “another ice-field and two icebergs” and giving the positions of the ice and that of a derelict ship they had spotted. Captain Smith sent his thanks and compliments back and commented on the fine weather. While adding this information to the map in the chart room, Fourth Officer Boxhall remarked to the captain that La Touraine’s positions were of no use to them since French ships always took a more northerly course.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
On the steamer Californian, which is estimated to have been anywhere from eleven to twenty miles away, eight rockets were sighted but none were heard. A recent study has revealed that the unusually flat sea that night would have acted like a mirror that reflected and thus deadened the sound, making it inaudible beyond five to six nautical miles. Yet the rockets were definitely seen if not heard by the Californian, and the fact that its captain, Stanley Lord, did not wake the ship’s wireless operator to find out why a ship was firing rockets in the middle of the night remains one of the most haunting “if only’s” of the Titanic story.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Margaret Brown was already miffed that she had not been asked to testify before the Senate inquiry given her prominence on the Survivors’ Committee and the acclaim she was enjoying as a heroine of the Titanic. And as a supporter of women’s suffrage, Margaret was not shy about using her newfound fame to wade into the debate over gender equality swirling around the disaster. (One newspaper poet noted how the cry of “Votes for women” had become “Boats for women/When the brave/Were come to die.”) Margaret Brown stated in an interview that while “ ‘Women first’ is a principle as deep-rooted in man’s being as the sea … to me it is all wrong. Women demand equal rights on land—why not on sea?
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
On the same day that Marcelle Navratil arrived in New York, a brand-new movie entitled Saved from the Titanic was announced on the marquees of the city’s nickelodeons. The ten-minute silent film had been made in three weeks at Éclair’s studios in New Jersey and starred a real-life survivor of the shipwreck, Miss Dorothy Gibson, wearing the same white silk dress and black pumps in which she had escaped from the sinking liner. Dorothy had at first been unwilling to relive her ordeal so soon after the disaster and according to one newspaper there were times during the filming when she had “practically lost her reason by virtue of the terrible strain she had been under.” The one-reeler, which was produced by Jules Brulatour, would be Dorothy’s last film since she then embarked on a career in opera. This would prove to be short-lived, as would her marriage to Brulatour in 1917. Following a generous divorce settlement in 1919, the prettiest girl retreated from public attention and was never seen on stage or screen again.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
In Boat 4, most of the women realized that their husbands and sons could be among those struggling in the icy water, since they had waved good-bye to them only half an hour before. With Quartermaster Perkis at the tiller, Marian Thayer, Madeleine Astor, and Emily Ryerson and her younger daughter began rowing back determinedly, despite a few protests in their boat. Seven men were pulled into Boat 4, all of them crew or stewards. One passenger, the wife of a New York stockbroker, recognized her bedroom steward as he was hauled aboard. Two of the rescued men soon died, and several others lay moaning and delirious for most of the night.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
As they prepared to leave the scene, a floating door was suddenly spotted with what appeared to be a small Japanese man lashed to it. He looked frozen stiff and Lowe said, “What’s the use? He’s dead, likely, and if he isn’t there’s others better worth saving than a Jap.” Eventually Lowe relented and the man was pulled into the boat, where several women began rubbing his chest, hands, and feet. Within seconds he opened his eyes, said a few words that no one understood, and then stood up and stretched. He soon took an oar and began rowing so diligently that Lowe had to admit that he was ashamed of what he’d said about “the little blighter.” The rescued man was actually Chinese, one of eight Donaldson Line crewmen traveling in third class, four of whom had secreted themselves in the bow of Collapsible C.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Captain Rostron paid another visit to Ismay’s room that morning. He had received a wireless message from the Olympic proposing that the Titanic’s passengers be transferred to her. Rostron thought that putting the survivors into boats for a second sea transfer was a very bad idea. Even the sight of a ship that so closely resembled the Titanic might stir up panic among the survivors. Ismay agreed emphatically—the Olympic should stay out of sight. On board the sister liner, however, Frank Millet’s friend Daniel Burnham had been told that they were steaming to the rescue of the Titanic’s passengers, and he was preparing to give up his suite to Frank and Archie Butt. He could use the time on board with Frank to prepare him for the next meeting of the Lincoln Memorial Commission. In a letter waiting for Frank in New York, Burnham had written, “The rats swim back and begin to gnaw at the same old spot the moment the dog’s back is turned,” the “rats” being several congressmen who were still pushing for John Russell Pope’s design over that of Henry Bacon. The letter had concluded, “I leave the thing confidently in your hand.” When a list of the Titanic’s survivors was posted on the Olympic’s notice board the next morning, however, Burnham saw that Millet’s name was not on it. In his diary entry for April 16, the ailing architect recorded the news of the Titanic’s loss and noted that “Frank D. Millet, whom I loved, was aboard of her … and probably [has] gone down.” Burnham himself would die two weeks later, but the classical white temple he had championed for the Lincoln Memorial would prevail—a tribute to the architect’s persistence and that of the friend he loved.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
And another ice warning message that came into the Marconi Room at about nine-forty may not have struck operator Jack Phillips as being terribly pressing either. He had already delivered several ice messages to the bridge, and this one from the Mesaba, describing “heavy pack ice and great number large icebergs, also field ice,” likely didn’t seem very different from the others. He may have set it aside, as he had just made contact with the wireless station at Cape Race, Newfoundland, and was busily transmitting passenger messages. Second Officer Lightoller would later claim that this all-important message, indicating that not just random icebergs but a huge ice field lay directly ahead of the Titanic, went undelivered. As Lightoller left the bridge, he mentioned to Murdoch that he estimated they should reach the ice at around eleven o’clock.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
The German steamer Frankfurt had been the first to respond to the CQD call, but she was more than 170 miles, and many hours, away. The Cunard liner Carpathia was roughly 58 miles from the Titanic and had sent a message saying they were coming as quickly as possible and expected to be there within four hours.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
In fact, the “women and children first” protocol for abandoning ship was not a particularly ancient one. It began with the HMS Birkenhead, a British troopship that was wrecked off Cape Town, South Africa, on February 26, 1852. The soldiers famously stood in formation on deck while the women and children boarded the boats, and only 193 of the 643 people on board survived. Hymned as the “Birkenhead drill” in a poem by Rudyard Kipling, it became a familiar touchstone of Britain’s imperial greatness and AS BRAVE AS THE BIRKENHEAD was a much-used heading in UK Titanic press coverage. A story that Captain Smith had exhorted his men to “Be British!” further burnished the oft-cited claim that Anglo-Saxon men had not forgotten how to die.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
That morning Captain Rostron had considered several places he might land his more than seven hundred unexpected passengers. He’d first considered the Azores so that he could continue to the Mediterranean as scheduled; then Halifax, which was the nearest port. But on seeing the survivors come aboard, many of them in a distressed state and some in need of medical attention, it soon became clear that he should take them directly to New York. Rostron decided to visit Bruce Ismay to discuss the decision with him but the shattered White Star chairman quickly gave his agreement to whatever the captain thought was best. It was Rostron who had earlier prompted a dazed Ismay to send a wireless message notifying the White Star Line’s New York office about the accident. To Philip Franklin, the U.S. vice president of White Star’s parent company, the International Mercantile Marine, Ismay had written: Deeply regret advise you Titanic sank this morning after collision iceberg, resulting serious loss life. Full particulars later. Bruce Ismay.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
With a historian’s eye, Archibald Gracie attempted to separate truth from fantasy as he listened to the survivors’ stories, a potential book beginning to form in his mind. Second Officer Lightoller and Third Officer Pitman regularly stopped by the small cabin Gracie shared with Hugh Woolner to discuss various aspects of the disaster. All agreed that the explosions heard during the sinking could not have been the ship’s boilers blowing up. From the discovery of the severed wreck in 1985 we now know that the “explosions” were actually the sound of the ship being wrenched apart. But Gracie and Lightoller firmly believed that the ship had sunk intact—a view that would become the prevailing opinion for the next seventy-three years. Gracie thought that Norris Williams and Jack Thayer, “the two young men cited as authority … of the break-in-two theory,” had confused the falling funnel for the ship breaking apart. But both Williams and Thayer knew exactly what they had seen, as did some other eyewitnesses. On the Carpathia, Jack Thayer described the stages of the ship’s sinking and breaking apart to Lewis Skidmore, a Brooklyn art teacher, who drew sketches that were later featured in many newspapers. The inaccuracies in Skidmore’s drawings, however, only bolstered the belief that the ship had, in fact, sunk intact. And what of the most famous Titanic legend of all—that the band played “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ship neared its end? It’s often claimed that this was a myth that took hold among survivors on the Carpathia and captivated the public in the aftermath of the disaster. None of the musicians survived to confirm or deny the story, but Harold Bride noted that the last tune he heard being played as he left the wireless cabin was “Autumn.” For a time this was believed to be a hymn tune by that name, but Walter Lord proposed in The Night Lives On that Bride must have been referring to “Songe d’Automne,” a popular waltz by Archibald Joyce that is listed in White Star music booklets of the period. Historian George Behe, however, has carefully studied the survivor accounts regarding the music that was heard during the sinking and has found credible evidence that “Nearer My God to Thee” and perhaps other hymns were played toward the end. Behe also recounts that the orchestra’s leader, Wallace Hartley, was once asked by a friend what he would do if he ever found himself on a sinking ship. Hartley replied, “I don’t think I could do better than play ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ ” The legendary hymn may not have been the very last tune played on the Titanic but it seems possible that it was heard on the sloping deck that night.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
As 1:00 a.m. approached, Second Officer Lightoller was feeling frustrated. None of the lifeboats on the port side had yet been launched, despite his best efforts. He had managed to get Lifeboat 4 swung out and lowered half an hour ago, even though Chief Officer Wilde had twice told him to wait. Both times Lightoller had jumped rank and gone directly to Captain Smith to get the go-ahead to proceed. The captain had also suggested that Lifeboat 4 be lowered to A deck since he thought it would be easier for the passengers to board from there. But a crewman had just shouted up that the A-deck windows were locked. (Smith may have forgotten that, unlike the Olympic, the Titanic had a glassed-in forward promenade.) Lightoller sent someone to unlock the windows and to recall the passengers who had been sent down there. Meanwhile, he moved aft to prepare Lifeboats 6 and 8, ordering that the masts and sails be lifted out of them. Just then the roaring steam was silenced and Lightoller was slightly startled by the sound of his own voice. Arthur Peuchen overheard the order and, ever handy around boats, jumped in to help cut the lashings and lift the masts out onto the deck. After that the call went out for women and children to come forward. The “women and children only” order would be more strictly enforced here than on the starboard side where men were being allowed into boats. When a crowd of grimy stokers and firemen suddenly appeared carrying their dunnage bags, Chief Officer Wilde was spurred into action. “Down below, you men! Every one of you, down below!” he bellowed in a stern, Liverpool-accented voice. Major Peuchen was very impressed with Wilde’s commanding manner as he drove the men right off the deck, and thought it “a splendid act.” Helen Candee, however, felt sympathy for the stokers whom she later described as a band of unknown heroes who had accepted their fate without protest. She was waiting by Lifeboat 6 with Hugh Woolner, who had been by her side ever since he had gone down to her cabin from the smoking room after the collision. “The Two” had then walked together on the boat deck, amid the roar of venting steam, and had noticed that the ship was listing to starboard. They went into the lounge to escape the cold and the noise, and there a young man came over to them with something in his hand. “Have some iceberg!” he said with a smile as he dropped a piece of ice into Helen’s palm. The ice soon chilled Helen’s fingers, so Woolner dashed it from her and rubbed her hand and then kept it clasped in his.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
It was now just after 1:30 a.m. Ten of the Titanic’s sixteen regular lifeboats had departed, carrying approximately 330 people—only a fraction of the 2,209 on board. To the passengers still on deck, the downward slope toward the bow was now very apparent. Yet many of them, the first-class men in particular, still believed that the ship would last till morning and that help would arrive
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
At breakfast on Friday morning a crowd of curious hotel guests gathered around Arthur Peuchen in the Waldorf-Astoria’s dining room and made him recount his story once again. In the hotel’s largest ballroom, meanwhile, seven U.S. senators were preparing to question J. Bruce Ismay, the first witness to appear before the U.S. Senate investigation. As he began his testimony that morning, Ismay still seemed shaken by the disaster, and his voice was almost a whisper as he expressed his “sincere grief at this deplorable catastrophe” and offered his full cooperation to the inquiry. Yet his answers were guarded and often prefaced with “I presume” or “I believe” and concluded by “More than that I cannot say”—giving his testimony an air of evasiveness. His claims that he was simply a passenger like any other and that the Titanic was not pushed to its maximum speed were greeted with skepticism by the senators and with open hostility by the press. The Hearst newspapers famously dubbed him J. “Brute” Ismay and ran his photograph framed by those of Titanic widows. Edith Rosenbaum was among the few survivors who thought that the White Star chairman was being made a scapegoat and made a point of telling reporters that it was Ismay who had put her into a lifeboat.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Vigorous activity in cold water, it is now known, only intensifies the effects of hypothermia. Those who tried to swim without lifejackets out to boats were therefore likely among the first to perish.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Just before eleven, Jack Phillips was busily transmitting passenger messages when the Californian’s call blasted into his headset: “Say, old man, we are stopped and surrounded by ice.” An exhausted Phillips angrily tapped back, “Keep out! Shut up! I am busy. I am working Cape Race.” The Californian’s operator listened in as Phillips apologized to Cape Race for the interruption and asked for a repeat of the last message. Twenty-five minutes later the Californian’s wireless man could still hear Phillips sending messages to Newfoundland, so at 11:35 he took off his headset, turned off his equipment, and went to bed.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
At the White House that morning, Taft had met with Senator William Alden Smith of Michigan, who was also heading to New York for the Carpathia’s arrival. Smith was carrying subpoenas requiring J. Bruce Ismay and the Titanic’s officers and crew to give testimony at a U.S. Senate inquiry into the disaster. The senator had read Ismay’s intercepted “Yamsi” wireless messages that revealed his intention to spirit himself and the Titanic’s crew out of American jurisdiction as quickly as possible. Smith intended to head this off and hand Ismay the subpoena in person, and Taft had offered the senator his full support for the investigation.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
The fact that the Titanic slowly resumed her course after hitting the iceberg is not included in many accounts of the disaster but it was noted by several others on board besides Lawrence Beesley. Quartermaster Alfred Olliver later testified that Captain Smith gave the “Half Speed Ahead” order for the engines not long after the collision. The captain had by then sent Fourth Officer Boxhall below on a tour of inspection, so it seems likely that he thought the ship would have to limp in to New York or Halifax under its own steam and that they could proceed slowly in the meantime. By best estimates, the ship moved forward for about ten minutes and may have stopped when Chief Officer Wilde reported to Smith that the forepeak tank, a water ballast tank deep in the forward bow, was taking in seawater.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
When the fourth officer entered the post office on G deck, the mail clerks were hastily pulling armfuls of envelopes out of the sorting racks. On looking down into the lower storage room, he saw mailbags floating in water. When Boxhall reported this to the bridge, the captain gave the order for the lifeboats to be uncovered and went below to see the damage for himself. The ship’s designer, Thomas Andrews, was already making his own inspection tour of the lower decks. He went into the post office and soon dispatched a mail clerk to find the captain. The clerk hurried along the corridor and returned with Captain Smith and Purser McElroy. After they had viewed the damage, Andrews was overheard saying to Smith, “Well, three have gone already, Captain.” Andrews was undoubtedly referring to three of the ship’s bulkheads that divided the ship into the watertight compartments that gave the Titanic its reputation for unsinkability. With only three compartments flooded, however, there was a chance that the pumps could stay ahead of it. The captain then returned to the bridge and gave the order for women and children to go up on deck with lifebelts. Thomas Andrews, meanwhile, continued his inspection. At around twelve-twenty-five William Sloper saw Andrews racing up the staircase with a deeply worried look on his face. As the ship’s designer passed by Dorothy Gibson, she put her hand on his arm and asked him what had happened. Andrews simply brushed past the prettiest girl and continued upward three stairs at a time. He had just discovered that two more watertight compartments had been breached. Andrews knew how serious this was. The bulkhead between the fifth and sixth compartments extended only as high as E deck. As the ship was pulled down at the bow, the water would spill over it into the next compartment, and then the next, until the ship inevitably sank. In all his planning at Harland and Wolff, he had never imagined a scenario such as this. Andrews informed the captain that the ship had only an hour left to live—an hour and a half at best. Smith immediately told Fourth Officer Boxhall to calculate the liner’s position and take it to the Marconi Room so the call for assistance could be sent out. He also gave orders to muster the passengers and crew.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
So far, none of the six lifeboats that had left the Titanic had been filled to capacity, and none had carried any second- or third-class passengers. Second-class passengers had been told to board from their own promenade area farther aft on the boat deck. Crowds of steerage passengers, meanwhile, were waiting patiently in the well decks, while others sat in the third-class general and smoking rooms, chatting and playing cards. The gates leading up from the aft well deck had been locked to prevent men from third class from going up to the boats. But a number of them had climbed onto the large round bases of the two cargo cranes and were clambering along the arms of the cranes into second class.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
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In America, the Titanic is often described as a cross-section of the Gilded Age, an era of rapid industrialization and wealth creation in the United States that began in the 1870s and ended with the introduction of income taxes in 1913 and the outbreak of World War I the following year.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
One consequence of this change was the missing binoculars for the lookouts. On the trip to Southampton from Belfast, the lookouts had used the now-departed second officer’s binoculars, which he had locked in a drawer in his cabin before he left the ship. When Lightoller inquired about binoculars for the lookouts, he was told that none were available for them.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
But in 1912 a rebellion against the long reign of the corset was beginning. American debutantes had adopted a “park your corset” fad that year, where the constricting undergarments were shucked and left in dressing rooms at dances and parties. Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon, had introduced a corsetless gown in her spring 1912 collection, and in the current issue of the fashion magazine Dress, which some first-class ladies had probably brought on board, it was noted: “Quite as important as the more frivolous bits of underdress is the brassiere for the woman who wants to look pretty and be comfortable.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Contrary to popular belief, there was no “captain’s table” where E. J. Smith would entertain a favored selection of passengers each night. Smith normally took his meals at a table for six in the dining saloon or in his cabin, served by his valet or “tiger” as the captain’s attendant was known.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
On the passenger list a “Mr. and Mrs. Morgan” appear as the residents of portside cabins A-16 and A-20 when, in fact, these rooms were occupied by Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon. The “Morgan” pseudonym was likely employed to allow the Duff Gordons a quiet crossing, free from a flurry of shipboard invitations that would have required Lucile to spend her time charming the wealthy ladies who formed so much of her clientele. And for her husband, a reserved Scottish baronet, seven days of making small talk with ostentatious Americans would have been a week of purgatory. Sir Cosmo particularly detested the New York reporters who would be waiting at the pier to pester his wife with impertinent questions if they knew that she was on board. Lucile did not travel often with her husband, but this trip required his steady business hand as she was about to negotiate the lease for larger premises for the New York branch of Lucile Ltd. It was business that had first brought them together—Cosmo had invested in her fledgling fashion house in 1895—but he had soon become captivated by the small, spirited woman behind the enterprise. His mother, however, was adamantly opposed to a “scandalous union” with a divorcée, so they were not married until after her death in 1900.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Among her female friends, lesbians were particularly prominent: her closest friends in New York were Elsie de Wolfe and her partner, the theatrical agent Bessie Marbury, as well as Anne Morgan and her lover Ann Harriman Vanderbilt, and in Paris she was friendly with the lesbian novelist Natalie Barney and her circle. Lucy admired these independent, forthright women, and according to Randy Bryan Bigham, “a sexual ambiguity on Lucy’s part is possible.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Among Morgan’s many “loads” at the time was a scheme to create a huge international shipping syndicate that could stabilize trade and yield huge returns from the lucrative transatlantic routes. By June of 1902 he had purchased Britain’s prestigious White Star Line for $32 million and combined it with other shipping acquisitions to form a trust called the International Mercantile Marine. In 1904 Morgan installed White Star Line’s largest shareholder, forty-one-year-old J. Bruce Ismay, son of the line’s late founder, as president of the IMM. The second-largest shareholder was Lord William J. Pirrie, the chairman of Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipbuilders responsible for the construction of White Star’s ships. Pirrie had been the chief negotiator with Morgan’s men and was placed on the board of the new trust. The British government had acceded to Morgan’s flexing of American financial muscle in the acquisition of White Star but had also provided loans and subsidies to the rival Cunard Line for the building of the world’s largest, fastest liners, Lusitania and Mauretania—with the proviso that they be available for wartime service. By the summer of 1907, the Lusitania had made its record-breaking maiden voyage, and Pirrie and Ismay soon hatched White Star’s response. They would use Morgan’s money to build three of the world’s biggest and most luxurious liners. Within a year Harland and Wolff had drawn up plans for two giant ships, and by mid-December the keel plate for the first liner, the Olympic, had been laid. On March 31, 1909, the same was done for a sister ship, to be called Titanic. A third, named Britannic, was to be built later.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
For the launch ceremony, there was no beribboned champagne bottle to smash against the bow and no titled dowager to pronounce “I name this ship Titanic.” That was not how White Star did things. Instead, at five minutes past noon, a rocket was fired into the air, followed by two others, and then the nearly 26,000-ton hull began to slide into the River Lagan to cheers and the blowing of tug whistles.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
The most somber group of all, however, were the Ryersons of Haverford, Pennsylvania, who were returning home for the funeral of their twenty-one-year-old son, Arthur, a Yale student who been thrown from an open car while motoring on the Easter weekend. The family had received word by telegram in Paris, and Arthur Ryerson Sr. had cabled back to arrange his son’s funeral for April 19, two days after the Titanic was to arrive. His wife, Emily, was being given comfort by two of her daughters, Suzette, aged twenty-one, and Emily, aged eighteen, while thirteen-year-old Jack Ryerson was tended by his tutor, Grace Bowen. The Ryersons were part of Philadelphia Main Line society, named for the fashionable suburban towns built along the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a group that would be well represented on the Titanic’s first-class passenger list.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Yet the brassiere would not find wide acceptance till after World War I, by which time the corset had finally had its day. On this spring evening in 1912, therefore, only a few of the younger, more fashion-forward women on board, such as Edith Rosenbaum or Madeleine Astor, would have dared to shed their corsets for a brassiere and chemise. Most of the first-class women were helped into their corsets by their lady’s maids, after which they stepped into the various layers of knickers and petticoats that followed. The elegant rustle of undergarments was part of the allure of a well-dressed lady in 1912, and each evening this sound was heard on the Titanic’s grand staircase during the procession down to dinner.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
In an unpublished memoir, Helen also pictures “the Two,” as she calls herself and Woolner, standing together at the prow of the ship. “As her bow cut into the waves, throwing tons of water to right and left in playful intent,” she wrote, “her indifference to mankind was significant. How grand she was, how superb, how titanic.” This depiction prefigures the famous pose of the lovers in James Cameron’s cinematic epic, but since the ship’s forecastle deck was off-limits to passengers, it may be also be a fanciful one.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Tea gowns, or “teagies” as they were known, were worn without corsets at teatime—a time of day when gentlemen called on their mistresses—and they were filmy, pretty creations designed with just a hint of the boudoir.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Even in worship, the distinction of classes was observed on the Titanic; assistant purser Reginald Barker conducted the service for second-class passengers in their dining saloon, and a Catholic mass was held in the second-class lounge by Father Thomas Byles, followed by one for those in third class. (There was no Sabbath observance for the significant number of Jews on board, though kosher food was available in all classes.)
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Up in the crow’s nest on the foremast, lookouts Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee could see the lights of the French coast in the distance and the mast lights of other ships. For a closer look, binoculars would have helped, but the pair they had used in the crow’s nest on the trip from Belfast to Southampton had gone missing. This had been reported to Second Officer Charles Lightoller, but he had said there wasn’t a replacement set available. No one seemed bothered about it, so the lookouts weren’t worried either. Binoculars were not standard equipment in the crow’s nest on many ships. And these things just seemed to happen on a maiden voyage.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Though bachelorhood, it must be noted, is not necessarily an indicator of homosexuality, it took considerable resilience to remain single in an era when marriage bestowed manhood. For lesbians the social pressure was less intense since “maiden ladies” living together drew little scrutiny. In America, these alliances between women were sometimes known as “Boston marriages,” a term coined from Henry James’s 1886 novel The Bostonians, which described two “new women” living together in a marriage-like relationship.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
We also cannot know whether Frank’s closeness to Archie Butt ever extended beyond the bounds of mere friendship. Archie was far too careful to ever pen anything as indiscreet as Millet’s correspondence with Stoddard. Yet within Archie’s letters there are enough clues to picture him as a Ragtime-era gay man hiding in plain sight. Archie had the same gift for observation and waspish wit found in gay diarists from Horace Walpole and Henry “Chips” Channon to Cecil Beaton and Andy Warhol. He also had a remarkable eye for the details of women’s clothes and jewelry and could, for example, describe from memory a selection of First Lady Edith Roosevelt’s gowns and include such details as “black velvet with passementerie down the front.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
During the debate on the CLA Act in the House of Commons, a Liberal member named Henry Labouchère had questioned why sexual acts between men should not be included in the bill. The late addition of the Labouchère Amendment made any act of “gross indecency” between men punishable by two years in prison—thus criminalizing homosexuality in Great Britain for the next seventy-two years.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
Morgan was no doubt pleased that Millet was sailing on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. He had planned to be on board himself before changing his plans in favor of a stay at a spa at Aix-les-Bains with his mistress.
Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
within the realm of possibility that the ship could have been saved, and more likely that the Carpathia would have reached the Titanic in time to save all of her passengers.
Henry Freeman (Titanic: The Story Of The Unsinkable Ship)
Could Californian have rescued some of Titanic’s passengers and crew members from the icy waters if it had responded to the distress calls? I raised that question once again, to get the reporters’ attention. Now that we knew where Titanic went down, I said, we could see that Californian had indeed been close enough to rescue some of the passengers. The media always crave a controversy, so I gave them one that was 73 years old, and they seized it. By the end of the briefing, I was back in control.
Robert D. Ballard (Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic)
No one had ever searched for the wreck, which lay in water up to 13,000 feet deep. A company called Big Events had contacted me in early 1977 about looking for it. Through them, I met William H. Tantum, the president of the Titanic Historical Society, an organization devoted to learning about the ship and its passengers. Bill was a sweet guy and a vivid storyteller, a Yankee version of Shelby Foote, the southern historian in Ken Burns’s epic Civil War documentary. When Bill was talking, it was like you were on Titanic with him. He let me look through all the books, maps, and drawings he’d collected, and his passion to find Titanic stirred my own. We backed away from Big Events when we learned that the company wanted to market paperweights from pieces of Titanic’s cables, but Bill and I stuck together and looked for other opportunities.
Robert D. Ballard (Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic)