A Night to Remember

Mrs Celiney Yasbeck – a bride of fifty days – ran out into the corridor with her husband. Instead of making the long hike to the deck, it was easier to look below for trouble. In their night clothes they walked along to a door leading down to the boiler rooms and peeked through. Engineers were struggling to make repairs and get the pumps going. The Yasbecks needed no second glance – they rushed back to their cabin to dress.

Far above on A deck, second-class passenger Lawrence Beesley noticed a curious thing. As he started below to check his cabin, he felt certain the stairs ‘weren’t quite right’. They seemed level, and yet his feet didn’t fall where they should. Somehow they strayed forward off balance … as though the steps were tilted down towards the bow.

Major Peuchen noticed it too. As he stood with Mr Hays at the forward end of A deck, looking down at the steerage passengers playing soccer with the loose ice, he sensed a very slight tilt in the deck. ‘Why, she is listing!’ he cried to Hays. ‘She should not do that! The water is perfectly calm and the boat has stopped.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Mr Hays replied placidly, ‘you cannot sink this boat.’

Others also felt the downward slant, but it seemed tactless to mention the matter. In boiler room No. 5, fireman Barrett decided to say nothing to the engineers working on the pumps. Far above in the A deck foyer, Colonel Gracie and Clinch Smith had the same reaction. On the bridge the commutator showed the Titanic slightly down at the head and listing five degrees to starboard.

Nearby, Andrews and Captain Smith did some fast figuring. Water in the fore-peak … No. 1 hold … No. 2 hold … mail room … boiler room No. 6 … boiler room No. 5. Water fourteen feet above keel level in the first ten minutes, everywhere except boiler room No. 5. Put together, the facts showed a 300-foot gash, with the first five compartments hopelessly flooded.

What did this mean? Andrews quietly explained. The Titanic could float with any two of her sixteen watertight compartments flooded. She could float with any three of her first five compartments flooded. She could even float with all of her first four compartments gone. But no matter how they sliced it, she could not float with all of her first five compartments full.

The bulkhead between the fifth and sixth compartments went only as high as E deck. If the first five compartments were flooded, the bow would sink so low that water in the fifth compartment must overflow into the sixth. When this was full, it would overflow into the seventh, and so on. It was a mathematical certainty, pure and simple. There was no way out.

But it was still a shock. After all, the Titanic was considered unsinkable. And not just in the travel brochures. The highly technical magazine Shipbuilder described her compartment system in a special edition in 1911, pointing out, ‘The captain may, by simply moving an electric switch, instantly close the doors throughout and make the vessel practically unsinkable.’

Now all the switches were pulled, and Andrews said it made no difference.

It was hard to face, and especially hard for Captain Smith. Over fifty-nine years old, he was retiring after this trip. Might even have done it sooner, but he traditionally took the White Star ships on their maiden voyages. Only six years before, when he brought over the brand-new Adriatic, he remarked: ‘I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.’ Now he stood on the bridge of a liner twice as big – twice as safe – and the builder told him it couldn’t float.

At 12.05 a.m. – twenty-five minutes after that bumping, grinding jar – Captain Smith ordered Chief Officer Wilde to uncover the boats … First Officer Murdoch to muster the passengers … Sixth Officer Moody to get out the list of boat assignments … Fourth Officer Boxhall to wake up Second Officer Lightoller and Third Officer Pitman. The captain himself then walked about twenty yards down the port side of the boat deck to the wireless shack.

Inside, first operator John George Phillips and second operator Harold Bride showed no sign that they realized what was happening. It had been a tough day. In 1912 wireless was still an erratic novelty; range was short, operators were inexperienced, and signals were hard to catch. There was a lot of relaying, a lot of repeats, and a lot of frivolous private traffic. Passengers were fascinated by the new miracle, couldn’t resist the temptation of sending messages to friends back home or on other ships.