A Night to Remember

The Titanic woke them up. Never again would they be quite so sure of themselves. In technology especially, the disaster was a terrible blow. Here was the ‘unsinkable ship’ – perhaps man’s greatest engineering achievement – going down the first time it sailed.

But it went beyond that. If this supreme achievement was so terribly fragile, what about everything else? If wealth meant so little on this cold April night, did it mean so much the rest of the year? Scores of ministers preached that the Titanic was a heaven-sent lesson to awaken people from their complacency, to punish them for top-heavy faith in material progress. If it was a lesson, it worked – people have never been sure of anything since.

The unending sequence of disillusionment that has followed can’t be blamed on the Titanic, but she was the first jar. Before the Titanic, all was quiet. Afterwards, all was tumult. That is why, to anybody who lived at the time, the Titanic more than any other single event marks the end of the old days, and the beginning of a new, uneasy era.

There was no time for such thoughts at 2.20 a.m., Monday 15 April 1912. Over the Titanic’s grave hung a thin, smoky vapour, soiling the clear night. The glassy sea was littered with crates, deck chairs, planking, pilasters and cork-like rubbish that kept bobbing to the surface from somewhere now far below.

Hundreds of swimmers thrashed the water, clinging to the wreckage and each other. Steward Edward Brown, gasping for breath, dimly noticed a man tearing at his clothes. Third-class passenger Olaus Abelseth felt a man’s arm clamp around his neck. Somehow he wriggled loose, spluttering, ‘Let go!’ But the man grabbed him again, and it took a vigorous kick to free himself for good.

If it wasn’t the people, it was the sea itself that broke a man’s resistance. The temperature of the water was twenty-eight degrees – well below freezing. To Second Officer Lightoller it felt like ‘a thousand knives’ driven into his body. In water like this, lifebelts did no good.

Yet a few dozen managed to keep both their wits and their stamina. For these, two hopes of safety loomed in the littered water – collapsibles A and B. Both had floated off the sinking boat deck, A swamped and B upside down. Then the falling funnel washed both boats further clear of the crowd. Now the strongest and luckiest swimmers converged upon them.

After about twenty minutes Olaus Abelseth splashed alongside A. Perhaps a dozen others already lay half-dead in the wallowing boat. They neither helped nor hindered him as he scrambled over the gunwale. They just mumbled, ‘Don’t capsize the boat.’

One by one others arrived, until some two dozen people slumped in the hulk. They were a weird assortment – tennis star R. Norris Williams II, lying beside his waterlogged fur coat … a couple of Swedes … fireman John Thompson with badly burned hands … a first-class passenger in underpants … steward Edward Brown … third-class passenger Mrs Rosa Abbott.

Gradually boat A drifted further away; the swimmers arrived at less frequent intervals. Finally they stopped coming altogether, and the half-swamped boat drifted silent and alone in the empty night.

Meanwhile other swimmers were making for overturned collapsible B. This boat was much closer to the scene. Many more people swarmed around its curved white keel, and they were much louder, much more active.

‘Save one life! Save one life!’ Walter Hurst heard the cry again and again as he joined the men trying to board the collapsible.

Wireless operator Harold Bride was of course there from the start, but under the boat. Lightoller also arrived before the Titanic sank. He was treading water alongside when the forward funnel fell. The wave almost washed him away and at the same time pushed young Jack Thayer right up against the boat. By now Hurst and three or four others were crouching on the keel. Lightoller and Thayer scrambled aboard too. Bride was still under the boat, lying on his back, bumping his head against the seats, gulping for air in the stuffy darkness.

Then came A. H. Barkworth, a Yorkshire Justice of the Peace. He wore a great fur coat over his lifebelt, and this daring arrangement surprisingly helped buoy him up. Fur coat and all, he too clambered on to the upturned collapsible, like some bedraggled, shaggy animal.

Colonel Gracie arrived later. Dragged down with the Titanic, he tried first a plank, then a large wooden crate, before he spied the overturned collapsible. When he finally drew alongside, more than a dozen men were lying and kneeling on the bottom.