A Night to Remember

No one offered a helping hand. With each new man, the collapsible sagged lower into the sea; already the water slopped over the keel from time to time. But Gracie hadn’t come this far for nothing. He grabbed the arm of a man already lying on the boat, and hauled himself on to the keel. Next, assistant cook John Collins swam up and managed to get on too. Then Bride dived out from underneath and scrambled on to the stern.

By the time steward Thomas Whiteley arrived, collapsible B wallowed under the weight of thirty men. As he tried to climb aboard, someone swatted him with an oar, but he made it anyhow. Fireman Harry Senior was beaten off by an oar, but he swam around to the other side and finally persuaded them to let him on too.

All the time men straddling the stern and the bow flayed the water with loose boards, paddling to get away from the scene and steer clear of the swimmers.

‘Hold on to what you have, old boy. One more would sink us all,’ the men in the boat shouted to those in the water.

‘That’s all right, boys; keep cool,’ one of the swimmers replied when they asked him to stay clear. Then he swam off, calling back, ‘Good luck, God bless you.’

Another swimmer kept cheering them on: ‘Good boy; good lads!’ He had the voice of authority and never asked to climb aboard. Even though they were dangerously overcrowded, Walter Hurst couldn’t resist holding out an oar. But the man was too far gone. As the oar touched him, he spun about like a cork and was silent. To this day Hurst thinks it was Captain Smith.

As they moved off into the lonely night, away from the wreckage and the swimmers, one of the seamen lying on the keel hesitantly asked, ‘Don’t the rest of you think we ought to pray?’

Everybody agreed. A quick poll showed Catholics, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists all jumbled together; so they compromised on the Lord’s Prayer, calling it out in chorus with the man who suggested it as their leader.

It was not the only sound that drifted over the water. All the time while collapsibles A and B were filling up and painfully struggling away from the scene, hundreds of swimmers were crying for help. Individual voices were lost in a steady, overwhelming clamour. To fireman George Kemish, tugging at his oar in boat 9, it sounded like a hundred thousand fans at a British football cup final. To Jack Thayer, lying on the keel of boat B, it seemed like the high-pitched hum of locusts on a midsummer night in the woods back home in Pennsylvania.

8. ‘It Reminds Me of a Bloomin’ Picnic’

The cries in the night meant one thing to lively, impulsive Fifth Officer Lowe – row back and help.

He was in a good position to do something. After leaving the Titanic in No. 14, he had rounded up boats 10, 12, 4 and D, and all five were tied together like a string of beads 150 yards away.

‘Consider yourselves under my command,’ he ordered, and now he organized his flotilla for rescue work. It was suicide for all the boats to go – they were too undermanned to face the bedlam – but one boat with a hand-picked crew might do some good. So Lowe divided his fifty-five passengers among the other four boats and picked volunteers from each to give No. 14 some expert oarsmen.

It was nerve-racking work, playing musical chairs with rowboats at 2.30 a.m. in the middle of the Atlantic – almost more than Lowe could stand. ‘Jump, God damn you, jump!’ he shouted impatiently at Miss Daisy Minahan. On the other hand, an old lady in a shawl seemed much too agile; Lowe ripped it off and looked into the frightened face of a young man – eyes white with terror. This time nothing was said, but he pitched the man into boat No. 10 as hard as he could.

It took time to make the transfer. Then more time while Lowe waited for the swimmers to thin out enough to make the expedition safe. Then still more time to get there. It was after three o’clock – nearly an hour since the sinking – when boat 14 edged into the wreckage and the people.

There was little left – steward John Stewart … first-class passenger W. F. Hoyt … a Japanese steerage passenger, who had lashed himself to a door. For nearly an hour boat 14 played a hopeless blind-man’s-buff, chasing after shouts and calls in the darkness, never quite able to reach whoever was shouting.

They got only four, and Mr Hoyt died in an hour. Lowe had miscalculated how long it took to row to the scene … how long to locate a voice in the dark … most of all, how long a man could live in water at twenty-eight degrees. There was, he learned, no need to wait until the crowd ‘thinned out’. But at least Lowe went back.

Third Officer Pitman in No. 5 also heard the cries. He turned the boat around and shouted, ‘Now, men, we will pull towards the wreck!’

‘Appeal to the officer not to go back,’ a lady begged steward Etches as he tugged at his oar. ‘Why should we lose all our lives in a useless attempt to save others from the ship?’