A Night to Remember

Other women protested too. Pitman was torn by the dilemma. Finally he reversed his orders and told his men to lay on their oars. For the next hour No. 5 – forty people in a boat that held sixty-five – heaved gently in the calm Atlantic swell, while its passengers listened to the swimmers three hundred yards away.

In No. 2, Steward Johnson recalled Fourth Officer Boxhall asking the ladies, ‘Shall we go back?’ They said no; so boat 2 – about sixty per cent full – also drifted while her people listened.

The ladies in boat 6 were different. Mrs Lucien Smith, stung that she had fallen for the white lie her husband used to get her in the boat; Mrs Churchill Candee, moved by the gallantry of her self-appointed protectors; Mrs J. J. Brown, naturally brave and lusty for adventure – all begged Quartermaster Hitchens to return to the scene. Hitchens refused. He painted a vivid picture of swimmers grappling at the boat, of No. 6 swamping and capsizing. The women still pleaded, while the cries grew fainter. Boat No. 6 – capacity sixty-five; occupants twenty-eight – went no closer to the scene.

In No. 1, fireman Charles Hendrickson sang out, ‘It’s up to us to go back and pick up anyone in the water.’

Nobody answered. Lookout George Symons, in charge of the boat, made no move. Then, when the suggestion came again, Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon announced he didn’t think they should try; it would be dangerous; the boat would be swamped. With that, the subject was dropped. No. 1 – twelve people in a boat made for forty – rowed on aimlessly in the dark.

In boat after boat the story was the same: a timid suggestion, a stronger refusal, nothing done. Of 1,600 people who went down on the Titanic, only thirteen were picked up by the eighteen boats that hovered nearby. Boat D hauled in Mr Frederick Hoyt because he planned it that way. Boat 4 rescued eight – not because it rowed back but because it was within reach. Only No. 14 returned to the scene. Why the others didn’t is part of the mystery of why trained men in identical situations should react so differently.

As the cries died away, the night became strangely peaceful. The Titanic, the agonizing suspense, was gone. The shock of what had happened, the confusion and excitement ahead, the realization that close friends were lost for ever had not yet sunk in. A curiously tranquil feeling came over many of those in the boats.

With the feeling of calm came loneliness. Lawrence Beesley wondered why the Titanic, even when mortally wounded, gave everyone a feeling of companionship and security that no lifeboat could replace. In No. 3, Elizabeth Shutes watched the shooting stars and thought to herself how insignificant the Titanic’s rockets must have looked, competing against nature. She tried to bury her loneliness by pretending she was back in Japan. Twice she had left there at night too, lonely and afraid, but everything came out all right in the end.

In boat 4, Miss Jean Gertrude Hippach also watched the shooting stars – she had never seen so many. She recalled a legend that every time there’s a shooting star, somebody dies.

Slowly – very slowly – life in the boats picked up again. Fourth Officer Boxhall started firing off green flares from boat 2. Somehow this brought people out of their trance, cheered them up too. It was hard to judge distance, and some thought the green flares were being fired by rescue ships on the horizon.

Oars squealed and splashed in the water, voices sang out as the boats hailed one another in the dark. Nos. 5 and 7 tied up together; so did Nos. 6 and 16. Boat 6 borrowed a stoker for extra rowing power. Other boats were drifting apart. Over a radius of four or five miles, eighteen little boats wandered about through the night or drifted together on a sea flat as a reservoir. A stoker in No. 13 thought of times he had spent on the Regent’s Park lake and blurted out, ‘It reminds me of a bloomin’ picnic!’

At times it did seem like a picnic – the small talk, the children under foot. Lawrence Beesley tried to tuck a blanket under the toes of a crying baby, and discovered that he and the lady holding the baby had close mutual friends in Clonmel, Ireland. Edith Russell amused another baby with her toy pig that played the ‘Maxixe’ whenever its tail was twisted. Hugh Woolner found himself feeding cookies to four-year-old Louis Navatril. Mrs John Jacob Astor lent a steerage woman a shawl to comfort her little daughter whimpering from the cold. The woman thanked Mrs Astor in Swedish, and wrapped the shawl around her little girl.