A Night to Remember

Then they tied up with boat 16, and Hitchens ordered them to drift. But the women couldn’t stand the cold and insisted on rowing to keep warm. Mrs Brown gave an oar to a grimy stoker transferred from No. 16, and told everyone to row. Hitchens moved to stop her, and Mrs Brown told him if he came any closer, she would throw him overboard.

He sank back under a blanket and began shouting insults. Mrs Meyer answered back – accused him of taking all the blankets and drinking all the whisky. Hitchens hotly denied it. The transferred stoker, wondering what on earth he had run into, called out, ‘I say, don’t you know you’re talking to a lady.’

Hitchens yelled back, ‘I know whom I’m speaking to, and I’m commanding this boat!’

But the stoker’s rebuke worked. The quartermaster lapsed into silence. Boat 6 rowed on through the night with Hitchens subdued, Peuchen out of the picture, and Mrs Brown virtually in charge.

Even among the men clinging desperately to overturned boat B, there was time for petty bickering. Colonel Gracie – his teeth chattering, his matted hair now frozen stiff – noticed the man beside him wore a dry outing cap. The colonel asked to borrow the cap to warm his head for a minute. ‘And what would I do?’ the man shot back.

Nerves on boat B were understandably frayed. The air was leaking out from the hull, and every minute it sank a little lower in the water. The sea occasionally washed over the keel, and one impulsive move might pitch everybody into the sea. They needed cool leadership badly.

At this point Gracie was relieved to hear the deep, rich voice of Second Officer Lightoller, and even more relieved when a somewhat tipsy crewman on the boat called out, ‘We will all obey what the officer orders.’

Lightoller quickly responded. Feeling that only concerted, organized action would keep the boat balanced, he had all thirty men stand up. He arranged them in a double column, facing the bow. Then as the boat lurched with the sea, he shouted, ‘Lean to the right’ … ‘Stand upright’ … ‘Lean to the left’ – whatever was necessary to counteract the swell.

As they threw their weight this way and that, for a while they yelled, ‘Boat ahoy! Boat ahoy!’ Lightoller finally stopped them, urging them to save their strength.

It grew still colder, and the colonel complained again about his head, this time to Lightoller. Another man offered them both a pull from his flask. They turned him down but pointed out Walter Hurst, shivering nearby. Hurst thought it was brandy and took a big swig. He almost choked – it was essence of peppermint.

They talked a surprising amount. Assistant cook John Maynard told how Captain Smith swam alongside the boat just before the Titanic took her last plunge. They pulled him on, but he slipped off again. Later fireman Harry Senior claimed the captain let go on purpose, saying ‘I will follow the ship!’ It may have been true, but Hurst is sure the captain never reached the boat. Besides, Senior was one of the last to arrive – probably too late to have seen the captain himself.

Most of all they all talked of getting rescued. Lightoller soon discovered Harold Bride, the junior wireless operator, at the stern of the boat, and from his position in the bow he asked what ships were on the way. Bride shouted back: the Baltic, the Olympic, the Carpathia. Lightoller figured the Carpathia should arrive at daybreak … passed the word around, to buck up sagging spirits.

From then on they scanned the horizon searching for any sign. From time to time they were cheered by the green flares lit by Boxhall in boat 2. Even Lightoller thought they must come from another ship.

Slowly the night passed. Towards dawn a slight breeze sprang up. The air seemed even more frigid. The sea grew choppy. Bitter-cold waves splashed over the feet, the shins, the knees of the men on boat B. The spray stabbed their bodies and blinded their eyes. One man, then another, then another rolled off the stern and disappeared from sight. The rest fell silent, completely absorbed in the battle to stay alive.

The sea was silent too. No one saw a trace of life in the waves that rippled the smooth Atlantic as the first light of dawn streaked the sky.

But one man still lived – thanks to a remarkable combination of initiative, luck and alcohol. Four hours earlier, chief baker Charles Joughin was awakened, like so many on the Titanic, by that strange, grinding jar. And like many others he heard the call to general quarters a little after midnight.

But Joughin didn’t merely report to the boat deck. He reasoned that if boats were needed, provisions were needed too; so on his own initiative he mustered his staff of thirteen bakers and ransacked the Titanic’s larder of all spare bread. The bakers then trooped topside carrying four loaves apiece.

This done, Joughin retired to his cabin on E deck, port side, for a nip of whisky.