A Night to Remember

She was firing rockets now. One every fifteen minutes, with Cunard Roman candles in between. Word spread below that they were in sight. In the main dining-saloon the stewards took up their posts. In the engine room, the stokers shovelled harder than ever. At the gangways and boat stations the men stood ready. Everyone was wild with excitement, and the Carpathia herself trembled all over. A sailor later remarked, ‘The old boat was as excited as any of us.’

But Rostron’s heart was sinking. By 3.35 they were drawing near the Titanic’s position, and still no sign of her. He decided the green flare couldn’t have been so high after all. It was just the sparkling-clear night that let him see it from so far off. At 3.50 he put the engines on ‘stand by’ – they were almost at the spot. At 4.00 he stopped the ship – they were there.

Just then another green flare blazed up. It was directly ahead, low in the water. The flickering light showed the outline of a lifeboat perhaps 300 yards away. Rostron started up his engines, began to manoeuvre the Carpathia to starboard so as to pick up the lifeboat on his port side, which was leeward. An instant later he spotted a huge iceberg directly ahead and had to swing the other way to keep from hitting it.

The lifeboat was now to windward, and as he edged towards it, a breeze sprang up and the sea grew choppy. A voice from the dark hailed him, ‘We have only one seaman and can’t work very well.’

‘All right,’ Rostron shouted back, and he gently nudged the Carpathia closer, until the voice called again, ‘Stop your engines!’

It was Fourth Officer Boxhall in boat 2. Sitting beside him, Mrs Walter Douglas of Minneapolis was near hysterics. ‘The Titanic,’ she cried, ‘has gone down with everyone on board.’

Boxhall told her to ‘shut up’, and his sharpness cut her off instantly. She quickly pulled herself together and afterwards always agreed the rebuke was justified.

On the Carpathia no one heard her anyhow. All eyes were glued on the lifeboat bobbing towards the gangway. Mrs Ogden noticed the White Star emblem painted on its side, the lifebelts that made everybody look dressed in white. Mrs Crain wondered about the pale, strained faces looking up at the decks. The only sound was a wailing baby somewhere in the boat.

Lines were dropped, and now the boat was fast. A moment’s hesitation, then at 4.10 Miss Elizabeth Allen climbed slowly up the swinging ladder and tumbled into the arms of Purser Brown. He asked her where the Titanic was, and she replied it had gone down.

Up on the bridge Rostron knew without asking – yet he felt he had to go through with the formalities. He sent for Boxhall, and as the Fourth Officer stood shivering before him, he put it to him: ‘The Titanic has gone down?’

‘Yes’ – Boxhall’s voice broke as he said it – ‘she went down at about 2.30.’

It was half-day now, and the people on deck could make out other lifeboats on all sides. They were scattered over a four-mile area, and in the grey light of dawn they were hard to distinguish from scores of small icebergs that covered the sea. Mixed with the small bergs were three or four towering monsters, 150 to 200 feet high. To the north and west, about five miles away, stretched a flat, unbroken field of ice as far as the eye could see. The floe was studded here and there with other big bergs that rose against the horizon. ‘When I saw the ice I had steamed through during the night,’ Rostron later told a friend, ‘I shuddered and could only think that some other hand than mine was on that helm during the night.’

The sight was so astonishing, so incredible, that those who had slept through everything until now couldn’t grasp it at all. Mrs Wallace Bradford of San Francisco looked out of her porthole and blinked in disbelief – half a mile away loomed a huge, jagged peak like a rock offshore. It was not white, and she wondered, ‘How in the world can we be near a rock when we are four days out from New York in a southerly direction and in mid-ocean?’

Miss Sue Eva Rule of St Louis was equally puzzled. When she first saw one of the lifeboats splashing through the early dawn, it looked like the gondola of an airship, and the huge grey mound behind it looked like a frame. She was sure they were picking up the crew of a fallen dirigible.

Another bewildered passenger hunted up his stewardess in the corridor. But she stopped him before he said a word. Pointing to some women tottering into the main dining-saloon she sobbed, ‘From the Titanic. She’s at the bottom of the ocean.’

Ten miles away, with the coming of dawn, life was beginning to stir again on the Californian. At 4.00 Chief Officer George Frederick Stewart climbed to the bridge and relieved Second Officer Stone.