A Night to Remember

And as usual, it was a very mixed group. Around one table sat Archie Butt, President Taft’s military aide; Clarence Moore, the travelling Master of Hounds; Harry Widener, son of the Philadelphia streetcar magnate; and William Carter, another Main Liner. They were winding up a small dinner given by Widener’s father in honour of Captain Edward J. Smith, the ship’s commander. The Captain had left early, the ladies had been packed off to bed, and now the men were enjoying a final cigar before turning in too. The conversation wandered from politics to Clarence Moore’s adventures in West Virginia, the time he helped to interview the old feuding mountaineer Anse Hatfield.

Buried in a nearby leather armchair, Spencer V. Silverthorne, a young buyer for Nugent’s department store in St Louis, browsed through a new best-seller, The Virginian. Not far off, Lucien P. Smith (still another Philadelphian) struggled gamely through the linguistic problems of a bridge game with three Frenchmen.

At another table the ship’s young set was enjoying a somewhat noisier game of bridge. Normally the young set preferred the livelier Café Parisien, just below on B deck, and at first tonight was no exception. But it grew so cold that around 11.30 the girls went off to bed, and the men strolled up to the smoking-room for a nightcap. Most of the group stuck to highballs; Hugh Woolner, son of the English sculptor, took a hot whisky and water; Lieutenant Hokan Bjornstrom Steffanson, a young Swedish military attaché on his way to Washington, chose a hot lemonade.

Somebody produced a deck of cards, and as they sat playing and laughing, suddenly there came that grinding jar. Not much of a shock, but enough to give a man a start – Mr Silverthorne still sits up with a jolt when he tells it. In an instant the smoking-room steward and Mr Silverthorne were on their feet … through the aft door … past the Palm Court … and out on to the deck. They were just in time to see the iceberg scraping along the starboard side, a little higher than the boat deck. As it slid by, they watched chunks of ice breaking off and tumbling into the water. In another moment it faded into the darkness astern.

Others in the smoking-room were pouring out now. As Hugh Woolner reached the deck, he heard a man call out, ‘We hit an iceberg – there it is!’

Woolner squinted into the night. About 150 yards astern he made out a mountain of ice standing black against the starlit sky. Then it vanished into the dark.

The excitement, too, soon disappeared. The Titanic seemed as solid as ever, and it was too bitterly cold to stay outside any longer. Slowly the group filed back. Woolner picked up his hand, and the bridge game went on. The last man inside thought, as he slammed the deck door, that the engines were stopping.

He was right. Up on the bridge First Officer William M. Murdoch had just pulled the engine-room telegraph handle all the way to ‘Stop’. Murdoch was in charge of the bridge this watch, and it was his problem, once Fleet phoned the warning. A tense minute had passed since then – orders to Quartermaster Hitchens to turn the wheel hard-a-starboard … a yank on the engine-room telegraph for ‘Full speed astern’ … a hard push on the button closing the watertight doors … and finally those thirty-seven seconds of breathless waiting.

Now the waiting was over, and it was also clearly too late. As the grinding noise died away, Captain Smith rushed on to the bridge from his cabin next to the wheelhouse. There were a few quick words:

‘Mr Murdoch, what was that?’

‘An iceberg, sir. I hard-a-starboarded and reversed the engines, and I was going to hard-a-port around it, but she was too close. I couldn’t do any more.’

‘Close the emergency doors.’

‘The doors are already closed.’

They were closed all right. Down in boiler room No. 6 fireman Fred Barrett had been talking to second engineer James Hesketh when the warning bell sounded and the light flashed red above the watertight door leading to the stern. A quick shout of warning – an ear-splitting crash – and the whole starboard side of the ship seemed to give way. The sea cascaded in, swirling about the pipes and valves, and the two men leaped through the door as it slammed down behind them.

Barrett found things almost as bad where he was now, in boiler room No. 5. The gash ran into No. 5 about two feet beyond the closed compartment door, and a fat jet of sea-water was spouting through the hole. Nearby, trimmer George Cavell was digging himself out of an avalanche of coal that had poured out of a bunker with the impact. Another stoker mournfully studied an overturned bowl of soup that had been warming on a piece of machinery.