Voyage on the Great Titanic Read online

  I swallowed hard, but nodded.

  “So, I have your word,” he said.

  I nodded, as tears filled my eyes.

  “Don’t worry, love,” he said. “I’ll be fine.” He touched my cheek one last time, and then was gone before I could stop him.

  Wherever he went — wherever he is — I wish him Godspeed.

  Still later

  I was crying, but I returned to the lifeboat area. I had promised, so that was what I did. There were still plenty of passengers around, most of them men, but the boats all seemed to be gone. I swallowed, knowing that I had missed my opportunity and would now have to take my chances along with the people who remained. I should never have allowed Robert to leave, as we could have tried to swim to safety together. But — I had promised.

  For now, I sank into an empty deck chair to absorb the inevitability of my fate. The bow seemed to be almost underwater, so it would not be long now. The orchestra was still nobly playing away, and I took great comfort from listening to the music. I thought momentarily of writing in this diary, but instead, I took out Hamlet and began to thumb through the pages.

  “Margie-Jane!” a deep voice said. “What are you still doing here? I was certain you and Mrs. Carstairs had long since left.”

  It was Mr. Prescott, who had dined with us, along with his wife, so many times during the voyage. I scarcely knew him, but it was wonderful to see a familiar face.

  “She left earlier,” I said. “Where is Mrs. Prescott?”

  His expression tightened, and I deeply regretted having posed the question at all.

  “I sent her on ahead,” he answered. “Now, come, quickly, to the Promenade with me. We may just have time.”

  We hastened down there and I saw a number of women and children climbing across a bridge of deck chairs to get into a lifeboat. There was one left. I felt elated — and inconsolably guilty at the thought of getting aboard.

  “You and the men —” I started.

  Mr. Prescott cut me off. “We have no time for idle chatter, please, just come along.” Then he raised his voice. “Let us through, please, gentlemen! I have a young girl here!”

  Men moved aside, without the slightest thought for themselves. There are not sufficient words in the English language to honor their valor and gallantry, but I will never forget it — any of it — as long as I may live.

  Colonel Astor was there, helping his young wife across the treacherous bridge of chairs. I heard him ask if he could stay with her, due to her condition, but the officer refused him. The Colonel accepted this gracefully, and asked the number of the boat, so he would be able to find her in the morning. Then he moved away, his dog Kitty trailing behind.

  A woman was trying to board with her children, but the officers stopped her son and told him to go back and stand with the men. A man who must have been his father protested that the lad was only thirteen. The officer in charge scowled, but let him pass.

  Another woman was clutching her young son. Then he was wearing a woman’s hat — I am not sure who put it on his head, but it may have been Colonel Astor. After that, she and her children were allowed aboard with no comment from the officers. I wished so very much that Robert would find his way here; at only sixteen, they might relent and let him board as well.

  Except that I knew they would not, and he would not.

  “Quickly now,” Mr. Prescott said to me. “We mustn’t hold things up.”

  I did not know what to do, but found myself impulsively hugging him.

  “You are a perfect gentleman, sir,” I said, “and a credit to us all.”

  He smiled, and let his hand rest gently on my head for a second. “Come on now, child, it’s time. Mind the chairs.”

  Then, just like that, I was half-climbing, and half-falling, into the lifeboat. I recovered my balance, and made my way to a seat in the bow. As I sat down, the cry to “Lower away!” went up, and my end of the boat dropped toward the water. Next, the bow dropped, and we continued in that erratic fashion.

  The last thing I saw was Kitty — noble in her own right — staying close by her master’s side.

  The Titanic was so low in the water that we had a very short trip down. We made balky progress, and one of the two sailors aboard reached for a knife to cut us free. But then we hit the water, and were able to cast off. The portholes were still brightly lit, but I could see water rising unchecked through C Deck and making its inexorable way upward.

  “My God,” a woman near me whispered. “She really is going down.”

  All around us, heavy objects were crashing into the ocean. At first, I feared that the remaining passengers on the ship had gone mad, but then I understood that the deck chairs and other wooden articles could be used for flotation devices.

  We had only two men aboard, so another sailor came sliding down the davit ropes to join us. Several more followed in his wake, landing heavily in the boat. A number of women were knocked down and badly bruised as a result.

  Anyone who was near an oar grabbed hold and started rowing. I was too far forward to be of any help, and besides, I was unable to take my eyes off that beautiful stricken ship in what appeared to be her death throes.

  “Row with all your might!” a man was yelling. “Before we get sucked under!”

  First they rowed one way, and then we reversed direction. I had no sense that anyone was in charge. Two men who had taken a chance and jumped off the ship now swam towards us, their arms flailing wildly. They were hauled aboard, shivering from just that brief period in the freezing water.

  Even then, to my amazement, I could hear the brave sound of violins being played aboard the ship. As the bow began to disappear completely, there was an enormous din of shattering glass and crashing metal from inside the ship. People were leaping into the water from all directions, while others scrambled toward the stern in a frantic, hopeless attempt to save themselves.

  No one in our boat spoke, or perhaps even breathed. The horror of these last moments was too awful to watch, but it was impossible to look away. Several women gasped as the Titanic’s front funnel suddenly ripped free and smashed violently into the water, and then her stern rose higher in the air.

  I am not sure if the engine rooms had exploded, or if the ship broke in half — but amidst all of the crashing noises, the bow had gone under, and, slowly, the stern was lifted straight up into the sky. I could hear distant screams as people were thrown off, or else struggled to hang on. The ship’s lights were abruptly extinguished, and then came back on for one final second before we were all plunged into utter darkness.

  The clamor of smashing, crashing, tearing metal seemed endless. The stern stayed straight up in the air like that, a stark shadow against the stars, for what seemed like an hour, but may only have been a minute. Then, with an almost stately grace, it gradually slipped beneath the surface of the ocean.

  The Titanic was gone.

  Tuesday, 16 April 1912

  Carpathia

  I had to stop and return to my diary in the harsh light of day because the next part is the worst of all. After the Titanic sank, the unspeakable shrieking of hundreds of people dying filled the night. Frenzied, terrified screams. Since we were still very close to where the ship had sunk, I could distinguish individual voices begging for help, calling out for people they loved, and praying for salvation.

  “We must go back,” one of the women in my boat said, her voice shaking. “We must help them.”

  “We can’t!” another woman shouted, nearly hysterical. “They’ll kill us all! No one can help them anymore — we have to save ourselves!”

  Everyone chimed in with their own opinions — I was very much in favor of returning—and a near-mutiny ensued. Finally, a ship’s quartermaster named Perkis made the decision that we were so close we had to try. He said that he was in charge, and we would follow his bidding. So our boat began to row back, and we were able to pull five or six half-frozen men out of the water. Each time, I prayed that one of them would
be Robert, and each time, my prayers were not answered. One of the men was clutching a bottle of brandy, and Quartermaster Perkis tossed it overboard, since the man was obviously already intoxicated and might become unruly.

  The rescued men were drenched, and a goodly amount of water had spilled into the boat as we struggled to haul them in. It was deep enough to cover my boots completely. Most of the men were in a very bad way, and I offered the one closest to me my coat. He was too cold to respond, so I just took it off and covered him as well as I could.

  The screams of the dying seemed to last forever. It was a horrifying, unearthly sound that would have sickened the very Devil himself. I am not sure which was worse: the screams themselves, or the way they gradually faded away. I think we had enough room in our boat to try to rescue a few more — but now, we were rowing in a different direction, and the quartermaster could not be persuaded otherwise. The rescued men’s teeth were chattering, and some of them were out of their heads from the cold. Other than trying to help them get warm, no one knew what else to do.

  It was pitch-black, except for the stars, and even Quartermaster Perkis did not seem sure about which way we should go. As far as I know, we were just rowing around in circles. After a while, we heard a whistle blowing, and rowed towards it. A boat commanded by an Officer Lowe wanted as many lifeboats as possible to tie up together for safety. I think there were three other boats who responded to his call, and Officer Lowe transferred all of his passengers into our boats. He was planning to return to the site where we had last seen the Titanic, and try to rescue some more people.

  While we waited for him to return, our boats drifted aimlessly. There were a number of children, as well as a few babies, on our lifeboat, and some of them cried on and off. Obviously, there was no milk to give them to soothe their distress. I tried to help one woman by rocking her baby for a while, but had no more success calming him than anyone else had. Between the crying babies, a few seasick women, and the ravings of the frozen men — one of whom was also very drunk — ours was not a quiet boat.

  On the whole, I do not remember any conversations. There may have been some, but I just cannot remember. I think I just sat there in utter despair. Two of the women near me were weeping, but most had been silenced by a combination of grief, shock — and the terrible cold. Anyone who was not fortunate enough to be rowing, which served as an excellent distraction, just hunched down and tried to stay warm. At some point, two of the men we had pulled aboard succumbed to their ordeal, and died. After that, the silence aboard our boat was impenetrable.

  Officer Lowe returned with only four more survivors — all of them strangers — and then directed us to begin rowing again. A sailor caught sight of another boat with figures standing up on it. He said that it was one of the collapsible emergency boats, and she looked to be in grave danger of capsizing. With Officer Lowe’s encouragement, we rowed over there with one other lifeboat — Boat 12, I think. Between us, we were able to take on all eighteen or twenty men. Again, Robert was not among them. Maybe he was on another lifeboat, or was clinging safely to some wreckage, or — I could not face the other possibility.

  By now, our boats were very crowded and the water inside reached to my knees. Had the sea not been so calm, we would surely have been swamped.

  When a passenger first shouted that she saw a ship, none of us believed her. The men told her that it was probably only a shooting star, or maybe dawn beginning to break. But as the lights loomed closer, we realized that it was a steamer, and she was heading our way!

  For the first time, we all had a feeling of hope. The sky was getting brighter, and the steamer was still coming towards us. As a new morning dawned, the sky pink and light blue, I was stunned to see that we were surrounded by a veritable mountain range of icebergs. In the dark, they had been completely invisible, but now they were everywhere. For objects so lethal, they were also majestic, and almost beautiful in a horrid way.

  Someone in our boat checked her watch, and announced that it was going on to five in the morning. I felt as though our time in the boat had lasted for months, so I was surprised only a few hours had passed.

  The rescue steamer proceeded cautiously through the ice field. Every so often it would stop to take aboard the occupants of a lifeboat. Our boat rowed doggedly in their direction, but we did not get to her side until almost eight o’clock. Up close, I could see that our saviour was called the Carpathia.

  There were ladders, and cloth slings, hanging over the side to help us aboard. Many of the people in our boat were too weak to climb, but I chose a ladder. As I reached the deck, a uniformed man helped me aboard. As he asked me my name and wrote it down, a woman pressed a mug of hot liquid into my hands and wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. I lurched off to the side, out of the way, so that others could also come aboard.

  A great many survivors were waiting by the railing, searching for loved ones and friends. We were one of the last boats to be picked up, so I knew that their hopes were growing faint. My legs were shaking, so I sat down on the deck, and sipped the hot liquid. The taste was unexpected, but I recognized the smell as coffee. There may have been some brandy in there as well.

  A kind-faced woman knelt next to me and offered to show me to the saloon, so I could get warm. Once in there, someone else handed me a sandwich, and my mug was refilled. By and by, a doctor stopped to examine me, and pronounced me perfectly fit, and extremely lucky. I was none too sure of the former, but utterly certain of the latter.

  I must say that the commander of the Carpathia, Captain Rostron, was terribly heroic. Having seen those treacherous ice fields, I have no idea how he made his way to us without his own ship crashing. Once all of the lifeboats had been emptied, he steered his ship over to the area where the Titanic had gone down, in search of more survivors. Alas, there were none to be found, and there was not even much debris to be seen.

  Another ship, the Californian, arrived around then, and they were to continue the search while we headed for New York.

  Before we steamed away, Captain Rostron gathered all of us together for a brief service. He and a reverend gave thanksgiving for the approximately seven hundred of us who had been saved, and then led us in prayer in memory of the more than fifteen hundred people who had been lost.

  Fifteen hundred.

  As soon as I felt stronger, I began to look around to see if anyone I knew had survived. There were so few men, and I never found Robert. Or Mr. Prescott, or Mr. Hollings, or Ralph Kittery, or so many others. Colonel Astor had not survived, and neither had Mr. Andrews or Captain Smith or Dr. O’Loughlin or — my mind just could not accept the enormity of the loss of all those fine people.

  Especially, of course, Robert. I should never have left him alone like that, no matter how hard he begged. Surely, if he was brave enough to accept his fate, I should have been as well.

  I think the Titanic’s crew may have suffered the most devastating percentage of deaths. Stewards, cooks, engineers, postal workers — even the entire band perished. How admirable they were! How admirable all of them were!

  Steerage passengers also fared far worse than the rest of us, although those in the second class had a great many die, also. I am sure there were countless stories of heroism among their ranks, which will never be told, as so few eyewitnesses are alive to tell them.

  This afternoon, I was sitting out on the deck half asleep, when I heard a familiar bark. I opened my eyes to see Florence tugging at her leash, and trying to pull Mrs. Carstairs in my direction. Mrs. Carstairs saw me, and looked very pleased.

  “What an agreeable surprise!” she said. “I was so very concerned. Now that I have found you, you must come and join me for the rest of the voyage.”

  I shook my head, too exhausted and sad to face that notion. “Thank you, but I would rather be alone just now.”

  She stared at me, dumbfounded. “But —”

  “Robert died,” I said, and came very close to bursting into tears.

  She nodded
, her expression more serious than I had ever seen it. “I’m sorry, child. I know how fond you were of him.”

  I nodded, and rubbed my hand across my eyes, trying very hard not to cry. To my surprise, Mrs. Carstairs dragged over a deck chair — by herself! — and sat next to me.

  “My Frederick would have died, too,” she said. “With Thomas Prescott, and all of the others. And I would have been on that lifeboat, thinking that he would be perfectly fine.”

  We were now safely on a ship, surrounded by widows; she was, indeed, lucky Mr. Carstairs had not made the voyage. We sat in silence, for there seemed to be little to say.

  Then I let out my breath. “Thank you,” I said. “For I should have been in steerage.” And therefore, almost certainly would have also died in those icy waters.

  Mrs. Carstairs nodded, set Florence on my lap, and we sat there together without speaking for the rest of the afternoon.

  Wednesday, 17 April 1912

  Carpathia

  We are supposed to arrive in New York tomorrow night. During the last couple of days, I have done little more than write and think, and think some more. I am not hungry; for the most part, I have not slept.

  The Carpathia’s passengers have been uniformly sensitive and benevolent. They have donated clothes to those who have none, along with toothbrushes and other necessities. Some of them have even given up their beds! I decided that I would be more comfortable bunking on the floor of the saloon, or outside on the deck. For those of us in that position, the ship provided steamer rugs and blankets to try to make us comfortable.

  When my parents died in such quick succession, I thought my whole world had come to an end. I could not understand why they had died, or how life could be so cruel. And now, I do not understand why I survived, when so many others did not.

  And why did not every single lifeboat return to help our fellow human beings? Had we not already been so close, I do not think our boat would have gone back, either. People were too frightened, too confused, too self-protective, to remember others. But, we had room. All of the lifeboats did. Fear seems a paltry excuse. We were all afraid that night. I know I did not want to die, but neither did I want to doom others to their helpless, frozen fate.