Elizabeth Kaye - Lifeboat No. 8

The wireless operator of RMS Carpathia, Harold Thomas Cottam, was on the bridge of his ship when Jack sent out the first distress call. After Cottam returned to the wireless shack, he casually cabled the Titanic. “Do you know,” his message read, “that Cape Cod is sending a batch of messages for you?”

The message Jack sent back was shocking and stark: “Come at once. We have struck a berg. It’s a CQD, old man. Position 41.46 N 50.14 W.”

Cottam reread the message several times to be sure he had read it right. Then he ran to inform his captain. Moments later he cabled Jack, giving the Carpathia’s latitude and longitude and adding that she was fifty-eight miles away and steaming toward the Titanic as fast as possible. Jack wrote down the message and handed it to Harold Bride, who raced it to the wheelhouse, where Captain Smith was waiting.

The steward knocked again on Roberta’s cabin door, waking her from a sound sleep. “Don’t be afraid,” he told her, “but dress quickly, put on your life belt, and go on deck.”

Roberta grabbed the first clothes she saw and put on her life belt, but the chunks of cork within its canvas exterior made it cumbersome, and she could not get it tied. She rang for the steward, and as he secured the belt she joked about what an awkward contraption it was. The steward did not respond. Instead he smiled sadly and shook his head. Roberta fell silent. For the first time it struck her that something serious might have happened.

A CQD is not ambiguous. An operator receiving that call is required to instantly relay it to his captain. You don’t ask questions. You don’t have to. The call is, as Harold Bride would say later, “the whole thing in a nutshell.” As Jack Phillips tapped out one CQD after another, the Frankfurt contacted him again. The message read, “What is the matter with you?”

Jack stared at it, dumbstruck at first, then enraged. What sort of ship, he asked Harold, would hire an idiot to run its wireless? The Frankfurt was useless. In any case, Jack was in communication with the Carpathia, and unable to stay in touch with two ships at the same time. His fingers made a loud, staccato sound as he tapped his response to the Frankfurt: “You fool. Standby and keep out.”

Jack drummed his hands on the table. His rage nearly overwhelmed him, and he knew why, for his infuriating exchange with the Frankfurt had brought a fearsome fact to light: the lives of the Titanic’s passengers depended on his ability to summon help from another vessel.

Abruptly, he handed the headset to Harold and left the wireless shack, saying that he was going to take a look around. But it was such an odd moment to leave his post that he may have had an additional motive. By then, crew members in the lower reaches of the ship understood the situation. “You haven’t a half hour to live,” one man told another. “That is from Mr. Andrews. Keep it to yourself and let no one know.”

But on the Boat Deck, only the Captain and Mr. Andrews knew the full extent of the damage the iceberg had caused, for they had seen water filling the mail room and lapping against the service line in the squash court. They were passing this information on, but selectively; no one had a greater need to know it than Jack.

Did either man tell Jack what he had seen? Did Jack find Roberta and pass the information on? You can picture him: not wanting to alarm her but determined to make sure that she knew enough to flee to safety. All that can be known for certain is that shortly after Jack left the wireless shack, Roberta burst into the Countess’s stateroom and told her what no other passenger knew: that water was pouring into the squash court. It was daunting news. Yet even then, such was their faith in the ship that it did not occur to them that they were imperiled. The Countess readjusted Roberta’s life belt and gave her some brandy. “Now go straight up to the Boat Deck,” she told her.

Across from the wireless shack, on the Boat Deck, Lifeboat No. 8 hung suspended from its iron davit. Like each of the Titanic’s sixteen wooden lifeboats, No. 8 was built to carry sixty-five passengers and measured thirty feet long, nine feet wide, and four feet deep. It was a simple, sleek, and graceful structure that tapered to a point at the stern and at the bow and was fashioned from overlapping planks of white-painted yellow pine held by copper nails. The white interior had four wide seats made of pitch pine, as well as foot-wide planks for additional seating that ran the length of the boat on both sides. Beneath the seats were stowed three sets of heavy oars and a kerosene lamp.

Every ship is supposed to have a lifeboat drill, but there had been none aboard the Titanic. Most passengers did not even know where their life belts were kept. The Countess and her cousin Gladys had to ask a steward to find theirs. “I’m sure it’s unnecessary,” he said, “to put them on.”

“No,” the Countess replied firmly, “we’ve been ordered to do so.”

The steward fetched the life belts from atop the suite’s exquisite wardrobe. Then the Countess and Gladys dressed in woolen suits. Gladys topped hers with a seal wrap; the Countess put on a full-length ermine coat, placed her small brandy flask in one pocket, and fastened around her swanlike neck a strand of three-hundred-year-old pearls, a precious heirloom that she had worn at dinner just a few hours earlier. Her other jewelry, fine pieces configured from pearls and diamonds, remained in their satinwood box.

As the two women left the suite, Gladys picked up a miniature photograph of her mother. How silly, she thought. We shall soon be back here. She placed the miniature on the dressing table and walked out the cabin door.

On the way to the deck, they passed the assistant purser, Ernest Brown. He tipped his hat as they went swiftly by. “It is quite all right,” he told them, “don’t hurry!”

What a lovely night, the Countess thought as she walked out onto the Boat Deck. She stood near Colonel John Jacob Astor and his wife, Madeleine, a sweet-faced eighteen-year-old who was one year younger than her husband’s son. Lavished with riches by her doting forty-seven-year-old husband, Mrs. Astor was attired in a diamond necklace and a black broadtail coat with a sable lining, as if dressed for afternoon tea at the Ritz.

John Jacob Astor was the wealthiest traveler on board and one of America’s richest men. At a time when the upper class took a dim view of divorce, he had committed the dual sin of shedding his first wife and wedding a teenager. Their recent marriage had met with such disparaging gossip among New York society that they had decided to winter abroad. But now Mrs. Astor was pregnant; they wanted their child to be born in America, so they were heading home, accompanied by his valet, her maid, a nurse, and their Airedale, Kitty.

The Countess was impressed by Mrs. Astor’s calm, but then every first-class passenger was calm, for they all believed they would soon be told to go back to bed, and that the order to wear life belts and stand on deck was nothing more than a precaution issued by a seasoned captain known to err on the side of safety.

And so they chatted among themselves, contented, self-assured travelers returning from sojourns to Egypt or Paris, or from wintering in Baden-Baden or Cap Martin, unaware that these were the last hours of their lives or, if they proved to be among the lucky ones, the last in which they would ever be absolutely certain of anything.

“Ladies, come forward,” an officer shouted, his voice amplified by a megaphone. “Ready yourselves to get into the boats.”

He repeated the order several times, but not one passenger stepped forward. No one thought for a moment that the ship was going to sink, not even the officers poised to fill the lifeboats. Why, Caroline Bonnell wondered, would we trust ourselves to tiny open rowboats when we are aboard the biggest liner in the world?

The Titanic was not merely the biggest liner: At nearly a sixth of a mile long and ten stories high, she was the largest man-made moving object ever built, so immense that on her test launch it had taken twenty-two tons of tallow and soap to ease her down the slipway. The immoderate boast of the White Star Line was that she was “practically unsinkable,” but in 1912, when technological pride had morphed into technological arrogance, that essential qualifier had been summarily deleted.

Finally, with repeated urgings from the ship’s officers, the women moved toward the railing and the men drew back, a bit of graceful choreography that ultimately would have the effect of dividing the dead from the living.

Sarah Daniels stepped out on the Boat Deck and beheld an astonishing sight: a gathering of first-class passengers that would have looked like a party were it not for the seamen placing blankets in the lifeboats and scurrying about while a dozen assistant bakers, each carrying four loaves of bread, distributed their goods among the boats.

She ran back to the Allisons’ suite to implore them to dress and come up to the Boat Deck. But her pleas succeeded only in further enraging Mr. Allison.

Mr. and Mrs. Emil Taussig came onto the deck just as Captain Smith and several officers were preparing Lifeboat No. 8. Even then, the white-bearded, patriarchal captain cut a reassuring figure, no small feat for a beaten man whose heart was breaking.