Starry, starry night!

Immediately past midnight those on the bridge of Titanic knew the trouble that they were in. Captain Smith had been reminded that they had far too few lifeboats to hold those in peril aboard the ship. So, it came down to whom would be allowed on those precious lifeboats. As history has shown, they followed the stiff upper lip traditions of English on the sea and the captain proclaimed “Women and children first!� Just in case in might take some persuasion to carry this edict out, Smith also ordered that pistols be assigned to those who were in charge of determining who would board the lifeboats. The crew who were still basically strangers to one another began to follow orders and notify the passengers to go to the boat deck and board the lifeboats that waited for them there. They were told to dress warmly against the night chill but the real reason to get them to do that was the 33 degree temperature that would wait so many who would only have the protection of life vests to shield them against the cold. If Titanic had too few lifeboats she did have more than enough life vests and this would enable those picking up bodies later after the fact to find clusters of them across the North Atlantic for weeks and months after the disaster had occurred.

The ships position had been taken using that so familiar star field and the captain had gone to the radio shack to inform the wireless operators to begin transmitting that the ship was taking on water and was in danger of sinking. They looked at Smith with incredulous faces but he assured them that the unsinkable Titanic would, in the course of an hour or two at the most, be on the bottom of the Atlantic. It is interesting to note that the single mast light of another ship about ten miles away that had stopped for the night was visible to those on the bridge but they seemed to pay little to no attention to it as the night wore on. Those on board that ship heard the Titanic’s cry for help and tried to respond but were told to get off of the radio frequencies so that those who could really help could hear and take action. This ship, also owned by J.P. Morgan’s International Shipping Combine, followed instructions and shut down their radio and went to bed for the night. As time wore on, they could see rockets being shot off of Titanic’s deck but they simply thought that this was being done to entertain the passengers as was the custom on many ships of this day. Titanic’s crew were shooting off the rockets for two reasons: one, that they truly needed aid; and, two, that they wanted the passengers to realize the true gravity of the situation at hand.

Passengers aboard the ship were just as incredulous as the radio shack crew had been when they first heard the news and they were not really interested in getting out of bed and getting dressed to go on the boat deck of a ship that they thought was unsinkable. Members of the crew, at the start, did not help the situation any when they told passengers who asked why the ship had stopped that she had probably thrown a propeller and that things would be alright shortly. Things were not going to be alright and, as the ship began to go down by the head, the crew began to urgently insist that passengers go to the boats where they would see their women and children loaded and put out to sea right before their very eyes. Some of the men had to insist that their wives go on the boats and more than one of them told their loved ones that it was strictly a precautionary move and that they would be brought back to the ship later after the pumps took hold and Titanic studied herself. In reality, the pumps were of little use because the best of them were located in the engine room which would be the last place to flood!

The crew, especially the officers, were not that familiar with one another or the ship which they manned so they began to lower boats that in at least one case had no more than fourteen or fifteen passengers aboard. The ships builder saw boats pulling away partially loaded and told the remaining boat crews that the boats had been tested in Belfast where they were built with full complements of sixty grown men before Titanic was finished and that there was no danger, as so many crews thought, that they would split in two has they hung in the air in their davits if they had been fully loaded. This was how only seven hundred or so got away from the ship instead of the eleven hundred or so that might have otherwise been saved. As the foundering of Titanic came closer and closer confusion began to increasingly reign as those both aboard ship and those away in the boats could readily see that the ship was certainly going down and nothing was going to stop it. Gallant souls in Titanic’s electrical compartments kept here electricity running and her lights on until very late in the foundering process so that people were not prematurely cast into a terrifying darkness to go along with all that they already faced.

Many things were happening all at the same time aboard Titanic and the historical narrative gets confusing at this point. Some people claimed that they heard guns shots aboard the ship as the supposedly less civilized passengers of the third class, so many who had been locked below, began to find their way out and charge the boat decks in search of passage off of the ship. It is interesting to note that the greatest percentage of saved passenger came from first class, followed in order by second class and then steerage bringing up the rear. Titanic might have been simply a matter of statistics if it had not been for the great number of stories that appeared in the days after she was lost of the great sorrow and sacrifices that were made and the number of families that were forever torn apart. Among them were the aging married couple who had founded the Macy’s department store chain who elected to stay together board the ship even after she had gotten into a lifeboat but looked at her husband of a lifetime and simply decided that she would rather die with him. They were not the only ones making this type of decision, and, out on the boats there were many women who as they saw Titanic go down and heard the screams of their loved ones in the frigid waters of the icy North Atlantic die quickly away to nothing, wished that they were there with them. The old biblical term “until death do us part� apparently meant more in 1912 than it does to so many in this divorce prone age.

Among those who found ways around the women and children first edict passed down by the captain was one J. Bruce Ismay, president of the company, who simply jumped into a lifeboat to save his own skin. Many of the senior officers and captain Edward Smith himself went down with the ship or died in the freezing waters that so mercilessly engulfed them in their life vests as they floundered helplessly there. To those in the lifeboats, the screams of those in the water would echo in their minds until the very last one of them passed away almost a century later. As they floated there on the waters of one of the most dangerous seas in all of the world during this time of year no one really knows what their minds might have turned to and thoughts that entered there. A boat or two went back to search for survivors after the mass of screaming died away but they found less than a handful of souls to save among the incredible scene that they encountered there. Carpathia arrived on the scene around first light and her captain, who had braved icebergs all night to arrive there, could not believe what he and the survivors in the lifeboats saw spread out before them. There was an incredible ice field that went as far as the eye could see and Carpathia would have to navigate it for most of the day as she took the survivors back to New York City. The little one stacker was the true hero of the day and her captain would live in the annals of the White Star Line for as long as sea history is written and relived. Just over 1,500 people died aboard Titanic that early morning and 700 souls would remember that time as it would be the centerpiece of their lives for as long as most of them would live.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.