31/01/2024
ADRIFT ON A SEA OF GLASS...
Between 0045 and 0210 on the morning of Monday, April 15th 1912, a pitiful procession of eighteen lifeboats make the dramatic, often dizzying descent down the floodlit, port and starboard flanks of the slowly sagging Titanic. Once afloat, they drift under the stars like leaves on a blackened, rippling lake.
Fourteen of these are big, thirty foot long timber built boats, weighing a full, five tons each when empty. Each has a capacity of 65 people.
The two forward sited emergency cutters are also away. They have a capacity of 40 people each. Boat Two, lowered from the port side, contains 18. It's starboard situated counterpart, Boat One, holds just 12.
The roster is completed by two of the four Engelhart boats on board. Stowed flat on deck, they had telescoping canvas sides that could be raised when being readied for lowering. Each of these had a total capacity of 47 people each.
One by one, this motley flotilla of boats had been lowered from the Titanic in a ghastly cavalcade, back-lit by the falling, green and white stars of a series of eight distress rockets that clawed vainly at the heavens.
A sense of ruthless haste prevailed on the sloping Boat Deck. More than a full hour elapsed between the collision and the departure of the first lifeboat- Number Seven- at 0045. By now, all of the senior Titanic deck officers, together with the department heads on board, were all too well aware that the ship would surely sink within another two hours.
The process of preparing the boats for lowering was a complex logistical operation in its own right. Each boat had first to be stripped of it's canvas cover. Then each was supposed to be checked to ensure that it carried a full, requisite complement of a sea anchor, a boat hook, flares, lanterns, ten oars, provisions, a raiseable sail, a towing rope, and two water tanks.
Then each boat had to be laboriously swung out by hand, and subsequently dropped until each in turn was parallel with the Boat Deck. Only then were the boats ready for boarding.
No full, overall lifeboat drill had ever been held on the Titanic for either the crew or the passengers. Now, a handful of embattled ship's officers faced down a challenge that defied belief; the enforced, full scale, mid ocean evacuation of the biggest moving object on the face of the planet.
The mathematics were a painful pointer to the imminent mortal peril those people now faced. Collectively, the suite of twenty lifeboats on the Titanic offered seats for something like 1180 people at the most.
There were over 2200 people on board the Titanic that night, together with a dozen pet dogs. Unless some rescue ship could be summoned post haste, a minimum of 1, 000 people had nowhere to go, save into an ocean so pitifully cold that most people would freeze to death en masse within fifteen minutes.
The boats had no mechanical propulsion. There was no radio equipment on board them of any kind. Each was completely open, and exposed to the elements. A bespoke, assigned complement of trained crewmen was expected to row each boat to safety in turn.
In effect, they were little more than floating cockleshells, designed with no other true purpose in mind than shuttling passengers, ferry style, to some nearby, onrushing rescue ship. The thought that each might have to act as an actual, full scale bona fide survival craft in its own right had never even been seriously contemplated, let alone properly planned for.
And yet, this was exactly the scenario that had now come to pass.
In charge of lowering those boats, First Officer William Murdoch and Second Officer Charles Lightoller soon found that their first, major problem was effective communication with the small cadre of seamen at their actual disposal. When the Titanic came to a final, fatal stop, one of the first imperatives was to dampen the fires in the boilers. This had to be done to forestall a likely build up of steam. That would have triggered a massive boiler explosion that could have ended the Titanic in mere minutes.
This excess steam was now vented off from pipes located on each of the three towering, actually working funnels. It erupted with a sustained roar as deafening as Niagara Falls, and it made verbal communication on the Boat Deck all but impossible for some time. Murdoch and Lightoller had to resort to hand signals, plus the occasional bellow in an odd ear or two that was already raw in the biting night cold.
Of course, those boats had then to be filled. First class passengers started shuffling uneasily out from the lounge up to the Boat Deck at around 0040, led Pied Piper like by Wallace Hartley and his seven, fellow musicians.
This ghastly human tsunami resembled the hangover from some hideous fancy dress party. There were some men still in evening dress, and others with heavy coats draped over their pyjamas. Women sported everything, from heavy dresses and huge, heroic hats to overcoats and furs, flung across shoulders post haste on a last minute whim. Some brought gloves; others padded outside wearing carpet slippers underfoot.
Children in pyjamas were wrapped in blankets as they sagged like crumpled bundles across the shoulders of their ashen faced parents. There were little boys in sailor suits, and girls clutching favourite dolls and teddy bears. Often, the free hand clutched that of one or other of the parents.
Everywhere, the spectral white life preservers could be seen. Many of these were carried, but more still by now were actually worn. A keen sense of appreciation of the true danger was rising as slowly, as inexorably, as the water itself.
With the second and third class passengers largely milling about uneasily below, the first boats were, unsurprisingly, filled by those first class passengers already on deck. There was a total of 324 passengers in first class on the maiden voyage. This was less than half of the possible complement of 750.
What now followed was, to coin an unfortunate phrase, a perfect storm. The urgent need to get boats in the water met the initial, blithe reluctance of many first class passengers to eschew the apparent light, warmth and safety of the Titanic head on.
Into this cauldron was thrown the two, different interpretations of Captain Smith's 'Women and Children First' order. On the starboard side of the ship, First Officer Murdoch allowed men into the boats when no more women or children were in evidence.
On the port side, Second Officer Lightoller did not. He interpreted Smith's edict literally; no male passengers would be entering a Titanic lifeboat on 'his' watch.
Thus, Boat Seven, launched at 0045, contained just 28 people. It had 37 empty seats. Time and again during the first forty five minutes of the botched evacuation, this ghastly shortfall was repeated on both sides of the sinking ship.
By the time that second and third class passengers finally made it up on deck from around 0120 onwards, many of the boats were already gone. The feverish pace of the evacuation was now fuelled by the obvious, tilting reality of the sinking ship. Incidents of panic erupted like rashes of forest fires; the few, remaining boats were often subsequently filled to near bursting point.
One by one, the boats dropped and thudded down the sides in a series of convoluted, disorientating jerks. They had to be lowered manually, bit by bit, by serially stressed men that were themselves under a level of personal pressure that is impossible to describe, much less still understand.
For the nervous, shell shocked passengers huddled inside them, the actual, physical descent of each of these boats was an ordeal in itself. The ear piercing squeal of brand new ropes, yelping through block and tackle, was one thing. But the ominous groans of the creaking, load bearing davits and the increasingly loud, all too audible shuddering death spasms of the Titanic herself must have been massively unsettling.
The uneven, unsettling series of stop- start jerks as the boats tottered down the floodlit flanks of the Titanic were true, nerve shredding mini breakdowns for some. And then the sudden reality of that first, dull splash as each ghostly white keel in turn hit the dark, glittering Atlantic must have been shattering for some poor souls.
There now followed the ghastly black comedy of rowing the boats clear, and safely away from the ship. With actual, trained seamen being in such short overall supply on the Titanic, the need to retain the available, on board cadre to actually load and lower the boats outweighed the need to row them safely away.
So, the crews of those boats were fleshed out with off duty stokers and fire trimmers that had come up from below. The great majority of these men did not even know how to hold an oar, much less row with one.
So, oars and tempers alike clashed as boats went in circles, and the blood pressure of already traumatised occupants soared, just like the rockets being thrown up from the Titanic herself...
Illustrations of the sinking of RMS Titanic are the work and copyright of Mr. Ken Marschall.
