Passenger Helen Candee was among the few from first class who expressed a true foreboding about an approaching horror as she watched the parade ascending toward the crystal dome; she watched men and women dressed in fur coats and their finest hats, each clutching his or her life jacket of canvas and cork. It was, to Candee, the first trump—the very first dance in what was to become “a fancy-dress ball in Dante’s Hell.”
Candee’s friend, Colonel Archibald Gracie, was a writer of history books who had not quite grasped the possibility that history was unfolding before his eyes and would soon envelop him.
As the nightly migration of krill, cephalopods, and strange fish that no one had yet named came up from seven-tenths of a mile and swarmed outside the still-shining bedroom lights of F deck’s foremost portholes, Colonel Gracie found Frederick Wright at the top of the stairs and let out a laugh. Wright was the Titanic’s racquetball champion. Gracie had reserved the two-story ball court for a game at 7:30 a.m., and now he joked, “Hadn’t we better cancel that appointment?”
Wright answered a very emotionally flat yes and hurried away toward the rear of the ship, as though he intended to get as far away as possible from the front deck spaces. The Titanic’s primary decks were lettered A through G, from the top deck down. The base of the racquetball chamber was located on G deck, five decks beneath the beds of the front cargo cranes. At 12:15, the water was already flowing across the ball court’s floor, knee-deep on G deck. In another fifteen minutes, it would be up to the court’s ceiling at the top of F deck.
Wright evidently knew what was happening to his ball court; Jessop did not. If she had known, she would certainly have ventured back at once, seeking out her friend Jim and his cat, Jenny. Jenny had lived through the Hawke incident, was another transfer from the Olympic, and had just presented the Titanic with her litter of kittens. Jenny and her kittens would ordinarily have become the official good-luck charms for the ship, in addition to serving as the galley’s mousers.
“She laid her family near Jim, the scullion, whose approval she always sought and who always gave her warm devotion,” Jessop later wrote. “This big, patient, overworked fellow, whose eyes did not match and whose good humor was contagious—often irritatingly so when you were not in the mood—seemed always to need something to be kind to.
“But Jim was quieter than usual and somewhat distracted [during] that trip. He had left behind a wife, generally as cheerful as himself but on this occasion annoyingly anxious that he should not join the new ship’s crew. There was a reason, of course: The first and most important baby in the world was due to arrive soon. He did so much want to give in to her wish, for she demanded so little of him; but there was the one-room home to keep going, so Jim sailed on the Titanic, with a promise to bring a beautiful baby set from New York.”
From everything Jessop knew of Jim, if he had been able to get near a lifeboat, his last act of kindness would have been to pass Jenny and her kittens along in a basket to a woman or a child, asking nothing for himself. The ship was officially in a state of being abandoned, and by now only chief baker Charles Joughin and a handful of others among Jim’s bosses knew that twenty-two hundred human beings were about to be filtered through a peculiar Board of Trade mathematics that had allowed lifeboat space for only half of them.
Joughin set an example by refusing to take a seat in a lifeboat, even though as a man with sailing skills (and each of the lifeboats was equipped for conversion from a rowboat to a sailboat) he was assigned to take command of boat 10. Whatever warnings he had received about the ship’s condition, and notwithstanding the grim arithmetic of the night, Joughin and his team refused to surrender. Instead, they made certain that there was food and water in the boats, and Joughin assembled a small crew of volunteers to follow him during repeated trips down to third class, seeking out women and children to fill the boats.
No one would know for certain whether Jim was among Joughin’s crew of rescuers. If, after the work of warning and rescue was through, he eventually retired like Joughin to the pantry and galley area and prepared, as ship’s surgeon Will O’Loughlin had suggested, to meet a quick death indoors when the liner finally plunged down, Jim would have been located between the third and fourth smokestacks. This was also the area where Jenny had presented Jim with her family; should he have been unable to give the mother and her kittens over to a lifeboat (an unusual and even heartwarming event that would surely have been recalled by survivors had it occurred), the safe and familiar kitchen area is the likeliest of places Jim would have retreated to, in the end, with the ship’s cats.
Nearly a century later, maps of the Titanic’s debris would mark a quarter-mile-long swath strewn with cast-iron stoves, cooking utensils, and pantry goods. Deep-ocean archaeologists would name the region Hell’s Kitchen. The galley and pantry debris could be traced backward to a point about two and a half miles away, where—in a moment that was nearly two hours away after Jessop had begun her journey toward the top deck and Hosono had found himself trapped on the well deck—the ship would split in two.
If Jim ultimately retreated to the pantry area, trying to give comfort to his helpless companions in the familiar surroundings of their home, then familiarity was only an illusion, doomed to evaporate during the very instant in which chasms yawned open in the floor and pulled apart the walls and drew Jim and his cats into the ocean with the tumult of dishes, wine crates, crockery, cheeses, ovens, knives, electric dishwashers, and all of the tools of an apprentice chef’s trade billowing down with him in a remorseless gush.
4
Night of the Lightning Dolphins
SEPTEMBER 2001
EXPEDITION TITANIC XIII, MIR-2, DIVE 10
DEPTH: 2.5 MILES
Lamp trimmer Samuel Hemming’s hatch was still wide open, almost ninety years later and barely fifteen feet away from us. The anchor chains, although their features have been softened by a light dusting of deep ocean snow, seemed somehow brand-new. Beyond the range of our floodlights was the deck space where Dan Buckley watched people happily playing with pieces of the iceberg. All of the wood planking in that direction had since been reduced to a spongy pulp by bacteria and by scavenging invertebrates representing at least three different phyla.
No one really knows for sure how many species took part in the devouring of the deck. In its life after people and sunlight, command of the Titanic’s bow has been ceded to sea creatures like “gorgons” and eyeless crabs—along with the previously unknown “flashing Milk Duds,” so named because of their size, shape, and color. The one that drifted past my viewport has defied classification. No sooner had it appeared than it flashed out in dazzling green light, and by the time my eyes recovered, it was drifting out of view.
Nice defensive mechanism, I guessed—but some of the large red shrimp and many of the prey-seeking fish we see down here lack eyes and are already blind. The flashing Milk Duds must be using blinding light against any number of large-eyed creatures, most of which we haven’t seen yet, because they probably fled our own lights long before we crested the nearest hill.
No one would have believed, in April 1912, that so strange and wondrous a world existed in the “ever-black,” or that the Titanic would come crashing down into it.