She and Fraza knew at once that the ship had been hit hard. The noise of the impact was tremendous. Their room was most likely located on the starboard side of F deck, behind the number 1 cargo hatch region, where the impact was strong enough to literally throw fireman John William Thompson from his bunk. The Yasbecks could have been residing as low as G deck, just forward of the number 2 cargo hatch, where what were originally designed to be third-class open berths for men were remodeled to accommodate tiny subdivided cabins. This was the general region from which crewmen like Charles Hendrickson and passengers like Daniel Buckley were able to immediately begin seeking the cause of the interior earthquake and assess the damage.
Fraza had decided from the start not to take any chances. The rumble on the lower decks at the front of the bow had been too great and too alarming. Like Hendrickson and Buckley, he did not wait for official news or instructions to come down from above; rather, he went on a fact-finding mission of his own, and Celiney went with him. The path down the spiral stairs, toward the foremost boiler room, was already underwater within the first three minutes, just as Hendrickson and Samuel Hemming had found it. Fraza wanted to personally assess the damage in the boiler rooms, but the only way now open to him, to get a view of what were in essence the lungs and circulatory system of the ship, was to proceed along F and E decks toward the roof hatches over the boiler casings.
The newlyweds, still in their bedclothes, peered down into one of the front boiler rooms—probably boiler room number 5—and saw the crew at the bottom of a long ladder “trying to repair parts of the ship.”
The Yasbecks rushed forward again to their cabin, grabbed life jackets, and climbed hurriedly toward the bow section’s well deck. Then, in an unexpected moment of second-guessing that in later years would be compared to Lot’s wife looking back at Sodom, they reversed course and attempted a journey back to the cabin, where they had left seven hundred dollars in savings (more than twenty-eight thousand dollars today) and a dowry of gold and jewelry valued at a thousand dollars (more than forty thousand dollars today).
Judging by what he saw under Hemming’s hatch and in a front boiler room, Fraza was not necessarily surprised to find the return route blocked. The Yasbecks’ room was simply gone, and the narrow maze of corridors leading to it had slid completely beneath the flood. It occurred to Celiney that they might never be saved, and she stopped on the stairs at the edge of an indoor lake and began to pray.
Fraza was a “God helps those who help themselves” sort of man. He had no intention of standing on the stairs praying until the Atlantic Ocean lapped at their shoes. Grabbing his wife by the hand, he led her to Charles Lightoller’s side of the boat deck, where a lifeboat hung only half filled with passengers and where Lightoller was interpreting the skipper’s instruction “women and children first” as “women and children only.”
Celiney gestured frantically at all of the empty seats in the lifeboat and begged Fraza not to send her away alone. He stepped onto one of the wooden seats and swept her into his arms, kissing her as though he feared that it was their last embrace—which, in fact, it was. Two men dressed in what Celiney took to be police officers’ clothing grabbed her husband away and pushed him onto the boat deck while two crewmen in the lifeboat pulled Celiney to the floor. One of the officers on deck forced Fraza away from the scene at gunpoint, and Celiney began struggling and crying and demanded that the crew free her to join Fraza on the sinking ship.
“Shh,” one of the men restraining her said. “It’s okay,” he lied, “your husband will get away on another boat and join you afterwards.”
Celiney did not believe him, and she would lament forty-three years later, in a letter to historian Walter Lord, how the half-empty boat was lowered “so fast from the Titanic that I couldn’t jump off to be with my husband.”
“Why are they lowering the boat only half full?” she wondered.
Boat 6 was the first one to leave on the port side, finally touching down on the water at about 12:55 a.m. It had a carrying capacity of sixty-five, but only twenty-eight people were aboard.
On the other side of the ship, boat 7 had reached the water about ten minutes earlier, carrying twenty-eight people and passenger Margaret Hayes’s black Pomeranian dog, wrapped in warm blankets.
At 12:45 as boat 7 touched down, and just before boat 6 began lowering along the port side, and the first distress rocket went up, something inside the ship seemed to give way with a hollow thud and a surge, and an initial list toward the iceberg damage along the starboard side began shifting suddenly to the port side. During the seconds that followed, thousands of tons of water started to shift in the same direction. Aboard boat 6, Molly Brown saw a great gush bursting suddenly through an open porthole on what she believed to be D deck, although it was more likely the next deck below, E.
In the same chamber where the tires of passenger William Carter’s Renault Town Car were now slowly collapsing beneath fifty feet of water pressure, the Titanic had already claimed its first human victims nearly an hour before.
Fireman George Kemish was certain that the kindly stowaways living in the cargo hold must have died within the first three minutes after impact. There the water had come in fast enough to inflate and billow upward the number 1 cargo hatch’s interior canvas deck covers. The men did not have a chance. Kemish knew them as young, penniless, ship-hopping adventurers, and he would regret in later years that he never did learn their names.
“Stowing away in those days was quite easy,” Kemish wrote in June 1955. “No one knew who the stowaways were. Apparently they had no relatives or friends. That type is to be seen in most big ports. Never [listed as] missing, because they are never known—just world wanderers. They were always welcomed by us because—[in exchange for our keeping their secret]—they would keep our quarters clean.”
Edith (Rosenbaum) Russell’s stateroom, A-11, was still high and dry, more than four decks above the feeding frenzy of tiny grazers and predators being suctioned into the cargo holds, the firemen’s quarters, and the racquetball court. After surviving the Titanic, the famed and previously timid fashion reporter would become addicted to action and adventure. By the time World War I broke out, she was to become not just the first female war correspondent but also one of the very first war correspondents, literally living in the trenches.
However, during the first hour of April 15, 1912, Russell behaved not much different from Jessop. Russell returned to her stateroom repeatedly, giving in to the human tendency of shifting to a nesting urge in times of great stress—a natural default setting that often makes one attend to absurd details during a crisis. The impact with the iceberg had caught her just entering her stateroom. It seemed to Russell to have begun far forward in the bow and then to have rushed toward room A-11 (which was located on the starboard promenade deck, beneath the first smokestack).
The impact arrived as a series of distinct shocks. Nearly 250 feet forward, the same crash that almost bounced Celiney Yasbeck out of bed came to Russell as “a slight jar—[with a] second one quickly following, a little stronger—and then a third: a sort of bang, violent enough to make it necessary for me to cling to my bedpost.”
She saw the top of the iceberg—gray and monstrous, passing the promenade windows—and the floor of her room had started listing barely a minute later toward the starboard side. Just as quickly, she began to feel sick. Russell had been looking forward to arriving early in New York, on Tuesday night instead of on Wednesday. Now she had seen the effect of firing up more boilers and pushing the propellers to seventy-five revolutions per minute.