The examiner saw that this defender of the ship’s builders seemed either to not be grasping or to be evading the core of the question. Wilding’s calculations did not take into account the many random processes that began converging against the critical bulkhead after half past midnight, as the angle of the deck increased toward the bow and started shifting slowly toward the port side, and as the equivalent mass of several truck convoys of water, moving generally toward the stern, shifted at the whim of the flooded decks on the other side of the dam.
Edwards began to express skepticism about Wilding’s math; in particular he questioned the shipbuilder’s conclusion that the critical bulkhead could have held back more than twice the depth of water for which it had been designed.
Wilding finally admitted, regarding the critical bulkhead’s really being able to hold back more than a hundred feet of water pressure, that this conclusion was “only in general terms.”
“That is where your [test] tank is perfectly still and the water is quite passive?” Edwards wondered aloud. “And if there were a swaying movement, that would make a very great difference to the power of the water and the pressure of the water on the bulkhead, would it not?”
“It would undoubtedly make some difference,” Wilding said, “and that is why the strength of the bulkhead is so much in excess of the height.”
“Do you not think,” Edwards asked, considering the recent example of the Titanic, “that it might be very advisable, instead of relying upon mere calculations, to get bulkheads [more] practically tested under actual water conditions?”
The question clearly irritated the architect, and he replied as a headmaster might reply to an unruly schoolboy, “I think I told you that the results were known to me of bulkheads which had been tested, and they agreed with the calculation.”
Edwards did not take the dressing down quietly. “That is not quite an answer to my question,” he said, stressing again that the tests and calculations were based on water sitting perfectly still in a tank and not on real-world conditions representing “as near as may be approximated, the actual conditions which these bulkheads are built to resist.”
The commissioner now interrupted, on Wilding’s behalf, “Sometimes they are in a storm, you know.”
“Yes,” said Edwards.
“Are you to get a storm?” the commissioner sniped, “for the purpose of your test?”
Edwards conceded that he appeared to be on the verge of getting a storm, right there in the hearing room; and the commissioner cut Edwards’s whole line of questioning short.
Human law was capable of silencing an inconvenient line of questioning and turning it into instant resolution. Nature’s laws resisted such resolution, and under such laws, the Titanic, like Earth itself, could only abide. The test of Wilding’s bulkhead calculations, under conditions of nonpassive, shifting masses of water, was already being applied by the time Fraza Yasbeck led his beloved Celiney toward boat 6.
The Yasbecks had traveled from the forecastle and the forward well deck to the relative safety of the portside boat deck without facing the sorts of obstacles that Masabumi Hosono encountered at the stern. A few minutes behind them, twenty-one-year-old Irish immigrant Daniel Buckley—who, like the Yasbecks, had returned below to find the entire third-class section gliding down beneath the flood—now discovered the path from his quarters to the boat deck guarded by sailors.
On the starboard side of the well deck, the gate at the top of the stairs behind the cargo cranes would remain locked throughout the bow section’s final plunge, throughout deck-flattening bottom impact and a tsunami-like down-blast from the column of water that followed the wreck to the bottom. The barrier would still be telling its story, even after a century of rusticle assault.
The gate was little more than waist high. Although it was not an impressive barrier, according to Buckley there was a moment after midnight during which men identifiable to him only as “sailors” lined up at the top of the gate and stated with authority that the steerage passengers were to remain down below, either in their cabins or on the well deck.
Buckley knew that there was precious little left of “down below.” He had seen the disappearance of the cabins. Others had seen it, too, so it seemed to them that the crew had contrived a plan to keep them down in the forecastle and on the well deck to be drowned like rats in a cage. Buckley joined a group of men who rushed the gate—a rush that began when a steerage passenger was thrown down the steel steps by one of the sailors, as an example to anyone else who attempted to climb up to the boat deck. The man stood up again and made himself an example of another kind. He ran up the steps and over the gate, with an enraged crowd scrambling up behind him in support. The sailors fled as the leader of the charge vowed that if he could find the man who threw him down the stairs, he would pay him back, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and then some, by throwing him overboard.
Buckley recalled the gate being broken during the onslaught, but for the gate to still be closed when submersibles flew over it a century later meant either that Buckley misremembered what was in fact a mass exodus over the barrier or that crewmen came back to fix and relock the gate.
During the American inquiry, Senator William Alden Smith asked Buckley if the breakout through (or over) the gate was the only opportunity that third-class passengers from the well deck had for getting away in lifeboats with passengers from second class and first class. Buckley affirmed that this was indeed the case, because after the assault on the gate, the steerage passengers could not be kept down on the well deck any longer, and the classes on the boat deck became “all mixed.”
The British inquiry gave no such insights, because neither Buckley nor any other third-class survivor was seated for testimony.
At the stern, Japanese efficiency expert Hosono, like Buckley, refused to take no for an answer and barged past the crew member who had tried to keep him below. Swedish passenger Anna Turja and several of her friends from the stern made a similar, lifesaving decision to break out from the lower decks, refusing to listen to the commands of a crewman who ordered them to stay below in third class. Hosono and Turja had been shocked but not entirely surprised to discover lifeboats swung out all along the top deck with their covers off. The first clustering of passengers around the aft boats seemed a curious mixture of order and chaos.
Neither Turja nor Hosono knew anything yet about the mathematical discrepancies between naval architect Wilding’s calculations of bulkhead resistance and the real-world effects of water in motion, nor did they know of the discrepancy between the total maximum seating of 1,180 in the lifeboats and the more than 2,200 passengers and crew aboard the ship.
At approximately 12:45 a.m., almost up to the point at which Wilding’s miscalculation made itself known in boiler room number 5, Fifth Officer Harold G. Lowe was asleep in his quarters on the port side of the boat deck. His room was located near the first smokestack, several decks above the critical boiler room number 5 bulkhead. He had been forgotten by the rest of the crew; the work of waking the passengers and swinging the lifeboats out on their davits had begun without him.
It was the sounds of disorder that accompanied the cranking out of boat 4 outside his window—and probably the sudden loud arrival of “Buckley’s brigade” from the well deck—that finally woke him. Stepping outside his cabin, Lowe found women in the officers’ quarters with life jackets strapped over their clothing.