He could feel beneath his feet that something was terribly wrong with the ship, as though it were slowly tipping toward the bow, about ten degrees down. He knew this, in spite of (or rather, because of) the paradox of leveling. The Titanic had been constructed with a natural curvature of the decks, from the bow and stern downward toward the middle of the ship. Under normal circumstances, the deck in Lowe’s cabin slanted upward toward the forecastle. The uncanny leveling out was no less alarming than the dead engines. By the time Lowe had gotten out of bed, the initial listing toward the iceberg damage on the starboard side had also shifted to almost level. Directly underfoot, vast quantities of water were moving toward the port side.
Dressing quickly and crossing over to the starboard side, the fifth officer assisted in the lowering of boat 5, which reached the water about the same time as the boat carrying Molly Brown and Celiney Yasbeck. Lowe now carried with him a loaded revolver, under the premise “You never know when you will need it.”
The first distress rocket burst a hundred feet or more above the Titanic’s decks at about 12:45 a.m. At this time, mystery writer Jacques Futrelle arrived on the port side. This was also around the time that Molly Brown, descending into boat 6 along the port side, observed water suddenly exploding out of an open porthole near the waterline. Within this same time frame, the dam in boiler room number 5 broke and engineer Herbert Harvey, evidently unable to help engineer John Shepherd quickly enough to safety with his broken leg, died with him.
Lily Futrelle felt something strange happening beneath her feet. “I had no sooner reached the deck than she [the Titanic] began to list to port,” Mrs. Futrelle recalled.
Within ten or fifteen minutes, the porthole through which Molly Brown saw water rushing out would be carried down by both the shifting mass of water (indicated by the gush itself) and by the rapid and catastrophic loss of buoyancy in boiler room number 5. The increasing list to port was sure to pull the gushing porthole beneath the ocean surface, reversing the outflow to an inflow.
This was not the only opening now threatening to quicken the pace of the sinking.
On the starboard side, directly above boiler room number 6, publisher Henry Sleeper Harper had been awakened by the 11:40 p.m. impact. He ran to the nearest bedroom porthole and looked out to see what was happening. As reported in an April 1912 edition of his own magazine, Harper’s Weekly, he watched the iceberg racing toward the stern and into the dark only a few feet from the starboard hull, “crumbling as it went.” He could never have seen such details by looking through a closed porthole; only, as he said he had, by looking out of the porthole.
Almost a century later, When the mini-robot Jake maneuvered into Harpers’s stateroom, D-33, its lights revealed—beyond the wreckage of a wooden dresser that had spilled out Harper’s bowler hat—the porthole nearest his bed: wide open, in a manner consistent with Harper’s description of how he witnessed the iceberg’s passage. The dimensions of the porthole were twenty-four by nineteen inches. It was mounted on a pivot; so it would forever remain anyone’s guess what the original angle of the opening had been when the ocean reached D deck, for the journey to the bottom, with water rushing along the hull and the effects associated with the final crash into deep-ocean mud, must surely have changed the angle. At minimum, even if partly closed and even if no other openings of this sort existed, the Harper port at some point added two square feet to the original surface area of the damage (which had begun at only twelve square feet).
Three starboard D-deck portholes near the Harper stateroom were also open. Opposite the Harpers, on this same deck, the port side of the bow section displayed four additional open portholes plus an open gangway door. The D-deck portholes alone constituted a surface area approximately equal to the initial iceberg damage and were capable of doubling the rate of the ship’s sinking.
In 2001, historian and artist Ken Marschall began a count of porthole openings that would eventually combine the photographic results of more than twenty years of expeditions, all the way through 2010. Along the port side, Marschall counted 132 portholes that were located in regions of the hull not ruptured, bent, or otherwise deformed by the final crash on the abyssal plain. Only in uncrumpled areas could people’s intent be guessed at; of the 132 portholes, including a porthole under the front of the well deck, 18 percent appeared to be open.
On the starboard side, 17 percent of 114 C- and D-deck portholes appeared to have been left open. C deck hardly mattered, for by the time the D-deck openings were submerged, the cascade effect must have been gathering such momentum that any openings above, along C deck, were reduced to mere redundancy.
From E deck down through F deck, no determination could be made regarding the porthole accelerants, because the ports were of a different design: they swung upward and had to be “dogged” (or latched) closed with locking pins. The portholes of the Chambers staterooms (E-5 and E-7), into which ice had fallen during the 11:40 impact, had an open port of this either “propped open or dogged shut” style. The only determination possible, in this case, was from the Chamberses’ own testimony.
Marschall concluded that once the bow section broke away and began plunging toward the bottom, any open E-deck and F-deck portholes would probably have swung shut and possibly “only appeared ‘closed’ today from the outside. So we’ll never know how many of the E and F deck ports were undogged [not locked with a pin]—unless someone wants to take the time and expense of manually pushing on each and every port [with a submersible’s robot arm] to see if it pushes inward, open.”
The portside door at the front of the long E-deck corridor known as Scotland Road appeared at first glance to have been opened by someone (which would have made it a major, early source of flooding), but it was located in a region where the bow section had been bent like tin foil during bottom impact and must have popped open like a cork, for the doorway’s inner safety gate was still drawn shut and secured. Evidently, the Scotland Road door remained closed throughout the sinking and did not contribute to the Titanic’s acceleration toward its final plunge.
Above the damaged Scotland Road door, the portside first-class door on D deck told a different story. Although it had fallen off its hinges by 1996, it was still hanging open against the hull when Bob Ballard performed his first reconnaissance dives ten years earlier. Because the door was located in a region where there was no discernible hull deformation, with its inner gate clearly drawn open, Marschall believed it doubtful that the door could have been knocked open during the crash on the plain. The door’s eight locking pins should have kept it secure, just like the next steel door immediately behind it.
In this instance, Marschall’s bets were on someone “having opened it during the sinking.” He explained, “Considering the bow-down angle and the [development of a] list to port, one can imagine how that heavy door must have swung open with a vengeance the instant its last [locking pin] was released.” These steel “shell doors” were expected to be opened and handled only in calm ports with the ship standing level. “But surely,” Marschall decided, “with the bow angling down and tipping toward the port side—once that heavy door flew out of their hands, I would imagine all bets were off. I’m guessing that closing the door again (pulling it back ‘uphill’) would take far more manpower than was available.”