Even worse, the shared ducting with the second smokestack would assist in the overflow of water from boiler room number 4 to boiler room number 3, regardless of whether the number 4 compartment could be quickly sealed. Possibly, the boiler room number 2 bulkhead was also about to be rendered unclosable by the ferocity of the flood waiting to break through boiler room numbers 4 and 3. No one would ever know. The door to number 2 would never survive the breaking of the Titanic’s spine. Only the door at the rear end of the reciprocating engine room, as revealed by the robot Jake in 2001, would show any signs of having been closed in time. If boiler room number 4’s forward bulkhead and the doors lifted behind it were the bomb’s detonators, then D deck’s open gangway door was the timing device.
By his own testimony, Second Officer Charles Lightoller appeared to be the man who set the device in motion. He continued to believe that the newer lifeboats could buckle if filled on the decks to their maximum carrying capacity of sixty-five or seventy people; he continued to believe that the ropes could not bear the weight of fully filled boats. Lightoller decided that the safest plan was to send the lifeboats down on the ropes with only a minimum of passengers, have the half-empty boats row to the gangway doors, and then send additional passengers down to them on “pilot ladders” and “Jacob’s ladders,” lowered from the doors. The plan made sense in principle, but in practice it came apart quickly.
Captain Smith called out to the first boats through his megaphone—ordering them to come back to the ship’s side and be ready to take more passengers down through the gangway doors; inexplicably, their crews disobeyed, rowing away as though their minds had suddenly been illuminated by something more frightening than quartermaster George Rowe’s distress rockets and they were now trying to get away from the Titanic with all possible haste.
Harper and his entourage got away in boat 3 about the same time that Rowe’s third rocket went up, near 1 a.m. Forty people and Harper’s prize Pekinese dog, Sun Yat Sen, were launched aboard a boat designed to hold up to seventy.
The tilt toward the port side evidently increased by the time boat 3 had descended along the starboard side. Harper noticed that before the ropes could finally be loosened, the lines were leaning his lifeboat inward from its normal vertical alignment with the starboard hull until the side of the boat actually bumped and grated against the wall of rivets and steel.
The D deck porthole in the third-class recreation room—and within this same general time frame, D deck’s portside gangway door—had begun probing the cascade point.
Lightoller, in accordance with his plan to load half-filled lifeboats after they touched down on the sea, had sent a boatswain and six other men below with orders to open gangway doors on both D deck and E deck. None of them was ever seen again, and Lightoller never received confirmation that the order had been carried out. An analysis of the actual ruins of the Titanic indicates that only one door was successfully opened.
It was plain that other officers understood Lightoller’s plan and intended to abide. Passenger Norman Chambers, a mechanical engineer, would report that as boat 5 reached the water, Third Officer Herbert Pitman was under instructions to stay near the starboard side and prepare to take additional passengers down through an open gangway door. Chambers was certain that the starboard doors remained closed—all of them. This observation was consistent with physical evidence that only a single portside door was intentionally opened, almost certainly by the men Lightoller had sent below. It was also consistent with the disappearance of Lightoller’s boatswain and his entire team.
If the portside D-deck door was indeed open about the time the first or second rocket went up—which was about the same time Molly Brown saw water bursting suddenly through an open porthole near boat 6 and minutes before Harper’s boat began grating against the starboard hull (as the third rocket went up)—then a tilt to port that started with the boiler room number 5 collapse intensified during the flooding of the third-class recreation space, beneath the bow section’s well deck.
Under such conditions, once the steel door had been opened, not even seven men possessed enough strength to pull it closed again, “uphill.” Their most likely reflex, once they saw water rising perilously close to the door, would have been to keep trying, even if the odds seemed impossible, right up to the moment the water began surging over the door’s baseboards. Within seconds, the tilt to port must have begun worsening even further, and by the time the rush of seawater was up to the men’s knees, even wading would have become difficult—and running away impossible.
This was also within a time frame approximately ten minutes after boiler room number 5 gave up its buoyancy, meaning that the D-deck doorway and the portside corridor leading fore and aft of it ranked high among the last places on Earth that any seaman still taking in air and in his right mind wanted to be. There was no mystery in the question of why Lightoller never saw the boatswain or his men again—or about any of the other questions put to him regarding open gangway doors.
8
Everything Was against Us
On May 21, 1912, Solicitor General Sir J. Simon asked Second Officer Charles Lightoller the following question: If the Titanic was already down by the head, would it not have been unwise to open a door in the front part of a ship that was sinking by the bow?
Lightoller said he had not particularly noticed that the ship was tending to go down by the head when he gave the order for doors to be opened.
“Of course, you know now that the water was rising up to E deck?”
“Yes,” Lightoller replied. “Of course it was.”
“It appears to me,” the solicitor general said, “that you would be very unlikely to order the forward gangway door to be opened. You might get the head of the ship so deep in the water that you would ship water through that gangway door.”
“Of course, my lord, I did not take [it] into consideration at that time. There was no time to take all these particulars into mind. In the first place, at the time, I did not think the ship was going down.”
At approximately the time he ordered boat 6 away and Celiney Yasbeck screamed out for her husband, Lightoller found a gauge by which to measure what was actually happening to his ship. He ran forward and took a quick look down the narrow emergency stairway behind the portside wing bridge, which descended as far as D deck. He was shocked to find water on the floor of D deck. After the next lifeboat was sent away, he looked down and saw that the sea had climbed higher into the front compartments.
“Frankly,” Lightoller told an interviewer on November 1, 1936, “I’m never likely to forget the sight of that cold, greenish water creeping step by step up that stairway. Some of the lights were shining down on the water—and others, already submerged, were giving it a sort of ghastly transparency. But for my purpose, I could tell by that staircase measurement exactly what was happening; how far down she’d gone and how quickly she was going.”
The second officer would be unable to recall exactly when he realized that time was running out, but sometime before he prepared to assist with the launch of boat 10, shortly after 1:10 a.m., he began ordering more people into the lifeboats, despite his belief that a fully loaded boat might break. By then the list to port was growing so pronounced that the gap between the boat-deck rails and the lifeboats themselves was widening to three feet.