Boat 10 was eventually filled with fifty-five people, but Lightoller continued to abide by his rule of allowing only women and children into the boats, and he was inclined to tighten even that rule when it suited him. He believed that passengers from the third class had no right to be on the boat deck, whether they were men, women, or children. Lightoller’s definition of women did not include Violet Jessop, Annie Robinson, or the other stewardesses of the Titanic. His definition of children ended when any ten- or thirteen-year-old boy seemed either to have entered puberty or to be on the verge of it, therefore making him old enough to be a man.
Under Lightoller’s rules, when Fifth Officer Harold Lowe found a boy among the women in boat 14, he forced him out. Although the child was hardly more than a schoolboy, Lowe drew his revolver and said, “I give you just ten seconds to get back on that ship before I blow your brains out.”
By the time a second child was barred from a boat, Colonel John Jacob Astor, then known as the richest man in the world, had seen enough of Lightoller’s rules. A boy of about twelve was declared old enough to be a man and told he could not enter a lifeboat with his mother. The mother, of course, would not enter without her child, and anyone looking on who understood the escalating series of events unfolding beneath the boat deck would have known that this was a sentence of death for both mother and child.
Colonel Astor was among those who knew from the captain what was about to happen to everyone. Grabbing a hat—by one Astor family account, a girl’s hat; by another account, his own—he covered the boy’s head and declared, “He’s a child now!” However illogical the Astor declaration might have seemed, it was powerful enough to intimidate Lightoller into letting the boy enter the boat with his mother.
Even as Lightroller’s gauge at the stairwell revealed the water to be crawling up the steps with steadily increasing speed, his actions continued to create bottlenecks at the portside lifeboat stations. An insistence on separating wives from their husbands and mothers from their young boys caused heart-wrenching delays. His occasional retreats into denial of what his stairwell gauge was showing him caused further, fatal delays—in a race against time that his order to open gangway doors had already accelerated.
When passengers asked, “Why are you getting the boats out?” he had assured them and himself that the launchings were merely a precaution.
“Very likely you’ll all be taken aboard the Titanic again at daylight,” Lightoller insisted. He seemed to believe, even then, that it might somehow turn out that way. But everything was against them, Lightoller would tell Lord Bigham Mercey’s commission. Had the sea not been as flat as a tabletop, with not a ripple or a breeze, they would have seen a glow at the base of the iceberg even on a night such as this without a moon. No one in Lightoller’s time knew yet about the phosphorescent sea life that migrated more than seven-tenths of a mile underwater during the day and returned to the surface every night. All anyone knew was that every night, the strange oceanic lights came on, and the slightest disturbance of the ocean surface made them flash.
“Therefore,” Lightoller explained, “at any time when there is a slight breeze, you will always see at nighttime a phosphorescent line around a berg.” Even the slightest ocean swell, he added, causes the same effect, “showing a phosphorescent glow.”
The oars of the lifeboats were enough to reveal the effect that Lightoller said should normally have alerted First Officer Murdoch and the crow’s nest lookouts. Henry Sleeper Harper found the sea lights so bright that he almost imagined he had seen a sliver of moonlight reflected onto the water: “And at every stroke of the oars great glares of greenish-yellow phosphorescent light would swirl aft from the blades and drip in globules like fire from the oars as they swung forward. The phosphorescence was so brilliant that it almost dazzled us at first.”
In the same vicinity—as surely as the Titanic’s poolroom and Turkish baths were now alive with swirling lights—these same organisms would have revealed the iceberg at least a quarter to half a mile ahead of the collision point, if only there had been a breeze or a swell.
Lightoller also told the investigators that at 10 p.m. he was under instructions to keep a sharp lookout for ice; yet he had no apprehension about the continual firing up of more boilers to push the steam engines up to twenty-two knots. He and the rest of the officers had an ambition to see what the ship’s maximum speed would eventually be as it steamed full ahead on a moonless night through waters darker than a mineshaft, into an ice field that he and the captain had already discussed for twenty-five minutes.
“Everything was against us,” Lightoller insisted.
9
Stalking the Nightmare
AUGUST 23, 2001
RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH
EXPEDITION TITANIC XIII
John-David Cameron, Jim Cameron’s brother, was one of those Marines whose unit followed the old Greek philosophy of developing, to the men’s maximum potential, both the mind and the body. One requirement of his unit had been IQ scores that belonged up in lights on a movie marquee. Naturally, John-David was one of the men who understood our new generation of bot probes down to the smallest fiber-optic spool and plastic clip. In his spare time, while watching the deep scattering layer come up to the Keldysh’s fantail after sunset, he liked to kick back with beers rigged to either freeze in the bottle or foam all over a friend’s hand, arguing about where theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking might have gone wrong with the idea that information could never pass through the cosmic singularity (the Big Bounce) and where Stephen Jay Gould appeared to be taking the Butterfly Effect (an idea in chaos theory) and contingency theory (a behavioral theory) too seriously.
“And of course,” he’d be glad to tell you, “[physicist Werner] Heisenberg might have been here.”
John-David Cameron’s Internet link to the expedition (a predecessor of YouTube) and the Cameron brothers’ bot company were not given names like Earthship and Dark Matter, respectively, for nothing.
With historian Don Lynch, we had been reviewing Walter Lord’s careful matching of the Titanic’s passengers and crew members with their staterooms. Because many prospective passengers (including Lord William Pirrie and his friends) canceled their plans for the maiden voyage, there had been many opportunities for passengers to change and upgrade their rooms once they boarded—which, in fact, many wrote of having done. Thanks to Walter Lord’s decades of correspondence with survivors and his analysis of their family memoirs, when our bots ventured into a stateroom, we now had a very good idea whose room we were visiting.
Lynch would eventually become heir to Lord as the historian who knew more about the Titanic’s passengers than anyone alive. In the years leading up to our expedition, Lynch and I had disagreed often about the details of the ship’s last voyage. Now that Lord had allowed me to produce multiple copies of his entire history of correspondence, Lynch and I still disagreed on many points, but at least he finally understood the firsthand eyewitness accounts from which some of those disagreements had originated.
More often than not, the side-by-side addition of Lynch’s documents and his recollections of conversations with survivors revealed that his interpretations were correct. More and more, we came to appreciate the old cliché of how three witnesses to an accident could give three entirely different accounts of what happened. The paradox was multiplied when the memories were told and retold over many years. Memories kept bottled up inside and not spoken about for several decades tended, when finally spoken or written about for the first time, to more closely match the British and American inquiry testimonies. Memories repeated over and over by survivors from the very beginning tended to pick up mutations along the way.