About 1 a.m., someone tried to offer masseuse Slocomb a little dog to take care of, but she refused it. The crowd around her began to jostle and became more confused, and as Murdoch urged them, “Be British,” and a strange man thrust a baby into Slocomb’s arms and walked away, Wheat emerged from below and shouted, “Come on, Sloky, get in here!”
Wheat pushed Slocomb and the baby toward boat 11, insisting that there was not a minute to lose. He stepped onto a boat seat to steady Slocomb with the baby as she climbed in, and Murdoch told him to stay with her and the child in the boat.
This was turning out—not quite unexpectedly—to be too special a night for Joseph Holland Loring. Only six days earlier, he had scrawled a note in his account book and left it with his sister in France before boarding the Titanic, recording what his family would always regard as evidence of a premonition: “In case anything should happen to me, I wish all I own to be given to my wife as I know she will do her best for our children.”
The note was dated April 9, 1912. It listed in his accounts a sum of $564,000 (more than $22 million in 2011 dollars).
Loring boarded the Titanic with his friend George Rheims, who had just become his brother-in-law by eloping with Loring’s sister. The rest of the family had considered Rheims below their station in life, and only Loring seemed to be on the newlyweds’ side. It must have occurred to Loring that he should not have been here at all on this special and all too interesting night. The only reason he came to be standing on the Titanic’s slanting decks was that he had set off at his sister’s urging with her husband to plead her case with their father in New York.
Rheims and Loring shared neighboring staterooms on the starboard side of B deck, where the 11:40 p.m. impact had arrived as “a strong shock and a noise like steam escaping from machinery; really terrifying.”
Loring pulled a heavy coat from his closet, met Rheims in the corridor, then climbed the grand stairway with him to the top deck, where they saw the iceberg. This was probably the same iceberg observed by able seaman Joseph Scarrott—the second iceberg the Titanic came upon, just three or four minutes after impact with the first. Loring had remarked even at this early stage about his certainty that everything they saw would soon sink and about his expectation that they would not survive among the icebergs.
Rheims promised not to leave Loring’s side, and in the end he did not—until the ship began to leave them.
The fifth day of the voyage would have been of major importance to young Alfred Rush even if nothing at all had happened to the Titanic. April 14 was his sixteenth birthday. Up to that day, he and nine-year-old Frankie Goldsmith and the other boys in third class had played leapfrog over the stern’s brass-topped bollards, held competitions for who could shout the loudest echo into the ventilator shafts, climbed the rear cargo cranes, and explored all the way down to the escape hatches for peeks at the world’s largest reciprocating steam engines, which stood four stories tall, like giant mechanical sphinxes.
As the day began, never guessing that the Titanic had seen its last sunrise, that it was about to disappear into legend and become one of the pyramids of the deep, Rush—who was so short for his age that the other boys had nicknamed him Runtie—celebrated his birthday by wearing his first pair of long trousers. In accordance with British tradition, a boy always wore short pants before the age of sixteen. Long pants were a way of proclaiming that on this day he had become a man.
Rush was voyaging to America to meet his parents, who had gone ahead of him nearly two years before to establish a successful business. The Goldsmiths promised to look after him during the crossing, and they were among the lucky families from third class who chanced upon a path to the top deck free of closed gates, belligerent crewmen, or other obstacles.
Shortly after boiler room number 5 burst and Wheat had escaped from the submergence of the Turkish baths, the Goldsmiths and young Rush emerged on the starboard side, about the same time that a canvas-sided collapsible boat called C was being swung out on the davits. Boat 1 had already departed from this set of davits at about 1 a.m. with only twelve people aboard. This was the foremost set of starboard davits, and with the slant of the decks steadily increasing toward the bow and most of the rear lifeboats still being lowered, many people were leaving the front deck for what they believed to be the safety of higher ground. When the Goldsmiths reached boat C, the deck near the starboard wing bridge was still sparsely populated, with no hint of the chaos that would soon follow the emptying of the rear davits.
Had Rush emerged on the port side to confront Lightoller’s rules, he would automatically have been declared old enough to be a man, and even nine-year-old Frankie Goldsmith might have faced the deadly Lightoller injunction. Under the rules that Murdoch had laid down before he headed uphill to assist with the launching of the rear boats, women and children were to board first, accompanied by their men if any vacant seats remained.
Frank Goldsmith Sr. was instructed to wait on deck until boat C was ready for launch, while Emily Goldsmith, Frankie’s mother, and her son were ushered in. Rush was also ushered toward a seat. Perhaps trying to live above the taunts he had endured over his short stature, even though he could easily have passed as a child about Frankie’s age, Rush stepped back and joined Mr. Goldsmith.
“I am a man,” he declared, and before Emily could convince him otherwise, with a final no, the boy disappeared into a crowd of men ascending suddenly from inside the ship—some displaying expressions of panic and wearing wet clothing.
Meanwhile, Bruce Ismay, the ship’s owner, approached, eyeing boat C as one of his last chances to escape alive. This would turn out to be his final management decision: to save himself, knowing that women and children remained aboard, knowing that there were now too few lifeboats to accommodate even a substantial number of them, and that it was his earlier management decision to override Andrews’s design for more lifeboats that had created this shortage. Knowing all of this, Ismay ducked quietly into boat C: false authority, Ismay was—the boy was ten of him.
Henry Harper’s boat had been launched ahead of boat C, fifteen to twenty minutes after the boiler room number 5 collapse and about the time the first wave of stokers came running up from below. Even amid this earliest precursor to crowding and panic, Harper found room for his dog and his manservant from Alexandria, Egypt, who had been eager to cross with him on the Titanic “to see the country all the crazy Americans come from.”
In his report for Harper’s Weekly, Henry Harper mentioned in passing that about the time he and the Egyptian “dragoman” made themselves “quite at home” in boat 3, “four or five stokers or some such men came along and jumped into the boat at the forward end. The sailor who seemed to be in charge laughed a little.”
The sailor allowed the jumpers to take seats, and according to Harper, the men did not seem to him to have behaved improperly under the circumstances—an observation that he doubtless hoped would reflect favorably upon himself.
Just as boat 3 reached the halfway point in its descent, an Australian had hailed the crew to stop lowering so he could climb down on the ropes. The crew obeyed, the Australian slid down through open air to the boat, and he was later acknowledged for his bravery.
Harper’s boat had touched down on water about 1 a.m. Frankie Goldsmith and his mother saw the last of Alfred Rush about 1:30 a.m., while an atmosphere of general calm still prevailed around boat C for at least a little while longer.