Between these two events, efficiency expert Hosono arrived on the rear boat deck, where he found the forward tilt of the ship so extreme that it became difficult for him to maintain his balance. The curve of the deck had been designed to make the superliner more structurally immune to the stresses of rising and falling against ocean swells, and it made the bow section’s upturn toward the prow seem (by illusion) to become initially more level as the front decks slanted nearer the sea. This design had an equal and opposite effect at the stern, however: it exaggerated the tilt forward and heightened people’s level of alarm.
To Hosono, the tilt of the deck seemed impossibly extreme, and he saw sailors in the vicinity of boat 10—Fifth Officer Lowe among them—threatening men at gunpoint as the distress rockets continued to burst overhead, roughly every five minutes.
Chief baker Joughin seemed to be acting with greater desperation than even Lowe—grabbing children and throwing them so forcefully into boat 10 that he seemed not to care whether he broke their bones. First Officer Murdoch arrived on the scene, seeming just as desperate. The list to port had grown so great that Murdoch was forced to half pull, half hurl women across the gap between the boat deck and the lifeboats.
There was certainly good reason for Murdoch’s sense of desperation. He knew from the beginning that he was seeing the unlikely science fiction of a “penny dreadful” Morgan Robertson novel catching up with the realities of technological hubris; he understood that he might live just long enough to see a dystopian fantasy become history. Joughin knew all this and more.
The chief baker’s quarters on E deck were located on the port side, just in front of the upper casing for the giant reciprocating steam engines, behind the third smokestack. At 1:20 a.m., his porthole was already descending below the sea surface, and the imbalance that would soon be raising the three manganese-bronze propellers out of the water must already have begun to produce increasing strain on the hull. As the bow section continued to angle down, the rising stern kept the center of rotation located between the second and third smokestacks—with the fulcrum of the sea surface running almost directly through Joughin’s cabin. This was, in fact, the area where, at about 2:17 a.m., the Titanic’s spine was going to shatter.
At approximately 1:20 a.m., Joughin returned to his cabin to continue following “doctor’s orders.” He drank, preparing himself for the Titanic’s final plunge—which he realized, to his horror, might be sneaking up on him a bit faster than anyone had anticipated. There was water in his room—only enough to cover his ankles if he stood in the deepest part of the cabin’s portside tilt—but clearly, water was seeping down into his room from somewhere. He headed uphill against the list, up to the pantry on the starboard side, seeking out something a bit stronger to drink before he returned to the boat deck. Then, within those few minutes, Joughin heard what sounded to him like the first harbinger of the cracking and breaking of the ship, like the first tremors of tectonic pressure being released during the buildup toward a major earthquake. Joughin ran through the third-class section on his way toward the top deck and boat 10, snatching up more children and forcing their mothers to chase him.
At 1:27 a.m., the Titanic’s two Marconi operators sent out a desperate update hauntingly consistent with what Joughin was seeing and hearing: “Titanic calling CQD. Engine room flooding.” The first signs of metal fatigue appeared to have already begun manifesting as actual stress fractures, from at least as high as Joughin’s E deck cabin and possibly far enough down to become the first telltale leaks in the reciprocating engine rooms or the rearmost boiler room.
At boat 10, Hosono probably read everything he needed to know in Joughin’s face. “I tried to prepare myself for the last moment with no agitation, making up my mind not to leave anything disgraceful as a Japanese,” he would write to his wife, on the Titanic stationery he had kept in his pocket while leaving all of his gold currency behind.
An officer in charge called out that there was room for at least two more people, and he invited two sailors and a steward named William Burke to jump across the portside gap into boat 10. When a man next to Hosono jumped in, Hosono reflexively followed his example.
Boat 10 went down on the water with fifty-five people aboard, about fifty of whom could be crowded into and around the wide seats, with the rest obliged to either stand up in freezing air or hunker down on the floor under the seats. Burke would report to American investigators that after reaching the water, he found two men crowded underfoot.
“One, apparently, was a Japanese,” Burke said. “I put him at an oar. The other appeared to be an Italian. I tried to speak to him but he said, ‘Armenian.’”
The Armenian’s last name was Krekorian, and he was evidently Neshan Krekorian, the man whose cabin had been close enough to the waterline to reveal the stars being eclipsed by icebergs on the horizon about forty minutes before one of the shadows loomed directly ahead of the Titanic’s prow.
In his 1913 book, The Truth about the Titanic, Colonel Archibald Gracie listed the Armenian passenger as someone who had jumped from A deck into the boat (more or less heroically, like the Australian who slid down the rope into Harper’s boat). Gracie listed the Japanese jumper in the same boat as “a stowaway,” a designation that carried with it, by sheer definition, the stigma of having allegedly entered the boat by illegitimate or even cowardly means.
Gracie’s listings reflected the groundswell of thought from the time in which he was raised. Against this backdrop, passages that would clearly be seen as pompous a century later were never expected to be read that way by Gracie’s own generation. Thus his description of what happened on the decks that night tended to diverge in two directions: Anglo-Saxons behaved bravely (whether jumpers or not), and certain nationalities and non-Anglo-Saxons behaved dishonorably (whether jumpers or not).
“The coolness, courage, and sense of duty that I here witnessed,” wrote Gracie, “made me thankful to God and proud of my Anglo-Saxon race that gave this perfect and superb exhibition of self-control at this hour of severest trial.”
Gracie listed an Italian in boat 14 and a Frenchman in boat 4 as stowaways—the latter evidently because he arrived very drunk at boat 4’s side after swimming with two other men as the bow submerged beneath their feet. In boat D, a Swede, an Englishman, and an American made, in Gracie’s eyes, legitimate jumps from the deck, whereas a “steerage foreigner” named Joseph Duquemin was listed as a stowaway. Aboard boat C, Gracie classified four “Chinamen or Filipinos,” but not Ismay, as “stowaways.”
British schoolteacher Lawrence Beesley jumped from B deck into boat 13 as it was being lowered. He came away from the Titanic with a book deal and was quoted favorably by Gracie. The colonel did list one “Japanese” man in Beesley’s boat without commenting or drawing further attention to the man’s case. Actually, the man was a Chinese sailor, and according to Millvina Dean (as related by her mother, who was a passenger), the women in boat 13 were “so disgusted” to find a nonwhite in the boat while their husbands remained on the decks above that in a near riot they threatened to throw him overboard in an impromptu oceanic lynching. Each woman later justified her own behavior by accusing the man of having acted ignobly to save his own life.
Jumping into boat 10, Hosono was trading death by freezing or drowning for a special kind of hell. He did not yet know that condemnation, firing, and decades of shame lay ahead of him. Although he was initially falsely accused of being the man the would-be murderesses of boat 13 had targeted, being able to demonstrate that he was in boat 10 would serve Hosono no better. Any apologies that might have been whispered quickly devolved into fresh accusations.