In the same boat with Hosono were Juliette Laroche and her two girls, Louise and Simonne. Joseph Laroche had pocketed all of his family’s valuables, including cash and a pouch of jewels, intending to give them to Juliette. As they neared the lifeboat, however, something happened about which Juliette would never speak, and Joseph was separated from her before he could pass along his life’s savings. She began her descent on boat 10’s falls with two fatherless daughters, pregnant and penniless, without even the memory of a parting kiss from her husband.
Forward of the Laroches and Hosono, boat 4 was among the next to begin its descent, twenty to thirty minutes after Joughin heard the grinding or cracking sounds below the decks and water had begun entering just behind the third smokestack.
Anyone in the Laroche and Hosono boat, looking toward the bow, would have been able to see what Emily Ryerson would soon be reporting in her affidavit to the American inquiry. The forecastle was now a submerging island, separated from the superstructure of the bridge by a turbulent strait that only a short time before had been the well deck. The distance from the foremost part of the boat deck to the sea was only about twenty feet on the port side because of the increasing list. According to Ryerson, everyone could plainly see the forgotten C-deck portholes: “open, and the water rushing in, and the decks still lighted.”
When boat 10 reached the water and was rowed off a dozen feet, Hosono looked back and observed that the distress rockets were still flying up and detonating, but his most lasting memory of those first moments on the water would be of the children in his boat suddenly wailing and shrieking.
Aboard boat 6, the last glimpse Celiney Yasbeck caught of her husband revealed him to be running toward the starboard side of the ship. She held out hope that he was no longer on the sloping decks and had made it into one of the starboard lifeboats, for it had not yet occurred to those in boat 6 that the reason for Lightoller’s increasingly fierce “women and children only” rule and the reason so many people were still milling about under the deck lights was that by now there existed only about four hundred spaces in the remaining lifeboats, and there were more than eighteen hundred people still aboard.
As Yasbeck watched, as the flood entering the forward portholes and the submerged D-deck shell door made the original damage inflicted by the iceberg negligible by comparison, and as the slope of the decks progressed with awful perceptibility, the people began yelling and crying. Yasbeck did not know that eighty-seven women in third class (49 percent) and fifty-four of the children (64 percent) were about to be lost, compared with four women and one child from first class.
In the same lifeboat with Yasbeck, first-class passenger Marjorie Newell was mystified about how, at a time such as this, the band played on—Irving Berlin tunes, one after another, came sharp and crisp across the water. “We were very privileged,” Newell would recall. At twenty-two, she and her father had just completed a tour of Egypt and the Holy Land and had boarded the Titanic in Cherbourg, France. “There was always something really odd about first-class passengers. They had different ways. They never looked over to third class, not even in the worst of moments. They were apart.”
Despite the clarity of the approaching horror, Newell maintained her complacency; she was not nearly as aware as fifteen-year-old Yasbeck of how easily life could turn all so clearly too hard. Not until Newell heard the screams did she begin to understand that something might have gone seriously wrong with the Titanic.
“How ironic,” she would tell history at age 102. “How ironic: My father felt he was safer [on the ship] than we were in the boat.” Only later, after her father had walked away from the portside boat deck, would it occur to Newell that humanity had pushed nature too far and that before her eyes, nature was pushing back.
The inequity of it began to gnaw at her and would continue to do so for the rest of her life. Those who were the most innocent of the hubris committed that night seemed condemned to be punished the hardest for it. In the lower rear quarters of third class, aft of the fourth smokestack, the little portholes along E deck and F deck went dark, and Newell would forever wonder about the passengers behind those portholes who must have been trying to find their way out.
Whether the dousing of the lights was a result of circuits shorting from the leaks Joughin discovered, from an adjustment made by the engineers in an attempt to conserve power for the Marconi apparatus and other life-saving equipment, or from localized electrical surge and burnout effects, there was little light for the two hundred or more third-class passengers who had been delayed—and kept mostly uninformed below deck—until most of the lifeboats were already descending from their davits.
“In first class, you had all the light you wanted,” Newell observed. “In the darkness, the passengers in third class could not find their way out. They couldn’t see anything at all. The women and children were trapped in the dark. They [must have been] screaming. It was the single, most callous, inhumane act.”
11
The Geometry of Shadows
SEPTEMBER 2001
RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH
EXPEDITION TITANIC XIII
Had he lived to see it, Isaac Asimov would have loved our 2001 expedition, especially during the planning stages for the rescue of our little robot Elwood, after it became trapped among the chandeliers, above the mahogany and the white worms. According to plan, my dive to the virtually unexplored stern section was to be followed by a detour to the bow section one-third of a mile away so we could plant new equipment to enable history’s first rescue of one robot by another.
We almost did make history. Jake’s video of little Elwood’s battery burn-up revealed gas bubbles, ranging from a quarter of an inch to more than an inch wide, being ejected toward the ceiling. The surrounding water pressure was nearly six thousand pounds per square inch. The bubbles were probably hydrogen, mostly. If that same burnout had occurred at the surface, the smaller bubbles would have instantly expanded larger than cantaloupes, and the larger ones would have released enough gas to fill refrigerators. The very same explosion at or near the surface, with Elwood caged in the submersible’s bot bay, could easily have made a bit too much history.
A further review of the Jake footage revealed a small section of the grand stairway still intact down near E deck: several wooden steps, fifteen feet across, with the metal railings evidently having been lifted away with the rest of the structure. Near the end, the five stories of oak must have developed tremendous positive buoyancy, most likely departing the Titanic in a single mighty burst through the crystal dome. A section of metal framing consistent with the top of the dome lay almost a third of a mile behind the bow section, near the stern section’s crash site (although it might also have come from a shorter yet otherwise nearly identical rear stairway). In the bow section, fragments of the front stairway’s dome had evidently slid off the emerging wood pile and fallen to the bottom of the empty stairwell, landing not very far from its single segment of intact wooden steps.
The destruction in and around the great stairwell was immense, and the clear impression, based on the evidence coming in through our gallery of bot-eye views, was that most of the destruction occurred during the final minutes at the surface and during the first seconds of contact with the bottom.