From the same vantage point, Lily Futrelle, the wife of mystery writer Jacques Futrelle, watched the ship’s bow burying itself deeper and deeper into a dead calm sea. As she stared, the calm began to unravel. The strait of water between the forecastle and the superstructure of the bridge grew increasingly turbulent. Then the submergence of the forecastle and the rise of the propellers became a clear and present irritant to the biolumes. In death, the Titanic was creating exactly the sort of flashing display that would have illuminated the base of the iceberg and saved the ship from this fate.
“We could see the last of the two collapsible [rafts, on davits] putting away from the steamer,” Futrelle would write. “The water by this time was so close to the upper deck that it was hardly necessary to lower the raft. I tried to shut my eyes but I could not. There was a horrible fascination about it. The ocean was aflame with the glowing phosphorous, which looked like a million little spirits of light dancing their way to the horizon.”
Charlotte Collier had known from the start that the ship was in a desperate situation, but she lingered on the deck with her husband and her daughter near boat 14, as Charles Joughin and Murdoch tossed children across the portside gap and persuaded their mothers to follow and as Harold Lowe forced a schoolboy out of the same boat at gunpoint.
Eight-year-old Marjorie Collier cried and begged Lowe not to shoot the boy. Marjorie thought she had seen enough horrors for one night, beginning with the stoker who had come running onto the deck with all five fingers severed from one hand and the blood running shockingly bright against the black coal dust that carpeted his face and clothes. The stoker had assured her father, Harvey Collier, that the ship would sink. Despite his obvious state of physical distress, Murdoch commanded the fingerless man and his fellow stokers to stand back from the boat and allow passengers to be loaded aboard.
“How many unhappy men were shut off in that way I do not know,” Charlotte would write a month later. “But Mr. Murdoch was probably right.” To Charlotte, Murdoch was “a bulldog of a man who would not be afraid of anything. This proved to be true. He kept order to the last, and died at his post. They say he shot himself. I do not know.”
Joughin, Lowe, or one of the other men assisting Murdoch grabbed little Marjorie from Charlotte’s arms and flung her into boat 14. Before Charlotte had time to react, a crewman grabbed her by an arm, yelling, “You too! Take a seat in that boat or it will be too late.” Charlotte tried to cling to her husband, but he broke her grip on him as a second man threw both arms around her waist and dragged her down toward her daughter and the boat.
“Go, Lotty,” Harvey shouted, as Lowe jumped in and took command of the lowering. “For God’s sake, be brave and go!”
Charlotte obeyed and stayed in boat 14; on a seat plank nearby, Madeline Mellinger clung to the side of her mother’s coat.
After Lowe unhooked the ropes and the boat had rowed off a short distance, Charlotte saw an iceberg looming into view, staying close to the Titanic like a faithful dog. She at first believed it must be the same berg that had caused the present calamity; then she realized that this “dog” belonged to a very large pack. Two more mountains of ice drifted out of the starlight toward her. When she looked away from the bergs, the Titanic suddenly appeared to be both horrible and beautiful at the same time, somehow taking on the qualities of “an enormous glowworm.”
Charlotte watched, hoping to recognize her husband’s face up there near the davits, but all she could distinguish were shadowy groups of human figures on every deck. “They were,” she would recall, “standing with arms crossed upon their chests and with lowered heads. I am sure that they were in prayer. On the boat deck that I had just left, perhaps fifty men had come together. In the midst of them was a tall figure. This man had climbed upon a coil of rope [or other chair-high object] so that he was raised far above the rest. His hands were stretched out as if he were pronouncing a blessing.”
Moment by moment, the Titanic (which now added belches of foam and black smoke to the stirring of the biolumes) was transforming into a vision that was simultaneously volcanic and biblical—with mountains carried into the midst of the sea, the waters thereof being troubled, and the works of humanity broken and melting into the earth.
More than two hundred feet nearer than Charlotte Collier and Madeline Mellinger, boat 2 was in trouble. Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall—the navigator whose 11:40 p.m. walk toward the bridge would forever memorialize the scant seconds between the warning bells and the impact—discovered that the lifeboat was being drawn closer to the ship, despite the best efforts of his rowers. Boxhall’s initial plan to find an open gangway door and take at least three more people down Jacob’s ladders into boat 2 was being thwarted as much by a growing sense of time running out as by an inability to find the now submerged D-deck shell door—or any other open door. He would recall for the American examiners that the developing suction, against which he now ordered the crew and the passengers to row in full retreat, was strongest while the broad flat regions of the forecastle and the well deck were slowly gliding down.
As the forecastle and other major deck structures finally relinquished their grip on the surface and slipped underwater, they created powerful eddies accompanied by sudden gulps, by the hollow thuds of imploding compartments, and by the wholesale release of trapped air. Aroused by the developing maelstrom, Lily Futrelle’s million bioluminescent points of light blazed even more strongly to life. The people of boat 14 beheld, in the boundary layer of turbulence that completely enveloped the ship’s submerged head, a far brighter pixelation effect than had ever been created by a mere pod of lightning dolphins. Little Marjorie Collier and her mother looked down and could see, near the place where Georgyj Vinogradov’s gorgon would take root, the image of the Titanic’s prow, as clearly as one could see a pebble in a pond on a sunny day.
Between 2:00 and 2:05 a.m., just about forty minutes after the last distress rocket showered white flares over the bridge, the sea was up to Daniel Buckley’s closed gate at the top of the bow section’s well-deck stairs. The foremast stood out of the water like a lone sequoia tree, tilting over toward the port side.
B deck and most of the superstructure from Buckley’s gate up to the bridge were still above water, but with every boat except the last collapsible having cast off from the davits, Joe Loring and George Rheims knew that the final horror would soon be approaching from the direction of the mast.
Loring took his brother-in-law’s hands in his own and said, “George, if you survive, look after my babies.”
Rheims promised that if he lived, Loring would not have to worry about his family. He then told Loring to wait for a minute while he ran down two decks to his stateroom on B deck, which was still standing high and dry under the starboard side of the first smokestack. Expecting for himself nothing except death and wishing only that the one object in the world most precious to him would be found clutched close to his body, Rheims stayed in his room just long enough to pull his wife’s picture from its frame and stuff it under his clothes. As he bolted up the grand stairway, the water was rising at least to the top of the stairway’s D deck and onto C deck, but the greater mass of the oaken tower was still pressing down on the E deck landing with just enough force to keep the entire structure stable—for at least a few minutes longer.