When he rejoined his brother-in-law on the starboard boat deck, Rheims seemed to have developed a sense that their best chance for survival would be to jump over the side and swim as fast as they could toward one of the departing lifeboats. He understood that during a leap into the water from a height of two or three stories, the cork-filled and loose-fitting shoulder-strapped life jackets, which appeared to have been perfectly designed to parachute upward upon impact, would transform instantly into hangmen’s nooses. Under “man overboard” conditions, the life jackets seemed to be a means of committing suicide by hanging oneself to avoid drowning.
Evidently, Rheims did not consider freezing to death. All he wanted to consider was how a faster, more streamlined swim toward the lifeboats might increase his chances, if only slightly, of reaching one of the boats alive, before they rowed too far away. Decreasing the weight he had to carry would shave critical seconds off his swim time, so he dropped his gold-filled money belt to the deck next to his life jacket, along with the heavy warm coat he had put on earlier. He shed his shoes and his long pants (along with the increased drag force inherent in pockets), keeping only his wife’s photo tucked under the strap of his undershorts. Loring followed his example, stripping down to his shirt and undershorts and throwing his clothes to the boat deck.
The best bet they had, Rheims decided, was to walk down toward the approaching danger, jump from as low a height as possible into the water, and swim like Olympic competitors toward the nearest lifeboat. Loring hesitated, openly questioning his own swimming ability and looking pleadingly in the direction opposite the descending bow, toward the rising stern and the illusory safety of higher ground.
“There,” Loring said. “We should go all the way up to the rear of the ship.”
“That would be sure death, and you should come with me,” Rheims insisted, as the water drew nearer the front of the boat deck and the white-painted sides of the lifeboats receded deeper into the night.
On the same side of the boat deck, Jack Thayer, the seventeen-year-old whose open C-deck porthole must by now be contributing to the accelerating rate of the Titanic’s sinking, was having essentially the same argument as the two men who had stripped themselves nearly naked outside the grand stairway entrance.
Thayer briefly debated with a friend whether they should attempt to fight their way toward the last boat on the front davits or slide down one of the ropes dangling from the nearest set of davits and swim after one of the partly filled lifeboats, which they could both plainly see reflected in the Titanic’s lights. The chances of actually seeing the lifeboats (much less reaching them) were diminishing fast, as the electric lights began fading from whitish-yellow to red and from red toward a ruddy brown glow. Thayer’s friend dissuaded him from jumping—at least for a little while. Indecisiveness maintained a powerful and often contagious grip on people.
The ship itself had been behaving with a sort of mechanical indecision since about the time the last rocket had detonated. For a few minutes—probably as the Harper stateroom and other open C-deck ports dunked under along the starboard side—the Titanic seemed to have come gradually out of its list to port and developed a slight list to starboard. Soon, however, something along Scotland Road must have given way, like an arterial wall rupturing, and allowed a new, deep interior hemorrhage to bring the list to port into full control again.
By the time water had mounted the grand stairway’s C deck and commenced its climb toward the next landing, the increasing pressure on the wooden tower to float free must already have begun generating loud, visible, and undeniably frightening stress fractures along the perimeter of the stairwell.
Thayer was suddenly aware of a large crowd surging onto the front of the boat deck, shortly before Purser McElroy fired two warning shots into the air. Along with the commotion of the crowd, jostling backward from the gunshots, came a series of loud noises from inside the ship. The noises, which made Thayer think of bulkheads snapping, seemed to be herding even greater masses of people onto the deck.
When first-class passenger Hugh Woolner saw Officer Murdoch fire two warning shots into the air, he decided with his friend Bjornstrom Steffansen that running to the port side and jumping overboard might be the better part of valor. They reached boat D along with Joseph Duquemin, who was eventually branded a “steerage foreigner stowaway” by Colonel Archibald Gracie.
On the starboard side, Colonel Gracie was working with First Officer Murdoch at the boat 1 davits, helping to crank the davit heads inboard again in the hope of being able to launch one of the collapsible boats, stowed upside down on the roof behind a cat’s cradle of smokestack stays. A century later, the front davit would still be standing guard in its final, cranked-in position.
Somewhere amid the cranking in of davits and the jostling and the increasing confusions of the night, Second Officer Lightoller fired off a warning shot from the roof to prevent a rush by “steerage passengers.”
During the last minutes before the ship tilted into position for the final plunge, collapsible boat A came crashing down from the roof, perfectly horizontal. On the way down, it broke most of the oars someone had leaned against the side of the officers’ quarters, meaning to give the boat a smooth incline down to the deck. Gracie gave up any thoughts of trying to get away in the collapsible. Too many people were crowding around, so he decided to leave boat A to Murdoch, climb uphill toward the stern, and take his chances with what would surely be the last part of the ship going down.
During his ascent along the starboard boat deck, Gracie passed seventeen-year-old apprentice chef John Collins running downhill toward boat A with a baby in his arms and the mother trotting behind with a second child. Of this small group, only Collins would ever be seen again.
Murdoch continued to struggle with his team to pull boat A over the side on the davits, hoping to save the women standing nearby and to somehow keep a hundred people from swamping an emergency raft built to hold, at most, only sixty passengers. None of the women or children who stood near boat A’s davits at this moment lived to tell what happened next, but in an evidently desperate bid to save them, Murdoch was required to fire more warning shots—which would escalate quickly into something worse.
Tennis champion Richard Norris Williams II was standing with his father outside the perimeter of the boat A crowd just before the final shots rang out. Richard’s father had insisted, despite all of the signs before his eyes, that the Titanic’s design principle of compartmentalization would allow the ship to settle only so far into the water and then stop sinking. Not until Captain Smith sent a crewman running and shoving a path uphill from the wheelhouse, and they saw water sweeping across the floor of the bridge from its port side, did the elder Williams express a sense of fear and begin running uphill, toward the stern. Richard followed. As he turned, the sounds of gunfire erupted behind him. He quickened his pace, choosing not to look back.
The electric lights continued to dim until they were barely, if at all, brighter than embers and coals in a campfire, but most people’s eyes adapted, to one degree or another. The Titanic’s lamps no longer drowned out the starlight. The stars themselves now stood out in the night like grains of bright dust as, uphill, the distant deckhouses and people gradually became vaguely outlined shapes.
Against this backbone of encroaching black, passenger Eugene Daly was near enough to the side of boat A to see what Richard Norris Williams II had heard. An officer was attempting to save the women behind him in the collapsible raft—first with warning shots into the air, then by pointing his revolver at a group of men and threatening to shoot if they dared rush toward the raft, and finally by actually shooting two of them. The crowd scrambled toward the stern, and there followed a third gunshot. When Daly looked back, he saw the officer himself lying on the deck. Passenger Carl Olof Jansen could not tell whether any passengers had been shot, but he glanced to one side just in time to see the officer in charge of boat A’s launch putting the revolver to his own head and pulling the trigger.