Moss supposed there was at least some small chance that he might be experiencing his second shipwreck in only four months. Last December 11, he had been second officer aboard the Harloff and Rodseth shipping line’s Hebe when a hurricane formed out of place and out of season and the old freighter began to lose steam power and to founder. Moss managed to help everyone aboard to escape alive in broken and wave-swamped lifeboats.
Now, promoted to first officer, Moss was en route to join his next ship, the Norheim, when yet another steamer seemed to make a sudden swerve toward chaos, but he was not worried. Although the Titanic did not have the Hebe’s better ratio of seats in lifeboats to souls aboard, it was a far larger vessel, divided from stem to stern by damage-limiting watertight compartments. Whatever was happening to the Titanic, it could not possibly be as bad as the final voyage of the Hebe.
Down in the foremost boiler room (number 6), a system of watertight doors did indeed appear to have blocked the mini-tsunami that Hendrickson saw falling upon the firemen’s tunnel. A hundred feet behind Hendrickson’s position, boiler room number 6’s front bulkhead stood against the flooded tunnel like an unbreakable dam.
During the seconds before Hendrickson was awakened, another leading fireman, Fred Barrett, was standing outside the foremost boiler room’s number 10 stokehold, having already been present for the previous day’s assessment of what should have forever remained a separate and forgotten crisis involving fire damage at the bottom of a steel bulkhead.
The starboard coal bunker near stokehold number 10 had raged with fire at the base of what was about to evolve from an ordinary, redundant bulkhead to a critical safeguard separating boiler room number 6 from boiler room number 5. Hendrickson would testify later that coal bunker fires were quite uncommon in ships at sea and that in fact, during his five years with the White Star Line, which owned the Titanic, he had never even seen a coal fire prior to the one that had burned during the Titanic’s maiden voyage. It had caused the steel to glow cherry red on the first day, April 10. The fire was not put out until the evening shift of Saturday, April 13. Hendrickson and at least three other men under Barrett’s command had been working around the clock for more than seventy-two hours to put out the fire and shovel out every block of coal—whether inert or burning—and feed it into the furnaces.
Tonight, Sunday night, the places where the steel had glowed red were horribly apparent: in order for steel half an inch thick to emit a noticeably red glow, the bottom of the bulkhead must have reached a minimum temperature of 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit, shifting the iron crystals into a harder and less flexible alignment. The loss of flexibility should not have mattered very much as long as the bulkhead—its base dented and warped out of shape—was not called upon to do any great deal of extra work before it could be repaired in New York.
Barrett was located in a boiler room just forward of the fire damage when stoker George Beauchamp, standing nearby, saw the telegraph from the engineer’s platform in the reciprocating engine room signaling with a red stop light. Very soon after the signal came a rumble from the starboard hull “like the roar of thunder,” in Beauchamp’s words.
“Shut the dampers!” Barrett hollered—an order that was shorthand for “cut off the air supply to the furnaces.” The order had not yet been carried out, and other men were still relaying the message, when water began spraying into the compartment two feet above the floor plates. It seemed to Barrett that the lower margin of the ship’s starboard side had suddenly developed a series of rents and at least one hole.
In the next compartment aft, boiler room number 5, John Shepherd, an engineer, watched a hole open up about two feet behind the fire-damaged bulkhead; this meant that the bulkhead itself (already rendered brittle at its base) had suffered a lateral, compressive kick from the iceberg. In spite of this, the men with Shepherd were not worried. The hole was small, no wider than the bottom of a beer bottle, and it appeared to be the damage farthest to the rear.
Boiler room number 5’s pumps should surely have been able to handle it, from everything Shepherd, Barrett, and Beauchamp knew. The giant on the other side of the hull seemed to be losing strength as it pounded toward the rear along boiler room number 5. It had failed even to disturb the piles of coal in the boiler room’s hind bunker. With the danger passing—and evidently weakening—the worst they expected was a detour to Belfast, Ireland, for repairs. The three of them knew that the ship would stand up well against any possible assault. The new science of compartmentalization was bound to keep them perfectly safe. In little more than an hour, only two of them would still be alive.
Directly above the ceilings of the foremost boiler rooms and the coal bunker fire, Norman and Bertha Chambers and their neighbors in first class noticed that their staterooms had remained unbearably hot throughout the voyage. Even after the bunker fire was extinguished, the heating problem persisted, so the Chamberses went to sleep that night with the porthole of their stateroom, E-7, wide open. At 11:40 they were awakened by ice rumbling through the opening and onto the bedroom floor. In E-25, a few staterooms back at the end of the hallway, James McGough was also awakened by chunks of ice falling through his open porthole.
About ninety feet away from E-7 and E-25, on the port side of the first smokestack, seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer had also tried to combat an inexplicable overheating of his room by leaving his porthole open. Because he was opposite the iceberg’s impact along the starboard side, as well as two decks higher than the Chamberses, Thayer’s perception of the collision was less dramatic. He merely felt the floor sway, as though the ship were being gently pushed from the starboard side in a new direction.
Some ninety feet behind Barrett and the dam at the front of boiler room number 5, the same shock of impact—which seemed to have been abating as it punched only one tiny hole in the boiler room and gently swayed the deck beneath Thayer’s feet—came on again stronger when it roared through boiler room number 4. All of the lights in the compartment went out, and coal trimmer George Cavell thought that the impact would have knocked him completely off his feet had an avalanche of coal not buried him first. The earliest, ominous sounds of gurgling must also have started about the same moment, but Cavell was too busy rescuing himself from premature burial to take notice.
Minutes later, when boiler room number 4’s electrician restored the lights, Cavell would begin to wonder if his escape from suffocation was only a brief respite. Water began rising steadily through spaces in the floor plates—rising definitely from somewhere below. Although boiler room number 4’s bilge pumps would presumably be able to keep the sea from rising up to Cavell’s waist, it was clear that the mischief being worked between the iron and the ice did not stop at the border between boiler rooms number 5 and 6.
Boulders of ice breaking away and bouncing along the ship’s bottom had evidently begun inflicting damage along the Titanic’s double-hulled keel as well as along the ribbing and surface of the starboard side. The ice fall added up to a significant loss of weight along the iceberg’s Titanic-facing side, and if at the moment of impact the ship was also riding over a submerged ledge of ice as well as abrading the berg’s side, this same weight loss could have caused the ledge to rise slightly by the time it reached boiler room 4.