Under the ship’s third smokestack, nearly 150 feet behind Cavell in boiler room number 4, fireman George Kemish had just checked the dials in boiler room number 2 when the crash came. The ship was running with a full head of steam—then accelerating gradually to twenty-three knots. Everything seemed to be working to perfection, until the telegraph signaled stop, and there followed “a heavy thud and grinding tearing sound,” according to Kemish.
More than a hundred feet behind Kemish’s compartment, among the steam engines between the third and fourth smokestacks, coal trimmer Thomas Patrick Dillon felt more than heard the impact. It came to him as “a slight shock,” following the ringing of the alarm from the bridge by between two and “a few” full seconds. There was a lag time between the stop alarm from the bridge—the shouting out of the stop order to the men running the engines—and the relaying of a signal to stop feeding the boilers and to shut the dampers, which were 250 feet forward from Kemish’s position, in Barrett’s boiler room.
During this interval, the iceberg continued moving toward Dillon at approximately forty feet per second. The “slight shock” Dillon felt was merely the last note in a resounding chorus of ice chunks falling against the starboard hull. Near the ship’s stern the impact felt so slight that virtually no one took it to mean anything serious.
For thirteen-year-old second-class passenger Madeline Mellinger, much in her life had already gone seriously wrong. She missed her father dearly, and her mother never spoke about the exact nature of the “mistake” he had made that ultimately drove him out of England. His last beautiful letter to Madeline had come from Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1909—and then there was only a desert of silence.
Madeline’s father had been a journalist—“a genius whose extravagant high living brought the family to ruin,” Madeline recalled. She remembered cheerless and cold-sounding words from early childhood, such as divorce and auction sale, followed by the loss of her family’s home furnishings, all of the fine family heirlooms, and finally her home itself.
Madeline’s mother, Elizabeth, had become a maid and traveling companion for wealthy families. She was eventually forced to send Madeline away to relatives and then to a girls’ boarding school outside London. Now, at last, the sequence of disasters seemed to be abating. The year 1912 had become one of promise and adventure, once Elizabeth secured a permanent job with relatives of the Colgates, a family known, in those days, as “new money”—still in the process of making its fortune by turning powdery mixtures of chalk microfossils and peppermint oil into toothpaste.
Young Madeline was excited beyond imagining when her mother came up to London from Southampton to tell her that they would finally be reunited aboard the Titanic as traveling companions of a Colgate cousin on a trip to the United States. They would henceforth be living in Bennington, Vermont, and then in a new estate on Manhattan’s West 57th Street.
The Mellingers’ assignment to a second-class cabin proved no obstacle to dining invitations in first class, because their traveling companion, C. C. Jones, seemed to take a special liking to Madeline’s educated and formerly wealthy mother. More than fifty years later, Madeline would tell historian Walter Lord that she suspected Jones wanted to become her stepfather.
Madeline was at first enchanted by the elegantly dressed people, intricate woodwork, and engraved glass of the dining areas, and then she became enchanted by Jones. “He came to our table—which was reserved,” she would say later. “He had on a fur coat, full length, and I had never seen such a thing on a man. He gave me a golden sovereign (another first). Sunday, before lunch, he came over to our cabin in second class to bring pictures of lovely Bennington in spring, and to tell us what to do upon landing. We never saw him again alive.”
The Mellingers’ cabin was on the same deck as the open portholes of the Thayer and the Chambers staterooms, just behind the second-class dining saloon, on the starboard side. The iceberg passed directly outside the Mellingers’ porthole. Elizabeth’s hearing was very poor, but she felt the change in the engines below and possibly the straining of the propeller shafts, the last boulders of ice falling off the berg and bouncing against the starboard hull. Madeline was awakened by the sudden commotion of her mother springing from the lower bunk and climbing on top of a couch beneath the porthole. Elizabeth looked outside, saw nothing, and told Madeline she might as well go back to sleep.
In the same general region of second class, a multilingual Japanese man named Masabumi Hosono was dozing off at 11:40, having just completed a lucrative but long and distressing assignment helping Japan’s allies in Russia to streamline the all but completely dysfunctional Siberian Railway. The Titanic was only the second leg of his long journey home, and even though Hosono could have afforded to seek greater comfort in one of the first-class cabins, nonwhites were unwelcome there, in accordance with the rules of the time. It did not seem to matter, for on the Titanic, second-class accommodations were the equivalent of first-class ones on many other liners.
Besides, Hosono had already seen enough inequities in Russia to consider himself exceedingly lucky. The rich lived in rooms decorated with gold, lapis, and the finest Baltic amber. There was no second class in Russia—and very little left over for the so-called underclass. Hosono had seen people walking barefoot during the incomparably cold Siberian winter. In boardinghouses, the occasional renting out of hallway spaces by the innkeepers meant the difference between freezing and survival.
Hosono had seen men trying to live a week on no more sustenance than lumps of sugar carried in their pockets. He did not need to know that in a corner of the Titanic’s third-class section, a steamer trunk bearing a carefully packed diary would preserve the record of a fellow world traveler named Howard Irwin, including his brief friendship with a Russian expatriate named Vladimir Lenin. As Hosono began drifting off to sleep, he already knew that a Leninesque revolution was in the air. He did not have to read Irwin’s diary to confirm this.
Hosono did not understand the slight sensation of the floor rattling, as though the Titanic were a train riding over a series of split rail fasteners or some other defect in a long stretch of track. He guessed that it was nothing more than an engine cylinder encountering some difficulty wearing into its seatings. He did not hear a distinct crash, so he did not even consider the possibility of danger. He decided to ignore the rattling floor and let himself drift off more fully into sleep.
Quartered in the same cluster of suites, twenty-six-year-old architect and engineer Joseph Laroche was already in deep sleep. He was the cousin of soon-to-be Haitian president Tancrède Auguste and the son of the wealthy businessman Raoul Auguste. He was also one of the Titanic’s few passengers of African ancestry and the only such passenger married to a white woman, named Juliette. The engineer was traveling with his family to New York on the first leg of his return trip to Haiti. At 11:40, the Laroches’ two little girls, Simonne and Louise, ages one and three, were asleep on the second-class cabin’s couch, which had been designed for conversion into a bed.
Laroche had found the French relatively tolerant of interracial marriage, but in 1912 the friendliness and freethinking attitudes of the people seemed to end where competition in the job market began. Even when he could find work, Laroche too often received wages lower than the younger and less educated engineers, ostensibly because he was younger and less experienced. Juliette’s father owned a wine business in France and had tried to assist the couple financially, but Joseph wanted to provide for his family on his own merits.