Laroche’s initial plan, to be a successful engineer in France, was clearly not working. He was a believer in the old saying “If the first plan does not work, you’ve got to have another plan.” Nature, of course, had a third plan he had never anticipated, although: he, Juliette, and little Simonne and Louise apparently slept through the iceberg’s passing without noticing anything at all.
Above, in the first-class smoking room, passenger Spencer Silverthorne had settled into a large leather armchair and was browsing through a copy of the Virginian when he heard a series of loud thuds along the side of the ship. The loudest and nearest of the thuds came almost thirteen seconds after fireman Thompson was heaved out of his bunk, near the point of the bow. On the higher decks, and more than six hundred feet behind Thompson, the impact was not strong enough to splash a drink out of Silverthorne’s glass or to upset a card game nearby, although it did shake his chair.
“We’ve hit something!” he cried, then he dashed outside just in time to see the iceberg gliding behind the ship, higher than the boat deck and still shedding “tons and tons of ice.” There was now a widening margin of water between the cliff of ice and the wall of steel. Nonetheless, the avalanche continued. Silverthorne witnessed huge pieces of the cliff tumbling off and crashing into the sea as the berg appeared to be headed astern and away from the glare of the Titanic’s lights.
Atop the after-bridge, near the very end of the Titanic’s stern, quartermaster George Rowe had noticed the temperature dropping so quickly around 11 p.m. that whatever moisture was in the air through which he was steaming had begun crystallizing into what he called “whiskers round the light”—“that is,” he would later write to Walter Lord, “[I saw] very minute splinters of ice like myriads of coloured lights” forming halos around deck lamps. Rowe could not wait for the man assigned to the middle watch to arrive at midnight so he could get out of the intense cold.
At 11:40, Rowe was struck by a curious motion of the deck, an interruption of the Titanic’s otherwise steady glide through water that was dead calm and smooth enough to be full of reflected stars. It felt to him as though the ship were pulling alongside a dock wall—rather heavily, yet still with so slight a jar that he might not have noticed it at all had the North Atlantic been its usual turbulent self.
Rowe looked forward and saw what he at first mistook for a windjammer that had crossed the Titanic’s path with all of its sails set, but as it came into the glare of the “whiskered” lights, he realized that it was an iceberg. Like Silverthorne, he saw a wall of ice that appeared to be rising along the ship’s side now that great slivers of mass had fallen away. Far in front of Silverthorne and Rowe, and more than fifteen seconds earlier, witnesses near the bridge saw a berg that did not quite reach the boat deck. Rowe witnessed an iceberg that had already avalanched entire cliffs into the sea; it was rising about twenty feet above the boat deck, a hundred feet above the waterline.
The engines were trying to bring the propellers to a stop by then, but the effort seemed to make no difference, and the iceberg continued moving away from the back of the ship until at last it ceased to reflect anything from the Titanic’s lamps and became a receding silhouette, lost among the stars.
The immediate aftermath was deceptively peaceful, with neither the iceberg nor the ship appearing to have suffered greatly. Despite a combined release of energy that was capable of lifting the mass of fourteen Washington Monuments in a second, the rate at which the Titanic’s breached compartments began to flood would reveal to naval architect Edward Wilding that the total aggregate of punctures, rips, and parted seams added up to twelve square feet of openings to the sea—a surface area equal to approximately two sidewalk squares.
In many places (such as near the fire-damaged bulkhead, where Fred Barrett had been standing), the centers of the hull plates rattled and bent like parchment but did not break, except perhaps where blocks of ice had crumbled loose and gotten slammed between the iceberg and the hull, becoming focused impacts that sometimes allowed relatively soft ice to punch holes through steel plates already being deformed at points of severe ice ramming, in much the same manner that twenty-first-century antitank weapons would routinely pierce armor plate with relatively soft copper in focused bursts. The single hole in Barrett’s empty coal bunker was consistent with this sort of damage.
The Titanic took the shock like a series of gunshots, stabs, and rivet-popping punches—with the impacted plates rippling somewhat like dolphin skin and occasionally becoming slightly concave, while the main body of the ship remained mostly on course. Outside the impact zones, the passengers and the crew had felt little apparent resisting shock, as though the Titanic were merely a human hand striking a glancing blow against a sharp instrument.
2
Far from Okay
Crushed and half sunk on the bed of the Atlantic, the Titanic’s entire stern section and most of its debris would eventually be found at latitude 41 degrees 43 minutes north and longitude 49 degrees 56 minutes west (just over 960 miles northeast of Manhattan). Only twelve hours before the convergence of the iceberg and the Titanic, a Marconi operator aboard SS Mesaba had radioed that ice was drifting southward into this same path:
Latitude 41 deg. 50 min. north—Longitude 49 deg. 15 min. west, passed a quantity of bergs, some very large. Also, a field of pack ice about five miles long, with numerous bergs intermixed…. Had to steer about twenty miles south to clear it. The ice seemed to be one solid wall—[of bergs] at least sixteen feet high, as far as could be seen. In Latitude 41 deg. 35 min. north, Longitude 50 deg. 30 [min.] west, we came to the end [of the ice field], and we were again able to steer to the westward [toward the United States].
The airwaves were buzzing with such news. The steamer La Bretange reported, “Latitude 41 deg. 39 min. and Longitude 49 deg. 21 min. [through] 50 deg. 21 min., steamed through an ice field with numerous icebergs for four hours—7:30 to 11:38 a.m.” At 11:52, another ship, the Baltic, reaffirmed what lay in the path of the Titanic’s final resting place, warning, “Icebergs and large quantity of Field Ice today at Lat. 41.51n Longitude 49.52w.” The Baltic’s Marconi operator added that the German oil tank steamer Deutschland—also along the Titanic’s path at latitude 40 degrees 42 minutes north—was no longer under control, it was low on coal, and it was calling out to other steamers.
With the wisdom of perfect hindsight, no one later believed that these clear warnings of danger ahead could have been responded to with anything but increased vigilance.
Down in third class, close to the waterline and approximately forty minutes before impact, Neshan Krekorian became the first and only known survivor positioned low enough to witness the deadly fleet edge-on, along the horizon line. Located in quarters only two decks above the ship’s waterline, he had gone to sleep in a room where heating problems were correctable only after his bunkmates opened both portholes. By 11 p.m., the temperature in the room had shifted from unbearably hot to unbearably cold.