From the moment the iceberg was sighted, there was very little that could be done to save the ship. Conceivably, there was no time even to begin steering, and the Titanic struck at precisely the angle at which it was aimed when the countdown to zero began.
Quartermaster Olliver stood by in silent disbelief as First Officer Murdoch assured Captain Smith that all of the watertight doors were closed. Olliver also witnessed the skipper ordering the engines forward at half speed, for several minutes, during which the ship probably advanced about half a mile.
Able Seaman Joseph Scarrott had felt the entire forecastle shiver, almost simultaneously with the confusion of three bells warning of danger straight ahead, and amid enough vibration and pummeling of the hull to wake anyone in the berths below. Scarrott ran down several decks to tell a friend that something had just gone frighteningly amiss. A groggy voice told him to go away and not to come back unless it turned out to be something important.
By the time Scarrott climbed to the top of the forecastle, the Titanic was steaming smoothly forward again. There was freshly broken ice lying on the forecastle roof, and whole truckload amounts of ice were strewn along the starboard side of the well deck. When Scarrott looked over the rail, he saw an iceberg that he believed must have been the one the bow had just struck, passing not very far behind the bridge, but this could not possibly have been the case.
At a velocity of nearly forty feet per second, the iceberg that created the actual lesions and punctures in the hull had passed from the point of the bow, beyond the bridge and almost to the second smokestack, in all of ten seconds. Twelve seconds after that, it passed Quartermaster Rowe on the after-bridge, then disappeared astern. The able seaman’s trip two or three decks down to the crews’ berths, his waking of a friend, the quick rebuke, and his return to the top deck took considerably longer than the ten-second interval in which the iceberg would have remained plainly visible from the forecastle.
Scarrott recalled for the examiners that several “minutes” might have been involved; and actual minutes must indeed have been involved in his mission of warning the sleeping crew on the lower decks. By the time he returned to the top, it seemed to him as though the ship was still trying to make an evasive, circling maneuver around the iceberg. Then the Titanic stopped, very near to its final resting place.
What Scarrott most likely saw was a second iceberg; because very soon after impact, the Titanic was steaming forward at half speed, through an ice field no less densely populated than the eastern fringe of bergs that Neshan Krekorian had observed nearly forty-five minutes earlier. The sighting of a second iceberg (if this was indeed what Scarrott saw) was certainly a powerful enough signal to the bridge that the Titanic must now be surrounded by hull-piercing bergs and that this would diminish even the hope of sighting another ship and steaming toward it, should the damage turn out to be life-threatening.
By this time, Swedish passenger August Wennerstrom and several of his traveling companions were finding the jolt that bounced them awake in the bow section more amusing than dangerous. They ran all the way back to the third-class smoking room, located just under the after-bridge, where Quartermaster Rowe remained at his post awaiting instructions from the bridge. Wennerstrom and his friends had hoped to find something to drink, to celebrate the exciting “talk of an iceberg,” the stopping of the ship, and what was sure to be an extra day or two of better than average accommodations and all the free food one could eat.
Finding the smoking room’s beer service closed down for the night, and with little else to do except wait and see if the Titanic’s engines were going to start up again, they lit cigarettes and played the piano. Even witnessing a group of Italian immigrants entering the room with life jackets and uttering prayers to Maria failed to darken their spirits. The Swedes sang louder and started dancing in a circle around the distressed Italians.
Far in front of the party in the smoking room, just a few steps to the rear of the spiral stairs on G deck, twenty-one-year-old Daniel Buckley had jumped out of his lower bunk the moment he felt the crash. Even as Quartermaster Olliver saw the helm reverse and the iceberg pass astern, water began running over Buckley’s shoes. Colder than the steel deck plates, foot-cramping cold, the water was trying to rise against bed frames and cabin walls.
“You’d better get up,” Buckley told his three cabinmates. “There’s something wrong.”
They had all been awakened by the collision, but they had all come aboard with total confidence in the world’s largest new steamer, regarded by the press and by Edwardian culture to be the virtually unsinkable pinnacle of technology’s achievements. Buckley’s bunkmates merely laughed at him.
“Get back into bed,” one of them taunted. “You are not in Ireland anymore.”
Buckley put on some warm clothing and ran up, in his wet shoes, from G deck to the forwardmost of the ship’s two well decks. He arrived not very far from the place where Joseph Scarrott had stood alone atop the forecastle, watching the Titanic come slowly to a stop after skirting what appeared to be a second iceberg. There were more people arriving on deck now, more and more of them. Few seemed to be taking the several tons of ice on the well deck very seriously. The icefall had occurred on what was normally an outdoor recreation area for the steerage passengers, and many of Buckley’s fellow travelers were launching themselves into impromptu games of ice hockey and not-so-playful ice-ball fights.
Buckley’s mind was working on an altogether different assessment of danger, and it occurred to him that life jackets might soon be needed on the playground, so he decided to head down again to G deck, where he knew he could count on coming back with at least four life jackets from his cabin. At the bottom of the stairs he encountered an unexpected barrier. The water had swallowed the stairs at least four steps deep and was lapping toward his feet as he watched. The four life jackets—along with everything Buckley owned that was not presently in his pockets—were already disappearing into the Atlantic.
In the next compartment forward, lamp trimmer Samuel Hemming discovered equally disturbing signatures of disaster. Although he was not quite ready to believe in signs that were plainly readable, he knew better than most people exactly what was occurring. More than four hours earlier, as he was leaving the bridge for some much-needed sleep, First Officer Murdoch had told him, “When you go forward, get the fore scuttle hatch closed.” Hemming looked ahead, toward the hatch between the anchor chains. “There should be no glow coming from that,” Murdoch explained, “as we are in the vicinity of ice, and I want everything dark before the bridge.”
Hemming had closed the hatch himself before retiring to his bunk, but a burst of air pressure from below had blown it open again, at essentially the same moment the crash woke him. By the time he ran to an open porthole and looked outside, the iceberg had disappeared aft, leaving behind only the loud hissing of escaping air. Hemming traced the source of the hiss to the bottom of the forecastle head, in the storeroom compartment nearest the point of the bow, immediately in front of the double-hulled sides of the locker where the anchor chains were stored. In this region of the ship, every hull section was doubly layered, from the very bottom all the way up the sides—yet underfoot, water was flooding into the tank space above the keel. Air was shooting out of the tank compartment as though through a high-pressure exhaust line. Lamp trimmer Hemming was now witness to the foremost damage caused by the collision.