By 11:50, ten minutes after impact, a carpenter came down to join Hemming. The lamp trimmer explained his findings: water seemed to be moving up from below, but he believed the ship to have survived in reasonably okay condition, because the anchor-chain locker and the front storage room appeared to be dry.
“No, it’s far from okay,” the carpenter replied. “She is taking water fast in cargo holds [number] 1 and 2 and all the way past the racquet court.” He explained that the flooding was occurring as far back as boiler room number 6.
“What does this mean?” Hemming asked.
A boatswain climbed down behind the carpenter and explained exactly what it meant: “You’d better turn out [scramble out of here]. Anyone in this part of the ship has a half hour to live—the rest, not very much longer.” The boatswain added that this assessment came from Thomas Andrews, the ship’s designer. “But don’t tell anyone,” the boatswain commanded, adding that the designer and the skipper did not want panic to spread, creating the sort of rush on lifeboats that could easily kill everyone. “And so,” the boatswain advised, “let’s keep it to ourselves.”
3
A Slight Trepidation
As the clock struck midnight, John Hardy and at least two other second-class stewards ran along a wood-paneled corridor, banging desperately on doors. Madeline Mellinger, the thirteen-year-old girl whose father had disappeared in New Zealand, was jolted awake a second time by an unexpected commotion—and by the deck steward’s unusually high-pitched cry of “Get up! Put on warm clothes and hurry on deck with life jackets.” Madeline jumped down from the top bunk and ran to the door, but by then the man had disappeared, and it was too late to ask what he was screaming about.
In later years, Madeline would realize that if she had failed to take the man’s order seriously, or if the Colgates had left her behind in boarding school, she would have become motherless as well as fatherless, because her mother was all but completely deaf and did not hear the knock at the door. Obeying the order, Madeline took the life jackets down from the top of the wardrobe closet, shook her mother awake, and grabbed her hymnal (a going-away gift from her school) and a handful of precious letters. The doll she had hugged every night as she went to sleep was too large to carry with the rest of her load, so she tucked it gently into a storage hammock on the cabin wall.
As the Mellingers made their way toward the top deck and toward what was to become the remarkable journey of boat 14, Madeline did not yet believe that they were leaving their room for the last time, so she barely noticed that her mother was wearing only a nightgown and a heavy fur coat but no shoes. For years to come, she would often express feelings of guilt about her mother’s frozen feet. She also began to feel bad about leaving the doll behind the moment she heard adults speculating that the water beneath the Titanic was more than two miles deep and that sunlight could never reach the bottom. Even when she was in her seventies, Madeline was haunted by thoughts of her childhood companion: images of her lovely doll sitting among silently deteriorating curtains and wall panels, all alone in the night—forever.
Among the moments Steward Hardy would keep coming back to, in his seventies, were the odd questions of his American examiners.
“When did you ship with the Titanic?” Senator Duncan Fletcher asked.
“I shipped with her on her last voyage,” Hardy replied.
“In what capacity?”
“As second-class steward.”
“Did anything unusual happen on that voyage?” the senator asked.
That probably depended, Hardy supposed, on whether being awakened by an iceberg and then being roused by Purser Reginald Barker from first class—who normally never came down to second class—counted as anything unusual. No, nothing out of the ordinary happened until about that time, Hardy told the senator.
The Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackelton had no doubts about what happened to the Titanic and why. He knew that without moonlight over a dark sea on which no successions of waves were breaking at the feet of icebergs, there could be no starlight reflected from white foam and no disturbance of bioluminescent marine animals like comb jellies to reveal an iceberg a mile away. He knew from experience that on excessively calm nights sea ice became “black ice,” and a skipper did not want the eyes of his ship looking down from an angle more then ninety feet high in the crow’s nest, but rather from low in the bow of the ship, looking out from a point as near as possible to Krekorian’s angle, across the surface of the sea toward the starlit horizon.
Shackelton also knew from experience that on a night with no wind, the sudden drop of air temperatures, which had sent the passengers indoors less than two hours before impact, was a clear indication that the Titanic was approaching an ice field, if the warnings from the Baltic and La Bretange were not already enough. Passenger Emily Ryerson had thought that Bruce Ismay, the Titanic’s owner, was rebuffing her after he showed her one of the ice warnings and after she responded with a suggestion that the Titanic should be slowed down, but Shackelton knew that had Ismay or anyone else in his industry listened to his passenger, he might never have been called to explain to Lord Mercey’s committee how the Titanic came to be the subject of bio-archaeology for explorers of the future.
“And you think all these liners are wrong,” the examiner asked the explorer, “in following the accepted standard of putting the danger quickly behind by going at top speed in regions where ice is reported?”
The examiner turned incredulous when Shackelton explained that in the vicinity of Antarctic ice he had slowed his research vessel—which had been built specifically to resist ice—to only four knots.
“Then where did that get you to?” the examiner asked.
“We got very near the South Pole, my lord.” He did not have to emphasize that they got there and back alive.
The examiner pressed the question: Whether he was in an icebreaker or in a ship whose floatability had been enhanced by dividing it into a series of watertight containers, would he slow down?
“I would slow down, yes,” Shackelton replied.
“And supposing you were going twenty-one and three quarters to twenty-two knots?”
The explorer summed it up in thirteen words: “You have no right to go at that speed in an ice zone.”
“I think the damage is serious,” Barker said, and then he brought Hardy forward and showed him a flooded crew compartment stairwell in which the water was rising much faster than it would be in a small bathtub with the faucets opened all the way. At the top of the stairs, a newly installed water fountain for the firemen and the coal trimmers was about to be overtaken by this unnatural indoor tide. Even after Hardy was asked to assist in closing additional watertight doors along F deck, he still had confidence that the Titanic would remain afloat.
Hardy had been advised by Barker to get the passengers on deck with their life jackets—“just as a precaution.” As he ran along a second-class corridor, he personally woke passengers in at least twenty cabins by loudly banging on their doors while shouting, “Everybody on deck with life belts on, at once.” He was most likely the mysterious savior who woke young Madeline Mellinger.
Unlike Madeline and her mother, the entire Laroche family had slept through the impact and were not awakened until a steward banged on the door and ordered them up to the top deck. To Juliette Laroche, the ship had seemed from the very first day to be “a monster,” as she wrote in a letter to her father, posted from Queenstown, Ireland, on April 11, 1912. Although Juliette’s nonwhite husband, Joseph, was not permitted to hold a first-class ticket, the prejudicial norms of the Gilded Age had played no role in the inception, from day one, of her belief that something wicked had come into her life, clothed in steel. Her concerns went deeper than the physical surroundings of second-class accommodations—which she found to be wonderful, externally. Indeed, Juliette echoed the consensus view that the arrangements in second class could not have been more comfortable were they traveling first-class on another ship.