For Joughin’s refusing Murdoch’s order to save himself and Thomas Andrews’s actions: Lord and Graham commenting on Jessop’s observations, L/P file, pp. 703, 707, 708–710. The 66 to 75 percent figure is consistent with the prior Quinn chronology, revealing Murdoch as a key rescuer, in Paul J. Quinn, Dusk to Dawn (Hollis, NH: Fantail Press, 1999), 125, 178. The identifications of Murdoch aft and on the port side rely on people who personally knew him, including Jessop and Joughin, and not on people likely to have confused him with another officer. The Quinn analysis led us, during Expedition Titanic XIII, to add a line spoken by James Cameron in his film, Ghosts of the Abyss, honoring the all too frequently maligned Murdoch.
Annie Robinson’s experience of a previous shipwreck appears in the British Inquiry, May 20, 1912, p. 299. Wyn Craig Wade, Titanic: End of a Dream (New York: Penguin, 1979), 280, described the accounts of new ropes and new paint jamming the davits, and Henry Sleeper Harper described the “biolumes” flashing to life in “The True Story of the Disaster,” Harper’s Weekly, Apr. 27, 1912.
George Harris’s rescue efforts with Joughin, and his own ultimate rescue by Murdoch: letter from Harris to Bill MacQuitty, Dec. 16, 1956, with 1992 annotations, derived from MacQuitty’s interview with Harris, L/P file, pp. 560–561; Charles Joughin, British Inquiry, May 10, 1912, p. 140.
Dr. Will O’Loughlin’s unusual prescription for how to face death indoors after rescue work was completed: Charles Joughin, letter to Walter Lord, 1955, L/P file, p. 426;George Harris, letter to Bill MacQuitty, Dec. 16, 1956, L/P file, p. 561; letter from Mary Sloan to her sister, written aboard the SS Lapland, Apr. 27, 1912, p. 2, L/P file, pp. 310–311. The surgeon’s “drink heavily” advice seemed universal, as noted by Walter Lord, Sept. 13, 1993, p. 4, L/P file, p. 33.
Maude Slocomb’s rescue by Joseph Wheat, and her observations at one of the last boats: Wheat, British Inquiry, May 16, 1912, pp. 240–243; Slocomb, interview by Walter Lord, July 1955, L/P file, p. 268.
On the curious fate of George Rheims and Joe Loring: correspondence between Loring’s daughter and Walter Lord, Apr. 1987, L/P file, pp. 421–423; letter from Rheims to his wife, Apr. 19, 1912, p. 1, L/P file, p. 232; Joseph Scarrott, British Inquiry, May 3, 1912, p. 23. The timing described in the Rheims account is indicative of two to three minutes between the impact and the first sighting of the iceberg on the starboard side, and it is consistent with Scarrott’s account of what appeared to be a second iceberg sighted as the Titanic stopped. It is also consistent with several icebergs encountered by lifeboats casting off from the Titanic.
The sad case of young Alfred Rush was discussed in detail, as the full story became available from the Goldsmith family, by Walter Lord, Sept. 13, 1993, annotated transcript, pp. 10, 13, L/P file, pp. 40, 42A. In a letter from Frank Goldsmith to Walter Lord, Nov. 28, 1955, L/P file, p. 453, Goldsmith suggested that the boat he and his mother left the Titanic in was on the port side (boat D), not the starboard side (boat C).
The evidence points to a departure in boat C, however. Boat D departed about 2:05 a.m. while the port side of the bridge was submerging nearby (Goldsmith never reported seeing this). Boat C departed on the starboard side before boat D, yet still beyond the point at which the extreme list to port had taken control of the lowerings. On the port side, people had to step across a gap to boats that were leaning away from the ship: Charles Joughin, British Inquiry, May 10, 1912, p. 140. On the starboard side, the boats scraped against the Titanic’s hull while lowering.
In another letter from Goldsmith to Lord, Oct. 15, 1970, L/P file, p. 461, Goldsmith again described the intense list of the Titanic near the end, with the lifeboat leaning into the ship so hard that it caught at least three times on the rivets and plates—“nearly tipping us out into the water.” However, he described the tilt in the wrong direction (to starboard), and though recalling correctly that his lifeboat must have left on the side of the ship opposite the tilt, he appeared to have reversed sides in his memory (from the starboard side to the port side and boat D). Further verification that Murdoch would have allowed sixteen-year-old Rush and even Frank Goldsmith’s father into the starboard forward boat is recorded by Susanne Stormer, The Biography of William McMaster Murdoch (Kosel, Germany: Hans Christian Andersen, 1995), 114–115.
Don Lynch’s poignant discussion of Thomas Andrews, Bruce Ismay, and the decision to remove extra lifeboats from the Titanic’s design was recorded by James Cameron, Ghosts of the Abyss, DVD, Walden Media/Disney, 2003.
The departure of Henry Harper’s boat, the characterization of some men jumping into descending lifeboats as brave (depending on race or national origin), and the drawing of guns by officers against passengers: Henry Sleeper Harper, “The True Story of the Disaster,” Harper’s Weekly, Apr. 27, 1912; Masabumi Hosono, letter to his wife, Apr. 1912, in M. Findlay, “A Matter of Honor,” Voyage 27, Winter 1998, pp. 122, 124.
The desperate measures adopted by William Murdoch and Charles Joughin at the aft portside lifeboats: Colonel Archibald Gracie, in Jack Winocour, ed., The Story of the Titanic as Told by Its Survivors (New York: Dover, 1960), 187; Charles Joughin, British Inquiry, May 10, 1912, p. 140.
Regarding the reference to the “penny dreadful” Morgan Robertson novels: Morgan Robertson was a weak stylist and, as was culturally acceptable at the time, openly anti-Semitic. Although several of his predictions came to naught, sometimes he had the uncanny knack of being more accurate than Nostradamus. In his novel Beyond the Spectrum, which he wrote in 1914, Japanese Americans were imprisoned in camps on U.S. soil, and Japan was defeated in a global air and naval war by America’s use of a weapon that destroyed with a blinding light. The war began when Japanese planes bombed American bases in Manila and Hawaii on a December morning.
In 1898, Robertson had written Futility; it was about a ship called the Titan that sank one April night after striking an iceberg on the starboard side. “Fourteen years later,” wrote Walter Lord in his preface to A Night to Remember (New York: Holt, 1955), “a British shipping company named the White Star Line built a ship remarkably like the one in Robertson’s novel. The new liner was 66,000 tons displacement; Robertson’s was 70,000. The real ship was 882.5 feet long; the fictional one was 800 feet. Both vessels were triple screw and could make 24–25 knots. Both could carry about 3,000 people, and both had enough lifeboats for only a fraction of this number. But, then, this didn’t seem to matter because both were labeled ‘unsinkable.’”
Charles Joughin’s possible witnessing, at 1:20 a.m. of the first breaking of the ship, is recorded in his testimony to the British Inquiry, May 10, 1912, pp. 144–145. His actions and observations are further recorded in a personal communication with Lord, annotated with Lord’s assessment of Joughin’s subsequent last run through third class, snatching up children and refusing orders to save himself in a lifeboat: L/P file, pp. 31, 426.