Further indications of the ship’s flooding conditions at this time were provided in a Frank Prentice interview by Walter Lord, p. 2, L/P file, p. 649, and the first real attempt to assess the role of open portholes was discussed by Ken Marschall, L/P file, p. 129B. Frank Prentice was one of the people aboard who mentioned having his porthole open at the moment of impact. It is unknown whether he latched it closed. He probably did, for the flood through the porthole would have been equal to about 10 percent of the initial iceberg damage, and water should thus have been pouring in, at 1:20 a.m., with the force of several fire hoses opened to full power.
Prentice’s room was located just in front of Joughin’s room, and surely Joughin would have noticed this as the source of the leak if water were gushing out of Prentice’s door and down the slant of the deck, away from his room. Instead, Joughin reported to the British Inquiry, May 10, 1912, pp. 145, 147, that it was essentially a trickle coming down to his room, with no associated sound of a gush nearby. At 1:27 a.m., the Titanic’s two Marconi operators sent out a message hauntingly consistent with Joughin’s observations, as noted by John Durant, a Marconi operator aboard the Mount Temple, to the British Inquiry, May 15, 1912, pp. 212–213.
There was much discussion in this portion of the British Inquiry about the Marconi operators’ and the engineers’ understanding of specifically which engine room was taking water at this time, with a focus on the reciprocating engine room (the entire front part of the reciprocating engine room did indeed break away). In the files of Bill MacQuitty, assembled for the City Heritage Collection, Titanic Marconi operator Harold Bride clarified that at approximately 1:30 a.m., he was sending out a warning about flooding in the aft engine rooms. He told the following to D. Hyslop et al., Titanic Voices (Southampton, UK: Southampton City Council, 1994), 150: “The list forward was increasing. [Jack] Phillips told me the wireless was growing weaker. The captain [who certainly knew an engine room from a boiler room, noting also that the dynamos were aft of the boilers] came and told us that our engine rooms were taking water and that the dynamos might not last much longer.”
Masabumi Hosono’s preparations for the end, and the events in boat 10, are recorded in his letter to his wife, Apr. 1912, in M. Findlay, “A Matter of Honor,” Voyage 27, Winter 1998, p. 122; Charles Joughin, British Inquiry, May 10, 1912, p. 141; and William Burke, American Inquiry, Apr. 26, 1912, p. 822.
M. Findlay, “Solving the Mystery of Mr. Hosono’s Lifeboat,” Voyage 27, Winter 1998, pp. 124, 130, provides the last name of the man who entered boat 10 with Hosono: Krekorian. Colonel Archibald Gracie, in Jack Winocour, ed., The Story of the Titanic as Told by Its Survivors (New York: Dover, 1960), listed the last boats and the people in them: boat 10, p. 186; boat 14, p. 190; boat 4, pp. 202–203; boat D, p. 211; boat C, p. 258; and boat 13, p. 253.
Gracie automatically listed surviving men of non-Anglo-Saxon races and certain nationalities as “stowaways.” In boat 4, Gracie listed a Frenchman as a “stowaway,” but aside from the male crew assigned to the boat, all of the passengers were women and children except for three men who were described by Martha Stephenson as “dropped off the ship and . . . swimming towards us [as boat 4 pulled away]”: Jack Winocour, ed., The Story of the Titanic as Told by Its Survivors (New York: Dover, 1960), 209. These appear to be the only three candidates for Gracie’s branding of a French “stowaway.”
In her letter to Colonel Gracie, Stephenson had written unfavorably about one of the jumper-swimmers: “One man was drunk and had a bottle of brandy in his pocket which the quartermaster promptly threw overboard and the drunken man was promptly thrown into the bottom of the boat and a blanket thrown over him.” Gracie’s comments about “the coolness, courage, and sense of duty… of my Anglo-Saxon race,” appear on page 132 of Winocour.
Lawrence Beesley’s account is also published in Winocour (pp. 37, 142, 253). On the same boat with Beesley was Millvina Dean’s mother, who gives an account of the women in boat 13 who threatened violence against a nonwhite survivor: Roger Ailes interview with Millvina Dean and Charles Pellegrino, Fox News, Sept. 1994, L/P file, p. 662.
The long years of shame and ridicule that Hosono faced as a nonwhite male survivor because of Gracie and the press: “Letter Rectifies Decades of Shame of Japanese Titanic Survivor,” Arizona Daily Star, Dec. 21, 1997, p. 20. Juliette Laroche and her two children were in the same boat with Hosono: O. Mendez, Titanic Commutator 24, no. 149 (Nov. 2000): 46–48; and Judith Geller, Titanic: Women and Children First (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 96.
In a lifeboat forward of Juliette Laroche and Hosono, Emily Ryerson witnessed an open D-deck porthole “and the water rushing in”: affidavit, American Inquiry, p. 1107.
The bias against certain races and nationalities aboard the Titanic was so acceptable in Edwardian society as to be openly preached from the pulpit and published in such prominent papers as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In the published sermons, religious leaders took particular exception to the making of “mulatto” children by men like Joseph Laroche: “Dr. C. Parkhurst’s Strong Words—Men and Religion: A Horrible Marine Massacre,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Apr. 22, 1912, p. 3. One preacher, invoking the biblical prophet Ezekiel, blamed wealth: “Their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver them,” suggesting that God struck down the Titanic because its passengers were wealthy, notwithstanding the fact that the highest mortality was suffered by the poor. Celiney Yasbeck’s observations from boat 6, and the census of women and children lost in third class, upholds this statistic: Judith Geller, Titanic: Women and Children First (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 181; Yasbeck, letter to Walter Lord, June 15, 1955, p. 3, L/P file, pp. 226–227.
Marjorie Newell watched lights going off throughout the ship: M. Newell Robb, personal communication, 1991; J. Fuoco, “Memories of a Terrible Night,” Mystic Museum, 1991, L/P file, pp. 131–132. Referring to a possible attempt by the engineers to conserve power for the Marconi apparatus and the boat-deck lights, Bill MacQuitty cited a letter from Alfred White to the family of William Parr, June 21, 1912, L/P file, pp. 182–186. During the filming of A Night to Remember, MacQuitty learned additional details from family member Frank Johnston, including corroboration of White’s story of having been instructed, near the end, to bring up more service power.
Possible archaeological corroboration of what Newell and White saw: Parks Stephenson recorded evidence of surge-and-burn effects during his 2005 dive. In a letter to author, Dec. 24, 2010, he wrote: “Just outside the Marconi Room, we found an electrical distribution panel that had suffered a brief fire, melting some (but not all) fuse holders and scorching a portion of the panel. The dousing of the lights could be due to something similar—a localized electrical casualty could cause some lights to fail while others stayed on.”