The Loss of the S.S. Titanic by Lawrence Beesley (readnow .txt) 📖

river.

 

We now moved slowly ahead and passed the Teutonic at a creeping pace,

but notwithstanding this, the latter strained at her ropes so much

that she heeled over several degrees in her efforts to follow the

Titanic: the crowd were shouted back, a group of gold-braided

officials, probably the harbour-master and his staff, standing on the

sea side of the moored ropes, jumped back over them as they drew up

taut to a rigid line, and urged the crowd back still farther. But we

were just clear, and as we slowly turned the corner into the river I

saw the Teutonic swing slowly back into her normal station, relieving

the tension alike of the ropes and of the minds of all who witnessed

the incident.

 

[Illustration: FOUR DECKS OF OLYMPIC, SISTER SHIP OF TITANIC]

 

Unpleasant as this incident was, it was interesting to all the

passengers leaning over the rails to see the means adopted by the

officers and crew of the various vessels to avoid collision, to see on

the Titanic’s docking-bridge (at the stern) an officer and seamen

telephoning and ringing bells, hauling up and down little red and

white flags, as danger of collision alternately threatened and

diminished. No one was more interested than a young American

kinematograph photographer, who, with his wife, followed the whole

scene with eager eyes, turning the handle of his camera with the most

evident pleasure as he recorded the unexpected incident on his films.

It was obviously quite a windfall for him to have been on board at

such a time. But neither the film nor those who exposed it reached the

other side, and the record of the accident from the Titanic’s deck has

never been thrown on the screen.

 

As we steamed down the river, the scene we had just witnessed was the

topic of every conversation: the comparison with the Olympic-Hawke

collision was drawn in every little group of passengers, and it seemed

to be generally agreed that this would confirm the suction theory

which was so successfully advanced by the cruiser Hawke in the law

courts, but which many people scoffed at when the British Admiralty

first suggested it as the explanation of the cruiser ramming the

Olympic. And since this is an attempt to chronicle facts as they

happened on board the Titanic, it must be recorded that there were

among the passengers and such of the crew as were heard to speak on

the matter, the direst misgivings at the incident we had just

witnessed. Sailors are proverbially superstitious; far too many people

are prone to follow their lead, or, indeed, the lead of any one who

asserts a statement with an air of conviction and the opportunity of

constant repetition; the sense of mystery that shrouds a prophetic

utterance, particularly if it be an ominous one (for so constituted

apparently is the human mind that it will receive the impress of an

evil prophecy far more readily than it will that of a beneficent one,

possibly through subservient fear to the thing it dreads, possibly

through the degraded, morbid attraction which the sense of evil has

for the innate evil in the human mind), leads many people to pay a

certain respect to superstitious theories. Not that they wholly

believe in them or would wish their dearest friends to know they ever

gave them a second thought; but the feeling that other people do so

and the half conviction that there “may be something in it, after

all,” sways them into tacit obedience to the most absurd and childish

theories. I wish in a later chapter to discuss the subject of

superstition in its reference to our life on board the Titanic, but

will anticipate events here a little by relating a second so-called

“bad omen” which was hatched at Queenstown. As one of the tenders

containing passengers and mails neared the Titanic, some of those on

board gazed up at the liner towering above them, and saw a stoker’s

head, black from his work in the stokehold below, peering out at them

from the top of one of the enormous funnels—a dummy one for

ventilation—that rose many feet above the highest deck. He had

climbed up inside for a joke, but to some of those who saw him there

the sight was seed for the growth of an “omen,” which bore fruit in an

unknown dread of dangers to come. An American lady—may she forgive me

if she reads these lines!—has related to me with the deepest

conviction and earnestness of manner that she saw the man and

attributes the sinking of the Titanic largely to that. Arrant

foolishness, you may say! Yes, indeed, but not to those who believe in

it; and it is well not to have such prophetic thoughts of danger

passed round among passengers and crew: it would seem to have an

unhealthy influence.

 

We dropped down Spithead, past the shores of the Isle of Wight looking

superbly beautiful in new spring foliage, exchanged salutes with a

White Star tug lying-to in wait for one of their liners inward bound,

and saw in the distance several warships with attendant black

destroyers guarding the entrance from the sea. In the calmest weather

we made Cherbourg just as it grew dusk and left again about 8.30,

after taking on board passengers and mails. We reached Queenstown

about 12 noon on Thursday, after a most enjoyable passage across the

Channel, although the wind was almost too cold to allow of sitting out

on deck on Thursday morning.

 

The coast of Ireland looked very beautiful as we approached Queenstown

Harbour, the brilliant morning sun showing up the green hillsides and

picking out groups of dwellings dotted here and there above the rugged

grey cliffs that fringed the coast. We took on board our pilot, ran

slowly towards the harbour with the sounding-line dropping all the

time, and came to a stop well out to sea, with our screws churning up

the bottom and turning the sea all brown with sand from below. It had

seemed to me that the ship stopped rather suddenly, and in my

ignorance of the depth of the harbour entrance, that perhaps the

sounding-line had revealed a smaller depth than was thought safe for

the great size of the Titanic: this seemed to be confirmed by the

sight of sand churned up from the bottom—but this is mere

supposition. Passengers and mails were put on board from two tenders,

and nothing could have given us a better idea of the enormous length

and bulk of the Titanic than to stand as far astern as possible and

look over the side from the top deck, forwards and downwards to where

the tenders rolled at her bows, the merest cockleshells beside the

majestic vessel that rose deck after deck above them. Truly she was a

magnificent boat! There was something so graceful in her movement as

she rode up and down on the slight swell in the harbour, a slow,

stately dip and recover, only noticeable by watching her bows in

comparison with some landmark on the coast in the near distance; the

two little tenders tossing up and down like corks beside her

illustrated vividly the advance made in comfort of motion from the

time of the small steamer.

 

Presently the work of transfer was ended, the tenders cast off, and at

1.30 P.M., with the screws churning up the sea bottom again, the

Titanic turned slowly through a quarter-circle until her nose pointed

down along the Irish coast, and then steamed rapidly away from

Queenstown, the little house on the left of the town gleaming white on

the hillside for many miles astern. In our wake soared and screamed

hundreds of gulls, which had quarrelled and fought over the remnants

of lunch pouring out of the waste pipes as we lay-to in the harbour

entrance; and now they followed us in the expectation of further

spoil. I watched them for a long time and was astonished at the ease

with which they soared and kept up with the ship with hardly a motion

of their wings: picking out a particular gull, I would keep him under

observation for minutes at a time and see no motion of his wings

downwards or upwards to aid his flight. He would tilt all of a piece

to one side or another as the gusts of wind caught him: rigidly

unbendable, as an aeroplane tilts sideways in a puff of wind. And yet

with graceful ease he kept pace with the Titanic forging through the

water at twenty knots: as the wind met him he would rise upwards and

obliquely forwards, and come down slantingly again, his wings curved

in a beautiful arch and his tail feathers outspread as a fan. It was

plain that he was possessed of a secret we are only just beginning to

learn—that of utilizing air-currents as escalators up and down which

he can glide at will with the expenditure of the minimum amount of

energy, or of using them as a ship does when it sails within one or

two points of a head wind. Aviators, of course, are imitating the

gull, and soon perhaps we may see an aeroplane or a glider dipping

gracefully up and down in the face of an opposing wind and all the

time forging ahead across the Atlantic Ocean. The gulls were still

behind us when night fell, and still they screamed and dipped down

into the broad wake of foam which we left behind; but in the morning

they were gone: perhaps they had seen in the night a steamer bound for

their Queenstown home and had escorted her back.

 

All afternoon we steamed along the coast of Ireland, with grey cliffs

guarding the shores, and hills rising behind gaunt and barren; as dusk

fell, the coast rounded away from us to the northwest, and the last we

saw of Europe was the Irish mountains dim and faint in the dropping

darkness. With the thought that we had seen the last of land until we

set foot on the shores of America, I retired to the library to write

letters, little knowing that many things would happen to us all—many

experiences, sudden, vivid and impressive to be encountered, many

perils to be faced, many good and true people for whom we should have

to mourn—before we saw land again.

 

There is very little to relate from the time of leaving Queenstown on

Thursday to Sunday morning. The sea was calm,—so calm, indeed,

that very few were absent from meals: the wind westerly and

southwesterly,—“fresh” as the daily chart described it,—but often

rather cold, generally too cold to sit out on deck to read or write,

so that many of us spent a good part of the time in the library,

reading and writing. I wrote a large number of letters and posted them

day by day in the box outside the library door: possibly they are

there yet.

 

Each morning the sun rose behind us in a sky of circular clouds,

stretching round the horizon in long, narrow streaks and rising tier

upon tier above the skyline, red and pink and fading from pink to

white, as the sun rose higher in the sky. It was a beautiful sight to

one who had not crossed the ocean before (or indeed been out of sight

of the shores of England) to stand on the top deck and watch the swell

of the sea extending outwards from the ship in an unbroken circle

until it met the skyline with its hint of infinity: behind, the wake

of the vessel white with foam where, fancy suggested, the propeller

blades had cut up the long Atlantic rollers and with them made a level

white road bounded on either side by banks of green, blue, and

blue-green waves that would presently sweep away the