When the Great Ship Went Down

By Otto Friedrich

The collision seemed nothing more than a mild jolt. It felt, said Lady Cosmo Duff Gordon, "as though somebody had drawn a giant finger along the side of the ship." She started up in bed, but everything was quiet, so she lay back again. It was 11:40 p.m. Up in the first-class smoking room, where a group of young men were playing a last few rounds of cards, the grinding sound disturbed the game. Several of the players wandered out into the freezing night to take a look. "We hit an iceberg--there it is," somebody said. As the players looked toward the rear, they could see a dark mountain of ice receding into the distance. They went back to their game, and the ship sailed majestically on.

The Titanic was her name, the largest and most luxurious ocean liner afloat. She weighed 46,328 gross tons and was 882.5 ft., roughly 3 1/2 city blocks long. Her engines, developing 55,000 h.p., could drive the Titanic at a speed of up to 25 knots. And the luxury suites (price: $4,350 for an Atlantic crossing) contained elegant furnishings, sumptuous draperies and even private promenade decks.

The great ship was considered unsinkable. She had a double bottom and 16 watertight compartments. Mrs. Albert Caldwell later remembered that she had asked one of the deckhands whether the Titanic was truly unsinkable. "Yes, lady," he had said, "God himself could not sink this ship." With that air of invincibility, the Titanic set forth on her maiden voyage on April 10, 1912. Her route lay from Southampton, England, to Cherbourg, France, Queenstown, Ireland, and New York City. She carried 2,207 people, and lifeboats for only 1,178.

The unsinkable Titanic had received and dismissed warnings about icebergs, according to Walter Lord's celebrated account, A Night to Remember. She was invulnerable if as many as four of her watertight compartments were flooded. But the 300-ft. gash inflicted by the iceberg inundated five compartments. Water poured into the mail room and swirled knee deep around the postal workers as they tried to haul sacks of mail to a higher deck. When word of the leaks reached the bridge, somebody asked Captain Edward J. Smith whether he thought the ship was seriously damaged. He paused, then slowly said, "I'm afraid she is."

Confronting the unthinkable, Smith had to move gradually from disbelief to doubt to desperation. It was 12:05 a.m. when he ordered all passengers mustered on deck, 12:15 when the first call for help was sent out on the wireless, 12:45 when the first of 20 lifeboats was lowered.

Then began that elaborate ritual of women and children first. "It's all right, little girl," Dan Marvin said to his bride as he escorted her to one of the boats. "You go and I'll stay awhile." She never saw him again. "Walter, you must come with me," pleaded Mrs. Walter Douglas. "No, I must be a gentleman," said Douglas, turning away. Mrs. Isidor Straus, wife of the co-owner of Macy's, refused to be separated. "I've always stayed with my husband, so why should I leave him now?" she said.

Passengers on the lower decks were not given a choice, and so, while almost all the women in first class escaped, nearly half of those in third class drowned. There was also an element of happenstance. Boat No. 1, which could have held 40 people, departed with only twelve. While John Jacob Astor went stoically to his death, Henry Sleeper Harper managed to find lifeboat room not just for himself but for his Pekingese, Sun Yat-sen, and an Egyptian dragoman he was bringing home on a whim. Benjamin Guggenheim changed into evening clothes for the occasion, and so did his valet. "We've dressed in our best," Guggenheim said, "and are prepared to go down like gentlemen."

The end came quickly. Just an hour and a half after the first boat got away, the stern of the Titanic towered up out of the water. The passengers in the lifeboats could hear the screams of those they had left behind. And the crashing sound of everything breaking loose, the five grand pianos, the ice- making machine, dozens of potted palms. At 2:20, with a few of her red and green running lights still aglow, the Titanic suddenly slipped beneath the waves. Nobody knows exactly how many lives she took with her. The best estimate: 1,503.