Titanic

To the Lifeboats

In the wheel house, Fourth Officer Boxhall was still waiting impatiently for Quartermaster Rowe to bring the distress rockets. The reason for his impatience lay roughly 10 miles away to port. Once again, Boxhall looked through his binoculars and saw the unmistakable flicker of a ship. Finally when Rowe arrived.
"Fire one, and fire another every five or six minutes," ordered Captain Smith. When the first rocket burst into the sky, it was 12:45AM, April 15, just over an hour since the collision.
"They wouldn't fire rockets at sea for nothing," Emily Ryerson said to her
husband waiting at boat 4.
"Can't you hear the band playing?" said Arthur Ryerson to his wife, hoping to stop her worrying. The ship was still visible, and the sight of it made it hard for Second Officer Lightoller to get people to enter boat 6, just forward of the forward Grand Staircase. He put in only two crewmen into the boat though, fearing a shortage of capable hands. He put Quartermaster Robert Hichens at the tiller (the man who was at the wheel when Titanic struck), and lookout Frederick Fleet, the man who spotted the berg first. When the boat had only two dozen people in it, he ordered the men to stand by the davits to lower. Margaret 'Molly' Brown had just persuaded some of her friends to enter and was leaving to see where else she could help, when a crew man picked her up and dumped her into the boat which was already four feet below.
          When the boat drew level with B deck, Hichens realised that he only had Fleet to manage the oars.
"I can't manage this boat with only one seaman" he called out. Lightoller ordered the men to stop lowering while he decided what to do. He couldn't only not spare anyone, but the boat also was two decks below.
"I'll go, if you like" came a voice from the crowd.
"Are you a seaman?" asked Lightoller.
"I'm a yachtsman, and I can handle a boat with the average man" replied Major Arthur Peuchen from Toronto. After deciding against going down to B deck and entering the boat through there, he swung out hand over hand onto the davit and then climbed down the falls and entered the boat. He was only three days short of his fifty-third birthday.
          Now that boat 6 had been lowered, Lightoller then moved to boat 8, just aft of 6 when an elderly couple approached. They were Mr Isidor and Mrs Ida Straus. Isidor, founder of Macy's department store in New York led his wife to boat 8, but when she put her foot on the side of the boat, she turned back to her husband.
"We have lived together for many years, where you go, I go." Mr Straus begged her to get in, but still she refused.
"No. I will not be seperated from my husband. As we have lived, so shall we die together."
"I'm sure no one would object to an elderly man like Mr Straus taking a seat in the boat," said Hugh Woolner, a London Businessman. "i'll ask the officer".
"I will not go before the other men," replied Isidor firmly, and with that, after giving her stoat to her tearful maid Ellen Bird, Mr and Mrs Straus went to take a seat in some deck chairs.
         Only two dozen people entered boat 8 in the end, and Cheif Officer Wilde began to lead some more women to boat 10 up the boat deck. Ligholler once again put only two men in boat 8, but fearing a repeat of the incident at boat 6, Smith ordered Steward Alfred Crawford and a cook aboard to help with the oars. He ordered seaman Thomas Jones to row for the ship that was still visible a few miles off to port, and told him to leave the passengers there and then row back.
          It was now 1:00, and 5 lifeboats floated nearby to the ship.   Word was spreading throughout the ship via crewmen saying that many ships had heard the distress call, and many ships, including the Olympic would be standing by in an hour. Now, at just after 1:00, lifeboat 1 is lowered. It contains only 12 people, 5 of which are passengers and only 2 of them women. In that boat was first class passengers Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon and his wife Lucile, along with their secritary, lookout George Symons was put in charge. He was told to lay off from the ship and come back when hailed.
          Two Catholic priests from second class were circling around third class offering comfort. They found that many men were in the third class general room playing cards or dancing to a tune played by someone on the piano. Many were also joking, trying to forget the seriousness of the situation.
          By 1:20am, 6 boats had left the Titanic, none of them filled to capacity. Although the scene on the boat deck remained calm, down in the bowels of the ship in boiler room 5, it was a different story. Engineer John Shepard fell into an open manhole while manning the pumps with Engineer Herbert Harvey and Leading Stoker Fred Barrett. Suddenly, the bulkhead between boiler rooms 6 and 5 gave way. Harvey ordered Barrett up the escape ladder while he tried to rescue Shepard. Barrett looked down to see the men engulfed in water, but he could not do anything to help.
          On the starboard boat deck, boat 11 was being lowered. Mrs Nellie Becker passed her two young children into the boat. Her husband was a misionary in India, but the rest of the family were returning to America because of baby Richard's medical condition. When the order was given to lower away, Nellie yelled out "Oh, please let me go with my children!" and with that she got into the boat. Suddenly she realised that her eldest child, 12 year old Ruth Becker was still aboard.
"Ruth", she yelled out. "Get in another boat!". Boat 11 was lowered with 70 people aboard, it's capacity was 65. Just aft of boat 11, boat 13 was being readied.   Ruth asked is she could board, and the seaman in charge simply said "Sure" and picker her up and dumped her in. Also entering boat 13 was Lawrence Beesly, the second class London school teacher.
          Boat 13, now filled to capacity began to be lowered into the sea. When it touched the black water far below, it was washed backwards because of water coming out of a cindencer charge just above the water line. Crewmen fumbled with the falls but because they were so taught due to the wash, they wouldn't detach from the boat. Above them was another boat, number 15. It was being lowered on top of boat 13. Soon, the people in boat 13 was able to touch the botttom of boat 15, but their cries for help were unanswered and the boat continued coming down. Then, a crewman lunged at the falls with a knife, and the small craft silently drifted out from under boat 15, just seconds before it landed only inches away.
          On the port side, Lightoller was still working at the boats. Cheif Officer Wilde came up to him while he was doing so to ask where the firearms were kept. this was Lightoller's duty before the shuffle in Southampton when he worked as First Officer. He led Wilde, Captain Smith and First Officer Murdoch to Murdoch's cabin where the guns were stored. As Lightoller turned to leave, Wilde pushed a gun and some ammunition into his hand.
"Here you are. You may need this". Lightoller didn't think he'd need the gun, but he was to be proved wrong later on.
          While Lightoller worked, Fifth Officer Harold Lowe and Sixth Officer James Moody came up to boat 14. Lowe told Moody that he had seen several boats away, and the next one should have an officer.
"You go. I'll go in a later boat," said Moody to Lowe. For him though, there would be no other boat.
          Lowe, who had ran away from home at the age of 14, spoke to the seaman in charge about the boat, and when he found that he was having trouble keeping the crowd away, Lowe drew his revolver and ordered the boat to be lowered away. On the deck, he could see several men he thought were going to jump, so he fired his revolver over the side of the ship. No one moved. Boat 16 was lowered shortly afterward next to boat 14. The people in the boats were now beginning to realise that they were very lucky to be free from the sinking liner.

Titanic

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