A Night To Remember by Walter Lord tells the story of the Titanic tragedy.
The novel opens with the sighting of an iceberg dead ahead by Frederick Fleet from the Crow's nest of the new White Star liner, Titanic. Immediately Fleet rang the Crow's nest bell three time and called the bridge to let them know. At the last minute the bow began to turn to port and the ship seemed to clear the iceberg.
Quartermaster George Thomas Rowe saw the towering iceberg slide by the starboard side on the after bridge. In the First Class dining saloon on D Deck, empty except for four crew members, a "faint grinding jar seemed to come from somewhere deep inside the ship..." Enough to paus their gossiping about the passengers.
In the galley, the sudden jar caused the new rolls Chief Night Baker Walter Belford was making to roll onto the floor. Passengers also felt the jolt: it woke a young Swiss girl, Marguerite Frolicher as well as Lady Como Duff Gordon; Mrs. John Jacob Astor though something had happened in the kitchen. It also woke the Managing Director of the White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay who in his suite on B. Deck was certain the ship struck something.
In the First Class Smoking room, an eclectic mixture of passengers had gathered to play cards or read: Arche Butt, President Taft's military aide; Harry Widner of the Philadelphia streetcar industrialist; Spencer V. Silverthorne, a Nugent department store buyer; Hugh Woolner the famous English sculptor's son. They raced out onto the deck to find an iceberg quietly slipping by in the dark.
From the bridge, the watertight doors had been closed, and the grinding sound ended by the time Captain Edward J. Smith arrived. The closing of the water tight doors meant both Fireman Fred Barrett and Assistant Second Engineer James Hesketh barely escaped the flooding of boiler room No. 6. But boiler room No. 5 was also rapidly flooding.
While things appeared normal to most of the passengers, some noticed that the motion of the ship had ceased. "The creaking woodwork, the distant rhythm of the engines, the steady rattle of the glass dome over the Deck A foyer -- all the familiar shipboard sounds vanished as the Titanic glided to a stop. Far more than any jolt, silence stirred the passengers." But information was difficult to come by as stewards didn't really know themselves. And so some of the passengers decided to investigate themselves.
On deck there was no sign of imminent danger, just three of the ship's four funnels roaring out steam. It was extremely cold so those who had ventured out quickly returned inside. Various theories and explanations were circulated about: the ship had lost a propeller or they have struck an iceberg. Those who learned about the iceberg were largely unconcerned, going back to bed or visiting the starboard well deck to play in the ice or collect some.
But ten minutes after the collision with the iceberg, strange things were happening in the bow of the ship: off duty crew and steerage passengers entering their quarters or compartments were seeing water. In the boiler rooms, the crew struggled to get control of the situation with water pouring in, lights going out,setting up pumps and dealing with the boilers. On the bridge, Captain Smith who had 38 years service with the White Star Line attempted to appraise the situation: he sent Fourth Officer Boxhall to inspect the ship and he returned stating not much was wrong. Still Captain Smith decided to have Boxhall have the carpenter sound the ship. However on his way to do this, Boxhall encounters Carpenter J. Hutchinson rushing to the bridge who reveals that the ship is taking on water fast, as well as mail clerk Iago Smith who tells him that the mail room is flooding. Behind them is Bruce Ismay who asks Captain Smith if the ship is badly damaged. Captain Smith tells him he believes it is. On the ship was the Managing Director of Harland and Wolff Shipyard, Thomas Andrews. He had been taking many notes and was on the maiden voyage to identify any problems the ship might have. Captain Smith and Andrews toured the boat. Meanwhile the steerage passengers know that something serious has happened because what they experienced was not a "jar" but a tremendous noise. Others began to notice a troubling "list" of the ship which was puzzling since the Titanic was stopped in calm waters.
Captain Smith and Thomas Andrews took stock of what they knew: "Water in the forepeak...No. 1...No. 2 hold...mail room...boiler room No. 6...boiler room No. 5. Water 14 feet above keel level in the first ten minutes....Put together the facts showed a 300-foot gash, with the first five compartments hopelessly flooded." Andrews explains that no matter what, Titanic cannot remain afloat with five of her compartments flooded, because those flooded compartments would cause the Titanic's bow to sink so low that the waters would spill into the remaining compartments. This was a shock to Captain Smith who believed he was on an unsinkable ship.
Twenty-five minutes after the encounter with the iceberg, at 12:05 AM Captain Smith gave the order to uncover the boats and to gather the passengers. Captain Smith walked to the wireless shack a second time and told First Operator John George Philips to send a request for assistance. Just ten miles away the Californian had earlier attempted to send a message around 11:00 PM to Titanic warning about ice but had been put off. Now exhausted, Wireless Operator Cyril F. Evans went to bed, shutting off his set at 11:30PM. Third Officer Groves had earlier questioned Captain Lord about a ship still in the water in the distance and was told it was Titanic. Groves was interested in the wireless but not knowing much about it took off the headphones and left at 12:15AM.
The crew began to waken others in the cooks', waiters' and stewards' quarters. "And so it went. No bells or sirens. No general alarm. But all over the Titanic, in one way or another, the word was passed." Eventually the First Class passengers were awakened as well the Second Class passengers. Initially most were unconcerned but as the minutes ticked by, the ship began to list, and the lower decks filled with water, it became apparent that the ship - the unsinkable Titanic was sinking.
Discussion
Walter Lord's book, A Night To Remember, published in 1955, is a must-read for those interested in the Titanic. Lord wrote his book after interviewing many survivors, passengers, crew and relatives of survivors. Lord also interviewed crew from the Carpathia and the Californian. He studied the Titanic's blueprints, builder's specifications and cargo manifests and also reviewed much of the testimony given at investigations undertaken in London and Washington. The book offers diagrams of the Titanic, as well as a time line of the sinking. It concludes with a list of the passengers.
Lord takes his readers through the tragedy beginning with the Titanic striking the iceberg, the gradual realization that the ship was truly and rapidly sinking, the mustering of crew and (some) passengers, the haphazard loading of the lifeboats, the sinking, the rescue of survivors by the Carpathia, and the the arrival in New York aboard the Carpathia.
Lord's book, written in 1955, forty-three years after, expressed the belief that the Titanic tragedy changed the world in many ways. It certainly changed the maritime industry: the International Ice Patrol was established (in 1914 and continues to this day), Atlantic liners stopped ignoring iceberg warnings, ships had twenty-four hour wireless, and the winter marine lane was moved further south to avoid icebergs. Ships were required to carry lifeboats for ALL passengers and crew. Class distinction could no longer be the criteria for filling a lifeboat and determining who got saved.
Lord notes that both during the tragedy and its aftermath - in the reporting of it and the official inquiries, class distinction played a significant role. As Lord notes, the White Star Line denied that class distinction played a part in who survived and who did not, and this was backed up by the investigators too. However, during the sinking, the focus was on the First Class passengers - the Ryersons, Astors, Rothschilds, Benjamin Guggenheim, the Widners, Henry Sleeper Harper of the family who owned Harper's Weekly, and the many other Edwardian rich that graced Titanic. Stewards went door to door waking the First Class passengers, helping them into life belts and encouraging them to go to the Boat Deck. However the Third Class passengers were left to fend for themselves, something they expected and accepted. There was no policy on the White Star Line for steerage passengers except where they could not go. "At some points the ccrew barred the way to the Boat Deck; at others they opened the gates but didn't tell anyone; at a few points there were well-meaning efforts to guide the steerage up."
The losses among steerage were far greater than among First and Second Class passengers. "...The statistics suggest who they were-the Titanic's casualty list included 4 of 143 First Class Women (three by choice)...15 of 95 Second Class Women... and 81 of 179 Third Class Women....only 23 out of 76 steerage children were saved....
Not to mention the children. Except for Lorraine Allison, all 29 First and Second Class children were saved, but only 23 out of 76 steerage children. "
Although Lord claims that the tragedy resulted in some of the social and racial prejudices being lost, in reality, the decades after 1955, when he wrote his book, have shown that racism has remained strong in the years following the sinking of the Titanic. This was especially true during the fight for racial equality during the 1960s in the United States. At the time of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, racial prejudices coloured American and British perceptions of the tragedy. "With this lost world went some of its prejudices - especially a firm and loudly voiced opinion of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon courage. To the survivors all the stowaways in the lifeboats were "Chinese" or "Japanese"; All who jumped from the deck were "Armenians", "Frenchmen," or "Italians." " These prejudices were expressed at the U.S. Inquiry. Steward Crowe claimed that the men who rushed the boats were "...probably Italians, or some foreign nationality other than English or American..." But as Lord points out, "Steward Crowe, of course, never heard the culprits speak and had no way of knowing who they were." This prejudical view was so intense at the Inquiry "...that the Italian Ambassador demanded and got an apology from Fifth Officer Lowe for using "Italian" as a sort of synonym for "coward". "
In addition to racial prejudice, perhaps worse was the indifference that Lord describes by both the media of the day and during the inquiries. Newspapers offered few interviews with steerage passengers; a famous issue of the New York Times offered only two interviews with steerage passengers, while only two of forty-three survivor accounts were from Third Class passengers in the New York Herald's paper. Both the Congressional inquiry and the British Court of Enquiry failed to either investigate further or even note the lack of care and duty towards the steerage passengers. This criminal failure was largely ignored by the ruling classes and mostly expected and accepted by those with less wealth and social standing.
Lord also notes how the Titanic tragedy changed that and many other things about life and business in the early 20th century. "Overriding everything else, the Titanic also marked the end of a general feeling of confidence. Until then men felt they had found the answer to a steady, orderly, civilized life....For 100 years technology had steadily improved.....The Titanic woke them up. Never again would they be quite so sure of themselves....Here was the "unsinkable ship" - perhaps man's greatest engineering achievement - going down the first time it sailed."
In the end, as Lord notes was the "element of fate" in this needless tragedy. "If the Titanic had heeded any of the six messages on Sunday...if ice conditions had been normal...if the night had been rough or moonlit...if she had seen the berg 15 seconds sooner --or 15 second later...if she had hit the ice any other way...if her watertight bulkheads had been one deck higher...if she had carried enough boats...if the Californian had only come. Had any one of these "ifs" turned out right, every life might have been saved. But they all went against her -- a classic Greek tragedy."
A Night To Remember is well-written without being overly dramatic. A more modern day account would have offered more of what it was like for the Third Class survivors who found themselves barred from escaping the rising waters of the sinking Titanic. Lord does interrupt the telling to discuss the impact of the Titanic tragedy on society, specifically, American and to a lesser extent, British. His discussion of how class and racial prejudice played a part in who was saved and who died might have been better placed at the end of the book, after the arrival of the Carpathia. Nevertheless, Walter Lord's account of the Titanic tragedy is highly recommended as a good stating point for those interested in exploring this famous maritime tragedy.
Book Details:
A Night to Remember by Walter Lord
New York: Henry Holt and Company 1955
266 pp.
