Violet Jessop and Annie Robinson stood on the port side as the distress rockets went up. Stewardesses were barred from the boats on the forward part of the port side, but as they headed toward the boats in the rear, First Officer William Murdoch crossed over from the starboard side to assist with the launchings. He was more efficient at getting the lifeboats loaded, because he avoided the Lightoller injunctions against stewardesses and young boys and eliminated the delays caused by women unwilling to leave without their husbands by urging couples to enter a lifeboat together if there was room.
As Jessop and Robinson stood looking around, shipbuilder Thomas Andrews appeared on deck with a steward and began throwing wooden doors, deck chairs, and anything else that might be assembled into makeshift rafts over the side of the boat deck. Robinson could not suppress the thought of “Oh no, not again.” Just as Jessop had been unwilling to talk about the crash of the Olympic, Robinson too did not mention that this was her second shipwreck. She had been aboard the Lake Champlain when it struck an iceberg a few years before.
They were approaching boat 16 when Jessop heard music coming from the forward half of the boat deck, near the Marconi shack and boat 8. She had seen Jock Hume passing by with his musical instrument twenty or thirty minutes before, looking rather pale and remarking, “Just going to give them a tune to cheer things up a bit.”
Jessop heard mostly cheery ragtime music, interspersed with Irving Berlin. “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” was soon followed by what she swore to be a first attempt at “Nearer My God to Thee,” which broke off into cheery ragtime again.
Surely it’s all a dream, Jessop thought, as she watched Murdoch trying to persuade a small group of immigrants to enter a boat. The newest arrivals on the boat deck seemed to be speaking Russian, and the first officer could not make himself understood.
“Give a good example and get in,” Murdoch said, and Jessop realized later that a language barrier was the reason that she and Robinson survived: they served as examples for the Russian women to follow. Murdoch helped Jessop across the wide portside gap into a boat, bidding her good-bye and good luck. He then tossed her a baby wrapped in a blanket.
“Look after that, will you?” Murdoch said of the child, then ordered the boat lowered away. It creaked as its davit heads occasionally jammed against ropes that were a little too new, trying to slide through freshly varnished pulleys that had never been used. What Jessop remembered most about the descent was how dark it suddenly seemed after the boat passed below the bright lights of the promenade deck into the realm of the hull’s black-painted steel. Darkness was followed by a sudden flood of light from a row of E-deck portholes, followed by another blackout. She was at once both fascinated and chilled by how the portholes night-blinded her and intensified the blackness of the ocean. Another flare of porthole rows was followed by the next blackout of steel plates, then (as her eyes began to adjust) the next porthole flare, and finally the touchdown on water calmer and blacker than an oil pool, until oars stirred the “biolumes” to life.
Another person saved by Murdoch was sauce chef George Harris. When the iceberg passed by, he was taking a cigarette break on the promenade deck outside the French café. Harris was among the few aboard who knew that a ship made of iron could not possibly be called unsinkable, so he assisted chief baker Charles Joughin in what was initially a mission to load biscuits and drinking water into the lifeboats. The mission had gradually evolved. Joughin assembled a handful of his kitchen staff to follow him down to third-class quarters in the stern and to usher women and children up to the boat deck.
Some of the crew had apparently arrived at arbitrary decisions to stand between third class and the boat deck; but on this night even a pastry chef was recognized as having some sort of authority in the rescue operation, especially if he seemed to be acting as though he were in charge. The kind of man who stood in the way of Masabumi Hosono and Daniel Buckley proved no obstacle to Joughin’s mission. However, the women whom Joughin and Harris encountered below were reluctant to leave their husbands, so Joughin contrived a more aggressive plan. He and his team began snatching children out of their mothers’ arms and running up the steps, knowing that the women would follow them. Then they formed a sort of bucket brigade at the lifeboats, literally “chucking” children into the boats and pushing their screaming mothers in after them.
Sometime between the loss of boiler room number 5 and the final fatal buildup of pressure against boiler room number 4 Harris and Joughin could plainly see that there was not enough lifeboat space left for even half of the people still aboard. The ship’s surgeons, William O’Loughlin and John Simpson, in a conversation that seemed amazingly matter-of-fact in hindsight, advised that the ship would kill them quickly and relatively painlessly if, after the boats were away, they stayed indoors near the stern—which would presumably be the fastest part going down during the final plunge.
O’Loughlin recommended that each of them should help wherever he could, in any way that he could, while making certain to take a hefty supply of whiskey from the pantry and, after the last lifeboats were gone, drinking himself unconscious inside the stern so as not to feel the final crushing pressures that would surely prove deadly during the first thirty seconds of descent.
Shortly afterward, Joughin began drinking his “medicine.” Harris, the sauce chef, sought out an expensive red wine, but his advance toward painless oblivion was interrupted by a woman wandering below the decks with two children.
“Leave the children with me,” Harris commanded. “And get as many rugs as you can find to cover them and yourself when you meet me on deck.”
By the time the woman arrived, Harris had already passed one of the children into boat 11. He held the other child while a crewman helped their mother into the boat with the heavy bundle of rugs she had yanked from the floor somewhere nearby in first class.
“You go into the boat with that other child,” Murdoch instructed Harris.
“So I have to thank Officer Murdoch for my escape,” Harris wrote thirty-four years later, adding that he ended up living what he would call a charmed life: “I am seventy-five years of age and was torpedoed four times in the last war—also a prisoner [of war] in Singapore and Hong Kong.” The sauce chef added that when he finally retired from the sea to the peace and quiet of New Zealand, he arrived just in time for the Napier earthquake.
“Child, things are very bad,” Dr. O’Loughlin told one of the stewardesses. He prescribed the same “medicine” he had offered the sauce chef and the baker, warning that the mail rooms and the cargo holds were gone and that soon, if not already, the poolroom and the Turkish baths would be, too.
Maude Slocomb’s friend, assistant steward Joseph Wheat, had closed off several extra bulkhead doors near the Turkish baths on F deck when, about 12:45 a.m., he noticed water starting to flow down from E deck past the roof of boiler room number 5’s casing and into the bath chambers. The doors he closed seemed to be keeping the flood from coming directly back along the corridor, but Wheat understood immediately that the sea had mounted the deck above and was spilling down the stairs—first as a stream, then quickly developing into a minor waterfall. Realizing that F deck and E deck must suddenly have carried him well below the sea surface, he did not wait to see the waterfall gather itself into frothing rapids. He raced the sea to the top decks.