Rheims witnessed the shooting of at least one passenger by a discharge from an officer’s revolver, and while everyone around the mostly naked Rheims either fled or stood in shock, providing the people in boat A with just a few seconds more in which to attempt a safe launch, Rheims saw the officer give a military salute and shoot himself.
Moments later, boat A’s davits began to slip beneath the surface, its ropes pulling the boat down with them in a sudden upsurge of icy black water that washed everyone who had been standing behind Murdoch out of the boat. Seconds after that, Rheims too went under, and he never did see his brother-in-law Joe Loring again.
Apprentice chef Collins did not get near enough to boat A to even attempt saving the mother and children he was escorting toward Murdoch. As boat A went under, he was struck by a wall of water glutted with people and debris. It taught him the incomparable horror of having a child torn out of one’s arms.
Deep below, the bulkhead at the front of boiler room number 4 had resisted twice the height of water that broke the damaged bulkhead between boiler room numbers 5 and 6. The dam had by now taken all the pressure it could hold.
The rupture—the probable cause of the boat-deck wave—occurred about 2:10 a.m. Once boiler room number 4 was filled, the final stage in the cascade effect took command of the night. The boilers in room numbers 4 and 3 shared all of their vents, joined in an upside-down branching pattern, inside the second smokestack. Once boiler room number 4 collapsed and overflowed, water spilled over the branch at the E-deck junction into the boilers in the next compartment back, and out the boilers’ mouths.
If the watertight doors had by then been used to seal the bulkhead between boiler room numbers 3 and 4, the doors were, against the multiple geysers in boiler room number 3, as ineffective as valves against a major arterial rip. The only event that could now slow the bleeding toward the stern, albeit only slightly, was the tendency of water that had already pooled behind the second funnel to rush forward as the bow section suddenly angled down more steeply.
Thayer had heard what sounded and felt to him like a deep interior thud, a seemingly explosive force muffled by many intervening decks. The thud and the wave were consistent with the implosion of an entire boiler room, manifested as a sudden loss of buoyancy that pitched the deck down toward the flooded chambers of the bow, initially to an angle of about fifteen degrees.
Thayer also believed, during this final phase of the sinking, that the list to port briefly began to even out—intensifying the strength and volume of water being drawn onto the starboard deck. The wave gave Thayer the false impression of a ship that had suddenly started moving forward, and from above him came a rumbling roar that gave him the further and all too realistic impression of “standing under a steel railway bridge while an express train passes overhead, mingled with the noise of a pressed steel factory and wholesale breakage of china.”
Not very far from where he stood, the breaking of glass and steel overhead would have been precisely the sounds guaranteed to accompany the grand stairway’s breaking free, coming apart, and beginning to push upward through the crystal dome.
When Thayer finally leaped over the starboard side, the sea was almost level with the roof of the bridge and the crow’s nest. Water was only seconds away from the base of the first smokestack. Watching from boat D, quartermaster Arthur Bright noticed that even though the lights along the stern were still blazing, the windows, portholes, and deck lamps had all but faded from existence in the front half of the ship, leaving Thayer with little more than shadows by which to interpret what he saw happening between the first and second smokestacks.
From at least as far back as the third smokestack, the Titanic seemed to be surrounded by a glare that stood out in the night as though the stern were coming alive with St. Elmo’s fire tinted red. The contrast between the heavenly glow aft and the shadows it threw across the forward part of the ship stopped Thayer from swimming away and held him transfixed to the spot. The piercing cold of the water had suddenly lost its power to shock or frighten him.
He was now more fascinated than afraid. The Titanic had been transforming before his eyes into a horror, yet it was now also, paradoxically, spellbinding. Thayer could no more look away from the ship than he could turn from the stare of a cobra.
As boat A tore free from its davits and popped to the surface, the rumble and roar of parting steel, breaking glass, and cracking wood became louder and more distinct. In the shadowy front of the ship, between the first two smokestacks, Thayer believed he saw the superstructure break. Something buckled and blew upward near the first smokestack. A huge dark shape seemed to be rising on its haunches, like a volcanic island trying to be born. What Thayer probably witnessed was the emergence of the grand stairway.
Thayer’s friend Richard Williams was still moving uphill along the boat deck with his father, having managed to slow the elder Williams’s panicked pace, just before the ship began its sudden lurch downward and swept them up in a wave. “I turned toward the bow,” Williams would write later. “I saw nothing but water with a mast sticking out of it. I don’t remember the shock of the cold water. I only remember thinking, ‘suction,’ and my efforts to swim in the direction of the starboard rail to get away from the ship.”
Before he could move more than five breaststrokes from the starboard boat deck, Williams believed he felt the deck rushing forward and rising up beneath him. What he believed was all a matter of relative perspective. What he actually felt was a rush of water and debris carrying him backward and dropping him onto the deck somewhere behind the second or third smokestack.
Williams and his father were suddenly able to stand—suddenly high and dry. He would later record, “My father was not more than twelve or fifteen feet away from me.”
Underfoot, the flood within the ship was forcing bursts of trapped air up to the surface along with great masses of cracked oak. Every grain of coal dust that had clung inside the vents from the first four chambers of boilers appeared to be breaking loose—either to be jetted out through the tops of the stacks or to be sent gurgling up through the intake vents at their bases. The dust and the black mist spread out horizontally in distinct layers over the sea, breaking the glare from astern into eerie red streamers of light and shadow.
One of the two forward smokestacks buckled at its base and leaned suddenly to one side just as Richard Williams recognized his father among the shadows and began moving toward him.
At precisely that moment, Williams would record for historians, “I saw one of the four great funnels come crashing down on top of him. Just for one instant, I stood there transfixed—not because it had only missed me by a few feet; curiously enough not because it had killed my father, for whom I had more than a normal feeling of love and attachment; but there I was transfixed, wondering at the enormous size of this funnel, still belching smoke.”
14
The Truth about William Murdoch
SEPTEMBER 2001
RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH