Headed in the same direction, Celiney Yasbeck’s boat came upon the staircase. In the same lifeboat, Marjorie Newell observed decorative wood trim floating everywhere—“and what looked like an entire story of the grand staircase sticking out of the water, ten or twelve feet high.”
The stairway on the ocean appeared to be surrounded by cakes of ice, which made sense to Marjorie, given that sunrise was plainly revealing several icebergs drifting nearby. What did not make sense to Marjorie, when she looked closer, was why it should be that the cakes of ice were all the same size. “Oh, no . . .”
Then she understood. The identical cakes of ice were really life jackets, scores and scores of lifejackets, enclosing the dead.
There was one more thing that did not make sense. The staircase was bigger than a lifeboat, yet there were dead people all around it. Had they all drifted to the wooden island after they died? How many had perished without ever noticing the island? Or had they all found it and scrambled for safety, sinking and tipping it repeatedly with their weight? There was a story behind the stairway and the bodies, but it would never be known.
Boat B appeared to have been left behind. Atop its overturned hull, Charles Lightoller and Albert Moss understood that they were all being kept above water only by the bubble of air beneath the keel. With increasing wind and the gradual development of ocean swells, the boat began to show threatening signs of tipping too far to one side or the other. All that was necessary to spill all of boat B’s survivors into the sea again (including the recently arrived Charles Joughin), was for the tilt-and-burp effect to reduce, only fractionally, the volume of air underfoot.
Two more people, including the man Lightoller believed to be senior Marconi operator Jack Phillips, died and were lowered over the side. Lightoller commanded the rest to remain standing to follow his instructions for handling the swells: “Lean to the right. . . . Now, hold the middle. . . . Lean to the left . . .” Lightoller knew that inevitably they would weaken and miscoordinate their rocking motions with the sea, at which point they would all be sunk to their knees or spilled over the side, and the sea would probably finish them off in all of five minutes. Although it appeared that the time had come for even the most resilient soul to give up, Lightoller helped the survivors to keep a grip on their courage and to endure his precarious balancing act as long as a single drop of warm blood pulsed within them.
Their one chance at rescue almost backed away. Boat 12 was rowing toward the Carpathia with boat 4 in tow when the crewman in charge saw, in the distance, what he at first believed to be one of the Titanic’s funnels still afloat and decided that they should row away from it, especially after he heard what sounded like voices shouting. “Apparitions,” he thought. “Ghosts of the Titanic.” One of the boat B survivors, Jack Thayer, had no way of knowing that his mother was aboard a lifeboat that approached and then mysteriously began to withdraw.
Lightoller had concluded that the strange behavior of boat 12 simply meant that he and his crew were now so weakened by their ordeal that they were past the point of making their shouts heard. The thought of their shouts putting a superstitious dread into boat 12’s commander did not occur to him as he reached into an ice-crusted pocket and withdrew his whistle.
“The piercing sound carried,” Lightoller would survive to write, “and likewise [it] carried the information (for what it was worth) that it was an officer making the call.”
As boat 12 pulled up alongside the wreck of boat B, Madeline Mellinger and her mother cleared a space for Lightoller. Thirteen-year-old Madeline was shocked at how frozen he appeared to be, clothed in nothing more substantial than a light navy suit with a seaman’s sweater underneath. Two hours earlier, after he had taken charge of boat B, the clothing was soaking wet; now it was stiffened and crackling with ice.
Elizabeth Mellinger removed her cape and put it on Lightoller’s shoulders, then rubbed his hands and arms and tried to restore circulation in his limbs. He seemed to recover his strength quickly. Though still appearing quite stiff, the officer stood up and took command of boat 12.
The usual command position in a lifeboat was at the tiller on the stern, but Lightoller gave his instructions from the bow to the superstitious seaman at the tiller. In this manner, they reached the Carpathia, where Madeline was lifted aboard on a sling, ahead of her mother. Lightoller saw that Elizabeth and everyone else went up to the warmth of the rescue ship ahead of him. Madeline watched him come up last, and then she discovered that she could not find her mother. While Joughin went to the ship’s galley to have the chill removed from him in a warm oven, Elizabeth, who had left the Titanic in her bare feet, was taken to the Carpathia’s infirmary for treatment of frostbite and for a level of hypothermia that had finally rendered her unconscious.
Madeline became the little girl mentioned in the newspapers, wandering from one deck to another crying out for her missing mother. Later in the day, the two were reunited. When Lightoller found them, he was so thankful to Madeline’s frostbitten mother for putting her coat over his back and keeping him alive that he wanted to give her a sincere token of his appreciation.
“But I have nothing to give except this little tin whistle,” he explained—the very same whistle with which he had summoned her lifeboat to his side.
Elizabeth cherished it till her death in 1962 at the age of ninety-one. In that year, sixty-three-year-old Madeline, in accordance with her mother’s wishes, delivered the whistle to Walter Lord, the historian her family believed should inherit it for keeping the memory of that incredible night alive. The bond between the families was not to last, however.
“The whistle has a curious pitch,” Lord told Madeline during a phone conversation, mentioning this only in passing.
“What do you mean?” Madeline asked.
“It’s not the sort of sound I would have expected it to make,” Lord replied. Sensing, then, that something was wrong on the other end of the line, he tried to explain further just how pleased he was to have Lightoller’s whistle. “And, of course,” he added, “the first thing I did was to blow it.”
“Oh, no,” Madeline said. “We had never blown the whistle, Mother or I—and in fact no one has—in all the years we owned it. And always, always, we believed Lightoller should have been the last one to do so.”
“I did not know this,” Walter tried to explain. Madeline did not speak to him for seven years.
Aboard the Carpathia, the arrival of seven hundred additional passengers put immediate and considerable stress on the food supplies. Linens were also suddenly scarce, and Juliette Laroche desperately needed towels to fashion into diapers for her two baby girls.
One of the earliest actions of the Carpathia’s crew was to start resegregating the passengers into their original, Titanic-based classes. A stewardess informed second-class passenger Laroche that there were no spare linens for her, so she devised and implemented her own covert plan to collect table linens during meals, sit on them, and leave with them when no one was looking.
Two women from first class soon heard about Laroche’s plight and visited her, bearing gifts of extra clothing and linens. They were Madeline Astor and Edith Russell, both of whom had traveled with the Laroche family aboard the tender at Cherbourg.