Elizabeth Kaye: Lifeboat No. 8

Jack Phillips sent out the standard call: CQD. It meant “ALL STATIONS ATTEND: DISTRESS.” He followed it with MGY, the call letters of the Titanic .

One ship was no more than twenty miles away. It was the Californian, whose wireless operator, Cyril Evans, had tried to warn the Titanic about icebergs and had been told by Jack to shut up. For Evans, too, it had been a long, tiring day, capped off by Jack’s dismissive reply. At 11:30 p.m. he had turned off the wireless and gone to bed—forty-five minutes before the CQD was sent out.

As the Titanic ’s stewards passed along the order to put on life belts, a young seaman stood on the Californian ’s deck and detected a curious sight: a giant liner stopped dead in the water. He pointed the ship out to his captain.

“That will be the Titanic, ” the captain said, “on her maiden voyage.”

Then he turned away, unperturbed and unhurried, as if what he had seen was not the least bit unusual.

Caroline and Natalie were about to return to their cabin when an officer approached them. “Go below and put on your life belts,” he said. “You may need them later.”

Alarmed and frightened, they rushed down to C Deck to awaken Natalie’s parents, George and Mollie Wick. They relayed the officer’s order, but Mr. Wick chided them. “Why, that’s nonsense, girls. This boat is all right. She just got a glancing blow, I guess.”

Everyone they encountered in the hallway shared his opinion, so the two women returned to their cabin to prepare for bed again. But a moment later an officer knocked at the door and told them to go immediately up to the Boat Deck. “There is no danger,” he said. “It’s just a precautionary measure.”

The first ship to respond to the Titanic ’s distress call was a German liner, the Frankfurt. The message she sent back was “OK Stand by.”

The Frankfurt was 150 miles away, but from the strength of her signal, Jack Phillips was convinced that she was the ship closest to them. “Go tell the captain,” he instructed his assistant, a guileless twenty-two-year-old named Harold Bride.

Then Jack hunched over the wireless apparatus and waited anxiously for the Frankfurt ’s operator to relay her position. The information didn’t come.

It had been a strange trip for Ella White, a portly, opinionated widow with a vast estate in Briarcliff, New York, and a permanent suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. Boarding the ship, Mrs. White had sprained her ankle. Throughout the voyage she had remained in her cabin, attended by her maid, her manservant, and her companion Marie Grice Young, a cultured thirty-six-year-old given to wearing hats as high as wedding cakes, who had the distinction of having been the music teacher for Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter.

But at quarter past midnight on April 15, remaining in the cabin was no longer an option. Mrs. White put on several layers of warm clothes and insisted that Miss Young do the same. They locked their trunks and bags, and Mrs. White hobbled out of the commodious suite, leaning on a brass-and-wood cane that had a small, battery-operated light mounted on the end of it.

In the coming hours, that cane would be put to use in a way she could never have imagined.

The wireless operator of RMS Carpathia, Harold Thomas Cottam, was on the bridge of his ship when Jack sent out the first distress call. After Cottam returned to the wireless shack, he casually cabled the Titanic . “Do you know,” his message read, “that Cape Cod is sending a batch of messages for you?”

The message Jack sent back was shocking and stark: “Come at once. We have struck a berg. It’s a CQD, old man. Position 41.46 N 50.14 W.”

Cottam reread the message several times to be sure he had read it right. Then he ran to inform his captain. Moments later he cabled Jack, giving the Carpathia ’s latitude and longitude and adding that she was fifty-eight miles away and steaming toward the Titanic as fast as possible. Jack wrote down the message and handed it to Harold Bride, who raced it to the wheelhouse, where Captain Smith was waiting.

The steward knocked again on Roberta’s cabin door, waking her from a sound sleep. “Don’t be afraid,” he told her, “but dress quickly, put on your life belt, and go on deck.”

Roberta grabbed the first clothes she saw and put on her life belt, but the chunks of cork within its canvas exterior made it cumbersome, and she could not get it tied. She rang for the steward, and as he secured the belt she joked about what an awkward contraption it was. The steward did not respond. Instead he smiled sadly and shook his head. Roberta fell silent. For the first time it struck her that something serious might have happened.

A CQD is not ambiguous. An operator receiving that call is required to instantly relay it to his captain. You don’t ask questions. You don’t have to. The call is, as Harold Bride would say later, “the whole thing in a nutshell.” As Jack Phillips tapped out one CQD after another, the Frankfurt contacted him again. The message read, “What is the matter with you?”

Jack stared at it, dumbstruck at first, then enraged. What sort of ship, he asked Harold, would hire an idiot to run its wireless? The Frankfurt was useless. In any case, Jack was in communication with the Carpathia, and unable to stay in touch with two ships at the same time. His fingers made a loud, staccato sound as he tapped his response to the Frankfurt : “You fool. Standby and keep out.”

Jack drummed his hands on the table. His rage nearly overwhelmed him, and he knew why, for his infuriating exchange with the Frankfurt had brought a fearsome fact to light: the lives of the Titanic ’s passengers depended on his ability to summon help from another vessel.

Abruptly, he handed the headset to Harold and left the wireless shack, saying that he was going to take a look around. But it was such an odd moment to leave his post that he may have had an additional motive. By then, crew members in the lower reaches of the ship understood the situation. “You haven’t a half hour to live,” one man told another. “That is from Mr. Andrews. Keep it to yourself and let no one know.”

But on the Boat Deck, only the Captain and Mr. Andrews knew the full extent of the damage the iceberg had caused, for they had seen water filling the mail room and lapping against the service line in the squash court. They were passing this information on, but selectively; no one had a greater need to know it than Jack.

Did either man tell Jack what he had seen? Did Jack find Roberta and pass the information on? You can picture him: not wanting to alarm her but determined to make sure that she knew enough to flee to safety. All that can be known for certain is that shortly after Jack left the wireless shack, Roberta burst into the Countess’s stateroom and told her what no other passenger knew: that water was pouring into the squash court. It was daunting news. Yet even then, such was their faith in the ship that it did not occur to them that they were imperiled. The Countess readjusted Roberta’s life belt and gave her some brandy. “Now go straight up to the Boat Deck,” she told her.

Across from the wireless shack, on the Boat Deck, Lifeboat No. 8 hung suspended from its iron davit. Like each of the Titanic ’s sixteen wooden lifeboats, No. 8 was built to carry sixty-five passengers and measured thirty feet long, nine feet wide, and four feet deep. It was a simple, sleek, and graceful structure that tapered to a point at the stern and at the bow and was fashioned from overlapping planks of white-painted yellow pine held by copper nails. The white interior had four wide seats made of pitch pine, as well as foot-wide planks for additional seating that ran the length of the boat on both sides. Beneath the seats were stowed three sets of heavy oars and a kerosene lamp.