The Other Side of the Night

The Carpathia, the Californian, and the Night the Titanic Was Lost

Daniel Allen Butler

• Publisher: Casemate
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781935149705
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The New York Times –bestselling author of Unsinkable "recounts the disaster from the vantage point of nearby vessels" ( Publishers Weekly ). A few minutes before midnight on April 14, 1912, the "unsinkable" RMS Titanic, on her maiden voyage to New York, struck an iceberg. Less than three hours later, she lay at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. While the world has remained fascinated by the tragedy, the drama of those fateful hours was not only played out aboard the doomed liner. It also took place on the decks of two other ships, one fifty-eight miles distant from the sinking Titanic, the other barely ten miles away. The masters of the steamships Carpathia and Californian, Capt. Arthur Rostron and Capt. Stanley Lord, were informed within minutes of each other that their vessels had picked up the distress signals of a sinking ship. Their actions in the hours and days that followed would become the stuff of legend, as one would choose to take his ship into dangerous waters to answer the call for help, while the other would decide that the hazard to himself and his command was too great to risk responding. After years of research, Daniel Allen Butler now tells this incredible story, moving from ship to ship on the icy waters of the North Atlantic—in real time—to recount how hundreds of people could have been rescued, but in the end, only a few outside of the meager lifeboats were saved. He then looks at the US Senate investigation in Washington, and ultimately, the British Board of Trade inquiry in London, where the actions of each captain are probed, questioned, and judged, until the truth of what actually happened aboard the Titanic, the Carpathia, and the Californian is revealed. "Powerful... very, very well-done." — New York Times –bestselling author Clive Cussler

Chapter 1

THE CRUELEST OCEAN

At the dawn of the Age of Exploration, as the darkness of the Middle Ages began to recede, the most important sea route in the world was the one that began in the waters surrounding western Europe, ran south down the coast of Africa to round the Cape of Good Hope, and gave out into the broad expanse of the Indian Ocean. It was this route that allowed Portuguese and Dutch traders, using navigational secrets that they jealously guarded from the eyes of their Spanish and English competitors, to bring the flavors and textures of the mysterious and exotic Far East to a cold and drab European continent: spices, silks, ivory, jade, jewels, fruit trees, and tea.

But though the trade route to the East would remain a source of immense wealth for another three hundred years, once Christopher Columbus stumbled upon the New World in 1492 it slowly began to give pride of place to another passage. In the decades that followed Columbus’ voyages, the Spanish and Portuguese began to systematically plunder the cultures and empires of Central and South America, and for the next two centuries a steady procession of galleons passed back and forth between Europe and the Americas. Those sailing east were laden with treasure, while those sailing west were filled with explorers, missionaries, adventurers, and eventually settlers. Full-bellied, with steep-sided hulls and high forecastles and poopdecks, these ships were slow, cumbersome, and at best only indifferent sailers, often vulnerable to the ferocious storms that ripped up and down the American coasts. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of booty they carried back to Lisbon and Cadiz caused the westward passages across the Atlantic to usurp the primacy of the route around the southern tip of Africa, which fell into an eclipse from which it would never escape, as the fortunes made in trading spices in India were soon surpassed by the fortunes gathered from the looted treasures of the Incas, Mayas, Toltecs, and Aztecs.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, as the Spanish and Portuguese empires began their decline and the number of galleons sailing across the Atlantic diminished in proportion, their place being taken primarily by British ships. These were called East Indiamen—they were stout, bluff, and highly seaworthy—and they carried a commerce in trade goods rather than plunder between the Old World and the New. As the beginning of the 19th century approached, the jewel in the maritime crown of shipping lanes was the route that spanned the Atlantic from Great Britain to North America.

What made it so valuable was the simple fact that Britain’s economy was the fastest-growing in the world, while Canada and the American colonies were its largest markets. Britain supplied most of North America’s demands for industry as well as meeting its requirements for precision manufactures, along with specialized materials and luxuries that were as yet beyond the Americans’ and Canadians’ ability to produce. Russian oak from the Baltic states, British railroad rolling stock, Austrian crystal, German optics, French wines and fabrics, Irish laces, all were carried to the United States in British ships. On their return crossings, those same ships would have cargo holds full of raw cotton from the American South, Canadian and American ores, pine and fir from the Pacific Northwest and Canada, and countless tons of grain. As more sophisticated and diverse commerce developed, ships began to be more specialized, their size, hull forms, and sail plans adapted to specific roles, be they carrying cotton or tobacco, tea or coffee beans, passengers to Europe or immigrants to the United States—or, given over to darker tasks, rum-running and slaving.

Yet no matter what form of trade or commerce a ship might be undertaking as it made its way across the Atlantic, it was never an easy or safe passage. In particular, the North Atlantic soon came to be regarded as the cruelest ocean. Capricious and chimerical, the North Atlantic could transform herself from a vista of gently rolling swells passing beneath an azure sky to a maelstrom of towering waves driven by howling winds under glowering leaden clouds, and then to a smooth, tranquil calm under impossibly bright stars, all in a matter of hours. Her tricks were many, her weapons legion: the North Atlantic could conjure up impenetrable fog to confuse and bewilder helmsmen, driving rain that blinded helm and lookout alike, wind-driven sleet that could abrade the paint from a ship’s hull or tear a topman from the rigging, hurricane-force winds, seas sixty…eighty…a hundred feet high—and always at her disposal she had one of her most subtle devices: ice.

The mot of Samuel Johnson, that an ocean voyage was much like being thrown into jail with the added opportunity of being drowned, has been repeated often enough that it has become something of a weak joke. Yet in Johnson’s day it was a profound, if acerbic, observation, made all the more so by its undeniable truth. Passage across the Atlantic meant being confined to cramped, dimly lit and poorly ventilated quarters, for weeks, sometimes months, on end, while being fed a monotonous diet of barely edible food. Nor was the chance of being drowned inconsiderable, for throughout most of the 18th century nearly one in every five ships which set sail from London or Bristol, New York, Boston, Halifax, Southampton or Liverpool never arrived at its intended port.

Records exist to bear this out. Historians estimate that in the past 400 years, over a thousand ships have been lost just along the North Carolina coastline alone, a treacherous stretch of water known as “The Graveyard of the Atlantic.” Farther up the Atlantic, off the coast of New England, records show that in the years between 1790 and 1850, three out of every five American sailors working those waters would eventually lose their lives to drowning. It is a matter of official note that, from 1840 to 1893, 7,523 people perished as 125 passenger ships were lost on the North Atlantic. Often the circumstances were such that a ship setting out on what would prove to be her final voyage would simply sail into oblivion. Running afoul of ice, winds, waves, or the ever-present threat of a fire on board, unless by some fortunate chance another passing vessel was nearby to render assistance, a ship which found itself in distress was doomed.

For the most part, the missing ships were merchant vessels mainly carrying cargo, along with a handful of passengers, and were crewed by some fifty to sixty sailors. Records of the losses, though not thorough by modern standards, are plentiful but obscure: more attention was paid to the vanished cargoes than to the lives lost, as those keeping the records were mostly insurers who, while not entirely indifferent to the fate of the crews aboard lost ships, had financial losses as their first priority. As for any passengers aboard a ship gone missing, their fate was accepted as simply one of the risks taken when crossing the open ocean. One of the hidden barbs in Samuel Johnson’s comment was the implication that an ocean voyage was something that no sane person ever willingly undertook, and that even when necessary there was something vaguely disreputable about it.

That attitude began shifting as Western Europe and North America moved into the 19th century. As the Industrial Revolution took hold on both continents, business became more international, compelling more and more industrialists, businessmen, and merchants to hazard the trip across the North Atlantic for commercial purposes. At the same time the social changes being wrought in the nations of Western Europe, particularly in Great Britain, transforming agrarian communities into industrial societies, created a surplus population which began emigrating from Europe to Canada and the United States, a migration which would gradually shape the character of both continents.

Suddenly there was a new industry on the North Atlantic, whole shipping lines springing up devoted to carrying passengers as well as cargo. Names that would become household words in a few decades’ time appeared in the newspapers, advertising crossings to and from Liverpool, Cobh (later Queenstown), London, Hamburg, Bremen, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Halifax—names like Cunard, White Star, Collins, Inman, Hamburg-Amerika, Norddeutscher-Lloyd, and Holland-America. People began moving across the ocean in unprecedented numbers, until hundreds, then eventually thousands, of passengers were being carried by individual ships at one time. But while the nature of business on the North Atlantic had changed, the ocean itself hadn’t, and when one of these passenger-laden ships went missing, the loss of life was no longer negligible. In fact, it could be horrific.

One of first recorded passenger ships to disappear was the square-rigged packet Lady of the Lake, bound from England to Quebec in 1833, when she was lost in mid-Atlantic with 215 passengers and crew aboard. It was believed that she struck an iceberg. A similar fate overtook the Ocean Queen, which disappeared somewhere in midocean with ninety souls aboard her in 1834. Two years later the packet Driver with 372 people aboard sailed from Boston and was never seen again. Another tragedy came in 1840, when the 222-ton Rosalie, built in 1838, vanished in the Sargasso Sea. In September 1853, the emigrant ship Annie Jane foundered somewhere west of Scotland, taking all 348 passengers and crew with her, leaving not a trace.

Sometimes there were tantalizing hints as to the fates of missing ships. In August 1840 the steamship President, ostensibly the pride of the American merchant fleet, made a somewhat unimpressive debut as she took more than sixteen days to cross from New York to Liverpool on her maiden voyage. Despite the extravagant claims of speed made by her owners, the President’s crossing was fully three days longer than the rival Cunard Line’s new Acadia, also on her maiden voyage. But the President soon became a popular ship and usually sailed with a full or nearly full passenger list. The only persistent criticism of her was that her coal consumption was considered by some of her officers to be excessive, and on one occasion she had to turn back to New York to avoid running out of coal in mid-Atlantic.

On March 11, 1841, the President left New York with 136 passengers and crew aboard, and almost immediately was caught in a fierce gale. An American packet, the Orpheus, saw her two days later, “rising on top of a tremendous sea, pitching and laboring very heavily.” She was never seen again. There were only a few clues to her fate, mostly scattered reports of wreckage found floating on the sea, but eventually the conclusion was inevitable—the President had sunk, taking everyone aboard with her.

Rigged as she was like any other steamer of the day with a full set of masts and yards, she should have been able to ride out almost any storm under sail, even if she were deprived of the power of her engines. What is most likely was that she encountered a rogue wave—at the time a little-known phenomenon–-one of those enormous walls of water that suddenly rears up before or alongside a ship, breaking over it with thousands of tons of water, sufficient to reduce even the stoutest wooden hull to flinders in moments. It was only one of many weapons the North Atlantic had at her disposal to teach respect to those who failed to show her sufficient deference.

Whatever the exact cause, the disappearance of the President was like a brooding spectre that hovered over the Atlantic for a long time. The disaster badly frightened those travelers who had to make a transatlantic crossing, and they switched their bookings from steamers to sailing packets in droves, although it was never explained how the fact that the President was a steamship had contributed to her disappearance. Yet, a year later, the number of passengers making the crossing on steamships was barely half of what it had been before the President was lost. There was more to come.

Not all ships that were lost simply sailed into oblivion. On September 27, 1854, the speedy Arctic, the finest ship in Collins’ fleet, six days out of Liverpool and about sixty miles south of Cape Race, Newfoundland, was caught in a heavy fog and rammed by the small French steamer Vesta. At first the damage to the Arctic seemed slight, but it soon became obvious that the flooding was rising faster than the ship’s pumps could cope. The Arctic’s captain, James Luce, steered his ship toward Newfoundland, hoping to run her into shallow water and save her.

But while she was still some twenty miles short of her goal, the rising water quenched the fires in the Arctic’s boilers and she lost all power. With the ship’s situation now hopeless, her captain ordered the passengers into lifeboats. In what was one of the saddest chapters of the history of the American merchant marine, the Arctic’s crew, abandoning all pretense of discipline, commandeered the boats—in some cases physically throwing passengers out—and rowed away, leaving those still on board to their fate. Shortly afterward the ship sank, taking with her almost 400 lives, leaving only forty-five survivors.

Tragedy would again strike the Collins Line two years later. In late January 1856, Cunard’s brand-new Persia was ready to set out on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York. By purest chance, the then-fastest ship on the Atlantic run, the Collins Line’s Pacific, had left Liverpool just three days before with forty-five passengers and 141 crew aboard. Although the captain of the Persia was firm in his protests that there would be no “race” to New York between his ship and the Pacific, the public certainly anticipated such a contest. There was much belching of smoke and furious churning of paddlewheels when the Persia pulled away from the dock that morning, but unknown to those watching her depart, there would be no record crossing for the Persia on this voyage. Five days out of Liverpool, making well over eleven knots, she ran headlong into a field of ice. Her bow was damaged—sixteen feet of her hull plating had its rivets sheered off—and her starboard paddlewheel and its housing were crushed and crumpled. Her speed reduced by more than half, down by the head, nevertheless the Persia pressed on to New York, her iron hull having withstood an impact that would have shivered a wooden-hulled vessel.

When the Persia limped into New York on February 9, there was no sign of the Pacific— she had literally vanished without a trace. As more and more ships made port in New York and Boston and reported the extent of the icefield that the Persia had encountered, it became clear what had most likely happened to the Pacific. Running at eleven knots or better, she had driven into the ice, and the impact which the Persia’s iron hull had been able to absorb had overpowered the wooden keel and frames of the Pacific, sending her to the bottom with everyone aboard her. It would be more than a century before her wreck was found—in the same waters where the Persia had rammed the ice floe.

Disaster would twice overtake the Inman Line as well. In 1854, the City of Glasgow, a beautiful Clyde-built ship, disappeared in the North Atlantic with 480 passengers and crew aboard her. Sixteen years later, somewhere between New York and Liverpool, the City of Boston, with 177 passengers and crew, vanished forever. It’s believed that she was a victim of a fire onboard; certainly fire caused the loss of Hamburg-Amerika’s Austria in 1858, costing 471 lives.

Collision was a hazard as well, as ships would get lost in fog, storm, and mist, and blunder into each other. Almost 400 people drowned when Hamburg-Amerika’s Cimbria was accidentally rammed and sunk. In 1891 the Anchor Line’s Utopia sank after colliding with a collier, and 562 aboard her were lost. Norddeutscher-Lloyd’s Elbe was the victim of a collision in 1895, at the cost of 332 passengers and crew; in 1898 the French Line’s La Bourgogne was rammed by a merchantman and quickly sank, taking 549 lives with her.

Naval ships were by no means immune from the North Atlantic’s furies either. HMS Atalanta had begun her career with the Royal Navy as HMS Juno in 1844. After service in the Pacific she became in turn a storeship, a barracks, and the headquarters of the Portsmouth Dockyard police before being converted into a training ship in 1878 and renamed. Sailing to Bermuda in January 1888, Atalanta arrived there on the 29th, and set sail for home on the 31st with 250 young cadets and thirty-one officers and ratings aboard. She never arrived at Portsmouth, nor was any trace of her or any clue to her fate ever found. Her disappearance was considered a national catastrophe in Britain.

What marked each of these tragedies–along with countless others—was the inability of the ship in distress to summon aid from any other ship that was out of immediate sight or sound. The problem was, in a nutshell, communications–-or rather a lack of them. The simple truth was that once a ship sailed out of sight of land, ...