“The result of all these forces was that we were carried parallel to the ship’s side, and directly under Boat 14, which had filled rapidly, and was coming down on us in a way that threatened to submerge our boat.
“‘Stop lowering 14!’ our crew shouted; and the crew of No. 14, now only twenty feet above, cried out the same. The distance to the top, however, was some seventy feet, and the creaking of the pulleys must have deadened all sound to those above, for down she came, fifteen feet, ten feet, five feet, and a stoker and I reached up and touched the bottom of the swinging boat above our heads. The next drop would have brought her on our heads. Just before she dropped another stoker sprang to the ropes with open knife in hand. ‘One,’ I heard him say; and then ‘Two,’ as the knife cut through the pulley ropes.”
Almost immediately the exhaust stream carried the boat clear, and the other boat slipped into the water, on exactly the same spot that the first one had occupied. It was indeed a narrow shave, for the two boats almost rubbed gunwales.
Leaving the boats as they are being got away, let us go to some other part of the ship to see what is happening.
Down below, in the engine-room and stokeholds, begrimed heroes were working hard at their duty. The black squad always occupies the most dangerous place in a ship at such times; and to the credit of these men, who are hidden from the gaze of the people who stroll leisurely about decks, or while away the hours in concert room or card room, let it be said that they rarely fail in the moment of danger. On the Titanic, those men whose engine-rooms and stokeholds had not been flooded, and who knew they would be wanted, stayed below; the engines in the principal engine-room, which was still protected by its bulkhead, must be run to keep the pumps working and the dynamos running which supplied the electricity for light and the wireless. If the pumps could be kept going, then the vessel could float long enough for help to come; if the wireless could be kept working, then help could be appealed for across the ether waves; and while the men below strove, some at drawing fires to prevent explosions, others at stoking fires that were safe, up in the Marconi cabin two men were sticking to their posts. The men, Phillips and Bride, were heroes, and their names will be remembered while men remember the story of the Titanic.
They had sent out the first messages for assistance—SOS, the new call for ships at sea, changing it occasionally to CQD, the old signal. Then, when things grew more serious than ever, and the news was brought down to them, the instruments began to buzz out longer messages, that told ships scores of miles away what had happened, and what was happening. And now and again there came a voice from the ether through the apparatus on the operators’ heads, telling them that the signals had been caught, and that this ship and that ship was coming at full speed. From seventy miles away the Carpathia’s operator sent such a message; from 300 miles away the Olympic also sent her message saying that she was coming. And thus it went on, this long-distance conversation on which so much depended, and which might stop at any moment, for the captain had told Phillips and Bride that the dynamos might not be able to hold out very long. It was the last quarter of an hour, and Phillips, forgetting all about himself, refusing to think of escape, stood to his work, tapping out the messages, urging the rushing ships to put on every ounce of steam. And Bride, no less a hero, bethought him of Phillips’s safety. He went and got their lifebelts, put one on Phillips and one on himself.
Captain Smith looked in just then, and said: “Men, you have done your full duty; you can do no more! Abandon your cabin now. It is every man for himself. Look out for yourselves. I release you.”
“But Phillips clung on,” said Bride, “sending, sending. He clung on for about ten minutes after the captain released him. The water was then coming into our cabin.”
A hero? Every inch a hero and a man! But what of another man? The one who, creeping silently into that cabin, where a man stood hazarding his life, juggling with death, lest haply he might do some good for that helpless crowd above, tried to slip the lifebelt from the hero’s back? What of that man? He had had a lifebelt himself, but, too scared to fetch it, had thought of an easier way. Bride, catching him in the act, had a desire for blood. “I suddenly felt a passion not to let that man die a decent sailor’s death,” he said. “I wished he might have stretched a rope or walked a plank. I did my duty. I hope I finished him; but I do not know.”
Phillips went down with the ship he had tried to save. Bride, more fortunate, came through alive, as will be seen. He reached the deck just as the end came. The last boat had gone—and there remained on the ship some fifteen hundred souls, hundreds of them clinging now in terror to each other. The gay tunes of the orchestra changed to the solemn strains of a hymn. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the starboard was sinking, dipping deeper and deeper, the stern rising higher and higher, hundreds of people being clustered there, waiting for they dared not think what. The full terror of it all was now beginning to sink into minds that had refused to accept the possibility of disaster. The water lapped up higher and higher, and men scrambled up the sloping deck, seeking to outrace the water, which soon covered the bridge and carried the captain away from the ship, holding in his arm some poor, lonely babe who had been forgotten in the hurly-burly. “Boys!” he had cried lustily ere he went, unwillingly, for he would have stayed by his boat but for that wave that washed him overboard. “Boys, you can do no more! Look-out for yourselves!” And men prepared to cast themselves into the sea, realising now that there was no hope to be found in this ship on which so many hopes had been set. But, instead of jumping, they now found themselves compelled to hang on like grim death to anything that was at hand—rails, stanchions, deck-houses, ropes—to save themselves from being washed away, for the stern was now towering high above the water, and the deck seemed like a sheer precipice, down which one might slip—to death.