An hour or two afterwards he went aft to thank the baker for some special bread he had made for him; then back to his stateroom, where apparently he changed into working clothes, and sat down to write.
He was still writing, it would seem, when the Captain called him.
VIII.
On the night of Sunday, 14th April, at 11 40 ship’s time, in clear fine weather, near Latitude 41° 46′ N., Longitude 50° 14′ W., the Titanic collided with the submerged spur of an iceberg and ripped her starboard side ten feet above the level of the keel for a length of about three hundred feet, thereby giving access to the sea in six of her forward compartments.
The calamity came with dreadful swiftness. In the vivid words of a stoker, on duty at the time of collision some two hundred and fifty feet from the stem: “All of a sudden the starboard side of the ship came in upon us; it burst like a big gun going off; the water came pouring in and swilled our legs.” Within ten minutes the water rose fourteen feet above the keel in five of the compartments; afterwards it rose steadily in all six; and by midnight had submerged the lower deck in the foremost hold. Yet so gentle apparently was the shock of contact that among the passengers, and probably among most of the crew as well, it was only the stopping of the engines that warned them of some happening; whilst for a considerable time, so quietly the great ship lay on the flat sea, such confidence had all in her strength, and so orderly was everything, that to many, almost to the last, it seemed impossible that disaster had come.[6]
“At first we did not realise,” says Mr. Albert Dick,[7] “that the Titanic was mortally wounded.... I do not believe that anyone on her realised she was going to sink.” Mr. Dick goes on to record that, in his view, nothing deserved more praise than the conduct of Andrews after the ship had struck. “He was on hand at once and said that he was going below to investigate. We begged him not to go, but he insisted, saying he knew the ship as no one else did and that he might be able to allay the fears of the passengers. He went.
“As the minutes flew by we did not know what to do or which way to turn.... Captain Smith was everywhere doing his best to calm the rising tide of fear.... But in the minds of most of us there was ... the feeling that something was going to happen, and we waited for Mr. Andrews to come back.
“When he came we hung upon his words, and they were these: ‘There is no cause for any excitement. All of you get what you can in the way of clothes and come on deck as soon as you can. She is torn to bits below, but she will not sink if her after bulkheads hold.’
“It seemed almost impossible that this could be true ... and many in the crowd smiled, thinking this was merely a little extra knowledge that Mr. Andrews saw fit to impart....”