A Night to Remember: Chapters 7–8

Never again would men fling a ship into an ice field, heedless of warnings, putting their whole trust in a few thousand tons of steel and rivets.

After the Titanic sank, the American and British governments established the International Ice Patrol, and today Coast Guard cutters shepherd errant icebergs that drift toward the steamer lanes.

If the White Star Line was indifferent, so was everybody else. No one seemed to care about Third Class — neither the press, the official Inquiries, nor even the Third Class passengers themselves.

Again, the testimony doesn’t suggest any deliberate hush-up — it was just that no one was interested. The British Court of Enquiry was even more cavalier.

Mr. W. D. Harbinson, who officially represented the Third Class interests, said he could find no trace of discrimination, and Lord Mersey’s report gave a clean bill of health — yet not a single Third Class passenger testified, and the only surviving steward stationed in steerage freely conceded that the men were kept belowdecks as late as 1:15 A.M.

Within days Ismay was pilloried; within a year a prominent survivor divorced her husband merely because, according to gossip, he happened to be saved.

The public depended on socially prominent people for all the vicarious glamour that enriches drab lives.

This preoccupation was fully appreciated by the press. When the Titanic sailed, the New York Times listed the prominent passengers on the front page.

Twenty years later she still recalled with awe, “There was a spirit of camaraderie unlike any I had experienced on previous trips. No one consulted the passenger list, to judge from the air of good fellowship that prevailed among the cabin passengers. They met on deck as one big party.”

This group knew the crew almost as well as each other. It was the custom to cross with certain captains rather than on particular ships, and Captain Smith had a personal following which made him invaluable to the White Star Line. The Captain repaid the patronage with little favors and privileges which kept them coming.

Today nobody could carry off these little gestures of chivalry, but they did that night. An air of noblesse oblige has vanished too.

Scores of ministers preached that the Titanic was a heaven-sent lesson to awaken people from their complacency, to punish them for top-heavy faith in material progress.

All the time while Collapsibles A and B were filling up and painfully struggling away from the scene, hundreds of swimmers were crying for help. Individual voices were lost in a steady, overwhelming clamor.

“Consider yourselves under my command,” he ordered, and now he organized his flotilla for rescue work.

He reasoned that if boats were needed, provisions were needed too; so on his own initiative he mustered his staff of 13 bakers and ransacked the Titanic's larder of all spare bread.