The Night Lives On (16 page)

At 4
A.M.
Chief Officer George F. Stewart arrived on the upper bridge to take over the watch. Stone filled him in on the original eight rockets…described how the ship firing them began to steam away after the first rocket went up…pointed out that he had informed Captain Lord three different times.

Stewart raised his binoculars and spotted to the south a four-masted steamer with one funnel and “a lot of lights amidship.” He asked Stone if that was the vessel that had been firing the rockets. No, said Stone, adding that this was a brand-new steamer he hadn’t seen before.

Stone now went below, leaving the Chief Officer to sort things out. To every sailor, rockets at sea normally mean distress, and Stewart was no exception. He had an uneasy feeling that “something had happened.” Yet he did nothing until 4:30
A.M.,
when Captain Lord had asked to be awakened. Stewart did this personally, and standing by the chart room door, he remarked that Stone had seen rockets during his watch.

“Yes, I know; he’s been telling me,” replied Lord.

The Captain now went on the bridge and began explaining his plans for getting through the ice and proceeding on to Boston. Stewart asked if he wasn’t going to go south first and try to learn something about the ship that had been firing rockets. Lord raised his binoculars and looked at the four-masted steamer. “No,” he
said, “she looks all right; she’s not making any signals now.”

But this, of course, was not the ship that Stone had watched. This was the newcomer that he hadn’t even seen, until pointed out by Stewart. Her condition— good or bad—was irrelevant. Nevertheless, Stewart did not tell the Captain that he was looking at the wrong ship. Asked at the British Inquiry why he failed to do so, he said he didn’t know.

Little is known of Stewart’s and Lord’s conversation over the next 50 minutes. At the Inquiry, Stewart said nothing about it; Lord said only that he learned for the first time that there was more than one rocket—something impossible to reconcile with the accounts of Stone, Gibson, and Stewart himself.

In any event, at 5:20 life on the
Californian
suddenly took on a much faster pace. Stewart burst into the radio room and shook awake the operator, Cyril Evans: “Wireless, there’s a ship been firing rockets in the night. Will you see if you can find out what is wrong—what is the matter?”

Evans needed no further prodding. Normally he arose at 7:00, but now he bolted out of bed and flicked on the set. One after another, the
Mount Temple
, the
Frankfurt
, and the
Virginian
told him about the
Titanic
, and at 5:45 he had an official message from the
Virginian
, giving him the
Titanic’s
position, 41°46’ N, 50°14’W. The
Californian’s
position was 42°5’N, 50°7’W—about 19 miles away.

By 6:00-6:15 Captain Lord had the
Californian
under way, but at the start it was very slow going. For the first three or four miles she crept westward and southward through heavy field ice, often studded with
bergs. By 7:00 she was in open water again and steaming south at 13 knots, her full speed. Around 7:30 Captain Lord calculated he was at the
Titanic’s
position, but found only the
Mount Temple.
She, too, had found nothing, but both ships could see the
Carpathia
stopped five or six miles to the east.

Wireless traffic indicated that the
Carpathia
was picking up the
Titanic’s
boats; so Captain Lord headed for her. There was too much ice to steer a direct course; therefore, the
Californian
continued south until she found a channel in the ice, then wriggled through it, and finally approached the
Carpathia
from the southwest or almost the opposite direction from the way she had started out. When he first noticed her, Captain Rostron estimated that the
Californian
was five or six miles to the west-southwest.

By now everyone on the
Californian
had been alerted. Extra lookouts were posted at the bow and in a coal basket hoisted above the crow’s nest. Seamen were swinging her boats out for rescue work. Awakened by Chief Officer Stewart, Third Officer Groves paused long enough to ask Second Officer Stone if it was really true about the
Titanic.
“Yes, old chap,” Stone replied, “I saw rockets in my watch.”

By 8:30 the
Californian
was alongside the
Carpathia,
just in time to watch Rostron pick up Boat 12, the last of the
Titanic’s
lifeboats. The two ships exchanged signals by wigwag, with the
Californian
agreeing to continue the search, while the
Carpathia
headed back for New York.

It was a disheartening search—no more survivors, not even any victims in sight, just seven abandoned lifeboats, some planks, deck chairs, a few pilasters, and a
number of green cushions floating around.

The
Californian
finally gave up the search and once more headed for Boston. Like everything else on this most disputatious of voyages, there was disagreement over when she resumed her journey. Captain Lord thought it was at 11:20
A.M.,
after a thorough check of the whole area; Third Officer Groves thought it was around 10:40, after the most cursory of investigations. The log backed up Captain Lord, but it was hardly a reliable document. It contained not one word about any of the rockets seen during the night.

Yet that seemed to be the party line when the
Californian
arrived in Boston on the morning of April 19. No one had seen anything—no rockets, no lights, nothing unusual on the night of the 14th-15th.

And for a while the strategy worked. The Boston press virtually ignored the
Californian
on April 21, 22, and 23. She lay quietly at her Clyde Street pier, discharging and taking on cargo without the benefit of reporters or other nosy people.

Yet behind the scenes the waterfront seethed with excitement. It turned out that besides Stone and Gibson, at least one other member of the crew had seen those rockets. In particular, Ernest Gill, assistant on one of the ship’s “donkey engines,” had watched them go up while out on deck taking a midnight smoke. Then Evans, Stone, and Gibson, though silent now, had talked a lot during the days just before the ship reached Boston. Secondhand versions of their experiences spread through the dockside bars.

On April 21 the ship’s carpenter, W. F. McGregor, visited his cousin John H. G. Frazer in Clinton, Massachusetts, and could contain himself no longer. A
reporter from the Clinton
Daily Item
was present, and on the 23rd the paper broke the story. It told how the watch on the
Californian
saw the rockets sent up by the
Titanic….

The officer on watch, it is said, reported this to the captain of the boat, but he failed to pay any attention to the signals, excepting to tell the watch to keep his eye on the boat. At this time the two boats were about ten miles apart. It being in the night, the wireless operator on the
Californian
was asleep at the time.

It is said that those on board the
Californian
could see the lights of the
Titanic
very plainly, and it is also reported that those on the
Titanic
saw the
Californian.
Finally the first mate on the
Californian
, who with several of the officers had been watching the
Titanic
, decided that he would take a hand in the situation and so roused the wireless operator, and an attempt was made to communicate with the
Titanic.
It was then too late….

Curiously, two days passed before the Boston papers picked up the
Daily Item’s
scoop, but rumors continued to spread. On the 24th the
Post
finally caught a whiff, and published an interview with Captain Lord, who denied that the
Californian
had seen anything unusual. She was only 20 miles away, he said, but sighted “no rockets or other signals of distress.”

On the 25th the
Morning Globe
carried Carpenter McGregor’s account, as it had appeared in the
Daily Item.
This brought another rash of denials from the embattled
Californian.
“The story is perfectly absurd,”
declared J. H. Thomas, agent of the Leyland Line in Boston. Captain Lord and his officers stuck to their guns: “None of the crew yesterday would say they had seen any signals of distress or any lights on the night of Sunday, April 14. One of them said he did not believe anyone else did.”

Later that morning the Boston
American
exploded a bombshell that went far beyond mere gossip. The paper carried a sworn affidavit, signed by the assistant donkeyman, Ernest Gill, relating what he had seen on the night of April 14-15. Boiled down, Gill’s affidavit declared that shortly before midnight he had noticed the lights of a very large steamer about ten miles away going along at full steam. He then went below but couldn’t get to sleep. Coming back on deck for a smoke, he saw no sign of the big steamer, but on the horizon in the same general direction he watched two white rockets burst in the sky. He did not report this to the bridge because “they could not have helped but see them.”

Once again the press descended on Captain Lord. What did he have to say now?

“A lie.”… “Bosh.”…“Poppycock,” the Captain told various interviewers, noting that Gill had been paid $500 for his account. Chief Officer Stewart, Second Officer Stone, and an unnamed quartermaster all backed the skipper up. Questioned by the
Herald’s
man, “Stone emphatically denied that he had notified Captain Lord of any rockets, as he had seen none, nor had any been reported to him.”

But by now nobody was really listening—the show had moved to Washington. On the 25th, Captain Lord, Wireless Operator Evans, and Gill himself were all
summoned to testify at the Senate hearings. Queried before he caught the train, Lord assured the Boston
Journal
, “If I go to Washington, it will not be because of this story in the paper, but to tell the Committee why my ship was drifting without power, while the
Titanic
was rushing under full speed. It will take about ten minutes to do this.”

It would take far longer than ten minutes—and more than a gratuitous slap at Captain Smith—to get the
Californian
off the hook. On the afternoon of April 26, the Senate Committee heard in turn Gill, Lord, and Evans…and ultimately rejected the Captain’s version of events. Putting all the evidence together, the Committee found that the
Californian
was less than 19 miles away, saw the
Titanic’s
rockets, and “failed to respond to them in accordance with the dictates of humanity, international usage, and the requirements of law.”

Meanwhile, the
Californian’s
conscience-stricken carpenter, McGregor, had not been idle. It was his interview in the
Daily Item
—not Gill’s affidavit, as generally supposed—that raised the first serious charges against Captain Lord and his officers. Now he added fuel to the fire with a letter to a friend in England making pretty much the same points. The letter soon came to the attention of a London civil engineer named Gerard Jensen, who decided it was his “public duty” to pass on the contents at once to the Board of Trade. In this way McGregor’s charges also became the basis for the British Inquiry’s interest in the
Californian.

Ultimately the Court heard not only the now-familiar stories of Captain Lord, Donkeyman Gill, and Wireless Operator Evans, but the accounts of the other characters in the drama as well: Third Officer Groves, who first
saw the strange ship; Stone and Gibson, who watched the rockets go up; and Chief Officer Stewart, who was the prime mover in finally waking up Evans.

“There are inconsistencies and contradictions in the story as told by the different witnesses,” concluded Lord Mersey, “but the truth of the matter is plain….When she first saw the rockets, the
Californian
could have pushed through the ice to the open water without any serious risk and so have come to the assistance of the
Titanic.
Had she done so, she might have saved many if not all of the lives that were lost.”

To the end of his days Captain Lord insisted that the
Californian
wasn’t “there.” From time to time he asked that the case be reopened, but the Board of Trade failed to find new grounds for any appeal, and there the matter stood. Gradually Lord came to be regarded by many as a sort of gallant loner fighting a huge bureaucracy— “Under the Wheels of the Juggernaut” was the title of one series of articles defending him.

Actually, Captain Lord’s battle was far from lonely. He enjoyed the support of the Mercantile Marine Services Association, which looked after the interests of British ship officers; he had well-placed sympathizers in Parliament; he could count on highly professional access to the press; he was backed by a small but articulate band of marine writers.

They come across as energetic, resourceful—and highly selective in presenting their evidence. They play up the testimony that the ship seen from the
Californian
looked like a freighter, but brush off Third Officer Groves, who always thought she was a passenger liner. Since the
Californian
was stopped for the night, they parade the witnesses who said the light seen from the
Titanic
was moving, but ignore the witnesses who always thought the light was stationary. As for the devastating conversation between Stone and Gibson while the rockets were going up, it is seldom mentioned.

Arguing that the
Titanic
gave the wrong position—that she was really much farther away—the
Californian’s
defenders offer a map, full of authoritative-looking squiggles, showing that the position given by the
Titanic
lay on the far side of an impenetrable ice field. They rarely mention another map with a much better pedigree. Plotted at the time by the U.S. Navy’s Hydrographic Office, it is based on the ice reports of nine different ships, including the
Californian
herself. It depicts the ice field as lying more from the northeast to the southwest, hence putting the
Titanic’s
reported position on the near side of the field, where of course she belongs. The exact lay of the ice field is, in fact, a subject for endless speculation.