Voyagers of the Titanic (20 page)

Other third-class voyagers were on the
Titanic
for political reasons. August Wennerström, aged twenty-seven, a socialist and a typesetter from Malmö, had earlier been prosecuted for insulting King Oscar II of Sweden. After his acquittal, he decided to shift to the United States with a fellow socialist, Carl Jansson, aged twenty-one, a handsome, strapping blond carpenter from Örebo. Jansson and Wennerström evaded the formalities required by the Swedish government by going to Denmark, acquiring tickets and documentation in Copenhagen, and leaving from Esbjerg, Denmark’s new North Sea port on the coast of Jutland, on a Wilson Line steamship to Hull, proceeding by train to Southampton. (Jansson was destined to become a carpenter in Wahoo, Nebraska; Wennerström became a gardener in Culver, Indiana.) They shared their cabin with Gunnar Tenglin, aged twenty-five, who had left Stockholm for the United States around 1903, aged about sixteen, and settled in Burlington, Iowa, where he learned English while toiling as a laborer. He had promised his mother to return to Sweden after five years, and did so in 1908. He married in Sweden and fathered a son, but in 1912 he resolved to return to Burlington, bought tickets in Copenhagen, and made the journey from Esbjerg to Hull and thence to Southampton. His future jobs in Burlington were in the local gasworks and railway yard.

Most Jewish third-class passengers who embarked on the
Titanic
at Southampton originated from the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe where conditions were hostile if not murderous. David Livshin was traveling under the name of Abraham Harmer, possibly the name of someone who had sold him an unwanted ticket. Livshin, who was twenty-five years old, had originated in an ill-destined seaport in Latvia that was variously known as Libau, Libava, and Liepaja. This ice-free Baltic harbor had fallen under Russian dominion after the last partition of Poland. A fortress and coastal defenses against German attack had been erected, a military base and naval installation had been built in the early twentieth century, and a port for seaplanes in 1912. The port was served by a good railway line: by 1906 an estimated forty thousand emigrants were leaving Russia for the United States each year with Liepaja as their port of embarkation. It was a place with a terrible past and a worse future. Stalin inflicted two mass deportations on the city, and in 1941 all but thirty of the seven thousand Jews remaining there were massacred in nearby sand dunes by German troops. We know a little of Livshin’s personal history: he had come to England in 1911, worked in Manchester as a jeweler, and married there a young woman from Lithuania who made
sheitels
(the Yiddish word for the wigs worn by Orthodox Jewish women to cover their hair according to religious law). She was now pregnant. We know nothing of Livshin’s life on board the
Titanic:
he did not have a future.

Another Jewish passenger—they were all supplied with kosher food—was Eliezer (“Leslie”) Gilinski, a locksmith aged twenty-two from Ignalina, a town in Lithuania that had been expanding since a station on the Warsaw–Saint Petersburg railway line was built there. Doubtless he had left Lithuania to avoid military service under the Russians and racial prejudice. He had been staying with his brother, who was a shopkeeper at Abercynon, a mining village in the Rhondda Valley where there had been anti-Jewish riots during the previous summer, but moved on to try his luck in Chicago. He was remembered in the Rhondda as an amiable young man. Berk Trembisky had been born in Warsaw thirty-two years earlier; a leather worker and bag maker, he lived in France, where he assumed a Gallic surname, Picard, before briefly working in London. Leah Aks, who had been born in Warsaw in about 1894, had left Poland for East London; there she married a tailor, and was traveling to join him in Norfolk, Virginia, with their ten-month-old son, Frank Philip Aks (“Filly”). Beila Moor, aged twenty-seven, a widowed Russian garment maker, was traveling with her son, Meier, aged seven, who accosted passengers and with winning pertinacity asked for the cowboy and Indian picture cards that came with their cigarette packets.

Lebanese and Armenian Christians, Russian Jews, Swedish socialists—all were refugees seeking safety, liberty, and prosperity in North America. They were, too, draft dodgers. Nikola Lulic, aged twenty-nine, had been born in a Croatian village but some ten years earlier had settled in Chisholm, Minnesota, a raw mining settlement in the Mesabi iron range—some years from being connected to the Duluth, Missabe & Northern Railway. Lulic worked in the Alpena Mine and lived in the so-called Balkan district of Chisholm. In the autumn of 1911, Lulic returned to Croatia for a long visit to his wife and children, who had remained behind. It was settled that when he retraversed the Atlantic he would act as unofficial companion to other emigrants who like him had got their tickets from the ubiquitous Swiss agent, Büchel (Lulic’s cost 170 Swiss francs, equivalent to £8 13s 3d). Lulic interpreted for fellow Croatians, acted as their courier to Southampton, advised them on shipboard customs, and doubtless coached his charges on their demeanor and replies when undergoing Ellis Island interrogation: if their hopes of work were too explicit they might be judged in violation of the ban on contract labor, but if they were too indefinite, seeming to have no contacts or idea where to get jobs, they might be excluded as likely to become public charges. Lulic was a lifelong sojourner: in the 1920s he farmed a plot in Croatia, while often visiting France as a seasonal worker.

The destinations of the Croat farmworkers being shepherded by Lulic were as varied as their starting points. Peter and Jovo Calik, twins aged seventeen, from Brezik, embarked at Southampton on tickets supplied by Büchel for Sault Sainte Marie in Michigan; Ivan Stankovic, aged thirty-three, from Galgova, was going to New York City; Vagovina’s Milan Karajic and Bratma’s Stefan Turcin were docketed for Youngstown with its foundries and steelworks; Ludovic Cor from Kricina for Saint Louis, Missouri; Mirka Dika from Podgori for Vancouver; Jovan Dimic, from Ostrovca, was heading for the coal mines of Red Lodge, the county seat of Carbon County, Montana; Jeso Culumovic, aged seventeen, from Lipova Glavica, for Hammond, Indiana; Jakob Pasic, twenty-one, farmer, from Streklijevac, for the iron mines of Aurora, Minnesota, outside Duluth in the Mesabi Range; and both the laborer Ivan Jalševic and the hotelier Franz Karun were journeying to Galesburg, Illinois. Many of them began their journey with an entrenched fear of slipping back into the abyss of poverty. “My father,” wrote the son of another immigrant to Galesburg, “had a fear of want, a dread in his blood and brain, that the ‘rainy day’ might come and in fair weather he hadn’t prepared for it.”
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It was, on the
Titanic,
the wrong fear.

9

Officers and Crew

Successive nights, like rolling waves,

Convey them quickly, who are bound for death.

—G
EORGE
H
ERBERT,
“M
ORTIFICATION
”

F
ollowing trials in Belfast Lough, the
Titanic
had steamed to Southampton with everyone on board at a high pitch of proud expectation. It took Herbert Lightoller, the second officer, two weeks, and the sixth officer, James Moody, fresh from nautical school, a week to master the layout of decks and passages after joining at Belfast. Able Seaman William Lucas was still “groping about” trying to find his way about the ship’s stairwells and companionways on the night it sank.
1
Lucas and other seamen slipped ashore in Southampton for last drinks in a pub while Captain Maurice Clarke, the Board of Trade surveyor, tested the lowering of two lifeboats and approved lifesaving equipment, distress rockets, and much else. The lowering of two lifeboats by trained seamen from a stationary ship in dock subsequently seemed inadequate; but Lightoller stressed that Clarke, confronted with a new ship that was the biggest in the world, was extra-conscientious, and reinforced his reputation as the strictest of the Board of Trade’s surveyors. “He must see everything, and himself check every item that concerned the survey. He would not accept anyone’s word as sufficient—and got heartily cursed in consequence.”
2

The
Titanic
surpassed the
Olympic,
officers and crew agreed. “She is an improvement on
Olympic . . .
and is a wonderful ship, the latest thing in shipbuilding,” Henry Wilde, who had been transferred from chief officer of the
Olympic
to the same post on the
Titanic,
told his nieces in Liverpool.
3
“This ship is going to be a good deal better than the
Olympic
at least I think so, steadier and everything,” a bedroom steward named Richard Geddes wrote during the first night at sea.
4
“Bai jove what a fine ship this is,” declared the captain’s steward, “much better than the
Olympic
as far as passengers are concerned, but my little room is nothing near so nice, no daylight, electric light on all day, but I suppose it’s no use grumbling.”
5
A saloon steward carped about the serving of meals: “we have to scramble for [it] like a lot of mad men but that won’t last for long when things get straightened out,” he wrote after his first dinner at sea.
6

The crew was considered as top-notch as the ship’s amenities. “Having fitted out this magnificent vessel, the
Titanic,
we proceeded to man her with all that was best in the White Star organisation,” said Harold Sanderson, who had been general manager of Lord Nunburnholme’s Wilson Line in Hull until recruited by Bruce Ismay to be his company’s general manager in Liverpool.
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Because the
Olympic
was detained by the coal strike, Ismay and Sanderson determined that Wilde should serve on the
Titanic
’s maiden voyage. William Murdoch was consequently demoted from chief officer to first officer, and Lightoller from first officer to second on the day before sailing. This sudden reshuffling threw them both off their stride, and caused confusion. David Blair, who had been second officer on the
Titanic
’s delivery voyage from Belfast, was assigned to another ship, while subordinate officers remained in their posts. Blair’s departure had one inadvertent by-product. He took with him the key to the locker containing binoculars for the ship’s lookouts to use when they were perched high in the crow’s nest. Binoculars were therefore unavailable to the lookouts. Their utility in the conditions prevailing when the liner scraped the iceberg is arguable; but some commentators were indignant at their irretrievability.

The ship was under the command of Captain Edward Smith. Beneath him, there were seven deck officers. Crews of Atlantic liners were divided into three departments: Deck, Engine, and Victualing (the latter was also called the Stewards’ Department). The deck crew amounted to seventy-three, including the seven ship’s officers, the surgeon for first-class passengers, an assistant surgeon for the rest, seven quartermasters, five lookouts, two mess stewards, two masters-of-arms, two carpenter-joiners, two window cleaners, a boatswain, a lamp trimmer, a storekeeper, plus twenty-nine able seamen.

There were 494 in the Stewards’ Department, including one strong-minded, self-reliant matron, two Marconi operators, and five postal clerks. There were 290 stewards and stewardesses as well as a window cleaner, linen keeper, stenographer, masseuse, fish cook, assistant soup cook, iceman, bakers, plate washers, and nine “Boots” to polish shoes. All 120 of the catering crew from the delivery voyage from Belfast signed on again at Southampton. Over 300 were added to their number at Southampton, so that the full complement on sailing was 428—far more than the deck or engine crew: 231 individuals were classified as first-class victualing crew, 76 as second-class, and 121 as third-class. The ship’s musicians traveled as second-class passengers and were not part of the Stewards’ Department. Although the Marconi men, postal clerks, and 68 à la carte restaurant staff had signed the ship’s articles, they were not White Star employees but paid by the Marconi Company, the General Post Office, and the Italian Gaspare (“Luigi”) Gatti who held the catering contract.

Of the 892 crew, 699 had Southampton addresses. About 40 percent of these were Hampshire men, but many had moved south when White Star transferred its operations from Liverpool in 1907, and originated from Merseyside. Over a hundred catering crew and nearly forty engineers had signed on in Belfast and continued on the Atlantic voyage, although not all of them were from Ulster. A few crewmen were Londoners: Able Seaman Joseph Scarrott was the sort of cockney who used rhyming slang: his monthly wages of £5 he called “bees and honey.” Most were simple patriots, like Quartermaster Bright who referred to England as “Albion”; and some were bad husbands and fathers, like John Poingdestre, whose family in Southampton were faint with hunger when he embarked: the children were later put into care in Jersey, and his descendants repudiate his memory.

The stores needed by an Olympic-class floating hotel were reckoned at 75,000 pounds of fresh meat; 11,000 pounds of fresh fish; 8,000 head of poultry and game; 6,000 pounds of bacon and ham; 2,500 pounds of sausages; 35,000 eggs; 40 tons of potatoes; 7,000 heads of lettuce; 1¼ tons of peas; 2¾ tons of tomatoes; 10,000 pounds of sugar; 6,000 pounds of butter; 36,000 oranges; 16,000 lemons; 180 boxes of apples; 180 boxes of oranges; 1,000 pounds of grapes; 50 boxes of grapefruit; 800 bundles of asparagus; 3,500 onions; 1,500 gallons of milk; 1,750 quarts of ice cream; 2,200 pounds of coffee; 800 pounds of tea; 15,000 bottles of beer and stout; 1,500 bottles of wine; 850 bottles of spirits; and 8,000 cigars. All these perishables were taken on board the
Titanic
in the day or so before departure from Southampton. Officers worked night and day receiving stores, allotting duties, testing instruments and contraptions, signing chits and certificates. Other indispensable items that did not need to be fresh or refrigerated had been loaded earlier in Belfast. Linen included 45,000 table napkins; 25,000 towels; 15,000 bed sheets and pillowcases; 7,500 bath towels; 6,000 tablecloths; and 4,000 aprons. Crockery included 12,000 dinner plates; 4,500 soup plates; 3,000 teacups; 3,000 beef tea cups; 1,500 coffee cups; 1,500 soufflé dishes; and 1,000 cream jugs. Cutlery included 8,000 dinner forks; 1,500 fish forks; 1,000 oyster forks; 400 sugar tongs; 400 asparagus tongs; 300 nutcrackers; and 100 grape scissors. There were 8,000 tumblers; 2,000 wineglasses; 1,500 champagne flutes; 1,200 small liqueur glasses or brandy balloons; and 300 claret jugs. Cleaning and maintenance equipment included 12 mops, 12 squeegees, 58 paintbrushes, and 72 brooms.

There is no king as great as a sea captain on his ship, Darwin said. Captain Edward Smith was absolute lord of these men, women, and provisions. He had been born in 1850 in the Staffordshire pottery town of Hanley and attended a Methodist school until, at the age of twelve, he went to work at the Etruria Forge. At eighteen he left for Liverpool and enlisted on a clipper ship. His first command, at the early age of twenty-six, was a one-thousand-ton three-master on the South America run. In 1888 he received his first White Star command as captain of the
Baltic
. He captained a total of seventeen ships from the
Baltic
to the
Titanic
and is estimated to have sailed two million miles for White Star. Latterly, he had commanded their newest liners and was commodore of their fleet. He had experienced gales and fogs, but had never been in an accident worth mentioning, he told a reporter in 1907 after the
Adriatic
’s maiden voyage: “I never saw a wreck, and I have never been wrecked, nor have I been in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster.”
8

Smith was paid £1,250 a year, with a bonus of £1,000 if he brought his ships to port in good order. He had married in 1887 and fathered a daughter in 1902. On land he enjoyed the comforting banality of an evening at home in his villa in Westwood Park, a Southampton suburb. With his sea salt’s beard and avuncular tubbiness, he looked solid, unflappable, and reassuring. He had a reputation as a safe seaman, a hospitable hotelier, and a good talker. Captains were often praised as raconteurs, for they had a fresh audience every week and could vary their repertoire according to need. Smith kept to the rule that large men should be jolly and lovers of life. “In the little tea parties in his private state room we learned to know the genial warm-hearted family man; his face would light as he recounted the little intimacies of his life ashore, as he told of his wife and the troubles she had with the dogs he loved, of his little girl and her delight with the presents he bought her,” recorded a first-class voyager who crossed the Atlantic with him on several ships. “He read widely, but men more than books. He was a good listener . . . although he liked to get in a yarn himself now and again, but he had scant patience with bores or people who ‘gushed.’ I have seen him quell both.”
9

The
Titanic
was to be Smith’s last post before retirement. When the ship left Southampton, with flags flying high, he might have fancied that the cheers of all the captains of the world were ringing in his ears. He belonged to the greatest seafaring nation ever known; he was captain of the greatest ship that ever sailed; and his last voyage was to be the apex of his career—the maiden voyage of the
Titanic
. As the liner crossed from Southampton to Cherbourg, he conducted maneuvers to test his ship, which performed well. Next day, the
Titanic
steamed into the Atlantic from Queenstown on the extreme southern route for westbound ships that was used by liners between mid-January and mid-August each year. With an average speed of twenty-two knots, it made 386 miles on April 11, 519 on April 12, and 546 on April 13. Smith continued to monitor the ship and its crew during the first two days of the voyage, and ate in his cabin until Friday evening. Smith spent much of Sunday on the bridge, although at 10.30
A.M.
he led a Christian service lasting forty-five minutes in the first-class dining saloon. Officers and seamen liked to sail under Smith’s command and admired his seamanship. “It was an education to see him con his own ship up through the intricate channels entering New York at full speed,” Lightoller recalled. “One particularly bad corner, known as the South-West Spit, used to make us fairly flush with pride as he swung her round, judging his distances to a nicety; she heeling over to the helm with only a matter of feet to spare between each end of the ship and the banks.”
10

White Star liners were supposed to hold a lifeboat drill each Sunday morning, but it was canceled because of a robust breeze, which stopped blowing soon afterward—the Sunday, overall, was unusually windless. English regulations did not require a lifeboat drill; and Charles Andrews, a nineteen-year-old assistant saloon steward from Liverpool who had been four years at sea, had been mustered only for boat drills in New York Harbor and on Sundays crossing back to Europe.
11
George Cavell, who had been a trimmer on White Star’s
Adriatic,
Oceanic,
and
Olympic
before the
Titanic,
testified that he had never been mustered for a lifeboat drill at sea: “the only boat drill as I ever had” had been on Sunday mornings, in New York Harbor, when there were no passengers about.
12

If first class on the
Titanic
was a Waldorf-Astoria and second class a Lyons Corner House, the bunkers and furnaces where Cavell labored were an inferno. Few of the engine crew of firemen, greasers, and trimmers who had delivered the ship from Belfast signed on again for the maiden voyage. The 280 men in the
Titanic
’s Engine Department included 13 leading firemen, 162 firemen, 72 trimmers, and 33 greasers (charged with cleaning and lubricating the moving parts of the engines). In 1911 Arnold Bennett was shown the innards of an Atlantic liner by the chief officer. He was taken up and down steel ladders, climbed over the moving chain of the steering gear, ducked past jets of steam, and stepped along greasy floors beside ramparts of machinery guarded by steel rails, with pressure dials everywhere. There were 190 furnaces with roaring, red-hot jaws. The vast, terrible stokehold seemed to stretch for an infinite distance. It was like hell superimposed on a coal mine: upstairs, on higher decks, Bennett reflected, confectioners were making petit fours while first-class passengers soared in elevators.
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