Titanic: A Survivor's Story by Archibald Gracie Read Free Book Online Page A

the Titanic is described as hesitating and assuming a vertical position before her final dive to the depths below can be accounted for only on this hypothesis of the sliding of the boilers from their beds. A second cabin passenger, Mr. Lawrence Beesley, a Cambridge University man, has written an excellent book about the Titanic disaster, dwelling especially upon the lessons to be learned from it. His account given to the newspapers also contains the most graphic description from the viewpoint of those in the lifeboats, telling how the great ship looked before her final plunge. He ‘was a mile or two miles away,’ he writes, ‘when the oarsmen lay on their oars and all in the lifeboat were motionless as we watched the ship in absolute silence – save some who would not look and buried their heads on each others’ shoulders….
    As we gazed awe-struck, she tilted slightly up, revolving apparently about a centre of gravity just astern of amidships until she attained a vertical upright position, and there she remained – motionless! As she swung up, her lights, which had shown without a flicker all night, went out suddenly, then came on again for a single flash and then went out altogether; and as they did so there came a noise which many people, wrongly, I think, have described as an explosion. It has always seemed to me that it was nothing but the engines and machinery coming loose from their place and bearings and falling through the compartments, smashing everything in their way. It was partly a roar, partly a groan, partly a rattle and partly a smash, and it was not a sudden roar as an explosion would be; it went on successively for some seconds, possibly fifteen or twenty, as the heavy machinery dropped down to the bottom (now the bows) of the ship; I suppose it fell through the end and sank first before the ship. (For evidence of shattered timbers, see Hagan’s testimony, page 85.) But it was a noise no one had heard before and no one wishes to hear again. It was stupefying, stupendous, as it came to us along the water. It was as if all the heavy things one could think of had been thrown downstairs from the top of a house, smashing each other, and the stairs and everything in the way.
    ‘Several apparently authentic accounts have been given in which definite stories of explosions have been related – in some cases even with wreckage blown up and the ship broken in two; but I think such accounts will not stand close analysis. In the first place, the fires had been withdrawn and the steam allowed to escape some time before she sank, and the possibility from explosion from this cause seems very remote.’
    Second : Did the ship break in two?
    I was on the Carpathia when I first heard any one make reference to this point. The seventeen-year-old son of Mr. John B. Thayer, ‘Jack’ Thayer, Jr., and his young friend from Philadelphia, R.N. Williams, Jr., the tennis expert, in describing their experiences to me were positive that they saw the ship split in two. This was from their position in the water on the starboard quarter. ‘Jack’ Thayer gave this same description to an artist, who reproduced it in an illustration in the New York Herald , which many of us have seen. Some of the passengers, whose names I have just mentioned, are also cited by the newspapers as authority for the statements that the ship ‘broke in two,’ that she ‘buckled amidships,’ that she ‘was literally torn to pieces,’ etc. On the other hand, there is much testimony available which is at variance with this much-advertised sensational newspaper account. Summing up its investigation of this point the Senate Committee’s Report reads: ‘There have been many conflicting statements as to whether the ship broke in two, but the preponderance of evidence is to the effect that she assumed an almost end-on position and sank intact.’ This was as Lightoller testified before the Committee, that the Titanic ’s decks were ‘absolutely