The sailor complied. He swung his ax to knock out the restraining pin. The boat was heavy to begin with, but now loaded with three tons of humanity it swung inward, crushing everyone between the boat and the wall. At least two passengers, sisters in their fifties, died instantly, of injuries associated with severe crushing. Lehmann’s right leg was damaged, but he managed to crawl from the mass of wounded bystanders. This was not easy. He was a large, round man and wore a long overcoat and a life jacket.
Passengers and crew again attempted to launch the lifeboat. They were making progress when something went awry and this boat too dumped its passengers into the water. At about the same time, Lehmann said, a “terrific explosion” rose from the deck in the direction of the bow. This new convulsion was likely caused by water infiltrating yet another boiler room and coming in contact with a superheated tank, one of a number of such secondary eruptions. Only about fourteen minutes had passed since the torpedo impact, but the sea was climbing fast.
MANY PASSENGERS decided to forgo the boats and take a more direct path. Dwight Harris headed toward the bow, as per his plan. He climbed over the port rail on A Deck and scuttled down the side of the ship, two decks, then went toward the bow, which had sunk to the point where all he would have to do was step into the water. He took off his shoes and discarded his overcoat, his hat, and his Medici book. He had no life jacket, not even his custom Wanamaker’s belt. He too had been afraid to go to his cabin for fear of being trapped. But now, at the water’s edge and facing the real prospect of drowning, he changed his mind.
“I took a look at things and decided I must have a life belt so I climbed up again to ‘A’ deck and rushed to my cabin,” he wrote. He put the belt on and returned to the bow. An officer called to him to come up to the lifeboats, “but I realized that all available space in them was badly wanted, so I shook my head no!—I got up on the rail, swung my feet over, and when the water got right up to the deck I jumped overboard!”
As he swam away, he looked up, and saw the ship’s giant funnels move past against the sky.
THEODATE POPE and Edwin Friend had planned that if an emergency arose they would rendezvous on the boat deck with Theodate’s maid, Emily Robinson. “The deck suddenly looked very strange crowded with people,” Theodate wrote, “and I remember two women were crying in a pitifully weak way.” Theodate and Friend looked over the port side and watched a boat being lowered. One end fell too fast and everyone plummeted into the sea. This could have been Ogden Hammond’s boat, or the one Lehmann tried to launch at gunpoint. “We looked at each other, sickened by the sight, and then made our way through the crowd for deck B on the starboard side.”
As they stood at the rail, they saw that efforts to launch the lifeboats on this side were having more success. Boats came down past them, winched slowly from the deck above. The two feared the ship was sinking so quickly and with so pronounced a list that it might roll onto the boats after they reached the water.
They climbed back up to the boat deck but made no attempt to board any of the remaining lifeboats.
“We walked close together, side by side, each with an arm around the other’s waist,” Theodate recalled. The two met a passenger whom by now they knew well, Marie Depage, the Belgian nurse. Depage seemed stunned. “She had a man on either side of her, friends of hers, so I did not speak,” Theodate wrote. “It was no time for words unless one could offer help.”
Theodate and Friend headed toward the stern, now an uphill climb. Her maid came up beside them and Theodate noted the tense smile etched on her face. “I could only put my hand on her shoulder and say, ‘Oh Robinson.’ ”
They searched for life jackets. They entered several cabins and found three. Friend helped the women put them on; they all walked to the rail. The ship’s giant funnels towered above them at an exaggerated slant. The water was far below.
Theodate glanced at Friend. The two looked down at the water. The time had come. “I asked him to go first,” she wrote.
Friend climbed down one deck, then jumped. He disappeared briefly, but soon bobbed to the surface, and looked up at the women. The ship continued to move forward; his form receded.
Theodate said, “Come Robinson,” and stepped off the rail.
GRACE FRENCH ran back to where she and Preston Prichard had been standing at the moment of impact. He was nowhere in sight. She went to the rail, took off her coat, and jumped. She had no life jacket. Her plan was to swim until she found a piece of floating debris. The jump took her deep under the surface, where an eddy caused by the passing ship held her down.
BY NOW, Captain Turner knew the ship would sink. He put on a life jacket but remained on the bridge, as did fellow officers and his helmsman, Hugh Johnston. In the Marconi house behind the bridge, the ship’s chief wireless man, Robert Leith, used auxiliary power to send message after message asking all ships in the vicinity to come at once.
Turner asked Johnston for another readout of the spirit gauge.
Johnston called, “Twenty-five degrees.”
Turner said, “My God.”