April 14, 1912. In the 40th minute of the 23rd
hour, somewhere in the North Atlantic Ocean, the RMS Titanic is unwelcomely kissed on
the cheek by a rather stubborn iceberg. You know what happens next. But you might
not know that one of the passengers, the ship’s chief baker, defied death that
night. This heroic man refused to get on one of the lifeboats, instead making sure women
and children were saved. When the ship finally plunged into the water, he rode it down, in
his own words, as if it was an “elevator.” But what we like about this man is the
fact that when he knew the end was nigh, he decided to get hammered. He went into the
pantry and chugged down some liquor. Why not end on a high, he must have thought. He was
very likely the last person alive on that ship just before it was completely submerged. The last
who survived, that is, so his story is important. But what’s more, he spent two hours in that
freezing cold water in his drunken state. While others died in minutes, he trod water
and didn’t even feel very cold. It’s nothing short of a miracle that this happened.
You’ll hear more about him later and the reasons he survived when he really should
have died, but since he was the last guy on the ship, we’ll leave his story until last.
When you read about the number of people that were on the ship that fateful night, not all
sources sound the same. We can’t be sure what the exact numbers were, but you’ll generally hear
about 2,200, 900 of whom were working on the ship. Some of the passengers were insanely wealthy.
Others were depressingly poor. First-class tickets on the Titanic went up to £870 (£105,883
today). Third-class tickets cost as little as £7 (£852) today. If we are thinking in
US dollars, we are talking over $130,000 in today’s money for the best first-class
ticket and over $1,000 in today’s money for a third-class ticket. A second-class ticket would
have set you back about $1,834 in today’s money. So, the experience on that ship was very different
for many people. Some of the deaths become front page news. If there were social media platforms
back then, these deaths would have resulted in a lot of strangers writing RIP on their Facebook
pages. But some of the poorest people on the Titanic didn’t even get a marked gravestone.
Some survivors never really recovered from the ordeal. One of them was Frederick Fleet.
He was one of the crewmen on the ship and the one that shouted “iceberg!” when things were
looking a bit hairy. He later testified in court, saying things might have been different if
he’d had some binoculars. In his own words, he said, “We could have seen it a bit sooner.”
When someone asked him just how much sooner, he replied, “Well, enough to get out of the way.”
When he saw the iceberg from the nest at 11.39 pm, he rang the bell to notify others. He also
used the nest phone to tell the bridge that there was possible trouble ahead. The call was
answered by sixth officer James Paul Moody, who asked Fleet exactly what he’d seen.
Fleet replied, “Iceberg! Right Ahead!” During his testimony, he was asked how large the
iceberg was, and he said he didn’t really know, but then when asked if it was about as large as
one of the tables in the courtroom, he replied, “It would be as large as those two tables
put together when I saw it at first.” Fleet was ordered to help put people on the
lifeboats. He got in lifeboat 6 himself, along with 28 other people, four of whom were
other men. Lifeboat 6 could have held 65 people. Fleet was one of the men that managed the oars
on the lifeboat. The guy on the tiller of the boat was quartermaster Robert Hichens,
a man whose name went down in history. That’s because of the way he allegedly treated
other occupants of the boat. Some of them later said he refused to pick up people in the
water, calling some of the people “stiffs.” Then there’s the famous story that a millionaire
named Molly Brown got so peeved with him that she threatened to throw him in the water.
She became angry when Hichens told her that if they went back, they would likely be swamped and
go down themselves. She wrote about her experience in the Newport Herald newspaper, saying:
“The only seaman in our boat was the quartermaster. He was at the rudder and
standing much higher than we were. He was shivering like an aspen. As we pulled away from
the boat, we heard sounds of firing and were told later that it was officers shooting as they
were letting down the boats from the steamer, trying to prevent those from the lower
decks from jumping into the lifeboats.” She was wrong about him being the
only able seamen. As you know, Fleet was also an able seaman. Fleet, by the
way, became very depressed after the accident, and his life later ended bleakly.
As for Molly Brown, it’s said another reason why she threatened Hichens is that
she told him that the women on the boat should row to keep warm. Hichens didn’t like
this idea at all. Rowing was a man’s job! It’s hard to know exactly what happened that
night. As the “Aspen Democrat-Times” said in its April 19, 1912 edition, some of the
stories sounded quite “hysterical.” Some stories were “sensational”. Brown wrote
some more about her time on the lifeboat, and we think her words are quite moving. She said:
“The splash of the oars partly drowned the voices of the perishing men on the doomed steamer.
The ladies all seemed terrified. Those having husbands, sons, or fathers buried their
heads on the shoulders of those near them and moaned and groaned only. While my eyes
were glued on the fast disappearing ship, I particularly watched the broad promenade deck.”
Brown was one of the lucky ones. 39 percent of first-class passengers died, mostly men.
76 percent of third-class passengers died, and 58 percent of second-class passengers died.
It wouldn’t be fair not to let Hichens have his say, too. We found his testimony. In it, he
explained why he wanted to get as far away as possible from the sinking Titanic. He said:
“Everybody seemed in a very bad condition in the boat, sir. Everybody was quite upset,
and I told them somebody would have to pull; there was no use stopping there alongside
the ship, and the ship gradually going by the head. We were in a dangerous place.”
He also said that he told everyone to row; women, too. As for some of the
misunderstandings, he said: “The wind had sprung up a bit then, and it got
very choppy. I relieved one of the young ladies with the oar and told her to take the tiller.
She immediately let the boat come athwart, and the ladies in the boat got very nervous.
So, I took the tiller back again and told them to manage the best way they could.”
He talked about arguing with a woman, saying: “She was rather vexed with me in the
boat, and I spoke rather straight to her, and she accused me of wrapping myself up in
the blankets in the boat, using bad language, and drinking all the whisky, which I deny, sir.”
He said no one on the boat told him to go back towards the sinking Titanic once they
were away, but he admitted that at first, he’d told everyone they needed to get away because
if not, the suction created by the skinking ship would pull them down under the water.
When a senator at the hearing asked him if he said the words, “We are to look out for ourselves
now, and pay no attention to those stiffs”, Hichens issued a denial. “I never made use of that
word, never since I have been born, because I use other words in preference to that,” he said.
We may never know the truth about the drama on that boat or if there was much drama at all.
As Brown said, there was an eerie atmosphere when the Titanic’s lights went out. In his testimony,
Hichens said, “We did hear cries of distress, or I imagined so, sir, for two or three
minutes. Some of the men in the boat said it was the cries of one boat hailing the other.
I suppose the reason they said this was not to alarm the women - the ladies in the boat.”
We should say here that the woman who accused Hichens of drinking all the whiskey and
taking the blankets was not Molly Brown but another first-class passenger, Leila Meyer.
She was taking the trip with her husband, Edgar. The wealthy couple paid £82 for their ticket,
which you will remember would be quite a few thousand bucks today. Mrs. Meyer’s story is a
sad one indeed. Just before she made the trip, her father had died, and when the ship
went down, her husband went down with it. She later explained what happened.
In a rather sad statement, she said: “I tried and tried to get Edgar to come into
the lifeboat with me and pleaded to be allowed to stay behind and wait until he could leave,
he not caring to leave before all the women had been saved. Mr. Meyer finally persuaded me to
leave, reminding me of our one-year-old child at home. I entered the lifeboat and watched
until the Titanic sank, but only for a short time did I see my husband standing beside the
rail and assisting other women into boats.” Let’s now move on to another
controversial survival story of the Titanic. This one is about the only
Japanese passenger on the ship, Masabumi Hosono. Fluent in Russian, he’d been working in Russia on
behalf of the Japanese Ministry of Transport. On his way home, he was first to stop in London,
and that’s why he ended up on the Titanic. When the ship hit the iceberg, Hosono got up
to see what was happening. Like most people, he had no idea what had happened, so he went
up to the boat deck. As the story goes, he was told by a steward to get away from the boat deck.
The steward looked at Hosono’s Asian appearance and wrongly believed him to be a third-class
passenger – folks not allowed on the boat deck. He was actually staying in second-class. Things
then got worse on the ship. Hosono knew it was definitely going to sink. He later said, “Somehow
I could in no way dispel the feeling of utter dread and desolation.” He managed to sneak
onto the boat deck, all the time worrying that he might not see his wife and kids again.
He helped women and children get into lifeboat 13, but he saw that there were two spaces left when
it was lowered. One guy jumped into one space, and Hosono jumped into the other. In terms of
protocol back then, this was against the rules, but Hosono wasn’t familiar with western sailing
protocols, and he really missed his family. Someone later wrote about his dire situation,
saying, “Faced with this textbook moral dilemma, Hosono chose life, and lived to regret it.”
When he was finally aboard the RMS Carpathia rescue ship, he started writing a letter
to his wife. This is now a famous document, the only surviving letter from the ship to be
written using official Titanic-headed stationery. Since he wrote it when things were so fresh in
his mind, it’s also interesting to look at today, for it gives us a rare glimpse into how
things transpired that night. Part of it went: “After the ship sank there came back again
frightful shrills and cries of those drowning in the water. Our lifeboat too was filled
with sobbing, weeping children and women worried about the safety of their husbands and
fathers. And I, too, was as much depressed and miserable as they were, not knowing what
would become of myself in the long run.” Earlier in the letter, he stated that he was
indeed ordered to get away from the boat deck and join the third-class passengers. As you know,
he wasn’t prepared to do this. He wrote, “What a terrible feeling I had… I was alone and screamed.”
This all sounds very reasonable for a person about to sink into the icy depths of the ocean and never
see the smiles on his children’s faces again, but his story became a huge embarrassment for
the Japanese public and the government. For them, the only Japanese guy on the ship had shown
utter cowardice. He had shamed the nation, a nation obsessed with honor and dying honorably.
The newspapers over there talked about how he’d sneaked onto one of the lifeboats and so let
Japan down by not dying as a man should. They talked about how women and children on the
Titanic had died while he had sneaked off. The US media joined in, writing stories about
brave western men who’d sacrificed their lives in comparison to Hosono sacrificing nothing.
When they referred to him in their stories, they often called him the Japanese “stowaway.”
Because he had chosen not to die an honorable death, Japan made him the subject of something
called “mura hachibu” - the Japanese term that means you should be socially ostracized. People
wrote him hate mail every day. They said he should have died. They said he should die now.
He couldn’t walk down the street without people saying bad things about him. He was an outcast.
He lived in shame until his death in 1939, but even after that, Japanese media used
him as an example, describing him as a man without honor. You can also be sure that his
story became a focal point when racist people wanted to talk about Asian people. Well, at
least he got to see his wife and kids again. His story isn’t much different from that of the
chairman of the White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay. This British shipping company was the
owner of the Titanic, and when it sank, Ismay was the highest-ranking White Star Line
official to survive. Many people called him a coward, too, saying the honorable thing to do
would have been to have gone with the ship. A poem was written about him at
the time, which read in part: “The Captain stood where the Captain should
When a Captain's ship goes down But the Owner led when the women fled,
For an Owner must not drown.” But like Honono, Ismay did at least help women and
children get into the lifeboats before he took a place for himself. Also, like Honono, he lived in
shame for the rest of his life. He became terribly depressed and hid from the world, with his
granddaughter saying he was like a living corpse. He had to testify, of course, which is
something we are interested in for this show today. Like everyone else, he heard a bump
in the night, but unlike most people, he had to find out what had happened as a matter of urgency.
He said he loaded boats with women and children, what he called the “natural order” of things.
When asked why he had gotten on one of the boats, he replied, “The boat was there. There was
a certain number of men in the boat, and the officer called out asking if there were any
more women, and there was no response, and there were no passengers left on the deck.”
He said he helped row the lifeboat away, always with his back to the ship. When asked why,
he replied, “I did not wish to see her go down.” Ok, so it’s about time we heard from
some third-class survivors of the Titanic. One of them was Rhoda Abbott.
She was born in England and later moved to Providence in the US. That’s
where she met her future husband, the middleweight champion boxer Stanton Abbott.
She divorced him after having two kids with him and took them back to England with her. But
the boys never seemed settled in the UK, so she decided to take them back to the
US. This is why she was on the Titanic. She was 39, and her two boys were 16 and 13.
The cabin for all three of them cost £20, quite a lot for a third-class cabin,
but then there were three of them. When the Titanic was pretty much finished, it
looked like all three of them were going to die. Remember that as she was a woman and her boys
were grown up, she could have found a lifeboat easier than they could have. Naturally,
she had wanted to stay with her children. Mrs. Abbott then told the boys they had one
last chance, and they all launched themselves into Collapsible A. It was soon swamped
with the weight and started to go down itself. It was fortunate that Fifth Officer
Harold Lowe picked them up on Collapsible D. She was indeed lucky to survive. Even when she
got onto the rescue ship, her legs were badly injured from the cold. After getting off,
she couldn’t move and spent the next two weeks in the hospital. We know a little about how
things went down because of another third-class survivor, who later wrote Abbott and her kids:
“She told me that she would get in the lifeboat if there hadn't been so many people around.
So, she and her sons kept together. She was thankful that three of them had stayed with her on
that piece of wreckage. The youngest went first, then the other son went. She grew numb and
cold and couldn't remember when she got on the Carpathia. There was a piece of cork in
her hair, and I managed to get a comb and it took a long time, but finally we got it out.”
537 of the 709 third-class passengers perished, most of whom were men. Nonetheless, some of
those who died were women, and some were mere girls. For instance, the 10-year-old Catharina
Van Impe from Belgium died with her father, Jean, and her mother, Rosalie. Of the 53 kids that
died on the Titanic, 52 were from third class. Now let’s clear something up here. In another
show we did about the Titanic disaster, we mentioned the third-class passengers being
told to stay in place. We kow for a fact that parts of the ship were not accessible to certain
passengers, but we also know for a fact that some of the third-class passengers were told to stay
in steerage – another name for the place where third-class passengers stayed.
It’s complicated, so let’s hear what the third-class survivors had to say.
In his testimony, third-class passenger Daniel Buckley was asked, “Were you permitted to go on
up to the top deck without any interference?” He said yes but then added, “They tried to keep us
down at first on our steerage deck. They did not want us to go up to the first class place at all.”
He also explained what happened when one guy tried to get out, saying, “There was one steerage
passenger there, and he was getting up the steps, and just as he was going in a little gate,
a fellow came along and chucked him down; threw him down into the steerage place. This
fellow got excited, and he ran after him, and he could not find him. He got up over
the little gate. He did not find him.” Another controversial aspect of the disaster
is the question of whether there were grills or gates separating the classes. In
his testimony, Buckley said there was. He was asked, “There was a gate between
the steerage and the first class deck?” He replied, “Yes. The first class deck
was higher up than the steerage deck, and there were some steps leading up to it; 9 or 10
steps, and a gate just at the top of the steps.” He was then asked if it was
locked, to which he replied: “It was not locked at the time we made the
attempt to get up there, but the sailor, or whoever he was, locked it. So that this fellow
that went up after him broke the lock on it, and he went after the fellow that threw him
down. He said if he could get hold of him, he would throw him into the ocean.”
He also said that when the gate was broken, he and his third-class passengers had about
the same chance of getting to a lifeboat. “They could not keep them down,” he said, which
suggests that they were, in fact, kept down at some point. They weren’t locked in like in the
movie, but they were told to stay in their place. Another third-class survivor said the gates
weren’t locked, but stewards kept him and others down. He said, “The stewards prevented
these men from getting up when the order was passed around for the women and children.”
This seems pretty obvious, seeing that men had to stay back while working-class women
and children were ushered to the lifeboats. And given the number of survivors from each
class, it is also obvious that third-class men were kept back for as long as possible.
Such was the case with the American blacksmith Anthony Abbing.
He was on his way back to Cincinnati when he only got as far as the Atlantic Ocean. No
one really knows how he died, but it is assumed he was “locked down in steerage.”
Some third-class men survived, such as a Norwegian laborer who was heading to
the US to do some tough work in South Dakota. His name was Olaus Jörgensen Abelseth.
He was in a party of five on the Titanic, which included a young woman who survived. He
later said he and his friends were told to wait on the poop deck, but when the time was around
1.30, and the Titanic was well and truly fudged, they made their way to the boat deck.
He said that he saw the last lifeboats leave. That’s when sailors were told they
could try and get on one of the collapsible boats. These were still lifeboats, but they had
collapsible canvas sides. Abelseth recounted: “I was standing there, and I asked my
brother-in-law if he could swim, and he said no. I asked my cousin if he could swim, and
he said no. So, we could see the water coming up, the bow of the ship was going down, and there was
kind of an explosion. We could hear the popping and cracking, and the deck raised up and got so
steep that the people could not stand on their feet on the deck. So, they fell down and slid
on the deck into the water right on the ship.” When the water was just five feet away, they
jumped in. Abelseth suddenly found himself entangled in something but managed to get
free. The other guys in his party were gone. Abelseth later said he swam for about
twenty minutes in the freezing water. There were dead bodies everywhere. But then
he saw Collapsible A and tried to get on it, only for someone to tell him to get off as he
was going to sink the boat. Still, no one tried to push him off, and no one tried to help him on.
Their fears were rational since when Abelseth did manage to drag himself over the side, the boat was
full of water. He remained submerged in it until they were later picked up. One man froze to death
with his arms around Abelseth. He later said, “We did not talk very much, except that we would say,
‘One, two, three,’ and scream together for help.” As dawn broke and a ship was in the distance,
Abelseth grabbed a guy from New Jersey whose face he remembered. The guy just said, “Who are
you? Let me be.” Abelseth later testified, “I held him up like that for a while, but I got tired and
cold, and I took a little piece of a small board, a lot of which were floating around there, and
laid it under his head on the edge of the boat to keep his head from the water; but it was not
more than about half an hour or so when he died.” When they were picked up by the Carpathia
at about 7:00 am, Abelseth was handed a warm blanket and given some coffee and brandy,
but he had to sleep on the deck in his wet clothes. He was still a third-class citizen!
He later testified, saying he and others in third-class passengers were told not to
move from steerage and that a ship was coming to rescue everyone. Some were not
happy about this, with Abelseth stating: “There were a lot of steerage people there
that were getting on one of these cranes that they had on deck, that they used to lift things
with. They can lift about two and a half tons, I believe. These steerage passengers were crawling
along on this, over the railing, and away up to the boat deck. A lot of them were doing that.”
Senator William Alden Smith then asked, “They could not get up there in any other way?”
Abelseth replied, “This gate was shut.” Nonetheless, he did add that he didn’t feel
the passengers down there were purposefully held back. That part of the ship filled
with water so fast that they really had to get out of there fast. When he was
asked if it filled quickly, he replied: “Oh, yes. There was a friend of mine who told
me that he went back for something he wanted, and then there was so much water there
that he could not get to his room.” This testimony is important in regard to
third-class passengers being locked behind gates, although he seems to contradict himself
at times. But forgetting about that, we think this bit of his testimony relating to
being on the boat deck is very, very touching: “We did not talk very much. Just a little ways
from us, I saw there was an old couple standing there on the deck, and I heard this man say
to the lady, ‘Go into the lifeboat and get saved." He put his hand on her shoulder,
and I think he said: ‘Please get into the lifeboat and get saved.’ She replied: ‘No; let
me stay with you.’ I could not say who it was, but I saw that he was an old man. I did not pay
much attention to him because I did not know him.” Very few people were alive on the ship as long as
Abeleseth was, but one man certainly outdid him. He was the guy we talked about at the beginning
of this show. His name was Charles John Joughin. This Liverpudlian was the chief baker on the
ship. When he wasn’t baking bread in Liverpool, he was going to the pub with his friends to make
use of his monthly wage of £12. As you know, that would have gotten him a seat
in third-class on the Titanic. But he was working, not traveling, on that
fateful day. At about 12.30, he was told he could get into lifeboat 10 as its captain, but he
turned that down and instead helped the women and children. He might only have been five feet three
and a half inches, but he was a strong guy for sure. Some women refused to go, either scared
or not wanting to leave their husbands behind, but Joughin didn’t give them much choice.
He virtually threw them into the boats. At one point, he went back to the pantry
and had some liquor. We don’t know how much, but he was merry as the Titanic went down. As
things started crashing and bending all around him, he took it all in his stride.
He later testified and said indeed, while all the commotion was going on,
he sneaked off for a tipple of liquor. He said at one point, “That was just after
I had passed the first lot of bread up, and I went down to my room for a drink, as
a matter of fact, and as I was coming back, I followed up my men on to the deck.”
Later in his testimony, he said, “I went down to my room and had a drop of liqueur
that I had down there, and then while I was there I saw the old doctor [possibly Dr. O'Loughlin]
and spoke to him and then I came upstairs again.” So, he was pretty smashed when the boat finally
went down. He admitted that himself. He was on the Titanic as it became almost vertical, and
people were spilling everywhere, screaming, bones breaking, old and young, just
flying like ants shaken from a plate. He said he looked on in horror when the bodies had
“piled up” in one spot. He said he just held on when the Titanic broke in half and went down as if
in an elevator. When he was asked how frightening that was, he replied, “There was no great shock,
or anything.” What a guy, but if you’ve ever been to Liverpool, you’ll know it’s a tough old town.
He was having another drink in the pantry when things started getting crazy. Talking about the
grim end, when the ship was done, he said, “I was just wondering what next to do when she went.”
He was then in the water for two hours. He said about that, “I did not attempt to get anything
to hold on to until I reached a collapsible, but that was daylight.”
He was asked, “Then you were in the water for a long time?”
He said, “I should say over two, hours, Sir.” Now, this shouldn’t have been possible. Others
died in mere minutes. Some got through, say, 20 or 30 minutes, but two hours treading
water at that temperature! How did he do it? When asked if he had felt calm, he replied, “It
was just like a pond.” By not getting shocked by the situation he helped himself a lot. He
even stayed calm when a collapsible saw him but refused to let him on. He testified, “I
tried to get on it, but I was pushed off it, and I what you call hung around it.”
He said he was colder in the boat than in the water. When a lifeboat came into
sight, he was one of the guys that jumped back in the water and swam towards it, so
there was more space in the collapsible. In his testimony, it almost sounds like the
commissioner can’t believe his ears. At one point, the commissioner says, “You have said you
thought it was about two hours before you saw this collapsible, and then you spent some time
with the collapsible. How long do you suppose it was after you got to the collapsible
that you were taken into the lifeboat?” Joughin replied, “I should say we were
on the collapsible about half-an-hour.” The commissioner asked, “That means that for
some two and a half hours you were in the water?” Joughin said, “Practically, yes.”
We don’t know how he survived that long in the water, although some say it was the
booze. Actually, alcohol doesn’t really help when you are fighting hypothermia, so we reckon the
fact he stayed so calm was more to the point. He actually lived until he was 78, taking
in final breaths in New Jersey. His story was talked about for years, so on his death
certificate, where it asked “occupation,” it was written, “Baker on the Titanic.”
That’s all for now, but if you liked this show, there are many more testimonies
we can recount for you later. Now you need to hear some more technical
details in “The Sinking of the Titanic (Hour by Hour).” Or, have a look at “Why Is
Titanic Still at the Bottom of the Ocean?”
