Free Voyagers of the Titanic by Richard Davenport-Hines Page B

canvas soaked with rain and sea spray, hard as sheet-iron, until the finger-nails were torn off, leaving raw bleeding wounds; drenched to the skin, oilskins blown to ribbons and sea-boots full of water.” It was a memory that no one could take from him, “the eternal rolling and pitching and the almost constant hurricanes . . . down below the Horn.” 1 Charles Herbert Lightoller, second officer on the Titanic, recalled his first voyage on a steamship from New York in the 1890s: “Frankly, I didn’t like it. Good times; good food. Always sure of your watch below. Yet I loathed the smoke and the smell, and longed for the towering tiers of bellying canvas, the sound of water rushing past the scupper holes, in place of the monotonous clank and bang of machinery. I sadly missed the feel of something living under my feet.” 2 It was consolation, though, that his steamer took only a fortnight to reach Glasgow.
    James Bisset, a future Cunard captain, recalled that when he passed his exams as first mate in 1905, aged twenty-one, he had served as an apprentice and second mate on four round-the-world voyages (on a 1,098-ton barque and full-rigged ship of 1,323 tons carrying coal and guano) but never in a steamship. “My commonsense told me that windjammers were doomed to extinction by the competition of steam; yet, in 1905, there were still many hundreds of sailing vessels under the British flag, and hundreds more under the American, French, German, Scandinavian and other national flags. They were owned and manned by diehards, of an ageing generation, and were kept going, with increasing financial difficulties, by the force of habit inherited from centuries of tradition.” 3 Officers of Bisset’s generation—he was born in 1883—recognized that steamers promised better pay and conditions, swifter voyages, and better chances of promotion, but he felt devalued when he moved over from sail to steam in 1905: “No more hounding men aloft, at risk of life and limb, to take in or make sail in a howling hurricane; no more tedious pully-hauly, sweltering in the doldrums; no more starvation on the bare whack of putrid pork and hard biscuits! But . . . no more of the peace and quiet of a sailing ship, snoring along in the trades with all sails set and everything drawing; no more exhilaration of running the easting down; no more thrills of gazing aloft at graceful curving sails . . . For the rest of my nautical life, I would be going to sea in oblong steel boxes with smoking funnels, thumping engines, vibrating propellers, rattling derricks and clattering winches; I would be dolled up like a gilded popinjay in my brassbound uniform, to impress the passengers; and perhaps there would be little real sailorizing to be done.” 4
    There was constant anxiety about a nighttime collision with an iceberg. The only way to detect them on a moonless night was by the white foam at their base: with moonlight it was easier to spot a glint of what is called “ice blink.” Lightoller recounted an occasion in the South Atlantic when the cold became piercing, the wind fell away, and suddenly the crew were confronted by the threatening, spectral outline of the monstrous berg that had been taking the wind out of their sails. With difficulty the ship drew off from the menacing ice walls—all the crew worrying whether there were protruding underwater ledges that might hole the ship beneath the waterline and sink it. “With the first streak of dawn it was easy to see what a narrow shave it had been,” Lightoller recalled. “With the full day there was revealed an impenetrable wall of ice for close on fifteen miles astern, and more than double that distance ahead.” The ship had to sail for two days before it left that mass of ice. “Pinnacles, bays, chasms and cathedral-like structures, huge ravines and bridges, bridges of ice, looking for all the world as if they had been built by some clever engineers, and would have done credit to them at