Free The Loss of the S. S. Titanic - Its Story and Its Lessons by Lawrence Beesley Page A

it was and
manned with untrained oarsmen. The second was that an explosion might
result from the water getting to the boilers, and dèbris might fall
within a wide radius. And yet, as it turned out, neither of these
things happened.
    At about 2.15 A.M. I think we were any distance from a mile to two
miles away. It is difficult for a landsman to calculate distance at
sea but we had been afloat an hour and a half, the boat was heavily
loaded, the oarsmen unskilled, and our course erratic: following now
one light and now another, sometimes a star and sometimes a light from
a port lifeboat which had turned away from the Titanic in the opposite
direction and lay almost on our horizon; and so we could not have gone
very far away.
    About this time, the water had crept up almost to her sidelight and
the captain's bridge, and it seemed a question only of minutes before
she sank. The oarsmen lay on their oars, and all in the lifeboat were
motionless as we watched her in absolute silence—save some who would
not look and buried their heads on each others' shoulders. The lights
still shone with the same brilliance, but not so many of them: many
were now below the surface. I have often wondered since whether they
continued to light up the cabins when the portholes were under water;
they may have done so.
    And then, as we gazed awe-struck, she tilted slowly up, revolving
apparently about a centre of gravity just astern of amidships, until
she attained a vertically upright position; and there she
remained—motionless! As she swung up, her lights, which had shone
without a flicker all night, went out suddenly, came on again for a
single flash, 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 bolts 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 to 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. 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
of explosion from this cause seems very remote. Then, as just related,
the noise was not sudden and definite, but prolonged—more like the
roll and crash of thunder. The probability of the noise being caused
by engines falling down will be seen by referring to Figure 2 [3] where the engines are placed in compartments 3, 4, and 5. As the
Titanic tilted up they would almost certainly fall loose from their
bed and plunge down through the other compartments.
    No phenomenon like that pictured in some American and English papers
occurred—that of the ship breaking in two, and the two ends being
raised above the surface. I saw these drawings in preparation on board
the Carpathia, and said at the time that they bore no resemblance to
what actually happened.
    When the noise was over the Titanic was still upright like a column:
we could see her now only as the stern and some 150 feet of her stood
outlined against the star-specked sky, looming black in the darkness,
and in this position