A Night to Remember

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1955

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-10

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary: “Another Belfast Trip”

At 11:40pm on April 14, 1912, lookouts Frederick Fleet and Reginal Lee were stationed in the crow’s nest of the RMS Titanic. The Titanic had received several ice warnings throughout the day. The absence of a moon and the uncharacteristically calm waters of the Atlantic made the obscure shape directly in the Titanic’s path difficult to see until the Titanic was nearly on top of it, steaming ahead at 22.5 knots. Fleet rang the watch bell, picked up the receiver connecting him to the bridge, and called out the alert, “Iceberg, right ahead” (2). First Officer William Murdoch ordered the ship’s engines stopped, the vessel turned hard to port, then the engines reversed. Simultaneously, Murdoch initiated the closing of the ship’s watertight doors. After 37 seconds ticked by, the Titanic’s bow began to turn. Fleet and Lee didn’t feel the judder as the jagged ice carved punctures into the ship’s hull, but many aboard did. Awakened, Captain Edward James Smith reported to the bridge.

First-class passengers playing cards in the dining saloon noticed a slight vibration beneath them; two stewards privately concluded that the Titanic must have thrown a propellor blade which would require a return to the shipyard in Belfast, Ireland. Depending on their physical proximity to the starboard bow, passengers and crew felt the severity of the interruption in varying degrees. Many passengers thought nothing of it, while others emerged from their cabins, inquisitive. Passengers who happened to have a line of sight out to starboard saw the enormous iceberg, reported to reach 100 feet above the surface of the water. In the Titanic’s boiler rooms five and six, which shared an exterior wall with the starboard bow, the sea began surging in through jagged tears in the iron.

Ten miles away, officers on the deck of the Californian, stopped in place by a large floe of ice, noticed large steamship liner passing them. Charles Victor Groves notified the Captain, Stanley Lord, who suggested they contact the ship by morse light, but Groves thought better of it when the ship’s lights seemed to go out. He thought that the liner had turned her lights off to encourage her passengers to go to sleep; he couldn’t have known that their lights disappeared from his view because the ship had turned so hard to port that her stern was now facing them.

Chapter 2 Summary: “There’s Talk of an Iceberg, Ma’am”

First-class passengers rang for their stewards, hoping to receive an explanation for the interruption. Some stewards claimed they didn’t know what had happened; others repeated the presumption of a propellor issue; others made mention of a minor inconvenience involving ice, but all reassured their first-class charges that there was nothing to worry about. First-class passenger Jack Thayer, 17, left his stateroom to assess the situation himself. Gaiety and lack of concern characterized the mood in the upper levels devoted to first-class living space, but below, closest to the Titanic’s bow, there was cause for alarm when steerage passengers and crew awoke to find water rising from the floor of their cabins. Employees in the two-deck-high mail room retreated upward as water rose above their knees. Firemen in the boiler rooms tempered their fires to avoid dangerous pressure from building, while engineers uncoiled hoses to attach to the ship’s water pumps.

White Star Line president Bruce Ismay blustered onto the bridge and began demanding answers. Captain Smith and the Titanic’s shipbuilder, Thomas Andrews, performed an inspection to assess the damage. Andrews delivered devastating news: The Titanic would sink. There were several conditions under which the ship could continue to float if her 16 watertight compartments were closed. Their current scenario wasn’t one of them. With the first five compartments flooded, there was no way to stop the onslaught of water, which would spill over the bulkheads, gradually bringing the ship down by the bow.

At 12:05, Captain Smith ordered the crew to begin preparing the Titanic’s lifeboats. At 12:15, Smith instructed Marconi wireless operators John George Philips and Harold Bride to begin calling for assistance. First-class passage on the Titanic included the amenity of wireless services, and the telegraphers had been busy all day, relaying incessant personal correspondence, much of it conversational and vapid. Philips became so frustrated while trying to keep up that he lashed out at the Californian when they radioed at 11:00pm to warn the Titanic of a particularly large iceberg in their vicinity. He told Californian’s operator to shut up and stop bothering him. Philips never relayed this sixth and final message warning of ice to the officers on the bridge. By 11:30pm, the Californian’s wireless operator had turned in for the night; his headset remained off from that point on.

Chapters 1-2 Analysis

The maritime conditions in the North Atlantic were prime for disaster on the night of April 14, 1912. The lack of a moon meant that the light cast by the natural satellite and its reflection on the water wasn’t visible to Fleet and Lee as they sat in the crow’s nest. One of the means of detection for icebergs commonly utilized by ships’ lookouts was the irregular behavior of the water at the base of these large natural structures; when there are waves, as there often are to some degree, on the surface of the water, the crash and flow of the water against the icebergs could be surveyed at a distance to help watchmen identify potentially dangerous masses. The air temperature had dropped from 43 degrees at 7:00pm to 32 degrees by 10:00pm—and by 10:30pm, the temperature of the water was 31 degrees. The Titanic had received six messages warning them about ice in the area; the most recent hadn’t even been delivered to the bridge by Harold Bride, but had it reached the officers it would have arrived only 40 minutes before the Titanic struck the iceberg. While it was commonly acknowledged that the presence of ice couldn’t be helped at that time of year, what was within Captain Smith’s control was the speed at which the Titanic was traveling when the iceberg was struck. She was steaming along at 22.5 knots at his insistence. A reduction in speed would have given the ship more time to turn away from hazards, and more time for her lookouts to spot ice in the distance.

This section highlights one of the book’s main themes: Nature Versus the “Unsinkable” Ship—the Arrogance of Technology. Even had the Titanic truly been unsinkable, as many readily believed, Captain Smith’s actions could be considered negligent. Collision with an iceberg causing such significant damage to a new, very costly investment belonging to the White Star Line was a level of carelessness unacceptable in a Captain of his experience and stature. Smith understood that advances in technology had made steamer vessels safer but, according to many historians, didn’t familiarize himself sufficiently with the capabilities and limitations of the Titanic. He took for granted her ability to self-correct given her many safeguards.

One aspect of Lord’s work is its strength in integrating so much primary source material into the narrative. Even though he drafted the book 43 years after the sinking of the Titanic, Lord found extensive opportunities to interview survivors and collect their firsthand accounts, but in the decades since the publication of A Night to Remember, details have emerged to contradict some of what he asserted in the text. Notably, the personal papers of Lord Mersey, who held the inquest into the Titanic’s sinking, have become available. In 2021, the estate of Lord Mersey made available to the public, for the first time, the private, professional journals of the judge who presided over the British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry. The final written decision was far more diplomatic than the judge’s own written reflections and puzzlements allowed, but in his private entries, Lord Mersey reveals aspects of the testimony and his conclusions about what he heard in those proceedings relative to multiple factors surrounding the disaster. Lord Mersey wrote that the crew failed to reduce the ship’s speed. Many Titanic historians think that Bruce Ismay, White Star Line’s president, pressured Captain Smith to push Titanic to the limits of her capabilities—given that it was her maiden voyage across the Atlantic—not only to impress the world with her technological prowess but to obtain valuable data on what to expect from her moving forward. Lord Mersey does not place blame directly on Captain Smith, which may or may not have to do with the Captain’s demise on board the Titanic—his insistence on going down with the ship. Possibly, Lord Mersey didn’t feel he had enough evidence to suggest culpability, but given Captain Smith’s positive reputation in the eyes of the public and the fact that the Captain wasn’t present at the proceedings to defend himself, Mersey may have been hesitant to tarnish the reputation of someone who was well regarded for much of his career. The results of the inquest covered several concerning actions and decisions aboard the Titanic, but the inquest was held by a commission that bore some responsibility of its own as a governing board of maritime rules and regulations. What is clear from Walter Lord’s depiction of the Titanic’s collision with the iceberg is that perhaps only one person truly appreciated the possibility that she could sink: Shipbuilder Thomas Andrews alone knew that the characterization “unsinkable” was hyperbole, and the ensuing hours were a testament to how literally passengers and crew had taken that claim.