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As Cottam acknowledged the signal, Titanic’s wireless operator, John George “Jack” Phillips called back: “CQD — CQD — SOS — SOS — CQD — MGY. Come at once. We have struck a berg. It’s a CQD, old man. Position 41.46 N, 50.14 W” CQD was the wireless distress call, and SOS was the new call just introduced to replace it. MGY was Titanic’s call sign. There was no mistaking the news, as much as Cottam could scarcely believe his ears. The new and “practically unsinkable” Titanic was going down.
“Shall I tell my captain?” Cottam wired back.
“Yes, quick,” came the reply.
Racing to Carpathia’s bridge, Cottam blurted the news to First Officer Dean, who, without knocking, went straight into the cabin of Captain Arthur Rostron. In the 1958 classic movie A Night to Remember, the scene, as re-created, has Rostron yelling out, “What the devil!” and sitting up angrily in his bed, but Cottani’s quick explanation stops him from taking the wireless operator to task. In his memoirs, Rostron wrote: “I had but recently turned in and was not asleep, and drowsily I said to myself: ‘Who the dickens is this cheeky beggar coming into my cabin without knocking?’ Then the First Officer was blurting out the facts and you may be sure I was very soon doing all that was in the ship’s power to render the aid called for.”
Rostron, a seasoned master known to his peers as “the Electric Spark,” was both decisive and energetic. He did not hesitate now. Again, as A Night to Remember reconstructs the scene, he ordered: “Mr. Dean, turn the ship around — steer northwest. I’ll work out the course for you in a minute.” The film’s script matches the decisiveness of the captain’s published memoirs. Rostron recalled that he asked Cottam if he was sure it was Titanic calling. “Yes, sir.” “You are absolutely certain?” “Quite certain, sir.” “All right, tell him we are coming along as fast as we can.”
Carpathia was not the only ship to receive Titanic’s distress call, but she was the closest of them all. Still, she was 58 miles away. The 13,564-ton, 558-foot Carpathia was a ten-year-old veteran of Cunard’s fleet, three days out of New York with 750 passengers bound to Gibraltar and the Mediterranean. As Rostron worked out his position in relation to Titanic’s, he realized that at Carpathia’s top speed of 14 knots, it would take four hours to reach Titanic. That just wasn’t good enough. He knew that many people would not survive in the icy waters unless help arrived soon.
Rostron called for more speed. Every off-duty stoker was roused and sent into the boiler rooms to shovel coal into the furnaces. To squeeze every bit of steam out of the boilers and into the engines, Chief Engineer Johnston cut off the heat and hot water throughout the ship, and pushed his men and machines to the limit. Carpathia surged forward at 15, 16 and finally 17 knots, faster than she had ever gone.
As Carpathia raced northwest towards Titanic, Rostron was well aware that he was steaming into danger. Numerous warnings of ice from other ships and Titanic’s own collision with an iceberg made him wary. But he couldn’t slow down. Rostron posted extra lookouts, including Second Officer James Bisset, who stood in the open, the frigid wind blasting his face as he stared into the darkness. When Bisset looked back at the bridge, he saw his deeply religious captain, hat lifted, lips moving quietly in silent prayer.
Carpathia’s crew was at hard at work, clearing the ship’s dining saloons to receive Titanic’s passengers, gathering blankets, uncovering the lifeboats and ru
Aboard Titanic, the end was fast approaching. At 1:45 a.m., Phillips called Cottam to plead, “Come as quickly as possible, old man; engine room filling up to the boilers.” The last boats had pulled away — many only half full — as a crowd of some fifteen hundred people raced towards the stern, which was rising out of the sea as Titanic’s bow went under.
Cottam kept trying to raise Phillips, but Titanic’s faint signals showed that power was failing aboard the sinking liner. At 2:17 a.m., Cottam heard the begi
On Titanic, Phillips and assistant wireless operator Harold Bride stayed at their posts nearly to the very end, frantically working the radio to urge the ships racing to Titanic to hurry. As Titanic’s stern rose higher in the air, the engineers — all of whom had remained at their posts, knowing that they would die, but who nonetheless kept the dynamos ru
It was 2:20 a.m., and Carpathia was still nowhere in sight. Hundreds of people huddled in twenty lifeboats, while in the water more than fifteen hundred people thrashed, struggled and screamed for help until the icy water took their lives. “The cries, which were loud and numerous at first, died away gradually one by one… I think the last of them must have been heard nearly forty minutes after the Titanic sank,” reported survivor Lawrence Beesley, floating in the distance in the relative safety of a lifeboat.
Two of those struggling in the water were Phillips and Bride. They made their way to one of the ship’s collapsible boats that had been washed off the deck when Titanic sank. Floating half submerged on the overturned boat through the night, they suffered from the cold with a handful of passengers and crew. As the long night wore on into early morning, Phillips died. Second Officer Charles H. Lightoller, washed into the sea as the ship sank, had also struggled onto the overturned lifeboat and took command of the precarious perch. “We were painfully conscious of that icy water, slowly but surely creeping up our legs. Some quietly lost consciousness, subsided into the water, and slipped overboard… No one was in a condition to help, and the fact that a slight but distinct swell had started to roll up, rendered help from the still living an impossibility.”
Lightoller hoped that help would come soon. “We knew that ships were racing to our rescue, though the chances of our keeping up our efforts of balancing until one came along seemed very, very remote.”
Rostron kept a careful lookout as Carpathia rushed into the darkness. “Into that zone of danger we raced… every nerve strained watching for the ice. Once I saw one huge fellow towering into the sky quite near— saw it because a star was reflected on its surface — a tiny beam of warning which guided us safely past.” At 2:40 a.m., he spotted a green flare on the horizon, just as the first icebergs came into view, but he did not slacken speed. Firing rockets and flares to signal his arrival, Rostron dodged the ice and he pressed on. He knew that the Titanic was probably gone, but he also knew that every minute counted for the survivors on — or in — the frigid sea. “It was an anxious time,” he later recalled. “There were seven hundred souls on the Carpathia; these lives, as well as all the survivors of the Titanic herself, depended on a sudden turn of the wheel.”