Miss Constance Willard was twenty years old and traveling alone. She stepped up to the side of Lifeboat No. 8 and froze, too anxious to take another step. A young officer cajoled her until the ship’s second officer, Charles Lightoller, cut him off. Like every officer on board, Lightoller had assumed that the iceberg had caused minimal damage. But he had lately taken a break from boarding the lifeboats and seen seawater moving inexorably up the steps that led to the crew’s quarters. Now he snapped, “Don’t waste time. Let her go if she won’t get in!”
Constance ran from them, but she returned moments later, chastened and ready to get on board. The young officer smiled reassuringly. “Be brave,” he told her.
It was 12:45 a.m. In the wireless shack, Harold suggested that Jack stop sending the distress call CQD and switch to the new, internationally agreed-upon call. “It may be your last chance to send it,” he said. He was joking, and Jack was still laughing as his fingers tapped out the first SOS call ever sent.
By then the Titanic was listing gently to starboard. Still, its passengers believed that the ship was safer than any of the lifeboats. When a steward led a group of anxious steerage women to Lifeboat No. 8 and helped them in, he watched in dismay as they jumped out a moment later and hurried back inside the ship, where it was warm.
The twenty-two-year-old bride, Maria Peñasco, stood weeping beside Lifeboat No. 8 as her maid tried in vain to calm her. The elegant niece of Spain’s prime minister, Maria was inconsolable as she waited for her dashing twenty-four-year-old husband, who had gone below to fetch her jewelry. Victor returned, gave her the box of jewels, and beseeched her to step into the lifeboat, but she turned away and broke into sobs. He begged and she wept and, looking on, the Countess’s cousin Gladys Cherry was alarmed. Such a terrible scene, she thought. But the Countess gently interceded, and Maria stopped weeping. Victor kissed his bride, then turned to the Countess. “Please take care of her,” he said. An instant later, he had disappeared among the other men.
Captain Smith stood shoulder to shoulder with the Countess as she and Maria stepped over the gunwale, followed by Gladys. The Countess’s maid, Roberta, was next, but just as she was about to get into the boat, she broke away, saying, “I must get Jack’s photograph.” Everyone protested, but she ran back down to her cabin and appeared a moment later, clutching the picture.
The next to enter Lifeboat No. 8 was the seasoned steward Alfred Crawford, followed by Able Seaman Thomas Jones, a thirty-two-year-old sailor with a walrus mustache and a reputation for knowing how to take charge. As Jones climbed into the boat, he glanced back at Tillie Taussig, still clinging to her husband. They were only a few feet away, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying because the sound made by the thick black steam escaping through the giant funnels had become deafening. But then, he didn’t have to hear a word. He could see the angst as they watched their daughter shivering in the lifeboat.
“Row straight for those ship lights over there,” Captain Smith told Jones, pointing to the Californian. “Leave your passengers on board of her and return as soon as you can.”
The Captain’s attitude, the Countess thought, is one of great calmness and courage. She could see the lights of the nearby vessel plainly. It was nineteen miles away, and she was soothed by the Captain’s belief that the ship would pick them up. “Surely,” she told Gladys, “our boats will be able to do double duty in ferrying passengers to the help that gleams so near.”
On the Titanic’s deck, officers were firing white flares to signal distress to any ship nearby. The flares rocketed across the starry night sky before bursting open and leaving a trail of white lights that rained down onto the sea like confetti at a celebration.
The flares were visible to seamen on the Californian’s bridge, who counted six of them in the space of ten minutes. Had they recognized what they were seeing, every man, woman, and child on the Titanic might have been saved. As it was, 1,502 people were about to die, while life on the Californian continued on as if the rockets had never been fired.