The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories

JAMES MORROW The Raft of the Titanic

15 April 1912

Lat. 40°25’ N, Long. 51° 18’ W

The sea is calm tonight. Where does that come from? Some Oxbridge swot’s poem, I think, one of those cryptic things I had to read in tenth form — but the title hasn’t stayed with me, and neither has the scribbler’s name. If you want a solid education in English letters, arrange to get born elsewhere than Walton-on-the-Hill. “The sea is calm tonight.” I must ask our onboard litterateur, Mr Futrelle of Massachusetts. He will know.

We should have been picked up — what? — fourteen hours ago. Certainly no more than sixteen. Our Marconi men, Phillips and Bride, assure me that Captain Rostron of the Carpathia acknowledged the Titanic’s CQD promptly, adding, “We are coming as quickly as possible and expect to be there within four hours.” Since the Ship of Dreams sailed into the Valley of Death, sometime around 2.20 this morning, we have drifted perhaps fifteen miles to the southwest. Surely Rostron can infer our present position. So where the bloody hell is he?

Now darkness is upon us once again. The mercury is falling. I scan the encircling horizon for the Carpathians lights, but I see only a cold black sky sown with a million apathetic stars. In a minute I shall order Mr Lightoller to launch the last of our distress rockets, even as I ask Reverend Bateman to send up his next emergency prayer.

For better or worse, Captain Smith insisted on doing the honourable thing and going down with his ship. (That is, he insisted on doing the honourable thing and shooting himself, thereby guaranteeing that his remains would go down with his ship.) His gesture has left me en passant in command of the present contraption. I suppose I should be grateful. At long last I have a ship of my own, if you can call this jerry-built, jury-rigged raft a ship. Have the other castaways accepted me as their guardian and keeper? I can’t say for sure. Shortly after dawn tomorrow, I shall address the entire company, clarifying that I am legally in charge and have a scheme for our deliverance, though that second assertion will require of the truth a certain elasticity, as a scheme for our deliverance has not yet visited my imagination.

I count it a bloody miracle that we got so many souls safely off the foundering liner. The Lord and all His angels were surely watching over us. So far we have accumulated only nineteen corpses: a dozen deaths during the transfer operation — shock, heart attacks, misadventure — and then another seven, shortly after sunrise, from hypothermia and exposure. Grim statistics, to be sure, but far better than the thousand or so fatalities that would have occurred had we not embraced Mr Andrews’ audacious plan.

Foremost amongst my immediate obligations is to start keeping a record of our tribulations. So here I sit, pen in one hand, electric torch in the other. By maintaining a sort of captain’s log, I might actually start to feel like a captain, though at the moment I feel like plain old Henry Tingle Wilde, the Scouser who never got out of Liverpool. The sea is calm tonight.

16 April 1912

Lat. 39°19 N, Long. 51°40 ‘W

When I told the assembled company that, by every known maritime code, I am well and truly the supreme commander of this vessel, a strident voice rose in protest: Vasil Plotcharsky from steerage, who called me “a bourgeois lackey in thrall to that imperialist monstrosity known as White Star Line.” (I’ll have to keep an eye on Plotcharsky. I wonder how many other Bolsheviks the Titanic carried?) But on the whole my speech was well received. Hearing that I’d christened our raft the Ada, “after my late wife, who died tragically two years ago”, my audience responded with respectful silence, then Father Byles piped up and said, so all could hear, “Right now that dear woman is looking down from heaven, exhorting us not to lose faith.”

My policy concerning the nineteen bodies in the stern proved more controversial. A contingent of first-cabin survivors led by Colonel Astor insisted that we give them “an immediate Christian burial at sea”, whereupon my first officer explained to the aristocrats that the corpses may ultimately have “their part to play in this drama”. Mr Lightoller’s prediction occasioned horrified gasps and indignant snorts, but nobody moved to push these frigid assets overboard.

This afternoon I ordered a complete inventory, a good way to keep our company busy. Before floating away from the disaster site, we salvaged about a third of the buoyant containers Mr Latimer’s stewards had tossed into the sea: wine casks, beer barrels, cheese crates, bread boxes, foot-lockers, duffel bags, toilet kits. Had there been a moon on Sunday night, we might have recovered this jetsam in toto. Of course, had there been a moon, we might not have hit the iceberg in the first place.

The tally is heartening. Assuming that frugality rules aboard the Ada — and it will, so help me God — she probably has enough food and water to sustain her population, all 2,187 of us, for at least ten days. We have two functioning compasses, three brass sextants, four thermometers, one barometer, one anemometer, fishing tackle, sewing supplies, baling wire, and twenty tarpaulins, not to mention the wood-fuelled Franklin stove Mr Lightoller managed to knock together from odd bits of metal.

Yesterday’s attempt to rig a sail was a fiasco, but this afternoon we had better luck, improvising a gracefully curving thirty-foot mast from the banister of the grand staircase, then fitting it with a patchwork of velvet curtains, throw rugs, signal flags, men’s dinner jackets, and ladies’ skirts. My mind is clear, my strategy is certain, my course is set. We shall tack towards warmer waters, lest we lose more souls to the demonic cold. If I never see another ice floe or North Atlantic growler in my life, it will be too soon.

18 April 1912

Lat. 37°11’N, Long. 52°11’ W

Whilst everything is still vivid in my mind, I must set down the story of how the Ada came into being, starting with the collision. I felt the tremor about 11.40 p.m., and by midnight Mr Lightoller was in my cabin, telling me that the berg had sliced through at least five adjacent watertight compartments, possibly six. To the best of his knowledge, the ship was in the last extremity, fated to go down at the head in a matter of hours.

After assigning Mr Moody to the bridge — one might as well put a sixth officer in charge, since the worst had already happened — Captain Smith sent word that the rest of us should gather post-haste in the chartroom. By the time I arrived, at perhaps five minutes past midnight, Mr Andrews, who’d designed the Titanic, was already seated at the table, along with Mr Bell, the chief engineer, Mr Hutchinson, the ship’s carpenter, and Dr O’Loughlin, our surgeon. Taking my place beside Mr Murdoch, who had not yet reconciled himself to the fact that my last-minute posting as chief officer had bumped him down to first mate, I immediately apprehended that the ship was lost, so palpable was Captain Smith’s anxiety.

“Even as we speak, Phillips and Bride are on the job in the wireless shack, trying to raise the Californian, which can’t be more than an hour away,” the Old Man said. “I am sorry to report that her Marconi operator has evidently shut off his rig for the night. However, we have every reason to believe that Captain Rostron of the Carpathia will be here within four hours. If this were the tropics, we would simply put the entire company in lifebelts, lower them over the side, and let them bob about waiting to be rescued. But this is the North Atlantic, and the water is twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.”

“After a brief interval in that ghastly gazpacho, the average mortal will succumb to hypothermia,” said Mr Murdoch, who liked to lord it over us Scousers with fancy words such as succumb and gazpacho. “Am I correct, Dr O’Loughlin?”

“A castaway who remains motionless in the water risks dying immediately of cardiac arrest,” the surgeon replied, nodding. “Alas, even the most robust athlete won’t generate enough body heat to prevent his core temperature from plunging. Keep swimming, and you might last twenty minutes, probably no more than thirty.”

“Now I shall tell you the good news,” the Old Man said. “Mr Andrews has a plan, bold but feasible. Listen closely. Time is of the essence. The Titanic has at best one hundred and fifty minutes to live.”

“The solution to this crisis is not to fill the lifeboats to capacity and send them off in hopes of encountering the Carpathia, for that would leave over a thousand people stranded on a sinking ship,” Mr Andrews insisted. “The solution, rather, is to keep every last soul out of the water until Captain Rostron arrives.”

“Mr Andrews has stated the central truth of our predicament,” Captain Smith said. “On this terrible night our enemy is not the ocean depths, for owing to the lifebelts no one — or almost no one — will drown. Nor is the local fauna our enemy, for sharks and rays rarely visit the middle of the North Atlantic in early spring. No, our enemy tonight is the temperature of the water, pure and simple, full stop.”

“And how do you propose to obviate that implacable fact?” Mr Murdoch inquired. The next time he used the word obviate, I intended to sock him in the chops.

“We’re going to build an immense platform,” said Mr Andrews, unfurling a sheet of drafting paper on which he’d hastily sketched an object labelled Raft of the Titanic. He secured the blueprint with ashtrays and, leaning across the table, squeezed the chief engineer’s knotted shoulder. “I designed it in collaboration with the estimable Mr Bell” — he flashed our carpenter an amiable wink — “and the capable Mr Hutchinson.”

“Instead of loading anyone into our fourteen standard thirty-foot lifeboats, we shall set aside one dozen, leave their tarps in place, and treat them as pontoons,” Mr Bell said. “From an engineering perspective, this is a viable scheme, for each lifeboat is outfitted with copper buoyancy tanks.”

Mr Andrews set his open palms atop the blueprint, his eyes dancing with a peculiar fusion of desperation and ecstasy. “We shall deploy the twelve pontoons in a three-by-four grid, each linked to its neighbours via horizontal stanchions spliced together from available wood. Our masts are useless — mostly steel — but we’re hauling tons of oak, teak, mahogany and spruce.”

“With any luck, we can affix a twenty-five-foot stanchion between the stern of pontoon A and the bow of pontoon B,” Mr Hutchinson said, “another such bridge between the amidships oarlock of A and the amidships oarlock of E, another between the stern of B and the bow of C, and so on.”

“Next we’ll cover the entire matrix with jettisoned lumber, securing the planks with nails and rope,” Mr Bell said. “The resulting raft will measure roughly one hundred feet by two hundred, which technically allows each of our two thousand plus souls almost nine square feet, though in reality everyone will have to share accommodations with foodstuffs, water casks, and survival gear, not to mention the dogs.”

“As you’ve doubtless noticed,” Mr Andrews said, “at this moment the North Atlantic is smooth as glass, a circumstance that contributed to our predicament — no wave broke against the iceberg, so the lookouts spotted the bloody thing too late. I am proposing that we now turn this same placid sea to our advantage. My machine could never be assembled in high swells, but tonight we’re working under conditions only slightly less ideal than those that obtain back at the Harland and Wolff shipyard.”

Captain Smith’s moustache and beard parted company, a great gulping inhalation, whereupon he delivered what was surely the most momentous speech of his career.

“Step one is for Mr Wilde and Mr Lightoller to muster the deck crew and have them launch all fourteen standard lifeboats — forget the collapsibles and the cutters — each craft to be rowed by two able-bodied seamen assisted where feasible by a quartermaster, boatswain, lookout, or master-at-arms. Through this operation we get our twelve pontoons in the water, along with two roving assembly craft. The AB’s will forthwith moor the pontoons to the Titanic’s hull using davit ropes, keeping the lines in place until the raft is finished or the ship sinks, whichever comes first. Understood?”

I nodded in assent, as did Mr Lightoller, even though I’d never heard a more demented idea in my life. Next the Old Man waved a scrap of paper at Mr Murdoch, the overeducated genius whose navigational brilliance had torn a three-hundred-foot gash in our hull.

“A list from Purser McElroy identifying twenty carpenters, joiners, fitters, bricklayers, and blacksmiths — nine from the second-cabin decks, eleven from steerage,” Captain Smith explained. “Your job is to muster these skilled workers on the boat deck, each man equipped with a mallet and nails from either his own baggage or Mr Hutchinson’s shop. For those who don’t speak English, get Father Montvila and Father Peruschitz to act as interpreters. Lower the workers to the construction site using the electric cranes. Mr Andrews and Mr Hutchinson will be building the machine on the leeward side.”

The Old Man rose and, shuffling to the far end of the table, rested an avuncular hand on his third officer’s epaulet.

“Mr Pitman, I am charging you with provisioning the raft. You will work with Mr Latimer in organizing his three hundred stewards into a special detail. Have them scour the ship for every commodity a man might need were he to find himself stranded in the middle of the North Atlantic: water, wine, beer, cheese, meat, bread, coal, tools, sextants, compasses, small arms. The stewards will load these items into buoyant coffers, setting them afloat near the construction site for later retrieval.”

Captain Smith continued to circumnavigate the table, pausing to clasp the shoulders of his fourth and fifth officers.

“Mr Boxhall and Mr Lowe, you will organize two teams of second-cabin volunteers, supplying each man with an appropriate wrecking or cutting implement. There are at least twenty emergency fire-axes mounted in the companionways. You should also grab all the saws and sledges from the shop, plus hatchets, knives and cleavers from the galleys. Team A, under Mr Boxhall, will chop down every last column, pillar, post and beam for the stanchions, tossing them to the construction crew, along with every bit of rope they can find, yards and yards of it, wire rope, Manila hemp, clothesline, whatever you can steal from the winches, cranes, ladders, bells, laundry rooms and children’s swings. Meanwhile, Team B, commanded by Mr Lowe, will lay hold of twenty thousand square feet of planking for the platform of the raft. Towards this end, Mr Lowe’s volunteers will pillage the promenade decks, dismantle the grand staircase, ravage the panels, and gather together every last door, table and piano lid on board.”

Captain Smith resumed his circuit, stopping behind the chief engineer.

“Mr Bell, your assignment is at once the simplest and the most difficult. For as long as humanly possible, you will keep the steam flowing and the turbines spinning, so our crew and passengers will enjoy heat and electricity whilst assembling Mr Andrews’s ark. Any questions, gentlemen?”

We had dozens of questions, of course, such as, “Have you taken leave of your senses, Captain?” and “Why the bloody hell did you drive us through an ice-field at twenty-two knots?” and “What makes you imagine we can build this preposterous device in only two hours?” But these mysteries were irrelevant to the present crisis, so we kept silent, fired off crisp salutes and set about our duties.

19 April 1912

Lat. 36°18 ‘N, Long. 52°48’ W

Still no sign of the Carpathia, but the mast holds true, the spar remains strong and the sail stays fat. Somehow, through no particular virtue of my own, I’ve managed to get us out of iceberg country. The mercury hovers a full five degrees above freezing.

Yesterday Colonel Astor and Mr Guggenheim convinced Mr Andrews to relocate the Franklin stove from amidships to the forward section. Right now our first-cabin castaways are toasty enough, though by this time tomorrow our coal supply will be exhausted. That said, I’m reasonably confident we’ll see no more deaths from hypothermia, not even in steerage. Optimism prevails aboard the Ada. A cautious optimism, to be sure, optimism guarded by Cerberus himself and a cherub with a flaming sword, but optimism all the same.

I was right about Mr Futrelle knowing the source of “The sea is calm tonight.” It’s from “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. Futrelle has the whole thing memorized. Lord, what a depressing poem. “For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” Tomorrow I may issue an order banning public poetry recitations aboard the Ada.

When the great ship Titanic went down, the world was neither various and beautiful, nor joyless and violent, but merely very busy. By forty minutes after midnight, against all odds, the twelve pontoons were in the water and lashed to the davits. Mr Boxhall’s second-cabin volunteers forthwith delivered the first load of stanchions, even as Mr Lowe’s group supplied the initial batch of decking material. For the next eighty minutes, the frigid air rang with the din of pounding hammers, the clang of furious axes, the whine of frantic saws and the squeal of ropes locking planks to pontoons, the whole mad chorus interspersed with the rhythmic thumps of lumber being lowered to the construction team, the steady splash, splash, splash of provisions going into the sea, and shouts affirming the logic of our labours: “Stay out of the drink!” “Only the cold can kill us!” “Twenty-eight degrees!” “Carpathia is on the way!” It was all very British, though occasionally the Americans pitched in, and the emigrants proved reasonably diligent as well. I must admit, I can’t imagine any but the English-speaking races constructing and equipping the Ada so efficiently. Possibly the Germans, an admirable people, though I fear their war-mongering Kaiser.

By 2.00 a.m. Captain Smith had successfully shot himself, three-fifths of the platform was nailed down, and the Titanic’s bridge lay beneath thirty feet of icy water. The stricken liner listed horribly, nearly forty degrees, stern in the air, her triple screws, glazed with ice, lying naked against the vault of heaven. For my command post I’d selected the mesh of guylines securing the dummy funnel, a vantage from which I now beheld a great mass of humanity jammed together on the boat deck: aristocrats, second-cabin passengers, emigrants, officers, engineers, trimmers, stokers, greasers, stewards, stewardesses, musicians, barbers, chefs, cooks, bakers, waiters and scullions, the majority dressed in lifebelts and the warmest clothing they could find. Each frightened man, woman and child held onto the rails and davits for dear life. The sea spilled over the tilted gunwales and rushed across the canted boards.

“The raft!” I screamed from my lofty promontory. “Hurry! Swim!” Soon the other officers — Murdoch, Lightoller, Pitman, Boxhall, Lowe, Moody — took up the cry. “The raft! Hurry! Swim!” “The raft! Hurry! Swim!” “The raft! Hurry! Swim!”

And so they swam for it, or, rather, they splashed, thrashed, pounded, wheeled, kicked and paddled for it. Even the hundreds who spoke no English understood what was required. Heaven be praised, within twelve minutes our entire company managed to migrate from the flooded deck of the Titanic to the sanctuary of Mr Andrews’s machine. Our stalwart ABs pulled scores of women and children from the water, plus many elderly castaways, along with Colonel Astor’s Airedale, Mr Harper’s Pekingese, Mr Daniel’s French bulldog and six other canines. I was the last to come aboard. Glancing around, I saw to my great distress that a dozen lifebelted bodies were not moving, the majority doubtless heart-attack victims, though perhaps a few people had got crushed against the davits or trampled underfoot.

The survivors instinctively sorted themselves by station, with the emigrants gathering at the stern, the second-cabin castaways settling amidships, and our first-cabin passengers assuming their rightful places forward. After cutting the mooring lines, the ABs took up the lifeboat oars and began to stroke furiously. By the grace of Dame Fortune and the hand of Divine Providence, the Ada rode free of the wreck, so that when the great steamer finally snapped, breaking in two abaft the engine room, and began her vertical voyage to the bottom, we observed the whole appalling spectacle from a safe distance.

22 April 1912

Lat. 33°42’ N, Long. 53° 11’ W

We’ve been at sea a full week now. No Carpathia on the horizon yet, no Californian, no Olympia, no Baltic. Our communal mood is grim but not despondent. Mr Hartley’s little band helps. I’ve forbidden them to play hymns, airs, ballads or any other wistful tunes. “It’s waltzes and rags or nothing,” I tell him. Thanks to Wallace Hartley’s strings and Scott Joplin’s syncopations, we may survive this ordeal.

Although no one is hungry at the moment, I worry about our eventual nutritional needs. The supplies of beef, poultry and cheese hurled overboard by the stewards will soon be exhausted, and thus far our efforts to harvest the sea have come to nothing. The spectre of thirst likewise looms. True, we still have six wine-casks in the first-cabin section, plus four amidships and three in steerage, and we’ve also deployed scores of pots, pans, pails, kettles, washtubs and tierces all over the platform. But what if the rains come too late?

Our sail is unwieldy, the wind contrary, the current fickle, and yet we’re managing, slowly, ever so slowly, to beat our way towards the thirtieth parallel. The climate has grown bearable — perhaps forty-five degrees by day, forty by night — but it’s still too cold, especially for the children and the elderly. Mr Lightoller’s Franklin stove has proven a boon for those of us in the bow, and our second-cabin passengers have managed to build and sustain a small fire amidships, but our emigrants enjoy no such comforts. They huddle miserably aft, warming each other as best they can. We must get farther south. My kingdom for a horse latitude.

The meat in steerage has thawed, though it evidently remains fresh, an effect of the cold air and the omnipresent brine. I shall soon be obligated to issue a difficult order. “Our choices are clear,” I’ll tell the Ada’s company, “fortitude or refinement, nourishment or nicety, survival or finesse — and in each instance I’ve opted for the former.” Messrs Lightoller, Pitman, Boxhall, Lowe and Moody share my sentiments. The only dissenter is Murdoch. My chief officer is useless to me. I would rather be sharing the bridge with our Bolshevik, Plotcharsky, than that fusty Scotsman.

In my opinion an intraspecies diet need not automatically entail depravity. Ethical difficulties arise only when such cuisine is practiced in bad faith. During my one and only visit to the Louvre, I became transfixed by Theodore Gericault’s Scene de naufrage “Scene of a Shipwreck”, that gruesome panorama of life aboard the notorious raft by which the refugees from the stranded freighter Medusa sought to save themselves. As Monsieur Gericault so vividly reveals, the players in that disaster were, almost to a man, paragons of bad faith. They ignored their leaders with insouciance, betrayed their fellows with relish and ate one another with alacrity. I am resolved that no such chaos will descend upon the Ada. We are not orgiasts. We are not beasts. We are not French.

4 May 1912

Lat. 29°55’ N, Long. 54° 12’ W

At last, after nineteen days afloat, the Ada has crossed the thirtieth parallel. We are underfed and dehydrated but in generally good spirits. Most of the raft’s company has settled into a routine, passing their hours fishing, stargazing, card-playing, cataloguing provisions, bartering for beer and cigars, playing with the dogs, minding the children, teaching each other their native languages, repairing the hastily assembled platform and siphoning seawater from the pontoons (to stabilize the raft, not to drink, God knows). Each morning Dr O’Loughlin brings me a report. Our infirmary — the area directly above pontoon K-is presently full: five cases of chronic mal de mer, three of frostbite, two of flux, and four “fevers of unknown origin”.

Because the Ada remains so difficult to navigate, even with our newly installed wheelhouse and rudder, it would be foolish to try tacking towards the North American mainland in hopes of hitting some hospitable Florida beach. We cannot risk getting caught in the Gulf Stream and dragged back north into frigid waters. Instead we shall latch onto every southerly breeze that comes our way, eventually reaching the Lesser Antilles or, failing that, the coast of Brazil.

As darkness settled over the North Atlantic, we came upon a great mass of flotsam and jetsam from an anonymous wreck: a poaching schooner, most likely, looking for whales and seals but instead running afoul of a storm. We recovered no bodies — lifebelts have never been popular amongst such scallywags — but we salvaged plenty of timber, some medical supplies, and a copy of the New York Post for 17 April, stuffed securely into the pocket of a drifting macintosh. At first light I shall peruse the paper in hopes of learning how the outside world reacted to the loss of the Titanic.

The dry wood is a godsend. Thanks to this resource, I expect to encounter only a modicum of hostility whilst making my case next week for what might be called the Medusa initiative for avoiding famine. “Only a degenerate savage would consume the raw flesh of his own kind,” I’ll tell our assembled company. “Thanks to the Franklin stove and its ample supply of fuel, however, we can prepare our meals via broiling, roasting, braising, and other such civilized techniques.”

5 May 1912

Lat. 28°10’N, Long. 54°40 ‘W

I am still reeling from the New York Post’s coverage of the 15 April tragedy. Upon reaching the disaster site, Captain Roston of the Carpathia and Captain Lord of the Californian scanned the whole area with great diligence, finding no survivors or dead bodies, merely a few deck chairs and other debris. By the following morning they’d concluded that the mighty liner had gone down with all souls, and so they called off the search.

The Ada’s company greeted the news of their ostensible extinction with a broad spectrum of responses. Frustration was the principal emotion. I also witnessed despair, grief, bitterness, outrage, amusement, hysterical laughter, fatalistic resignation, and even — if I read correctly the countenances of certain first-cabin and amidships voyagers — fascination with the possibility that, should we in fact bump into one of the Lesser Antilles, a man might simply slip away, start his life anew, and allow his family and friends to count him amongst those who’d died of exposure on day one.

If the Post report may be believed, our would-be rescuers initially thought it odd that Captain Smith had neglected to order his passengers and crew into lifebelts. Rostron and Lord speculated that, once the Titanic’s entire company realized their situation was hopeless, with the Grim Reaper making ready to trawl for their souls within a mere two hours, a tragic consensus had emerged. As Stanley Lord put it, “I can hear the oath now, ringing down the Titanic’s companionways. ‘The time has come for us to embrace our wives, kiss our children, pet our dogs, praise the Almighty, break out the wine and stop trying to defy a Divine Will far greater than our own.’ “

Thus have we become a raft of the living dead, crewed by phantoms and populated by shades. Mr Futrelle thought immediately of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. He muttered a stanza in which the cadaverous crew, their souls having been claimed by the skull-faced, dice-addicted master of a ghost ship (its hull suggestive of an immense ribcage), return to life under the impetus of angelic spirits: “They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, nor spake nor moved their eyes. It had been strange, even in a dream, to have seen those dead men rise.” And when we all come marching home to Liverpool, Southampton, Queens-town, Belfast, Cherbourg, New York, Philadelphia and Boston — that too will be awfully strange.

9 May 1912

Lat. 27°14’N, Long. 55°21’ W

This morning the Good Lord sent us potable water, gallons of it, splashing into our cisterns like honey from heaven. If we cleave to our usual draconian rationing, we shall not have to take up the Ancient Mariner’s despairing chant — “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink” — for at least two months. Surely we shall encounter more rain by then.

Predictably enough, my directive concerning the steerage meat occasioned a lively conversation aboard the Ada. A dozen first-cabin voyagers were so scandalized that they began questioning my sanity, and for a brief but harrowing interval it looked as if I might have a mutiny on my hands. But in time more rational heads prevailed, as the pragmatic majority apprehended both the utilitarian and the sacramental dimensions of such a menu.

Reverend Bateman, God bless him, volunteered to oversee the rite — the deboning, the roasting, the thanksgiving, the consecration — a procedure in which he was assisted by his Catholic confreres, Father Byles and Father Peruschitz. Not one word was spoken during the consumption phase, but I sensed that everyone was happy not only to have finally received a substantive meal but also to have set a difficult precedent and emerged from the experience spiritually unscathed.

14 May 1912

Lat. 27°41’ N, Long. 54°29’ W

Another wreck, another set of medical supplies, another trove of cooking fuel — plus two more legible newspapers. As it happened, the Philadelphia Bulletin for 22 April and the New York Times for 29 April carried stories about the dozens of religious services held earlier in the month all over America and the United Kingdom honouring the Titanic’’s noble dead. I explained to our first-cabin and second-cabin passengers that I would allow each man to read about his funeral, but he must take care not to get the pages wet.

Needless to say, our most illustrious voyagers were accorded lavish tributes. The managers of the Waldorf-Astoria, St Regis, and Knickerbocker hotels in Manhattan observed a moment of silence for Colonel John Jacob Astor. (Nothing was said about his scandalously pregnant child bride, the former Madeleine Force.) The rectors of St Paul’s church in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, commissioned three Tiffany windows in memory of the dearly departed Widener family, George, Eleanor and Harry. Senator Guggenheim of Colorado graced the Congressional Record with a eulogy for his brother, Benjamin, the mining and smelting tycoon. President Taft decreed an official Day of Prayer at the White House for his military adviser, Major Butt. For a full week all the passenger trains running between Philadelphia and New York wore black bunting in honour of John Thayer, Second Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad. During this same interval the flags of all White Star Line steamers departing Southampton flew at half-mast in memory of the company’s president, J. Bruce Ismay, even as the directors of Macy’s Department Store in Herald Square imported a Wurlitzer and arranged for the organist to play each day a different requiem for their late employer, Isidor Straus. The Denver Women’s Club successfully petitioned the City Council to declare a Day of Mourning for Margaret Brown, who’d done so much to improve the lot of uneducated women and destitute children throughout the state.

On the whole, our spectral community took heart in their epitaphs, and I believe I know why. Now that our deaths have been duly marked and lamented, the bereaved back home can begin, however haltingly, to get on with the business of existence. Yes, throughout April the mourning families knew only raw grief, but in recent weeks they have surely entered upon wistful remembrance and the bittersweet rewards of daily life, wisely heeding our Lord’s words from the Gospel of Matthew, “Let the dead bury their dead.”

18 June 1912

Lat. 25°31’N, Long. 53°33’W

To reward our steerage passengers for accepting the Medusa initiative with such élan, I made no move to stop them when, shortly after sunrise, they killed and ate Mr Ismay. I could see their point of view. By all accounts, from the moment we left Cherbourg Ismay had kept pressing the captain for more steam, so that we might arrive in New York on Tuesday night rather than Wednesday morning. Evidently Ismay wanted to set a record, whereby the crossing-time for the maiden voyage of the Titanic would beat that of her sister ship, the Olympic. Also, nobody really liked the man.

I also went along with the strangling and devouring of Mr Murdoch. There was nothing personal or vindictive in my decision. I would have acquiesced even if we didn’t detest each other. Had Murdoch not issued such a boneheaded command at 11.40 p.m. on the night of 14 April, we wouldn’t be in this mess. “Hard a-starboard!” he ordered. So far, so good. If he’d left it at that, we would’ve steamed past the iceberg with several feet to spare. But instead he added, “Full astern.” What the bloody hell was Murdoch trying to do? Back up the ship like a bloody motorcar? All he accomplished was to severely compromise the rudder, and so the colossus slit us like a hot knife cutting lard.

When it came to Mr Andrews, however, I drew the line. Yes, before the Titanic sailed he should have protested the paucity of lifeboats. And, yes, when designing her he should have run the bulkheads clear to the brink, so that in the event of rupture the watertight compartments would not systematically feed one another with ton after ton of brine. But even in his wildest fancies, Mr. Andrews could not have imagined a three-hundred-foot gash in his creation’s hull.

“Let him amongst you who has designed a more unsinkable ship than RMS Titanic cast the first stone,” I told the mob. Slowly, reluctantly, they backed away. Today I have made an eternal friend in Thomas Andrews.

5 December 1912

Lat. 20°16 ‘N, Long. 52°40 ‘W

Looking through my journal, I am chagrined to discover that the entries appear at such erratic intervals. What can I say? Writing does not come easily for me, and I am forever solving problems more pressing than keeping this tub’s log up to date.

Since getting below the Tropic of Cancer, we have endured one episode of becalming after another. Naturally Mr Futrelle supplied me with an appropriate stanza from Coleridge. “Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down — ‘twas sad as sad could be, and we did only speak to break silence of the sea.” And yet we are much more than the poet’s painted ship upon a painted ocean. The Ada abides. Life goes on.

In August, young Mrs Astor gave birth to her baby, faithfully attended by Dr Alice Leader, the only female physician on board. (Mother and child are both thriving.) September’s highlights included a spellbinding public recitation by Mr Futrelle of his latest Thinking Machine detective story, which he will commit to paper when we reach dry land. (The plot is so devilishly clever that I dare not reveal any particulars.) Last month our resident theatre company staged a production of The Tempest, directed by Margaret Brown and featuring our fetching movie-serial actress Dorothy Gibson as Miranda. (The shipwreck scene provoked unhappy memories, but otherwise we were enchanted.) And, of course, each dawn brings a plethora of birthdays to celebrate. Mr Futrelle informs me of the counterintuitive fact that, out of any group of twenty-three persons, the chances are better than fifty-fifty that two will share a birthday. I couldn’t follow his logic, but I’m not about to question it.

On the romantic front, I’ve been pleased to observe that our young wireless operator, Harold Bride, has set his cap for a twenty-one-year-old Irish emigrant named Katie Mullen. (Though Mr Bride has not been pleased to observe me observing him.) In June, Mr and Mrs Strauss marked their forty-first wedding anniversary. (Mr Lightoller arranged a candlelit dinner for them above pontoon F.) In July, Mr Guggenheim and his mistress, Mme Léotine Aubert, finally got married, Rabbi Minkoff officiating. (They passed their honeymoon in the gazebo above pontoon D.) Sad to say, last month Mr and Mrs Widener decided to get divorced, despite the protests of Father Byles and Father Montvila. The Wideners insist their decision has nothing to do with the stress of the sinking, and everything to do with their disagreements over women’s suffrage. I personally don’t understand why the gentler sex wishes to sully its sensibility with politics, but if ladies really want the vote, I say give it them.

7 July 1913

Lat. 9°19’N, Long. 44°42 ‘W

For reasons that defy my powers of analysis, a steady cheerfulness obtains aboard the Ada. Despite our isolation, or perhaps because of it, we’ve become quite attached to our crowded little hamlet. Notwithstanding the occasional doldrums, literal and figurative, our peripatetic tropical isle remains a remarkably congenial place.

I am aided immeasurably by the incompetence of captains who came before me. Thanks to the superfluity of wrecks, and our skill in plundering the flotsam and jetsam, we are blessed with a continual supply of fresh meat, good ale, novel toys for the children, au courant fashions for the first-cabin women, lumber for new architectural projects, rigging to improve our manoeuvrability, firearms to discourage pirates, and lambskin sheaths to curb our population. Drop by the Ada on any given Saturday night, and you will witness dance marathons, bridge tournaments, poker games, lotto contests, sing-a-longs, and amorous encounters of every variety, sometimes across class lines. We are a merry raft.

Even our library is flourishing. This last circumstance has proved especially heartening to young Harry Widener, our resident bibliophile, who needs bucking up after his parents’ divorce. Jane Austen is continually in circulation, likewise Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Conan Doyle, and an epic Polish novel, at once reverent and earthy, called Quo Vadis. We also have The Oxford Book of English Verse, compiled in 1900 by Arthur Quiller-Couch, so now I need no longer pester Mr Futrelle when I wish to ornament my log with epigraphs.

At least ten weeks have passed since anybody has asked when we’re going to reach the Lesser Antilles. How might I account for this cavalier attitude to our rescue? I suspect that the phenomenon traces in part to the special editions of the New York Herald-Tribune and the Manchester Guardian that we salvaged last May. In both cases, the theme of the issue was “The Titanic Catastrophe: One Year Later”. Evidently the outside world has managed to extract a profound moral lesson from the tragedy. Man, our beneficiaries have learned, is a flawed, fallible and naked creature. Our pride is nothing of which to be proud. For all our technological ingenuity, we are not gods or even demiurges. If a person wishes to be happy, he would do better planting his garden than polishing his gaskets, better cultivating his soul than multiplying his possessions.

Given the ethos that now obtains throughout North America, Europe and the British Empire, how can we blithely go waltzing home? How dare we disillusion Western civilization by returning from the dead? I’ve consulted with representatives from steerage, amidships and the aristocracy, and they’ve all ratified my conclusion. Showing up now would amount to saying, “Sorry, friends and neighbours, but you’ve been living in a Rousseauesque fantasy, for the Titanic’s resourceful company defeated Nature after all. Once again human cleverness has triumphed over cosmic indifference, so let’s put aside all this sentimental talk of hubris and continue to fill the planet to bursting with our contrivances and toys.”

To be sure, we also have certain personal — you might even say selfish — reasons to keep the Ada as our address. Colonel Astor, Mr Widener and Mr Guggenheim note, with great exasperation, that according to our salvaged newspapers the American Treasury Department intends to levy a severe tax on people at their level of income. (Ironically, these revenues will be due each year on the day the Titanic went down.) Reverend Bateman and Father Byles aver that their castaway flocks have proven a hundred times more attentive to the Christian message than were their congregations on dry land. At least half our married men, regardless of class, confess that they’ve grown weary of their wives back home, and many have started courting the nubile colleens from steerage. Surprisingly, some of our unescorted married women admit to analogous sentiments. Consider the case of Margaret Brown, our Denver suffragette and rabble-rouser, who avers that her marriage to J. J. Brown lost its magic many years ago, hence her proclivity for throwing herself at me in a most shocking and, I must say, exciting manner.

And, of course, we continue to expand our material amenities. Last week we put in a squash court. This morning Mr Andrews showed me his plans for a Turkish bath. Tomorrow my officers and I shall consider whether to allocate our canvas reserves to a canopy for the emigrants, analogous to the protection enjoyed by our second-cabin and forward residents. All in all, it would appear that, as captain of this community, I am obligated to defer our deliverance indefinitely, an attitude with which the vivacious Mrs Brown heartily agrees.

11 December 1913

Lat. 10°17’S, Long. 32°52’ W

Looking back on Vasil Plotcharsky’s attempt to foment a socialist revolution aboard the Ada, I would say that it was all for the best. Just as I suspected, the man is besotted with Trotsky. At first he confined his political activities to organizing marches, rallies and strikes amongst the steerage passengers and former Titanic victualling staff, his aim being to protest what he called “the tyrannical regime of Czar Henry Wilde and his decadent courtiers”. Alas, it wasn’t long before Mr Plotcharsky and his followers broke into the arms locker and equipped themselves with pistols, whereupon they started advocating the violent overthrow of my regime.

But for the intervention of our resident logic meister, Mr Futrelle, who can be as quick as his fictional Thinking Machine, Plotcharsky’s exhortations might have led to bloodshed. Instead, Futrelle explained to the Trotskyites that, per Karl Marx’s momentous revelation, the land of collectivist milk and classless honey is destined to rise only from the rubble of the Western imperialist democracies. The Workers’ Paradise cannot be successfully organized within feudal societies such as contemporary Russia or, for that matter, the good ship Ada. In due time, with scientific inevitability, the world’s capitalist economies will yield to the iron imperatives of history, but for now even the most ardent Bolshevik must practise forbearance.

Mr Plotcharsky listened attentively, spent the following day in a brown study, and cancelled the revolution. To tell you the truth, I don’t think his heart was in it.

Of course, not all of Vasil Plotcharsky’s partisans were happy with this turn of events, and one of them — a Southampton butcher named Charles Barrow — argued that we should forthwith institute a democracy aboard the Ada, as an essential first step towards a socialist Utopia. Initially I resisted Mr Barrow’s argument, whereupon he introduced his cleaver into the conversation, and I assured him that I would not stand in the way of progress.

And so a bright new day has dawned aboard the Ada. Mr Andrews’ astounding machine is now considerably more than a raft, and I am now considerably less than her captain. On 13 October, by a nearly unanimous vote, Mr Plotcharsky and Colonel Astor abstaining, we became the People’s Republic of Adaland. Our constitutional convention, drawing representatives from the aristocracy, the second-cabin precincts and steerage, dragged on for two weeks. George Widener, John Thayer and Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon were scandalized by the resulting document, mostly because it forbade the establishment of a state church, instituted a unitary Parliament oblivious to class distinctions, and — owing to the tireless efforts of Margaret Brown and her sorority of suffragettes — enfranchised every adult female citizen. I keep trying to convince Widener, Thayer and Duff-Gordon that certain concessions to modernity are better than the Bolshevik alternative.

On 13 November I was elected the first Prime Minister of Adaland in a landslide, thereby vindicating the platform of my Egalitarian Party and giving pause to Father Peruschitz’s Catholic Workers Party, Sir Cosmo’s Christian Entrepreneurs Party, Thomas Andrews’s Technotopia Party and Vasil Plotcharsky’s Communist Party. Two days after my triumph at the polls, I asked Maggie Brown to marry me. She’d done a splendid job as my campaign manager, attracting over eighty per cent of the female vote to our cause, and I knew she would make an excellent wife as well.

17 April 1914

Lat. 13°15’ N, Long. 29°11 W

The week began with an extraordinary stroke of luck. Shortly after noon, poking through the wreck of a frigate called the Ganymede, we happened upon a wireless set, plus a petrol engine to supply it with power. In short order John Phillips and Harold Bride got the rig working. “Once again I have the ears of an angel,” enthused a beaming Phillips. “I can tell you all the gossip of a troubled and tumultuous world.”

Woodrow Wilson has been elected the 28th President of the United States. The Second Balkans War has ended with a peace treaty between Serbia and Turkey. Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the Indian Passive Resistance Movement, has been arrested. Pope Pius X has died, succeeded by Cardinal della Chiesa as Pope Benedict XV. Ernest Shackleton is headed for the Antarctic. The feisty suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst languishes in prison after attempting to blow up Lloyd George. Nickelodeon audiences have fallen in love with a character called the Little Tramp. A great canal through the Isthmus of Panama is about to open. The second anniversary of the Titanic disaster occasioned sermons, speeches, editorials and religious observances throughout the Western world.

Good Lord, has it been two years already? It seems only yesterday that I watched Mr Andrews unfurl his blueprint in the chartroom. So much has happened since then: the launching of the Ada, the consumption of Ismay and Murdoch, the reports of our collective demise, our decision to remain waterborne for the nonce, the birth of this republic — not to mention my marriage to the redoubtable Maggie.

Adaland continues to ply the Atlantic in a loop bounded on the north by the Tropic of Cancer and on the south by the Tropic of Capricorn. We last crossed the equator in late February. Mrs Wilde marked the event by organizing an elaborate masquerade ball reminiscent of the fabled Brazilian Carnaval. The affair was a huge success, and we shall probably do the same thing three months hence when we hit the line again.

At least once a week we find ourselves within hailing distance of yet another pesky freighter or presumptuous steamer. By paddling furiously and hoisting all sails — our spars now collectively carry ten thousand square feet — we always manage to outrun the intruder. In theory, thanks to our wireless rig, we have endured the last of these nerve-wracking chases, for Phillips and Bride can now sound the alarm well before we become objects of unwanted charity.

2 September 1914

Lat. 25°48’S, Long. 33°16’ W

Against the dictates of reason, in defiance of all decency, with contempt for every Christian virtue, the world has gone to war. According to our wireless intercepts, the Western Front stretches a staggering four hundred and seventy-five miles across northern France, the Boche on one side, the Allies on the other, both armies dug in and defending themselves with machine guns. In my mind’s eye I see the intervening terrain: a no-man’s-land presided over by Death, now on holiday from Coleridge’s skeletal ship and reigning over a kingdom of muck, blood, bone, mustard gas and barbed wire, whilst Life-in-Death combs her yellow locks, paints her ruby lips, and sports with the boys in the trenches. Between 4 August and 29 August, Phillips informs me, 260,000 French soldiers died the most wretched, agonizing and pointless deaths imaginable.

“I was under the impression that, since the Titanic allegedly went down two years ago, self-delusion had lost favour in Europe,” Mrs Wilde remarked. “How does one account for this madness?”

“I can’t explain it,” I replied. “But I would say we now have more reason than ever to remain aboard the Ada.”

Although the preponderance of the butchery is occurring thousands of miles to the northeast, the British and Germans have succeeded in creating a nautical war zone here in the tropics. Mr Phillips has inferred that a swift and deadly armoured fleet, under the command of Admiral Craddock aboard HMS Good Hope, has been prowling these waters looking for two German cruisers, the Dresden, last seen off the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, and the Karlsruhe, recently spotted near Curasao, one of the Lesser Antilles. If he can’t catch either of these big fish, Craddock will settle for one of the Q ships — merchant vessels retrofitted with cannons and pom-poms — that the Germans have deployed in their efforts to destroy British commercial shipping around Cape Horn. In particular Craddock hopes to sink the Cap Trafalgar, code name Hilfskreuzer B, and the Kronprinz Wilhelm, named for the Kaiser himself.

We are monitoring the Marconi traffic around the clock, eavesdropping on Craddock’s relentless patriotism. Two hours ago Mr Bride brought me a report indicating that the Kronprinz Wilhelm is being pursued by HMS Carmania, one of the British Q ships that recently joined Craddock’s cruiser squadron. Bride warns me that the coming fight could occur near our present location, about two hundred miles south of the Brazilian island of Trindade (not to be confused with the West Indies island of Trinidad). We would be well advised to sail far away from here, though in which direction God only knows.

14 September 1914

Lat. 22°15’ S, Long. 29°52’ W

A dizzyingly eventful day. Approaching Trindade, we were abruptly caught up in the Great War, bystanders to a furious engagement between the Carmania and the Kronprinz Wilhelm. There is blood on our decks tonight. Bullets and shells have shredded our sails. From our infirmary rise the moans and gasps of a hundred wounded German and British evacuees.

I had never witnessed a battle before, and neither had any other Adaland citizens except Major Butt and Colonel Weir, who’d seen action in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. “Dover Beach” came instantly to mind. The darkling plain, the confused alarms, the ignorant armies clashing by night, or, in this case, at noon.

For two full hours the armed freighters pounded each other with their 4.1-inch guns, whilst their respective supply vessels — each combatant boasted a retinue of three colliers — maintained a wary distance, waiting to fish the dead and wounded from the sea. On board the Ada, the children cried in terror, the adults bemoaned the folly of it all, and the dogs ran in mad circles trying to escape the terrible noise. With each passing minute the gap separating the Carmania and the Kronprinz Wilhelm narrowed, until the two freighters were only yards apart, their sailors lining the rails and exchanging rifle shots, a tactic curiously reminiscent of Napoleonic-era fighting, quite unlike the massed machine-gun fire now fashionable on the Western Front.

At first I thought the Carmania had got the worst of it. Fires raged along her decks, her bridge lay flattened by artillery shells, her engines had ceased to function, and she’d started to lower away. But then I realized the Wilhelm was fatally injured, her hull listing severely, her crew launching lifeboats, her colliers drawing nearer the fray, looking for survivors. Evidently some shells had hit the Wilhelm below her waterline, rupturing several compartments. A North Atlantic iceberg could not have sealed her doom more emphatically.

Owing to the relentless explosions, the proliferating fires, the rain of bullets, and the general chaos, nearly three hundred sailors — perhaps three dozen from the Carmania, the rest from the Wilhelm — were now in the water, some dead, some wounded, most merely dazed. Fully half the castaways swam for the colliers and lifeboats of their respective nationalities, but the others took a profound and understandable interest in the Ada. And so it happened that our little republic suddenly found itself in need of an immigration policy.

Unlike the Titanic, the Wilhelm did not break in two. She simply lurched crazily to port, then slowly but inexorably disappeared. Throughout the sinking I consulted with the leaders of Parliament, and we soon reached a decision that, ten hours later, I am still willing to call enlightened. We would rescue anyone, British or German, who could climb aboard on his own hook, provided he agreed to renounce his nationality, embrace the founding documents of Adaland, and forswear any notion of bringing the Great War to our waterborne, sovereign, neutral country. As it happened, every sailor to whom we proposed these terms gave his immediate assent, though doubtless many prospective citizens were simply telling us what they knew we wanted to hear.

Being ill-equipped to deal with the severely maimed, we had to leave them to the colliers, even those unfortunates who desperately wanted to join us. I shall not soon forget the bobbing casualties of the Battle of Trindade. Even Major Butt and Colonel Weir had never seen such carnage. A boy — and they were all boys — with his lower jaw blasted away. Another boy with both hands burned off. An English lad whose severed legs floated alongside him like jettisoned oars. A German sailor whose sprung intestines encircled his midriff like some grisly life-preserver. The pen trembles in my hand. I can write no more.

29 October 1914

Lat. 10°35 ‘S, Long. 38° 11’ W

Every day, fair or foul, the Great War chews up and spits out another ten thousand mothers’ sons, sometimes many more. Were the Ada’s scores of able-bodied Englishmen, Irishmen, Welshmen and Scotsmen to sail home now and repatriate themselves, the majority would probably wind up in the trenches. The beast needs feeding. As for those hundreds of young men who boarded the Titanic intending to settle in New York or Boston or perhaps even the Great Plains, they too are vulnerable, since it’s doubtless only a matter of months before President Wilson consigns several million Yanks to the Western Front.

And so it happens that a consensus concerning the present cataclysm has emerged amongst our population. I suspect we would have come to this view even without our experience of naval warfare. In any event, the Great War is not for us. We sincerely hope that the participating nations extract from the slaughter whatever their hearts desire: honour, glory, adventure, relief from ennui. But I think we’ll sit this one out.

Yesterday I held an emergency meeting with my capable Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Futrelle, my level-headed Minister of State, Mr Andrews, and my astute Minister of War, Major Butt. After deciding that the South Atlantic is entirely the wrong place for us to be, we set a north-westerly course, destination Central America. I can’t imagine how we’re going to get through the canal. Mrs Wilde assures me we’ll think of something. Lord, how I adore my wife. In January we’re expecting our first child. This happy phenomenon, I must confess, caught us completely by surprise, as Mrs Wilde is forty-six years old. Evidently our baby was meant to be.

15 November 1914

Lat. 7°10’N, Long. 79°15’W

Mirabile dictu — we’ve done it! Thanks to Mrs Astor’s diamond tiara, Mrs Guggenheim’s ruby necklace, and a dozen other such gewgaws, we managed to bribe, barter and wheedle our way from one side of the Isthmus of Panama to the other. Being a mere 110 feet side to side, the lock chambers barely accommodated our machine, but we nevertheless squeaked through.

The Ada is heading south-southwest, bound for the Galapagos Islands and the rolling blue sea beyond. I haven’t the remotest notion where we might end up, luscious Tahiti perhaps, or historic Pitcairn Island, or Pago Pago, or Samoa, and right now I don’t particularly care. What matters is that we are rid of both the Belle Époque and the darkling plain. Bring on the South Pacific, typhoons and all.

Night falls over the Gulf of Panama. By the gleam of my electric torch I am reading the Oxford Book of English Verse. Three stanzas by George Peele seem relevant to our situation. In the presence of Queen Elizabeth, an ancient warrior doffs his helmet, which “now shall make a hive for bees”. No longer able to fight, he proposes to serve Her Majesty in a different way. “Goddess, allow this aged man his right to be your beadsman now, that was your knight.” The poem is called “Farewell to Arms”, a sentiment to which we Battle of Trindade veterans respond with enthusiastic sympathy, though not for any reasons Mr Peele would recognize. Farewell, ignorant armies. Auf Wiedersehen, dreadful Kronprinz Wilhelm. Adieu, fatuous Good Hope. Hail and farewell.

I am master of a wondrous raft, and soon I shall be a father as well. Over two thousand pilgrims are in my keeping, and at present every soul is safe. Strange stars glitter in a stranger sky. Colonel Astor’s Airedale and Mr Harper’s Pekingese howl at the bright gibbous moon. The sea is calm tonight, and I am a very lucky man.