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.