Steward James Johnson felt he knew just what it was. He recognized the kind of shudder a ship gives when she drops a propeller blade, and he knew this sort of mishap meant a trip back to the Harland & Wolff shipyard at Belfast—with plenty of free time to enjoy the hospitality of the port. Somebody near him agreed and sang out cheerfully, ‘Another Belfast trip!’

In the galley just to the stern, chief night baker Walter Belford was making rolls for the following day. (The honour of baking fancy pastry was reserved for the day shift.) When the jolt came, it impressed Belford more strongly than steward Johnson—perhaps because a pan of new rolls clattered off the top of the oven and scattered about the floor.

The passengers in their cabins felt the jar too, and tried to connect it with something familiar. Marguerite Frolicher, a young Swiss girl accompanying her father on a business trip, woke up with a start. Half-asleep, she could think only of the little white lake ferries at Zurich making a sloppy landing. Softly she said to herself, ‘Isn’t it funny… we’re landing!’

Major Arthur Godfrey Peuchen, starting to undress for the night, thought it was like a heavy wave striking the ship. Mrs J. Stuart White was sitting on the edge of her bed, just reaching to turn out the light, when the ship seemed to roll over ‘a thousand marbles’. To Lady Cosmo Duff Gordon, waking up from the jolt, it seemed ‘as though somebody had drawn a giant finger along the side of the ship’. Mrs John Jacob Astor thought it was some mishap in the kitchen.

It seemed stronger to some than to others. Mrs Albert Caldwell pictured a large dog that had a baby kitten in its mouth and was shaking it. Mrs Walter B. Stephenson recalled the first ominous jolt when she was in the San Francisco earthquake—then decided this wasn’t that bad. Mrs E. D. Appleton felt hardly any shock at all, but she noticed an unpleasant ripping sound… like someone tearing a long, long strip of calico.