He was right. Up on the bridge First Officer William M. Murdoch had just pulled the engine-room telegraph handle all the way to ‘Stop’. Murdoch was in charge of the bridge this watch, and it was his problem, once Fleet phoned the warning. A tense minute had passed since then—orders to Quartermaster Hitchens to turn the wheel hard-a-starboard… a yank on the engine-room telegraph for ‘Full speed astern’… a hard push on the button closing the watertight doors… and finally those thirty-seven seconds of breathless waiting.

Now the waiting was over, and it was also clearly too late. As the grinding noise died away, Captain Smith rushed on to the bridge from his cabin next to the wheelhouse. There were a few quick words:

‘Mr Murdoch, what was that?’

‘An iceberg, sir. I hard-a-starboarded and reversed the engines, and I was going to hard-a-port around it, but she was too close. I couldn’t do any more.’

‘Close the emergency doors.’

‘The doors are already closed.’

They were closed all right. Down in boiler room No. 6 fireman Fred Barrett had been talking to second engineer James Hesketh when the warning bell sounded and the light flashed red above the watertight door leading to the stern. A quick shout of warning—an ear-splitting crash—and the whole starboard side of the ship seemed to give way. The sea cascaded in, swirling about the pipes and valves, and the two men leaped through the door as it slammed down behind them.

Barrett found things almost as bad where he was now, in boiler room No. 5. The gash ran into No. 5 about two feet beyond the closed compartment door, and a fat jet of sea-water was spouting through the hole. Nearby, trimmer George Cavell was digging himself out of an avalanche of coal that had poured out of a bunker with the impact. Another stoker mournfully studied an overturned bowl of soup that had been warming on a piece of machinery.