The Band That Played On Read Free Page A

was 150 feet away when the Titanic , on her nose, with her after quarter sticking straight up into the air, began to settle—slowly.”
    Bride ended by saying that two things about the sinking stood out in his mind above all others. One was that Jack Phillips had continued to send messages even after Captain Smith told him he was free to leave his position and look after his own life. The other was the band that played on. “The way the band kept playing was a noble thing . . . How they ever did it I cannot imagine.”
    The twenty-five-hundred-word first-person account appeared in the next day’s New York Times along with fifty-two other stories about the ship. The headline was “Thrilling story by Titanic’s wireless man.” The subheadings were “Bride tells how he and Phillips worked and how he finished a stoker who tried to steal Phillips’s life belt—Ship sank to tune of ‘Autumn.’ ” The image of the lighted ship sliding under the waves (“She was a beautiful sight then”), while the band carried on regardless, captured the public’s imagination.
    Getting to talk to Bride was a journalistic scoop and one that would be associated with Van Anda for the rest of his life. But there was another journalist who’d been one step ahead. Unbeknown to the New York Times , Carlos F. Hurd, a thirty-six-year-old reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch , owned by Ralph Pulitzer, had been with his wife, Katherine, on the Carpathia as a paying passenger headed for the Mediterranean when it had diverted to pick up the Titanic survivors.
    Hurd found himself in the sad but privileged position of being a writer surrounded by eyewitnesses of one of the biggest peacetime tragedies in living memory and having plenty of time to amass an oral record. He began to speak to those who’d been rescued and found that there was no need to coax information from them. Happy to have been saved, they “found a certain relief in speech.” He took notes and employed Katherine as his assistant. The Carpathia ’s crew members, who’d been instructed by Captain Rostron to keep him away from the Titanic passengers, impeded his job. The crew refused him supplies of paper, banned him from contacting America by wireless, and had his cabin routinely searched for notes and transcripts. He was forced to write on anything available, including toilet paper, and to keep his material with him at all times.
    Messages sent to him care of the ship’s wireless room were not passed on, so he was out of contact with his editors. Despite that, he knew the New York staff would find a way to get to the Carpathia so that he could pass on to them this huge story. One of the telegrams that didn’t reach him was sent on April 18 by Ralph Pulitzer: “Chapin is on tug Dazelline. Will meet Carpathia between New York and Fire Island Thursday. Been [ sic ] on lookout and deliver to Chapman [ sic ] tug your full report of wreck with all interviews obtainable.” Charles Chapin was the editor of the Pulitzer-owned New York Evening World and Hurd had already anticipated what Chapin would want and had packaged his manuscript in a white waterproof bag, attached it to a cigar box, and added champagne corks on lengths of string, ready to toss it overboard. It was an unusual way of delivering copy, but these were unusual times.
    Captain Rostron of the Carpathia tried to deceive the flotilla of tugboats that he knew was awaiting his arrival in New York waters by radioing false positions, but the Dazelline , which could equal the Carpathia ’s speed of fourteen knots, didn’t fall for the trick. It managed to locate the ship and draw up close to it while a reporter bellowed Hurd’s name through a megaphone. Spotting Pulitzer’s flag, Hurd tossed the package toward the tug but, unfortunately, one of his corked strings tangled with a rope from a Titanic lifeboat, which had not yet been released and was still in the spot it had been hoisted to during the rescue. “A