A Day with Maggie Brown on the RMS Titanic, 1912
Time Surfing: Graphic History
Time Surfing: Experience History.
Historical Backdrop
Margaret Tobin Brown was 44 years old in April 1912. Born in Hannibal, Missouri, to poor Irish immigrants, she went west to Leadville, Colorado, married mining man J.J. Brown, and became suddenly rich in 1893 when his Little Jonny Mine hit gold. She taught herself languages, worked for women’s suffrage, juvenile courts, and miners’ families, and was separated — but not divorced — from J.J. In April 1912 she was touring Egypt and Europe with John Jacob Astor IV and his young wife when a cable said her grandson was sick. She booked passage home on the new White Star liner Titanic, boarding at Cherbourg on April 10 with her friend Emma Bucknell.
Nobody called her “Molly” in her lifetime — she was Maggie or Margaret; Hollywood invented the nickname decades later. On Sunday, April 14, Titanic was four days out, running about 22 knots into a flat, black, moonless sea. Seven ice warnings came in by wireless that day. The Sunday lifeboat drill was cancelled. There were 2,208 people aboard and lifeboat seats for 1,178.
Date/time and location: Sunday, April 14, 1912 — 7:20 a.m., ship’s time. Stateroom B-4, forward B Deck, RMS Titanic, North Atlantic, 41°N.
You wake to the hum. Not a noise exactly — a vibration in the brass bedstead, in the water glass, in your teeth. Sixteen hundred miles of ocean under the floor. The stewardess knocks twice and comes in with tea and hot water, sets the can down, draws the curtain off the porthole. Gray light. The cabin smells of new varnish, coal smoke bled in from the ventilators, lavender soap, and the faint rubber of the electric heater. You drink the tea standing up. The sea outside is flat as a millpond and the color of gun metal. You think about your grandson in Kansas City with his fever, and about how many days are left.
Date/time and location: Sunday, April 14, 1912 — 8:45 a.m. First Class Dining Saloon, D Deck.
The bugler works his way down the corridor playing the call for breakfast, the same fat tune every time. Downstairs the saloon is a white cave — 500 seats, oak carved to look like a Jacobean manor, leaded glass windows with nothing behind them but electric bulbs. The room smells of coffee, kippers, hot butter, and the starch in the tablecloths. You take grilled mutton kidneys with bacon, a baked apple, and coffee. Emma Bucknell sits across from you in black. She says again, quietly, that she had a bad feeling at Cherbourg and hasn’t shaken it. You tell her the ship is a hotel that floats and hotels don’t sink. She doesn’t laugh.
Date/time and location: Sunday, April 14, 1912 — 10:35 a.m. Divine Service, First Class Dining Saloon, D Deck.
Captain Smith reads the service himself, from White Star’s own prayer book, his white beard neat, his voice flat and unhurried, like a man reading a cargo manifest. A piano and a few of the bandsmen carry the hymns. Around a hundred passengers stand and sit and stand again. You sing “O God Our Help in Ages Past” loud enough that the woman ahead of you turns around. Afterward there is talk in the doorway. Sunday is the day they normally muster the crew and swing out the boats. Nobody swings out the boats. The captain goes back to the bridge and the stewards fold the chairs.
Date/time and location: Sunday, April 14, 1912 — 11:50 a.m. Boat Deck, port side, abreast of Lifeboat No. 6.
You take the air with the Astors. Colonel Astor is thin and courteous and bored; Madeleine is eighteen, five months pregnant, and cold. The wind off the bow cuts like a wet knife and the deck is empty except for a few walkers and a boy chasing a top. You put your hand on the white-painted gunwale of the boat hanging in its davits — canvas cover laced down tight, oars stowed, a light coat of new paint. It looks small. You say so. Astor says the ship is her own lifeboat. Below, on the well deck, third-class children are playing tag in the wind and someone’s accordion is going.
Date/time and location: Sunday, April 14, 1912 — 1:20 p.m. À la Carte / A-Deck landing, after luncheon.
Luncheon is cold roast beef, potted shrimps, a grill, cheese. Coming out, you see Mr. Ismay by the rail with a slip of yellow Marconi paper between two fingers, showing it to Mrs. Ryerson and Mrs. Thayer. Ice, he says. Field ice and bergs, from the Baltic, in our track. He says it the way a man reports a delayed train. He folds it away into his waistcoat pocket. Somebody asks if the ship will slow. He says they will likely put on more speed and get past it before dark. The talk moves to whether they will land Tuesday night instead of Wednesday. You go and find your coat.
Date/time and location: Sunday, April 14, 1912 — 4:10 p.m. Reading and Writing Room, A Deck.
The white room with the bow window is nearly empty. You write two letters on White Star paper with the red burgee at the top — one to your daughter Helen in Paris, one to your lawyer — and you use the ship’s steel-nibbed pen and blot each page. A steward brings tea at half past four with cucumber sandwiches curling at the corners. The window glass has gone cold enough to hurt your knuckles. Outside, the light is thinning and the sea has no swell at all, not a ripple, which any sailor will tell you is strange. A man near the fire says the temperature has fallen twenty degrees since noon.
Date/time and location: Sunday, April 14, 1912 — 7:50 p.m. First Class Dining Saloon, D Deck, and the Reception Room.
Dinner is long. Consommé Olga, poached salmon, lamb with mint sauce, roast duckling, Waldorf pudding. The saloon is loud with silver on china and the band plays in the reception room afterward — waltzes, then something light from a musical comedy. Men drift off to the smoking room for cigars and brandy and talk of markets. The stewards say the captain is dining upstairs with the Wideners. The air in the alleyways is arctic now; you can feel it every time a door opens. Emma says goodnight early. You stand a moment at the foot of the grand staircase under the glass dome, listening to the fiddles, and then you go down.
Date/time and location: Sunday, April 14, 1912 — 10:20 p.m. Stateroom B-4.
You get out of the gown and into a nightdress and a wrapper, unpin your hair, brush it out, and put yourself on top of the bed with the electric heater on and a book propped on your knees. The room is very quiet, only the hum and the water noise along the plating. Outside the porthole it is black. No moon at all. You read for an hour and your feet stay cold no matter what you do. You think you might get up and put on stockings. You don’t. Somewhere above, a door slams and someone laughs in the alleyway and then it’s quiet again.
Date/time and location: Sunday, April 14, 1912 — 11:40 p.m. Stateroom B-4 and the B-Deck alleyway.
It isn’t a bang. It’s a long grinding shudder, like a train going over a bad joint, and it runs the length of the ship under your back. The book goes off your knees. The water glass walks half an inch across the nightstand. You get up and press your face to the porthole and see nothing at all, only black. Then the hum stops. That’s the thing you notice — the engines have stopped, and after four days the silence is enormous. You open the door. The alleyway is white and bright and empty and freezing. A man in evening clothes goes past you toward the stairs, walking fast, not running, not looking at you.
Date/time and location: Monday, April 15, 1912 — 12:05 a.m. Stateroom B-4.
