Titanic's Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterton & Richie Kohler by Brad Matsen

Author:Brad Matsen [Matsen, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: HIS000000
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2008-09-30T23:00:00+00:00

Fred Barrett was in Boiler Room 6, ticking off the minutes until the end of his watch. He was a tall, beefy, twenty-eight-year-old sailor from Liverpool who had gone into the coal pits when he was thirteen, survived five years in the mines, shipped out as a trimmer, and never worked ashore again. He became a fireman, then a leading fireman aboard New York. Barrett knew how to rake a good, hot fire, and when he was put in charge of a boiler-room gang, he wasn’t afraid to use his fists to keep his men moving.

When Ismay canceled New York’s voyage because of the coal strike, Barrett sprinted to the hiring hall and got himself a berth on the only ship leaving Southampton. He boarded Titanic three hours before it sailed.

Barrett was struck stupid the first time he climbed down the ladder into the enormous stokehold. Each boiler room was fifty feet long, spanned the ninety-two-foot beam of the ship, and rose thirty feet up into the hull. He had never in his life been in so large an enclosed space.

Barrett worked four hours on, eight hours off; he took his turn stoking the furnaces and, as leading fireman, kept tabs on the eight men on his watch in Boiler Room 6. For the extra responsibility, he got 10 shillings more per voyage than a fireman’s wage of £6.

On Barrett’s other ships, firemen stoked their furnaces when they decided the fire needed coal. Titanic had a maddening new system that rang bells in each boiler room every few minutes to tell the firemen when to recharge. Since Queens-town, the bells had been coming every ten minutes as the ship cruised at around 20 knots.

Barrett understood that the heat from his fires flowed up through steel tubes and turned freshwater into steam that flowed through more tubes. The steam ran the engines, and the engines turned the propellers. Knowing that he was moving the ship with his fires gave him enough pride to endure the hundred-degree temperature, the bad-tempered men, and the bells that never stopped ringing.

Barrett had been at sea long enough to understand that the maiden voyage on any ship was never easy, but the first three days on Titanic had been hell. Nobody knew his way around. The thing was a maze. It took him a half hour to find his messroom and bunk, another half hour to figure out the way to his boiler room through the firemen’s tunnel. He had to climb seventy feet up spiral staircases from the engine room to get to the fresh air of the engineers’ promenade on the boat deck.

The worst part of the voyage so far had been the bunker fire. It had been burning when he’d come aboard in Southampton, and he’d had the bad luck of being assigned to the boilers right next to it. The chief engineer had ordered extra trimmers to haul the burning coal to the furnaces, putting a lot of extra traffic in front of Barrett’s boilers.

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