anging over the side level with
the deck. But they were very unwilling to go. The boat, which looked big
and solid on the deck, now hung dizzily seventy-five feet over the dark
water; it seemed a far from attractive prospect to get into it and go
out on to the cold sea, especially as everyone was convinced that it was
a merely formal precaution which was being taken, and that the people in
the boats would merely be rowed off a little way and kept shivering on
the cold sea for a time and then brought back to the ship when it was
found that the danger was past. For, walking about the deck, people
remembered all the things that they had been thinking and saying since
first they had seen the _Titanic_; and what was the use of travelling by
an unsinkable ship if, at the first alarm of danger, one had to leave
her and row out on the icy water? Obviously it was only the old habit of
the sea asserting itself, and Captain Smith, who had hitherto been such
a favourite, was beginning to be regarded as something of a nuisance
with his ridiculous precautions.

The boats swung and swayed in the davits; even the calm sea, now that
they looked at it more closely, was seen to be not absolutely like a
millpond, but to have a certain movement on its surface which, although
utterly helpless to move the huge bulk of the _Titanic_, against whose
sides it lapped, as ineffectually as against the walls of a dock, was
enough to impart a swinging movement to the small boats. But at last,
what with coercion and persuasion, a boat was half filled with women.
One of the things they liked least was leaving their husbands; they felt
that they were being sacrificed needlessly to over-elaborate
precautions, and it was hard to leave the men standing comfortably on
the firm deck, sheltered and in a flood of warm yellow light, and in the
safety of the great solid ship that lay as still as a rock, while they
had to go out, half-clad and shivering, on the icy waters.

But the inexorable movements of the crew continued. The pulleys squealed
in the sheaves, the new ropes were paid out; and jerking downwards, a
foot or two at a time, the first boat dropped down towards the water,
past storey after storey of the great structure, past rows and rows of
lighted portholes, until at last, by strange unknown regions of the
ship's side, where cataracts and waterfalls were rushing into the sea,
it rested on the waves. The blocks were unhooked, the heavy ash oars
were s