On
Sunday, April 14, the fourth day of the Titanic's maiden voyage,
the sea was exceptionally calm but the weather had turned cold. At 10:30
that morning, in the first-class dining room, Captain Smith presided over
Divine Services, attended by all classes of passengers. Normally, Sunday
services would be followed by a lifeboat drill for passengers and crew,
but for some reason, that day Captain Smith opted not to hold a lifeboat
drill on the Titanic.While passengers enjoyed luncheon and spent much of the day indoors because of the cold weather, the Titanic's Marconi operators, John Phillips and his assistant Harold Bride, were very busy transmitting private telegrams for passengers.
A
backlog accumulated when the ship's wireless system malfunctioned on the
night of Friday, April 12. Still, whenever an ice warning came across the
telegraph, Phillips and Bride halted their private transmissions and took
the warning to the captain and ship's officers.Before 2:00 p.m. that day, they had received three ice alerts, from the Caronia, the Noordam and the Baltic. When Captain Smith received the Baltic's warning, he handed it to White Star Chairman J. Bruce Ismay. Ismay put the message in his pocket and later remarked to a passenger, Mrs. Arthur Ryerson, that he would let the Titanic "run a great deal faster and get out of" the ice field. Yet another ice warning came in at 5:03 p.m. from the ocean liner Amerika.
At
7:30 p.m., Phillips and Bride intercepted an iceberg alert from the nearby
Californian. Captain Smith, however, never received the Californian's
warning, because he was in the Titanic's restaurant at a dinner
party hosted by the Wideners. Just before 9:00 p.m., the Captain left the
party and stopped in at the bridge, where he instructed Second Officer
Charles Lightoller to inform him if sea conditions became hazy. At 9:40
p.m., another ship, the Mesaba, telegraphed an ice warning.
Phillips, however, was preoccupied with private transmissions; by 11:00
p.m., he had still not delivered the Mesaba's warning to the Titanic's
captain and crew, and he scolded the California's wireless
operator for interrupting him with another ice warning.
