The Shadow Route

Genre: creative nonfiction

THis piece was written for a creative writing course i had taken in fall 2018. i read historical accounts of the SS Californian, a British steamship that is infamously known for being close in proximity to the RMS Titanic and failing to assist on the night of April 14th, 1912. While the majority of these details are based on facts, there is illustrative language that is used to world-build as well.

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It was a calm night out on the water, not even a slight wave or movement disturbing the surface. The Atlantic has always been a wonder, with ship-sized blocks of floating ice and miles upon miles of ocean ready to be sailed across. If it wasn’t for that very ice, the SS Californian would have been well on her course, miles ahead of her present location. There were lights to the east on that chilly sunday evening, quickly appearing more visible with the coming night sky. Stanley Lord, captain of the transport vessel, had looked out at the ice covered water and made a decision that would unknowingly condemn his ship’s infamous place in history. By morning, when the sun would once again greet the Atlantic waters, those lights will be replaced by the haunting image of both what was and what could have been. The sinking of the Titanic, and more controversially the ship that watched the Titanic sink, was an unfortunate act of fate disguised as tragedy.

Men laughed together, their conversation carried across the deck of the ship. There was not much to do at 22:30 in the middle of the Atlantic, besides the frequent check ins with other ships by wireless officer Cyril Evans and the lookouts surveying the ice from their nest. Three large chunks of ice spotted in the distance caught the attention of the birds, and they flocked to their operator to relay the message to any ships in range. Evans was a diligent man, quickly clicking away the alert in morse to anyone on the other end. Captain Lord looked out and decided to halt the ship for the night, with plans to set out on their course to Boston the next morning. He tells the crew that he is retiring for the evening, and heads to his cabin.

The crew looked out and noticed something to the east, seeing horizontal lights glow like an evening star. They collectively wonder what ship is roaming the iceberg infested waters so close to their location. Down below in the belly of the SS Californian, Evans clicks away about the icebergs. “Shut up! Shut up! I am busy”, morse response calls back at the same pace. The two operators had been in contact earlier that evening, and all Evans knew was that this responder was working on a famous white star liner ship traveling to New York. The unsinkable RMS Titanic, sailing out on her first voyage, was all the talk in the papers. She was a living city on the sea, sailing into the new century revolutionary and bold. After hearing the message, Cyril Evans did shut up that night. He retired the headset and went to sleep soon after he decided the Titanic didn’t need anymore reminders about obvious dangers like icebergs.

The night air was growing colder, the remaining crew members awake curling their jackets around themselves to stop shivering. It was around midnight, and they looked back towards the horizontal lights in the distance. These lights were the only other beacon of humanity out in the dark wasteland, but something was different this time. The lights were no longer silent, for they were launching bright rockets into the sky. The crew was taken aback by this action, split between believing that the lights were a form of entertainment or something possibly more serious. After the 7th rocket had been fired, the crew settled on letting the captain know. Lord was enjoying his sleep too much to consider what the rockets might mean, and instructed his crew to ask the nature of the rockets to the Titanic with a morse lamp.

After a few attempts for a response, it was deemed that the lamp was not effective. With a total of eight rockets ignited, the horizontal lights looked a bit tilted at this point in the night. Granted, it could be the cold messing with the seamen’s minds or an optical illusion. The lights in the distance might even be taking a course that escapes the view of the SS Californian. There could be any number of logical explanations, all packed away in the reasonable mind of each crew member watching the horizontal lights become slightly diagonal.

Hints of the coming daylight lighten the sky just barely, taking a few of the stars with it. The time is 3:40 on the morning of April 15th. Rockets light the sky once again, but the crew noticed it wasn’t coming from the east, but instead the south. It wouldn’t be until an hour later that captain Lord wakes for his shift and asks the operator to see what was going on once he returned on duty. Refreshed, Evans put on his headset and reached for the switch. The world immediately freezes as messages and SOS alerts flood into the ears of Evans. The RMS Titanic had sank overnight, around the time the lights were no longer visible in the distance. The Carpathia, whose rockets were seen from the south, had responded to the SOS signals and arrived at the site of the sinking to pick up survivors.

6 hours and 10 minutes after the lights were gone, after the only other trace of humanity besides the Californian in the freezing darkness was gone, Captain Stanley Lord and his crew arrived at the site just as the Carpathia finished rescuing survivors. They glided silently through the frozen graveyard for the next 2 hours, sifting through constant reminders of the signals they rejected throughout that long night. The captain couldn’t possibly comprehend that, by sleeping through the signals instead of investigating and taking action, he sent tidal waves through the still, icy water and swallowed the passengers who never made it to New York on the “Unsinkable” Titanic. Tidal waves that surged through the history books and forever marking the Californian as the vessel that watched the most famous ship sinking occur from only 19 nautical miles away. A lonely cargo ship that, throughout perhaps one of the longest nights in history, steadily watched the lights in the distance disappear forever.