The Titanic held him spellbound. She was exactly as the surviving Second Officer, Charles Lightoiler, had said. She was awesome and obscene. She was fascinating and violent. She was horrible and wonderfully dramatic. And most of all, Jonathan realized, she was escape from something worse.

If his timing of events on the program was correct, Jack Phillips would now be tapping off two Vs:

DIT-DIT-DIT-DA

DIT-DIT-DIT-DA

The fateful opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Death knocking at the door, the last signal anyone heard from the Titanic.

And then all was confusion—dimming lights, toppling smokestacks, and a rumbling roar that carried up through the deck plates, building to such convulsive force that the iron hull disintegrated amidships and a 120-meter length of ship broke loose and began hurtling toward the bottom. Then, as quickly as they had started, the roaring sounds died away. The women in lifeboat 11 thought they saw Titanic cutting short the final plunge and settling back again toward her propellers, with few of them guessing that what appeared to be a miracle—the great ship rising up again and righting itself in the water—was only a brief respite bought by a spectacular loss of weight.

Edith, who had been holding the “Hoffman” boys in her arms, knowing that their father was aboard the doomed ship and not wanting them to watch, now uncovered their eyes and unwittingly made them witness to the most gruesome part of the sinking.

High on the flagstaff, a kerosene lantern still burned. In its dim glow, Jonathan saw hundreds of shadows jostling about him. And then the Titanic— what was left of her—rolled gently onto her port side and all those hundreds of jostling bodies slid away from him into the dark. But Jonathan kept his balance. He hauled himself out over the starboard rail as the stern continued heaving to port, until at last he found himself standing level on the starboard hull of the ship.

He began running toward the lonely flagstaff lantern, barely noticing that he was stepping over upturned portholes until an open one caught his right foot, fractured his shin and sent the whole world spinning away from him. He came down hard on a curving wall of steel plates, felt rivets and brass porthole rims sliding under his outstretched palms, screamed, bounced off another open porthole, came down on his broken leg once more, heard it snap someplace else, rolled, bounced into the air again, and suddenly fetched up against Titanic’s six-story rudder.

As he tried to get his bearings, the stem’s nose corkscrewed straight down, swinging him and the giant brass propellers more than thirty meters above the water. For long seconds the stem seemed to hold steady, standing perfectly perpendicular in the night, silhouetted against the stars like a tall building, and then she began to slip down, bringing him closer to a sound such as no one would describe again until General Patton’s troops discovered the starving multitudes in Hitler’s death camps. It was the pleas and death cries of hundreds upon hundreds of people trying to haul themselves atop floating debris and atop each other, of children being dunked under, having ribs broken and arms dislocated, of Rosa Abbott crying out for her two missing sons. All that massed agony reverberated up the Titanic’s sides, up her cliffs of steel, to Jonathan’s ears, as a single unendurable moan.