The stewards began pleading with people to put on their life vests.

A woman screamed.

ISAAC BELL SMELLED SMOKE before he got close enough to see the fire. It was a bitter chemical blend of coal tar and gunpowder oddly layered with sweet whiffs of brandy. Suddenly he saw flames explode from the end of a corridor. It was as strikingly bright a fire as he had ever seen, with an intense white-orange color. He felt the heat fifty feet away.

He saw a band of stewards whose uniforms had been burnt to smoldering rags stagger from a cross-corridor dragging a hose. Bell ran to help them charge the flames. They were led by a tall man singed half bald. His green eyes blazed in a face black with soot.

“Archie?”

“How was dinner?” asked Archie, striding into the burning baggage room, spewing steam from the hose.

“You O.K.?”

“Tip-top. Most of the explosion went up the hatch, and our PS boy did himself proud getting Block out.”

“What’s burning?”

“Nitrate film stock. Clyde says it feeds on its own oxygen.”

Bell asked, “Any more hoses?”

“This is steam. There’s a saltwater hose in the companionway.”

Bell unreeled it and followed Archie into the burning room. “Where’s Clyde?”

“He went up the hatchway ladder to vent the fumes.”

Bell looked at the square opening in the ceiling. The bitter, undoubtedly poisonous smoke was billowing up it. “Is he all right?”

“I don’t know. It blew soon after he left. But it looks to me like he got the hatch open. Unless it blew open.”

Three dozen seaman streamed down from their sleeping berths directly above the fire. Stewards joined them, mobbing the forward baggage room with long hoses, directing steam and salt water into the furious orange maw of poisonous smoke and intense heat that threatened the ship. The water tended to spread the burning film, scattering it. The steam was better at smothering it. As they fought to confine the fire to the baggage room, paint on surrounding bulkheads was bubbling from the heat, all three automobiles exploded, and the brandy, a dining saloon steward shouted, threatened to “turn the bloomin’ ship into Maury flambé.”

With the crew fighting the fire, and his saltwater hose a less effective extinguisher than the low-pressure steam that Archie refused to relinquish, Isaac Bell ran up the companionways looking for Clyde. He could see that the steel hatchway that rose forty feet from the baggage room to the foredeck had directed the flaming force of the explosion straight up like an enormous square cannon, past the cram-packed quarters of seamen and stewards on the upper deck, and past the officers’ mess hall on the shelter deck. He stepped out on the open foredeck. A pillar of flame and smoke pouring skyward from the open hatch lighted the Mauretania’s mast, vents, and smokestacks bright as day.