Details sought on Chinese who survived Titanic
Documentary plans to explore 6 forgotten men on ill-fated ship
In the early hours of April 15, 1912, a lifeboat navigated the frigid waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, its skeleton crew scanning the dark, debrislittered surface for any sign of life. Hours earlier, the unthinkable had happened: The RMS Titanic, a majestic ocean liner deemed “unsinkable,” had struck an iceberg and slowly disappeared into the sea on its maiden voyage.
Hundreds of passengers fled in lifeboats. Hundreds more perished, going down with the ship or freezing to death in the icy water.
The only one of Titanic’s lifeboats to turn back to the wreckage found body after body — until it discovered a young Chinese man, still alive, clinging to a piece of wood.
That man would be one of six Chinese passengers who survived the Titanic, a little-known fact about the historic disaster that has largely remained untold or distorted, owing to a racially hostile environment toward Chinese people in the West at the turn of the 20th century.
Now, the lives of these men — who they were, how they survived that fateful night and why they were barred from entering the United States — are being examined in a new documentary, The Six, by Arthur Jones and Steven Schwankert.
“There were something like 700 Titanic survivors. They’ve all been so ‘claimed,’ if all the claims are to be believed,” Jones, a Shanghai-based filmmaker, told The Washington Post. “These were the only guys amongst those 700 that no one had ever claimed. They just completely disappeared. Why did they get ignored?”
On April 10, 1912, the Titanic set off on her maiden voyage to the United States from Southampton, England, with 2,229 passengers and crew members. The ship was supposed to arrive a week later at its transatlantic destination: New York City.
Instead, around 11:30 p.m. April 14, the Titanic struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and began to take on water.
Within hours, the massive ocean liner had cleaved in two and — with hundreds still trapped on board — was swallowed by the frigid waters of what is now known as “Iceberg Alley.”
About 1,500 people died in the tragedy. About 700 passengers survived and were plucked from their lifeboats by the RMS Carpathia the next morning.
The ill-fated voyage has been immortalized in countless documentaries, books and museums — and in the tin-whistled opening bars of a certain Celine Dion song now indelibly associated with the shipwreck, thanks to James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster film.
Over the past century, volumes have been written about the Titanic’s victims and survivors. However, for six Chinese passengers who survived the sinking, their ties to the Titanic have all but vanished.
Schwankert brought up the possibility of a Titanic project to Jones in 2014.
The New Jersey native, who has lived in China for 22 years, had recently researched the Titanic and come across a brief mention of six Chinese survivors. But the more he tried to find out about the six, the more dead ends he hit.
“It really started to bother me. Like, why don’t we know?” Schwankert said. “Like any history project, you start pulling the threads, and it just seemed like the thread didn’t lead anywhere.”
Before long, he had persuaded Jones to abandon their project and launch The Six.
With little to go on but the passenger manifest and list of survivors, the team set up a website, whoarethesix.com, to crowdsource tips. The invisibility of the six Chinese survivors is such that, even in China, Jones and Schwankert find themselves telling people: Yes, there were, in fact, Chinese passengers on the Titanic.
Eight Chinese nationals boarded the ship at Southampton. Their names appear in rigid cursive on a single ticket for third-class passengers: Ah Lam, Fang Lang, Len Lam, Cheong Foo, Chang Chip, Ling Hee, Lee Bing and Lee Ling.
Through two years of painstaking documentation, the filmmakers determined that the men in the group probably knew one another beforehand, having worked together as professional sailors on various ships in Britain. Because of an ongoing coal strike there, the men were being transferred by their company to a freighter docked in New York, the Annetta, which was to take them to Cuba.
“The reason they were traveling on Titanic in the first place is for work,” Schwankert said. “They were professional mariners, and they were being seconded from their company in the U.K. to go and work on the companies in North America.”
Their trip would not go as planned, of course.
How the eight men responded as the Titanic began taking on water may never be known. They would have been traveling in steerage, the lowest class of cabins, where the survival rate for non-British men was only about 20 percent.
What was documented is that one of the Chinese men was later found clinging to a large piece of floating wood by the one main lifeboat that chose to return to the wreckage to search for signs of life. Five others escaped in lifeboats. Notably, four were in “Collapsible C,” a backup escape vessel with canvas siding that was one of the last lifeboats to be lowered from the ship.
They happened to share the same lifeboat as Joseph Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star Line, which owned the Titanic. Ismay, who was later pilloried for saving himself instead of going down with the ship despite being such a high-ranking official, testified in official inquiries that “four Chinamen were in the boat” in which he had escaped.
The ship’s quartermaster, George T. Rowe, was on “Collapsible C” as well, and also testified to the presence of the Chinese passengers, though he suggested they had “found” the four men “between the seats” only at daybreak.
Schwankert noted that the official testimony was instrumental in getting their research started on the Chinese survivors.
“Let me put it this way: I view the Chinese passengers as the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the Titanic,” Schwankert said. “They’re not major characters. But they pop up at really opportune moments in the story. … In the beginning, Ismay’s testimony was really some of the only information that we had that even verified that they even existed.”