When the Titanic struck the iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, most passengers had only minutes. Charles Joughin, the ship's chief baker, had something else entirely.
Joughin had spent the evening before the sinking doing something that would, by all accounts, have been his undoing — and yet may have saved his life. He had been drinking steadily in his cabin since 7 p.m., working his way through a considerable quantity of whisky. When the impact came just before midnight, he was, to use the medical term, thoroughly intoxicated.
While other officers organized the lifeboats, Joughin busied himself in a way that speaks to his character: he went back to the kitchens and directed his team to haul forty pounds of bread up to each lifeboat, making sure people would have something to eat. It was the kind of practical, unhurried thinking that belongs to a man whose nerves — for whatever reason — were entirely steady.
He helped load women and children into lifeboats, reportedly throwing some of the more reluctant passengers in. When a place was offered to him in one of the boats, he refused it. He went back below and poured himself another drink.
As the ship's stern rose into the night sky, Joughin climbed the outside of the hull — not scrambling, not panicking, but stepping calmly upward as the ship tilted, as though ascending a very steep hill. He rode the stern down into the ocean as the Titanic made its final plunge. He barely got his hair wet.
What followed was the extraordinary part. The North Atlantic in April is approximately 28°F — cold enough to kill an unprotected person in ten to fifteen minutes. Joughin treaded water for over two hours. Two hours. He was eventually pulled onto an overturned lifeboat, and later transferred to another, and survived.
The medical community has puzzled over him ever since. Some believe the alcohol lowered his core temperature gradually, reducing the thermal shock. Others point to his size — he was a large man — or his relative calm in the water, which would have conserved body heat. No one fully agrees. He simply shouldn't have lived.
Charles Joughin died in 1956, at the age of seventy-eight, in Paterson, New Jersey. He never spoke much about that night. When he did, he said he didn't remember much of it.
Perhaps that is the most extraordinary detail of all.