there was no explosion of the boilers and that the great noise which was mistaken for it was due to “the boilers leaving their beds” on E Deck when the ship was aslant and, with their great weight, sliding along the deck, crushing and tearing through the doomed vessel forward toward the bow. Third Officer Pitman also gave his testimony on this, as well as the next point considered. Before the Senate Committee he said: “Then she turned right on end and made a big plunge forward. The _Titanic_ did not break asunder. I heard reports like big guns in the distance. I assumed the great bulkheads had gone to pieces.” Cabin-steward Samuel Rule said: “I think the noise we heard was that of the boilers and engines breaking away from their seatings and falling down through the forward bulkhead. At the time it occurred, the ship was standing nearly upright in the water.” The peculiar way in which the _Titanic_ is described as hesitating and assuming a vertical position before her final dive to the depths below can be accounted for only on this hypothesis of the sliding of the boilers from their beds. A second cabin passenger, Mr. Lawrence Beesley, a Cambridge University man, has written an excellent book about the _Titanic_ disaster, dwelling especially upon the lessons to be learned from it. His account given to the newspapers also contains the most graphic description from the viewpoint of those in the lifeboats, telling how the great ship looked before her final plunge. He “was a mile or two miles away,” he writes, “when the oarsmen lay on their oars and all in the lifeboat were motionless as we watched the ship in absolute silence--save some who would not look and buried their heads on each others’ shoulders.... As we gazed awe-struck, she tilted slightly up, revolving apparently about a centre of gravity just astern of amidships until she attained a vertical upright position, and there she remained--motionless! As she swung up, her lights, which had shown without a flicker all night, went out suddenly, then came on again for a single flash and then went out altogether; and as they did so there came a noise which many people, wrongly, I think, have described as an explosion. It has always seemed to me that it was nothing but the engines and machinery coming loose from their place and bearings and falling through the compartments, smashing everything in their way. It was partly a roar, partly a groan, partly a rattle and partly a smash, and it was not a sudden roar as an explosion would be; it went on successively for some seconds, possibly fifteen or twenty, as the heavy machinery dropped down to the bottom (now the bows) of the ship; I suppose it fell through the end and sank first before the ship. (For evidence of shattered timbers, see Hagan’s testimony, page 85.) But it was a noise no one had heard before and no one wishes to hear again. It was stupefying, stupendous, as it came to us along the water. It was as if