While officials didn’t understand what had just happened (or were outright in denial), Joughin acted quickly. Waking up his underlings, he immediately set to work supplying the precious lifeboats on board with bread.
As befits someone in his position, he had been placed at the controls of lifeboat 10 and had quickly helped put the women and children onto the collapsible boat. When they ran out of passengers ready to leave the ship, favoring the perceived safety of the huge (and still floating) Titanic above the small dinghy, he and a few other crew members went looking for people to rescue… and practically dragged them to the lifeboat ahead literally launch aboard, as the ship had begun to heel over noticeably at this point and the lowering lifeboat no longer rested flush with the hull.
In between these utterly selfless actions, Joughin apparently stopped several times in his now flooded quarters and quite understandably helped himself to a fair amount of alcohol. Under the impression that there were no lifeboats left, the forward-thinking baker then proceeded to dump what he assumed were 50 deck chairs and other floating materials in the ocean. You know, just in case!
Here, fiction begins to intersect with reality as James Cameron’s film features the baker, played by actor Liam Tuohy, in the same company as Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack and Kate Winslet’s Rose. It was around this time that he heard what was probably the Titanic breaking in two and followed a crowd on the stern of the sinking ship. Unlike the film, however, he would have remained the only individual at the end of the Titanic as it rose into the air, hung for a while, and then sank into the ocean.
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