Frederick Fleet, The Man Who Yelled “Iceberg! Right Ahead!”
Wikimedia CommonsFrederick Fleet, Titanic Survivor. 1912.
Frederick Fleet, a British sailor, was just 25 years old when he signed on as a crewman on the Titanic. He was one of five lookouts on the ill-fated voyage, and it was Fleet who made the famous call to the bridge: “Iceberg! Right ahead!”
At 10:00 p.m. on the night of April 14, he took to the frigid crow’s nest with his watch partner, a man named Reginald Lee. The departing team warned them to look out for small bits of ice in the water — a difficult task on a moonless night.
At 11:39 p.m., with just twenty minutes left in his shift, Fleet spotted the iceberg suddenly off the bow. Panicked, he rang the bell and notified the bridge. By the time his shift ended at midnight, people were already swarming to the lifeboats.
He was ordered to row Lifeboat 6, the same one occupied by the Unsinkable Mollie Brown, and got his group of survivors to safety on the nearby RMS Carapathia.
Fleet’s reception on land was mixed. Though he had spotted the iceberg, his role in the sinking became the subject of a number of inquiries.
The world wanted to know whether the disaster could have been avoided. Fleet always insisted that he could have prevented it if he’d just had binoculars — something the Titanic’s watch crew had asked for and been denied.
As he reached old age, he suffered from depression and ultimately committed suicide in 1965.
