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the motion of the ship that none could notice its movement (and there was no drink on the table stronger than Apollinaris!)
     
    Francis Browne was in his second year of theological studies in Dublin, preparing for his ordination as a Jesuit priest. He had been given this trip, his first on an ocean liner, as a treat by his uncle, the bishop of Cloyne, whose cathedral was in Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland, which would be the Titanic ’s next stop. Browne was traveling to Queenstown with the Odells, an English Catholic family known to his uncle, who were taking a motoring holiday in Ireland. Luckily for posterity, Browne had remembered to bring along his camera, another gift from Bishop Browne. Photographs actually taken on board the Titanic are few and those from the “Father Browne Album” comprise the largest and most significant part of them.
    Browne had begun snapping pictures that morning at London’s Waterloo Station before the 9:45 departure of the Boat Train. When it arrived in Southampton, Browne took a sweeping shot from the gangway of the port side of the Titanic towering above Ocean Dock. After documenting the near collision with the New York , he ate a hurried lunch in the dining saloon since he wanted to be up on deck when they sailed past the Isle of Wight. As he was photographing one of the four round stone forts that stand in the waters of the Solent off Portsmouth, an American passenger bore down on him. In a loud, penetrating voice that, in Browne’s words, “had not learned its intonation on this side of ‘the Herring Pond,’ ” the American asked, “Could you tell me, Sir, why is the channel so narrow here?”

     
    Francis Browne photographed author Jacques Futrelle standing beside the gymnasium on the boat deck. (photo credit 1.21)
    “I suppose when they built those forts they never calculated on having ships as big as the Titanic ,” Browne replied.
    “Oh, I did not mean that. Why is the land so near here?”
    With wry Irish wit, Browne responded, “Well, I suppose that they could not shift the Isle of Wight back any further than it is.”
    Undaunted, the American went on to question him about the distance between Dover and Calais and to ask “Why don’t you English cross here?” At this, Browne recalled “a ghost of a geography class” and replied, “Oh, that’s not France, that’s the Isle of Wight.”
    “I see. I thought it was France,” the American replied and moved off.
    Inquisitiveness would have been in character for this large, rumpled American with the Georgia drawl. His name was Jacques Heath Futrelle, and he was the author of a series of mystery novels that had earned him the nickname “the American Conan Doyle.” His popular Thinking Machine stories, which featured the brilliant amateur sleuth Professor S. F. X. Van Dusen, had first been serialized in Hearst’s Boston American , where Futrelle was a staff writer. The public’s enthusiasm for the character allowed him to quit journalism and concentrate on writing mystery novels. With his royalties he was able to acquire a large house called “Stepping Stones” on the harbor in Scituate, Massachusetts, for his wife, Lily May, also a writer, and their two children. If Futrelle’s faculties were less than keen during his exchange with Francis Browne that afternoon, it was perhaps because he and his wife had not slept the night before. A party with friends in London to celebrate his thirty-seventh birthday had lasted until 3 a.m., and instead of going to bed, the Futrelles had decided to simply pack up and make an early start for Southampton.
    Francis Browne soon spied Futrelle again up on the boat deck and took a photograph of him standing outside the arched windows of the ship’s gymnasium. Browne then stepped inside the gym and snapped the white-clad instructor happily posed on a rowing machine. He then went down to A deck and took a photograph beneath the ship’s bridge that shows Frank Millet’s friend,