The Atlantic Ocean

Timezone: UTC-4.

I am trying to make sense of the things that have been happening on this ship, and I am not succeeding very much. People rush only to dinner or to collect their laundry. We have plenty of time at our disposal to talk about our lives in the Old World on our way to the New. Some people are disembarking in New York, some are not, but we are all in transit, and quite comfortably easing into conversations we would, perhaps, not have on the shore. And, indeed, what will remain of it all, past where the waves will have kissed land?

Evening brings Irish music, and I repeat myself.

The staff of the First Class à la carte restaurant were having the hardest time of all. They were neither fish nor fowl. Obviously they weren't passengers, but technically they weren't crew either. The restaurant was not run by the White Star Line but by Monsieur Gatti as a concession.
Thus, the employees had no status at all. And to make matters worse, they were French and Italian – objects of deep Anglo-Saxon suspicion at a time like this in 1912.
From the very start they never had a chance. Steward Johnson remembered seeing them herded together down by their quarters on E Deck aft. Manager Gatti, his Chef and the Chefs Assistant, Paul Maugé, were the only ones who made it to the Boat Deck. They got through because they happened to be in civilian clothes; the crew thought they were passengers.
[…]
With this lost world went some of its prejudices – especially a firm and loudly voiced opinion of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon courage. To the survivors all stowaways in the lifeboats were “Chinese” or “Japanese”; all who jumped from the deck were “Armenians”, “Frenchmen” or “Italians”.
“There were various men passengers,” declared steward Crowe at the US inquiry, “probably Italians, or some foreign nationality other than English or American, who attempted to rush the boats.” Steward Crowe, of course, never heard the culprits speak and had no way of knowing who they were. At the inquiry things finally grew so bad that the Italian ambassador demanded and got an apology from Fifth Officer Lowe for using “Italian” as a sort of synonym for “coward”.
In contrast, Anglo-Saxon blood could do no wrong. When Bride described the stoker's attack on Phillips, some newspapers made the stoker a Negro for better effect. And in a story headlined, “Desirable Immigrants Lost”, the New York Sun pointed out that, along with the others, seventy-eight Finns were lost who might have done the country some good.
Walter Lord, “A Night to Remember”