It was in the last half hour of his watch on April 14, 1912, that Seaman Fleet, 25, in the crow's nest 50 feet above TITANIC's deck but with no binoculars (inexplicably, they had been misplaced in Southampton), spied a massive iceberg no more than 500 yards away. In desperation, Fleet phoned the bridge. "Iceberg, right ahead!" he cried. As he braced for the worst, the ship began to turn, narrowly avoiding avoiding a head-on collision. The gentle impact, which sheared a little ice onto the deck, led Fleet to assume, as he later told a U.S. inquiry, that they had survived "a narrow shave." Some two hours later, as the ship sand, Fleet rowed a lifeboat of women to safety.
Fleet worked at sea until 1936 and in his final years sold newspapers ("just to wile away the time," he said) in his home of Southampton, where he spent most nights drinking beer alone at the local workingmen's club. "He seemed a sad, lonely man," says TITANIC historian Brian Ticehurst. "His wife, Eva, was the only person he related to." Shortly after her death in 1965, Eva's brother, whose house the couple had shared, asked Fleet, 76, to move on. "The next morning," says Ticehurst, "the brother-in-law pulled open the curtains, and there was Frederick hangin from [a clothes post] in the garden."
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