Could you have built a personal lifeboat from stuff on board?
It seems possible.
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The problem was keeping yourself dry. The cold water did all the damage, which is why they were able to pluck a lot of lifejacketed bodies out of the ocean only hours later.
Anything you could have fabricated would have to have had enough buoyancy to keep you mostly dry, and that was a big problem.
That's not the only problem, the other problem is that if you cobbled a life raft together out of raincoats and empty beer kegs or something, you'd have to have a way to get it from the deck of the ship to the water... that kept you dry. Because if you threw in your raft and dived in after it, if you were even able to climb onto your raft you'd be wet in freezing temperatures and would probably die of hypothermia before the rescue boats got there. The lifeboats were carefully lowered down with ropes and winches that put them into the water gently and evenly (when working properly), so everyone in them stayed dry, but it's not like the crew manning the winches would cheerfully lower down your beer keg raft while they stayed to die.
And if you waited until the ship was on the verge of sinking and you were close enough to the water to jump, you'd have to fight off all the desperate people who knew there were no more lifeboats. At that point, people would have been willing to kill for one of your beer kegs (or whatever).
My personal experience with this kind of freezing cold water was kayaking around the Antarctic Peninsula. We were given modern dry suits and there was a rescue zodiac close by to fish out anyone who fell in, but they said that even with that anyone who fell in the sub-zero water was likely to die. "Just DON'T FALL IN", they said. We took that very seriously, and didn't.
The temperature of the water that night was estimated to be around -2°C (28°F). Those people were floating in water colder than the freezing point of 0°C (32°F). Seawater solidifies at a lower temperature than freshwater due to the salt content.
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