Voices from the Carpathia, page 25
After some time we saw in the distance a light. At first we thought it was the light of a ship, but soon we saw it was too low – too near the water. We found it was a light in a lifeboat. The boat was filled with survivors of the Titanic. We steamed up as near as it was safe for the ship to approach the small boat. The lifeboat was rowed alongside, and the passengers came aboard.
A pitiful appearance they made. Some of the women were clothed only in their night clothing. Some of the men were in evening dress, having come directly from the halls where they were enjoying themselves. The Carpathia passengers aided them in every way they could, giving them extra clothing, and taking them to their staterooms.
Soon it began to be dawn, the early daylight over the water, and we saw other lifeboats. One by one they came up to us and their occupants – and most of the boats themselves – were taken on board. We learned of the striking of the berg by the magnificent steamship, and of the appalling fact that while we were speeding to her aid, the Titanic had gone down an hour before we arrived. Her death list was officially placed at 1,635. Capt. E.J. Smith, 40 years a mariner, went down with his ship.
The crew of the Carpathia, other passengers – doctors, nurses, everyone – aided the passengers as they came on board. Some needed medical assistance – some stimulants. Later, as Carpathia passengers who had previously been aroused came on deck, they were astonished to see the increase in the ship’s load. We already had some 700 persons aboard, and here were several hundreds more.
But all took it in the best of humor. The passengers were willing to sleep on couches – bunks, on the tables, and even on the floor, until we got back to New York.
And imagine our surprise to see Miss Ostby, a lifelong friend of both myself and my wife, among those brought on board. The Ostbys had been among the guests invited to our wedding, although being abroad, they were unable to attend. They had, however, sent a present, which is still a treasured memento. Miss Ostby is now living in Brussels, Belgium, where we met her a few years ago.79
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MRS COLIN COOPER
After arriving in New York, Mrs Cooper granted the following interview. Mrs Cooper told how Mrs Harris refused to leave her husband on the Titanic and stayed with Mrs Thorne until their husbands forced them to enter a collapsible boat:
The men told Mrs. Harris and Mrs. Thorne that they wanted them to go; that the Titanic, they believed, would have a better chance if all who could leave her would do so.
Mrs. Harris told me that all the men were brave beyond anything. When her collapsible boat had gone about 100 yards from the Titanic, not more, the Titanic sank. She saw a crowd of men, and knew her husband was one of them, rush toward the stern in an effort to save themselves when the bow began to sink. The band was playing. There were waves, but no suction.
All the men stood back. The men were ordered to go below, women to the upper deck. The men went below without a word.
The theory grew that, although the Titanic was badly injured, she would float indefinitely. Some men and women even went back to bed. Other men smoked on the deck. Among many men and women there was a strong preference displayed to stay on the Titanic. Many women did not go into the lifeboats until they were ordered, and even then, they told me, they expected to be called back to the Titanic after a little while.
The whole talk of the women after they got on board the Carpathia, was that too many men had sacrificed themselves.
‘My life is finished,’ said one survivor to me, ‘and these useful men stayed without a murmur’.
Two hundred stokers with black faces and almost without clothes, came up from below and saw a lifeboat. Two men jumped in and started to lower it. The captain cried, ‘Go back in your place, every one of you’. And every one of those men turned back and went below without a word. They said they thought all the women had been put off.
The men saved were not cowards. The women repeatedly said they felt that more men should have been given a chance.
One of the stewards, the last to leave the Titanic, told us that at the last, when the passengers realized the Titanic was really sinking and that there was no escape, there was painful excitement but that there were no scenes to make mankind feel anything else than proud of the courage shown.80
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CHARLES E. CRAIN
After reaching New York, Captain Crain granted the following interview to reporters. Crain was ill in his cabin and didn’t witness the rescue itself:
It had been a gay trip out, the rescued passengers told me, with dinner parties, dancing and concerts. It seemed more like a picnic party than an ordinary voyage of a transatlantic steamship.
None of the passengers with whom I talked told me anything about any great crash. So far as I could learn all they had felt was a comparatively slight shock.
Mr. Harper, of No. 31 Gramercy Park, was one of my informants. Mr. Harper was put in one of the boats with his wife because he was an invalid. According to his story, and to that of others with whom I talked, there was absolutely no confusion on board the doomed ship up to the time they left her.
Another of the survivors with whom I talked was a boy about fourteen years of age. He told me a remarkable story of his rescue through the intervention of Colonel John Jacob Astor. He said he had tried to get into one of the lifeboats with his mother, but that the sailors had pushed him back, and said: ‘You’re not a girl. You can’t get in there. Stand back.’
Colonel Astor, who was assisting women into the boat, picked up from the deck a girl’s hat, and jamming it on the boy’s head, said: ‘There, my boy, you’re a girl now. Go ahead’.
The only thing of which any of the survivors with whom I talked complained in connection with the work of rescue was the difficulty experienced in getting the boats away from the sinking ship after they had been lowered.
This was due to a new arrangement in connection with the ropes with which the boats were lowered. The sailors did not understand it. It was a new contrivance placed on board the Titanic for the first time. The result was that as the boats touched the water the crew could not detach the lines and eventually had to cut them.
The intention of the officers of the Titanic was to place four sailors in each boat, but this could not be carried out in every case, with the result that in several of the boats passengers themselves had to take oars. In some instances, women were forced to row.
Mr. Harper told me he was in his cabin at the time the ship struck. He felt the shock, but it was not severe enough for him to be alarmed. However, he dressed and went to one of the upper decks where he remained for about ten minutes.
Then he noticed the passengers coming down from another deck who told him as they passed that they had been ordered to put on life preservers. Mr. Harper went back to his cabin, aroused his wife, and after both had put on lifebelts they went to the upper deck. There they found the women and children being put into the boats, and Mrs. Harper was sent with them, and her husband, being an invalid, was permitted to accompany her.
The boat in which the Harpers were experienced no trouble beyond that mentioned in disconnecting the tackle. It was rowed away from the Titanic and the occupants watched the great ship sink.
It was twenty minutes past three a.m. on Monday when she plunged head first out of sight. Her lights had been burning almost until the last. She had sunk gradually until the water reached high enough to extinguish the fires and stop the lights. Soon after that she took the fatal plunge.
The last boat that left the wreck had only seven passengers in it, but it was one of the smallest boats. However, it could have held more and Mr. Harper is convinced that many women must have been left on board.
As a matter of fact there was no great rush to get into the boats, he said, because very few of the passengers realized the gravity of the accident. They had a natural disinclination and fear to entrust themselves to the little craft. As a matter of fact, many of them felt safer aboard the big ship. None believed she would sink.
The shock was so mild one of the women survivors told me that after she had dressed and had gone on deck she thought so little of it that she went back to her cabin and remained there until her husband went for her. Another played several games of bridge after the crash.
Of course there was a good deal of excitement at the time of the shock. Everyone rushed back and forth asking, ‘What was that? What has happened?’ The officers, however, seemed calm, and the word was passed that it was merely a lump of ice, so everyone seemed satisfied. The lights were not extinguished, and there was nothing to alarm them until the orders were issued to put on life preservers.
It was a beautiful night. None could believe that anything like a collision could occur in such weather. It was not an iceberg into which the Titanic ran, but an icefield. It was one great solid mass, more than fifty-two miles long, rising at times to a height of what seemed seventy feet or more out of the water.
We on board the Carpathia could form some idea of its extent because we ran past more than fifty-two miles of it on our way back from the spot where we picked up the survivors.
Four of those we took on board from the boats were dead. They had perished from fright and exposure. We buried them on Tuesday. Their bodies were committed to the sea from the side portholes after the burial service had been read.81
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In another newspaper interview, Captain Crain told of his efforts to obtain information about his friend, victim Major Archibald Butt:
Naturally, I was deeply concerned in the fate of Major Butt, for he was not only a fellow-officer of the army, but also a personal friend of many years’ standing. I questioned those of the survivors who were in a condition to talk, and from them I learned that Butt, when the Titanic struck, took his position with the officers and from the moment that the order to man the lifeboats was given until the last one was dropped into the sea, he aided in the maintenance of discipline and the placing of the women and children in the boats.
Butt, I was told was as cool as the iceberg that had doomed the ship, and not once did he lose control of himself. In the presence of death he was the same gallant, courteous officer that the American people had learned to know so well as a result of his constant attendance upon President Taft. There was never any chance of Butt getting into any of those lifeboats.
He knew his time was at hand, and he was ready to meet it as a man should, and I and all of the others who cherish his memory are glad that he faced the situation that way, which was the only possible way a man of his caliber could face it.82
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MRS CHARLES F. CRAIN
After arriving in New York, Anna Crain granted the following newspaper interview. News of the disaster became known on the Carpathia, and many people lined the rails watching for the Titanic:
With the aid of powerful glasses we sighted the lifeboats. The first to come into view was rowed by women. The passengers and women on the Carpathia were stunned. ‘She has sunk,’ said an officer of the ship who stood near me. And then I realized for the first time that many lives had been lost.
As the Carpathia slowed up, the women at the oars of the first boat did not seem to be the least bit excited. They were taken on board, and their calmness was remarkable. No one of the women was crying and not one of them showed any nervousness.
It was a remarkable thing – the calmness of these women. Some were thinly clad, while others were dressed in evening gowns. Other boats came into view. It seemed as though they were coming from behind icebergs. And the women in the boats were too dazed to realize their situation.
Some of the boats were only half filled and the men who had been rowing were completely exhausted.
When all of the boats had been picked up and there were no others in sight, the first outburst of grief was heard.83
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Mrs Crain granted a second interview to another New York paper:
I never saw anything so remarkable in my life. Late Sunday we received a wireless message from the Titanic asking for aid. The next morning we reached a spot where the Titanic had called from and asked for help. There was nothing in sight and there was no wreckage. The sailors on the Carpathia seemed to be dumbfounded at not finding the Titanic. We were steaming along slowly, apparently aimlessly, when from in back of a small iceberg came a white boat. It looked very small. The captain ordered the boat stopped, and gradually the little boat drew up to us. We saw women rowing it. As they drew alongside the calmness of these women was unexplainable. They needed no assistance in climbing onto the Carpathia. They acted as if it were not at all unusual.
There was no crying among them, and as they came on board they yielded willingly to the many hands stretched out to them. They were taken into the dining saloon. None of them was properly clad. Those that were fully dressed were in evening gowns. The others had little or no clothing. In the dining saloon they were given clothing, and then, as if they had all been through similar experiences before, they went out on the deck and looked steadily ahead out over the ice-strewn ocean. We followed their example wonderingly and then realized the objects their eyes sought. More little white boats came into view. The same scene was repeated as they came alongside. There was no sobbing or weeping. The little band along the rail, gradually increasing in size as the boats came alongside, eagerly scanned each face as it came over the side of the boat. Then the stare ahead was resumed. The number in many of the little boats was pitifully small.
Finally the time came when all the little boats had drawn alongside. As the last one in the last boat came over the side there was a moan of anguish from one woman. It was repeated throughout the group around the railing. The hope that their relatives were in other boats had been proved wrong, and the long anxiety made the grief that followed more agonizing and heartrending.
Mrs. Astor and her maid were in the first boats that arrived, and she was immediately placed in the captain’s cabin. While the bereaved among the survivors gave way to their grief, food was prepared for them and many were taken to staterooms and put to bed. Others told us of the wreck. All declared that a great many who could have come in the small boats had been so confident that the Titanic could not sink that they had regarded the taking to lifeboats as foolish. Many women who had not this confidence in the wrecked vessel refused to go into the small boats because it meant separation from their men folks.84
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ELEANOR DANFORTH
After the Carpathia landed, Miss Danforth granted an interview to a New York newspaper:
Many stories were told by the survivors, some of them almost unbelievable. One man, J.B. Thayer Jr. of Philadelphia, stuck to the ship until the last. He leaped overboard just before the ship sank. He was not far enough away to get out of the fearful suction and was drawn down twice, he said. He finally came up, however, and was rescued by one of the boats in an almost unconscious condition. Another man, whose name will never be known, I was told, had stuck to his post loading women and children into the lifeboats until the last boat was off. When there were no more women to look out for, he jumped overboard. Just after he jumped the boat sank. He was sucked down.85
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Miss Danforth granted a second interview to a Boston newspaper:
Even for anyone aboard the Carpathia, which merely visited the spot where the Titanic went down and rescued the survivors, this is the most horrifying thing imaginable. What it must mean to the people who had an actual share in it is beyond imagination. I woke soon after midnight on Monday when the rush of feet on the deck overhead indicated, as I found later, that the Carpathia’s wireless had picked up the Titanic’s call for help.
The rush of feet back and forth continued, and I remember thinking vaguely that something must be wrong. Then I decided to go to sleep again and was just drowsing when suddenly I felt our engines give a great throb which meant quickened speed.
I dressed and went to the deck, for I knew it must be something unusual. The woman in the stateroom next to mine had already rung to ask the steward what had happened, but he gave her some evasive response.
When I reached the deck someone told me of the Titanic’s distress. You cannot imagine the anxiety, the alternating hope and fear that beset those of us who had gone on deck when we counted the minutes in that quick terrible flight to the region from which the Titanic had called. It was about four in the morning when we reached it.
Our hearts grew cold with horror when we searched the sea for a sign of the vessel. All around were icebergs, large and small. About twenty miles away there drifted an icefield, dead white and ghostly. We had been obliged to skirt bergs on the way, but we did not slow up – and this meant danger to the Carpathia but none of us stopped to think of that.
Soon after the sun began to rise. It was a night I shall never forget. The east was drenched with rose color, and as the light caught each of the bergs it turned their peaks to crimson and suffused them with delicate shades of pink and carmine.
The glowing east colored even the distant ice floe and made spots like blood in the hollows between the waves. Someone pointed out a glistening, pink-veined mountain of ice as the berg into which the Titanic had run. I think it may really have been the same berg, for I learned later from Titanic survivors that the berg was a tall one – so tall that they saw it slide past their stateroom windows and found the deck covered with ice splinters knocked from it by the crash.
There was almost no wreckage – a chair, perhaps, or a wooden rack, but nothing to give a hint as to the size or magnificence of the vessel lying two miles beneath our keel. Of course, being night, everything had been closed up and so went down with the vessel.
