Sinking of the "Titanic" : $b most appalling ocean horror; with graphic descriptions of hundreds swept to eternity beneath the waves ...Mowbray, Jay Henry
History
Sinking of the "Titanic" : $b most appalling ocean horror; with graphic descriptions of hundreds swept to eternity beneath the waves ...
Mowbray, Jay Henry
Shipwrecks -- North Atlantic Ocean -- History -- 20th century; Titanic (Steamship)
There was a fireman who told of a woman in the boat which he helped man
who started up “Pull for the Shore” and “Nearer My God, to Thee” after
his boat had left the wreck. This kept up all night until the Carpathia
arrived.
Laurence Beasley, a Cambridge University man, who was a second-cabin
passenger on the Titanic, amplified his previous account while visiting
the White Star offices. After describing events immediately following
the collision with the iceberg and his departure in a lifeboat, Mr.
Beasley is quoted as saying:
“We drifted away easily as the oars were got out, and headed directly
away from the ship. Our crew seemed to be mostly cooks in white
jackets, two at an oar, with a stoker at the tiller, who had been
elected captain. He told us he had been at sea twenty-six years and had
never yet seen such a calm night on the Atlantic.
“As we rowed away from the Titanic we looked back from time to time
to watch her, and a more striking spectacle it was not possible for
any one to see. In the distance she looked an enormous length, her
great bulk outlined in black against the starry sky, every porthole
and saloon blazing with light. It was impossible to think anything
could be wrong with such a leviathan, were it not for that ominous tilt
downward in the bows where the water was by now up to the lowest row of
portholes.
SHIP’S END ONLY A QUESTION OF MINUTES.
“About 2 A. M., as near as I can remember, we observed her settling
very rapidly, with the bows and the bridge completely under water, and
concluded it was now only a question of minutes before she went, and so
it proved. She slowly tilted straight on end, with the stern vertically
upward, and, as she did, the light in the cabins and saloons, which had
not flickered for a moment since we left, died out, came on again for
a single flash, and finally went out altogether. At the same time the
machinery roared down through the vessel with a rattle and a groaning
that could be heard for miles, the weirdest sound, surely, that could
be heard in the middle of the ocean a thousand miles away from land.
“But this was not quite the end. To our amazement, she remained in that
upright position for a time which I estimate at five minutes; others in
the boat say less, but it was certainly some minutes while we watched
at least one hundred and fifty feet of the Titanic towering up above
the level of the sea and looming black against the sky.
“Then, with a quiet, slanting dive, she disappeared beneath the waters.
And there was left to us the gently heaving sea, the boat filled to
standing room with men and women in every conceivable condition of
dress and undress; above, the perfect sky of brilliant stars, with
not a cloud in the sky, all tempered with a bitter cold that made us
all long to be one of the crew who toiled away with the oars and kept
themselves warm thereby--a curious, deadening, bitter cold unlike
anything we had felt before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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