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)
“Then began the real agonies of the night. Up to that time no one in
our boat, and I imagine no one in any of the other boats, had really
thought that the Titanic was going to sink. For a moment a silence
seemed to hang over everything, and then from the water about where the
Titanic had been arose a bedlam of shrieks and cries. There were women
and men clinging to the bits of wreckage in the icy water.
AN AWFUL CHORUS OF SHRIEKS.
“It was at least an hour before the last shrieks died out. I remember
next the very last cry was that of a man who had been calling loudly:
‘My God! My God!’ He cried monotonously, in a dull, hopeless way. For
an entire hour there had been an awful chorus of shrieks gradually
dying into a hopeless moan until this last cry that I spoke of. Then
all was silent. When the awful silence came we waited gloomily in the
boats throughout the rest of the night.
“At last morning came. On one side of us was the ice floes and the
big bergs, and on the other side we were horrified to see a school of
tremendous whales. Then, as the mist lifted, we caught sight of the
Carpathia looming up in the distance and headed straight for us.
“We were too numbed by the cold and horror of that awful night to
cheer or even utter a sound. We just gazed at one another and remained
speechless. Indeed, there seemed to be no one among us who cared much
what happened.
“Those in the other boats seemed to have suffered more than we had. We,
it seemed, had been miraculously lucky. In one of the boats was a woman
whose clothing was frozen to her body.
“The men on the Carpathia had to chop it off before she could be taken
to a warm room. Several of the stokers and sailors who had manned the
boats had been frozen to death, and they lay stiff and lifeless in the
bottom of the boats, while the women and children were lifted to the
Carpathia.
“I did not see Captain Smith after I was put into the small boat, but
others told me that when the Titanic went down Captain Smith was seen
swimming in the icy water. He picked up a baby that was floating on a
mass of wreckage and swam with it to one of the small boats. He lifted
the baby into the boat, but the child was dead.
“The women in the boat, according to the story told me, wanted the
captain to get into the boat with them, but he refused, saying: ‘No,
there is a big piece of wreckage over here, and I shall stick to that.
We are bound to be rescued soon.’ Nothing more was seen of Captain
Smith.
FIFTEEN BRIDES LOSE THEIR HUSBANDS.
“There was an absolute calm and silence on the Carpathia. There were
hundreds of women who had lost their husbands, and among them fifteen
brides. Few of these had been married more than five or six months. No
one cared to talk. The gloom was awful. I buried myself in my cabin and
did not come on deck again.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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