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)
“We reached the scene of the collision about 4 o’clock. All was black
and still but the mountain of ice just ahead told the story. A flare
from one of the lifeboats some distance away was the first sign of
life. We answered with a rocket, and then there was nothing to do but
wait for daylight.
“The first lifeboat reached the Carpathia about half-past 5 o’clock
in the morning, and the last of the sixteen boats was unloaded before
9 o’clock. Some of the lifeboats were only half filled, the first one
having but two men and eleven women, when it had accommodations for
at least forty. There were few men in the boats. The women were the
gamest lot I have ever seen. Some of the men and women were in evening
clothes, and others among those saved had nothing on but night clothes
and raincoats.
IMAGINE THEIR HUSBANDS PICKED BY OTHER VESSELS.
“As soon as they were landed on the Carpathia many of the women became
hysterical, but on the whole they behaved splendid. Men and women
appeared to be stunned all day Monday, the full force of the disaster
not reaching them until Tuesday night. After being wrapped up in
blankets and given brandy and hot coffee, their first thoughts were
for their husbands and those at home. Most of them imagined that their
husbands had been picked up by other vessels and then began flooding
the wireless rooms with messages. We knew that those who were not
on board the Carpathia had gone down to death, and this belief was
confirmed Monday afternoon when we received a wire from Mr. Marconi
himself asking why no news had been sent.
“We knew that if any other vessel could by any chance have picked
them up it would have communicated with land. After a while, when
the survivors failed to get any answer to their queries, they grew
so restless that Captain Rostron posted a notice that all private
messages had been sent and that the wireless had not been used to
give information to the press, as had been charged. Little by little
it began to dawn on the women on board, and most of them guessed the
worst before they reached here. I saw Mrs. John Jacob Astor when she
was taken from the lifeboat. She was calm and collected. She kept to
her stateroom all the time, leaving it only to attend a meeting of the
survivors on Tuesday afternoon.”
J. R. Moody was a quartermaster on the bridge beside First Officer
Murdock when the Titanic struck the berg. “There is no way of telling
the approach of the berg, and, besides, I do not intend to go into
that now,” said Moody. “We struck, and we paid dearly for it, and
that is all there is to that now. We were running between twenty-two
and twenty-three knots an hour. It seemed incredible that much damage
had been done at first, we struck so lightly. There was a little jar.
Almost immediately, though, Captain Smith rushed to the bridge and took
charge. Afterward I saw Murdock, standing on the first deck. I saw him
raise his arm and shoot himself. He dropped where he stood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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