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)
Standing at the rail of the main deck of the ill-fated Titanic, Arthur
Ryerson, of Gray’s lane, Haverford, Pa., waved encouragement to his
wife as the lifeboat in which she and her three children--John, Emily
and Susan--had been placed with his assistance glided away from the
doomed ship. A few minutes later, after the lifeboat with his loved
ones had passed beyond the range of his vision, Mr. Ryerson met death
in the icy water into which the crushed ship plunged.
It is now known that Mr. Ryerson might have found a place in one of the
first lifeboats to be lowered, but made no effort to leave the ship’s
deck after assuring himself that his wife and children would be saved.
It was not until the Carpathia reached her dock that relatives who
were on hand to meet the survivors of the Ryerson family knew that
little “Jack” Ryerson was among the rescued. Day by day since the first
tidings of the accident to the Titanic were published, “Jack” had been
placed among the missing.
Perhaps of all those who came up from the Carpathia with the impress of
the tragedy upon them, the homecoming of Mrs. Ryerson was peculiarly
sad.
While motoring with J. Lewis Hoffman, of Radnor, Pa., on the Main Line,
on Monday a week before, Arthur L. Ryerson, her son, was killed. His
parents abandoned their plans for a summer pleasure trip through Europe
and took passage on the first home-bound ship, which happened to be the
Titanic, to attend the funeral of their son. And now upon one tragedy
a second presses.
Upon leaving the Carpathia Mrs. Ryerson, almost too exhausted and
weak to tell of her experiences, was taken in a taxicab to the Hotel
Belmont. With her were her son “Jack” and her two daughters, Miss Emily
and Miss Susan Ryerson.
The young women were hysterical with grief as they walked up from the
dock, and the little lad who had witnessed such sights of horror and
tragedy clung to his mother’s hand, wide eyed and sorrowful.
Mrs. Ryerson said that she and her husband were asleep in their
staterooms, as were their children, when the terrible grating crash
came and the ship foundered.
The women threw kimonos over their night gowns and rushed barefooted to
the deck. Master Ryerson’s nurse caught up a few articles of the little
boy’s clothing and almost as soon as the party reached the deck they
were numbered off into boats and lowered into the sea.
HARROWING AND TERRIBLE.
Mrs. John M. Brown, whose husband was formerly a well-known
Philadelphian, but now lives in Boston, described her experience on the
Titanic as the “most harrowing and terrible that any living soul could
undergo.”
“Oh, it was heart-rending to see those brave men die,” Mrs. Brown said,
half-sobbingly, after she had left the pier in a taxicab brought by her
husband.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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