by Tim Maltin
H. H. Brunt, of Chicago, was at the gangplank waiting for A. Saalfeld, head of the wholesale drug firm of Sparks, White & Co., of London, who was coming to this country on the Titanic on a business trip and whose life was saved.
WAITING FOR CARPATHIA
During the afternoon and evening tugboats, motor boats and even sailing craft, had been waiting off the Ambrose Light for the appearance of the Carpathia.
Some of the waiting craft contained friends and anxious relatives of the survivors and those reported as missing.
The sea was rough and choppy, and a strong east wind was blowing. There was a light fog, so that it was possible to see at a distance of only a few hundred yards. This lifted later in the evening.
First to discover the incoming liner with her pitiful cargo was one of the tugboats. From out of the mist there loomed far out at sea the incoming steamer.
RESCUE BOAT SIGHTED
“Liner ahead!” cried the lookout on the tug to the captain.
“She must be the Carpathia,” said the captain, and then he turned the nose of his boat toward the spot on the horizon.
Then the huge black-hull and one smokestack could be distinguished.
“It’s the Carpathia,” said the captain. “I can tell her by the stack.”
The announcement sent a thrill through those who heard it. Here, at the gate of New York, was a ship whose record for bravery and heroic work would be a familiar name in history.
CHAPTER XII
The Tragic Home-Coming
THE CARPATHIA REACHES NEW YORK—AN INTENSE AND DRAMATIC MOMENT—HYSTERICAL REUNIONS AND CRUSHING DISAPPOINTMENTS AT THE DOCK—CARING FOR THE SUFFERERS—FINAL REALIZATION THAT ALL HOPE FOR OTHERS IS FUTILE—LIST OF SURVIVORS—ROLL OF THE DEAD
It was a solemn moment when the Carpathia heaved in sight. There she rested on the water, a blur of black—huge, mysterious, awe-inspiring—and yet withal a thing to send thrills of pity and then of admiration through the beholder.
It was a few minutes after seven o’clock when she arrived at the entrance to Ambrose Channel. She was coming fast, steaming at better than fifteen knots an hour, and she was sighted long before she was expected. Except for the usual side and masthead lights she was almost dark, only the upper cabins showing a glimmer here and there.
Then began a period of waiting, the suspense of which proved almost too much for the hundreds gathered there to greet friends and relatives or to learn with certainty at last that those for whom they watched would never come ashore.
There was almost complete silence on the pier. Doctors and nurses, members of the Women’s Relief Committee, city and government officials, as well as officials of the line, moved nervously about.
Seated where they had been assigned beneath the big customs letters corresponding to the initials of the names of the survivors they came to meet, sat the mass of 2,000 on the pier.
Women wept, but they wept quietly, not hysterically, and the sound of the sobs made many times less noise than the hum and bustle which is usual on the pier among those awaiting an incoming liner.
Slowly and majestically the ship slid through the water, still bearing the details of that secret of what happened and who perished when the Titanic met her fate.
Convoying the Carpathia was a fleet of tugs bearing men and women anxious to learn the latest news. The Cunarder had been as silent for days as though it, too, were a ship of the dead. A list of survivors had been given out from its wireless station and that was all. Even the approximate time of its arrival had been kept a secret.
NEARING PORT
There was no response to the hail from one tug, and as others closed in, the steamship quickened her speed a little and left them behind as she swung up the channel.
There was an exploding of flashlights from some of the tugs, answered seemingly by sharp stabs of lightning in the northwest that served to accentuate the silence and absence of light aboard the rescue ship. Five or six persons, apparently members of the crew or the ship’s officers, were seen along the rail; but otherwise the boat appeared to be deserted.
Off quarantine the Carpathia slowed down and, hailing the immigration inspection boat, asked if the health officer wished to board. She was told that he did, and came to a stop while Dr. O’Connell and two assistants climbed on board. Again the newspaper men asked for some word of the catastrophe to the Titanic, but there was no answer, and the Carpathia continued toward her pier.
As she passed the revenue cutter Mohawk and the derelict destroyer Seneca anchored off Tompkinsville the wireless on the Government vessels was seen to flash, but there was no answering spark from the Carpathia. Entering the North River she laid her course close to the New Jersey side in order to have room to swing into her pier.
By this time the rails were lined with men and women. They were very silent. There were a few requests for news from those on board and a few answers to questions shouted from the tugs.
The liner began to slacken her speed, and the tugboat soon was alongside. Up above the inky blackness of the hull figures could be made out, leaning over the port railing, as though peering eagerly at the little craft which was bearing down on the Carpathia.
Some of them, perhaps, had passed through that inferno of the deep sea which sprang up to destroy the mightiest steamship afloat.
“Carpathia, ahoy!” was shouted through a megaphone.
There was an interval of a few seconds, and then, “Aye, aye,” came the reply.
“Is there any assistance that can be rendered?” was the next question.
“Thank you, no,” was the answer in a tone that carried emotion with it. Meantime the tugboat was getting nearer and nearer to the Carpathia, and soon the faces of those leaning over the railing could be distinguished.
TALK WITH SURVIVORS
More faces appeared, and still more.
A woman who called to a man on the tugboat was asked, “Are you one the Titanic survivors?”
“Yes,” said the voice, hesitatingly.
“Do you need help?”
“No,” after a pause.
“If there is anything you want done it will be attended to.”
“Thank you. I have been informed that my relatives will meet me at the pier.”
“Is it true that some of the life-boats sank with the Titanic?”
“Yes. There was some trouble in manning them. They were not far enough away from her.”
All of this questioning and receiving replies was carried on with the greatest difficulty. The pounding of the liner’s engines, the washing of the sea, the tugboat’s engines, made it hard to understand the woman’s replies.
ALL CARED FOR ON BOARD
“Were the women properly cared for after the crash?” she was asked.
“Oh, yes,” came the shrill reply. “The men were brave—very brave.” Here her voice broke and she turned and left the railing, to reappear a few moments later and cry:
“Please report me as saved.”
“What name?” was asked. She shouted a name that could not be understood, and, apparently believing that it had been, turned away again and disappeared.
“Nearly all of us are very ill,” cried another woman. Here several other tugboats appeared, and those standing at the railing were besieged with questions.
“Did the crash come without warning?” a voice on one of the smaller boats megaphoned.
“Yes,” a woman answered. “Most of us had retired. We saved a few of our belongings.”
“How long did it take the boat to sink?” asked the voice.
TITANIC CREW HEROES
“Not long,” came the reply. “The crew and the men were very brave. Oh, it is dreadful—dreadful to think of!”
“Is Mr. John Jacob Astor on board?”
“No.”
/> “Did he remain on the Titanic after the collision?”
“I do not know.”
Questions of this kind were showered at the few survivors who stood at the railing, but they seemed too confused to answer them intelligibly, and after replying evasively to some they would disappear.
RUSHES ON TO DOCK
“Are you going to anchor for the night?” Captain Rostron was asked by megaphone as his boat approached Ambrose Light. It was then raining heavily.
“No,” came the reply. “I am going into port. There are sick people on board.”
“We tried to learn when she would dock,” said Dr. Walter Kennedy, head of the big ambulance corps on the mist-shrouded pier, “and we were told it would not be before midnight and that most probably it would not be before dawn to-morrow. The childish deception that has been practiced for days by the people who are responsible for the Titanic has been carried up to the very moment of the landing of the survivors.”
She proceeded past the Cunard pier, where 2,000 persons were waiting her, and steamed to a spot opposite the White Star piers at Twenty-first Street.
The ports in the big inclosed pier of the Cunard Line were opened, and through them the waiting hundreds, almost frantic with anxiety over what the Carpathia might reveal, watched her as with nerve-destroying leisure she swung about in the river, dropping over the life-boats of the Titanic that they might be taken to the piers of the White Star Line.
THE TITANIC LIFE-BOATS
It was dark in the river, but the lowering away of the life-boats could be seen from the Carpathia’s pier, and a deep sigh arose from the multitude there as they caught this first glance of anything associated with the Titanic.
Then the Carpathia started for her own pier. As she approached it the ports on the north side of pier 54 were closed that the Carpathia might land there, but through the two left open to accommodate the forward and after gangplanks of the big liner the watchers could see her looming larger and larger in the darkness till finally she was directly alongside the pier.
As the boats were towed away the picture taking and shouting of questions began again. John Badenoch, a buyer for Macy & Co., called down to a representative of the firm that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Isidor Straus were among the rescued on board the Carpathia. An officer of the Carpathia called down that 710 of the Titanic’s passengers were on board, but refused to reply to other questions.
The heavy hawsers were made fast without the customary shouting of ship’s officers and pier hands. From the crowd on the pier came a long, shuddering murmur. In it were blended sighs and hundreds of whispers. The burden of it all was: “Here they come.”
ANXIOUS MEN AND WOMEN
About each gangplank a portable fence had been put in place, marking off some fifty feet of the pier, within which stood one hundred or more customs officials. Next to the fence, crowded close against it, were anxious men and women, their gaze strained for a glance of the first from the ship, their mouths opened to draw their breaths in spasmodic, quivering gasps, their very bodies shaking with suppressed excitement, excitement which only the suspense itself was keeping in subjection.
These were the husbands and wives, children, parents, sweethearts and friends of those who had sailed upon the Titanic on its maiden voyage.
They pressed to the head of the pier, marking the boats of the wrecked ship as they dangled at the side of the Carpathia and were revealed in the sudden flashes of the photographers upon the tugs. They spoke in whispers, each group intent upon its own sad business. Newspaper writers, with pier passes showing in their hat bands, were everywhere.
A sailor hurried outside the fence and disappeared, apparently on a mission for his company. There was a deep-drawn sigh as he walked away, shaking his head toward those who peered eagerly at him. Then came a man and woman of the Carpathia’s own passengers, as their orderly dress showed them to be.
Again a sigh like a sob swept over the crowd, and again they turned back to the canopied gangplank.
THE FIRST SURVIVORS
Several minutes passed and then out of the first cabin gangway, tunneled by a somber awning, streamed the first survivors. A young woman, hatless, her light brown hair disordered and the leaden weight of crushing sorrow heavy upon eyes and sensitive mouth, was in the van. She stopped, perplexed, almost ready to drop with terror and exhaustion, and was caught by a customs official.
“A survivor?” he questioned rapidly, and a nod of the head answering him, he demanded:
“Your name.”
The answer given, he started to lead her toward that section of the pier where her friends would be waiting.
When she stepped from the gangplank there was quiet on the pier. The answers of the woman could almost be heard by those fifty feet away, but as she staggered, rather than walked, toward the waiting throng outside the fence, a low wailing sound arose from the crowd.
“Dorothy, Dorothy!” cried a man from the number. He broke through the double line of customs inspectors as though it was composed of wooden toys and caught the woman to his breast. She opened her lips inarticulately, weakly raised her arms and would have pitched forward upon her face had she not been supported. Her fair head fell weakly to one side as the man picked her up in his arms, and, with tears streaming down his face, stalked down the long avenue of the pier and down the long stairway to a waiting taxicab.
The wailing of the crowd—its cadences, wild and weird—grew steadily louder and louder till they culminated in a mighty shriek, which swept the whole big pier as though at the direction of some master hand.
RUMORS AFLOAT
The arrival of the Carpathia was the signal for the most sensational rumors to circulate through the crowd on the pier.
First, Mrs. John Jacob Astor was reported to have died at 8:06 o’clock, when the Carpathia was on her way up the harbor.
Captain Smith and the first engineer were reported to have shot themselves when they found that the Titanic was doomed to sink. Afterward it was learned that Captain Smith and the engineer went down with their ship in perfect courage and coolness.
Major Archibald Butt, President Taft’s military aide, was said to have entered into an agreement with George D. Widener, Colonel John Jacob Astor and Isidor Straus to kill them first and then shoot himself before the boat sank. It was said that this agreement had been carried out. Later it was shown that, like many other men on the ship, they had gone down without the exhibition of a sign of fear.
MRS. CORNELL SAFE
Magistrate Cornell’s wife and her two sisters were among the first to leave the ship. They were met at the first cabin pier entrance by Magistrate Cornell and a party of friends. None of the three women had hats. One of those who met them was Magistrate Cornell’s son. One of Mrs. Cornell’s sisters was overheard to remark that “it would be a dreadful thing when the ship began really to unload.”
The three women appeared to be in a very nervous state. Their hair was more or less dishevelled. They were apparently fully dressed save for their hats. Clothing had been supplied them in their need and everything had been done to make them comfortable. One of the party said that the collision occurred at 9:45.
Following closely the Cornell party was H. J. Allison, of Montreal, who came to meet his family. One of the party, who was weeping bitterly as he left the pier, explained that the only one of the family that was rescued was the young brother.
MRS. ASTOR APPEARED
In a few minutes young Mrs. Astor with her maid appeared. She came down the gangplank unassisted. She was wearing a white sweater. Vincent Astor and William Dobbyn, Colonel Astor’s secretary, greeted her and hurried her to a waiting limousine which contained clothing and other necessaries of which it was thought she might be in need. The young woman was white-faced and silent. Nobody cared to intrude upon her thoughts. Her stepson said little to her. He did not feel li
ke questioning her at such a time, he said.
LAST SEEN OF COLONEL ASTOR
Walter M. Clark, a nephew of the senator, said that he had seen Colonel Astor put his wife in a boat, after assuring her that he would soon follow her in another. Mr. Clark and others said that Colonel and Mrs. Astor were in their suite when the crash came, and that they appeared quietly on deck a few minutes afterward.
Here and there among the passengers of the Carpathia and from the survivors of the Titanic the story was gleaned of the rescue. Nothing in life will ever approach the joy felt by the hundreds who were waiting in little boats on the spot where the Titanic foundered when the lights of the Carpathia were first distinguished. That was at 4 o’clock on Monday morning.
DR. FRAUENTHAL WELCOMED
Efforts were made to learn from Dr. Henry Frauenthal something about the details of how he was rescued. Just then, or as he was leaving the pier, beaming with evident delight, he was surrounded by a big crowd of his friends.
“There’s Harry! There he is!” they yelled and made a rush for him.
All the doctor’s face that wasn’t covered with red beard was aglow with smiles as his friends hugged him and slapped him on the back. They rushed him off bodily through the crowd and he too was whirled home.
A SAD STORY
How others followed—how heartrending stories of partings and of thrilling rescues were poured out in an amazing stream—this has all been told over and over again in the news that for days amazed, saddened and angered the entire world. It is the story of a disaster that nations, it is hoped, will make impossible in the years to come.
In the stream of survivors were a peer of the realm, Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, and his secretary, side by side with plain Jack Jones, of Birmingham, able seaman, millionaires and paupers, women with bags of jewels and others with nightgowns their only property.
