ALL THE MEN ACTED CALMLY AND CHEERFULLY.
“All the men among the passengers, so far as I could see, acted calmly, cheerfully, masterfully. Among the stokers and others who were sent to man the lifeboats there were many cowards.”
Mrs. Emily Richards, who with her mother and her two children was on the Titanic, journeying from Penzance, Cornwall, to join her husband in Akron, O., said:
“I had put the children in bed and had gone to bed myself. We had been making good time all day, the ship rushing through the sea at a tremendous rate, and the air on deck was cold and crisp. I didn’t hear the collision, for I was asleep. But my mother came and shook me.
“‘There is surely danger,’ said mamma. ‘Something has gone wrong.’
“So we put on our slippers and outside coats and got the children into theirs and went on deck. We had on our night gowns under our coats. As we went up the stairway some one was shouting down in a calm voice: ‘Everybody put on their life preservers before coming on deck!’
“We went back and put them on, assuring each other that it was nothing. When we got on deck we were told to pass through the dining room to a ladder that was placed against the side of the cabins and led to the upper deck.
“We were put through the portholes into the boats, and the boat I was in had a foot of water in it. As soon as we were in we were told to sit down on the bottom. In that position we were so low that we could not see out over the gunwale.
“Once the boat had started away some of the women stood up, and the seamen, with their hands full with the oars, simply put their feet on them and forced them back into the sitting position.
“We had not got far away by the time the ship went down, and after that there were men floating in the water all around, and seven of them were picked up by us in the hours that followed between that and daybreak.