CONTINUALLY BUMPED INTO DEAD BODIES.
While we were cruising about the place our oars continually bumped into dead bodies, wearing life belts. Some of the bodies were of the half-naked stokers. They were killed by the shock. We knew that the temperature of the water had been 28 degrees at 11 o’clock the same evening. While we were waiting for the boat to go down we heard some fifteen or twenty shots from the rail of the ship. We only surmised what they were.”
There was a fireman who told of a woman in the boat which he helped man who started up “Pull for the Shore” and “Nearer My God, to Thee” after his boat had left the wreck. This kept up all night until the Carpathia arrived.
Laurence Beasley, a Cambridge University man, who was a second-cabin passenger on the Titanic, amplified his previous account while visiting the White Star offices. After describing events immediately following the collision with the iceberg and his departure in a lifeboat, Mr. Beasley is quoted as saying:
“We drifted away easily as the oars were got out, and headed directly away from the ship. Our crew seemed to be mostly cooks in white jackets, two at an oar, with a stoker at the tiller, who had been elected captain. He told us he had been at sea twenty-six years and had never yet seen such a calm night on the Atlantic.
“As we rowed away from the Titanic we looked back from time to time to watch her, and a more striking spectacle it was not possible for any one to see. In the distance she looked an enormous length, her great bulk outlined in black against the starry sky, every porthole and saloon blazing with light. It was impossible to think anything could be wrong with such a leviathan, were it not for that ominous tilt downward in the bows where the water was by now up to the lowest row of portholes.