EVERYONE FIGHTING EVERYONE ELSE.
We were the first people on the raft, but it wasn’t long before we were surrounded by the men from the boats. Everyone was fighting everyone else to get on the raft and to keep the others from getting on.
It was more horrible than the most realistic nightmare. About twenty men had managed to get on our raft, which was built to hold ten.
The buoys of the raft were already under water and the raft was nearly sinking. An old man swam to us. The men shouted to push him off if he tried to get on, but my husband wouldn’t do it and pulled him on board.
He was a Mr. Achard, of Baltimore, and had lost his wife, his son and his daughter in the wreck.
We were drifting helplessly around, no one knowing what to do, when my husband said that there must be a pair of oars on the raft. He felt underneath and found a pair, so the men were able to row out of danger.
The ship first went down up to the stern, but righted up. Then the bow arose above the water almost like a porpoise. The ship went slowly down. We saw the captain on his bridge.
We saw the water come up and up until it almost reached him. Then we heard a pistol shot. Many people thought that he had shot himself, but it was simply his last call for help. He went down with his boat.
It had been just forty minutes after the collision that La Bourgogne took her final dive. Then suddenly men, women and children, some of them still alive, were spouted out like sticks in a boiling volume. Those poor creatures, those who had the strength, would swim to the rafts and beg to be taken aboard, and, being denied, turn and disappear into the ocean.
Presently the sun broke through the heavy fog and the great curtain lifted. The surface of the ocean, which had been disturbed by great swells, became as calm as a millpond. It was a beautiful summer’s day. There was nothing to indicate that a great tragedy had just been enacted on these waters.