ICEBERGS ON EVERY SIDE.
“By the time I got the boat aboard day was breaking,” said the captain. “In a radius of four miles I saw all the other lifeboats. On all sides of us were icebergs; some twenty, some were 150 to 200 feet high, and numerous small icebergs or ‘growlers.’ Wreckage was strewn about us. At 8.30 all the Titanic’s survivors were aboard.”
Then, with tears filling his eyes, Captain Rostrom said he called the purser. “I told him,” said Captain Rostrom, “I wanted to hold a service of prayer—thanksgiving for the living and a funeral service for the dead.
“I went to Mr. Ismay. He told me to take full charge. An Episcopal clergyman was found among the passengers, and he conducted the services.”
As the prayers were being said, Captain Rostrom testified, he was on the bridge searching for survivors. He told of talking with the California, which had arrived. As he searched the sea, one body with a life preserver on floated by.
The man was dead, probably a member of the crew, the captain said. The body was not picked up, the officer explaining, “because the survivors of the Titanic were in no condition then to see a body brought aboard.”
“But I must say,” declared Captain Rostrom with positiveness, “every one of the survivors behaved magnificently. They sat in the boats until the order came for them to mount the ladder in turn, and then came up.”
Asked about the lifeboats, Captain Rostrom said he found one among the wreckage in the sea. Several of the lifeboats brought in on the Carpathia to New York, he said, were lowered last night and hauled away by tenders, he knew not where.
Captain Rostrom said that the Carpathia had twenty lifeboats of her own, in accordance with the British regulations.
“Wouldn’t that indicate that the regulations are out of date, your ship being much smaller than the Titanic, which also carried twenty lifeboats?” Senator Smith asked. “No. The Titanic was supposed to be a lifeboat herself.”
Captain Rostrom then explained that it was for the good of the shipwrecked people that he brought his ship to New York instead of going to Halifax.