KEPT TOGETHER BY GREEN LIGHT.
None are alive to tell the tale of that short period. Toward 2 o’clock on Monday morning a green light aboard one of the lifeboats kept the fleet of craft carrying the survivors together. Through the hours until dawn the men in charge of the boats hovered about that green light. Occasionally bodies of men slipped by the lifeboats. A few men, more dead than alive, were pulled aboard the boats, that were now overcrowded.
The weather became bitterly cold and the survivors suffered physical pain as well as mental anguish. Benumbed by the extent of the catastrophe most of the women sat motionless in their places. The Carpathia appeared soon after dawn. Not until the big Cunarder was close by did the realization of what had happened reach the women survivors.
Many of them became temporarily insane. It was necessary to use force to place them in swings in which they were hoisted to the Carpathia’s decks. The officers of the Carpathia knowing the Titanic had gone down, were prepared for an emergency. Passengers on the Cunarder gave their cabins to the Titanic sufferers. The captain surrendered his room for hospital purposes. Stewardesses were compelled to cut the clothing from some of the women who had jumped into the water and been picked up by the lifeboats.
Among the survivors picked up by the Carpathia were several babies. These little ones were tossed overboard by their parents and rescued by the boats. The identity of these orphans may never be determined. When the list of persons aboard the Carpathia was checked up it was found that among the survivors were thirty women who had been widowed by the disaster.
Nearly all these women, bereft of their life partners, were reassured by the hope that those who had been left behind had been picked up by another vessel until they reached New York. For some reason the impression prevailed on the Carpathia that the Californian had picked up a number of survivors floating in the sea upheld by life-preservers.