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.
SHIP’S END ONLY A QUESTION OF MINUTES.
“About 2 A. M., as near as I can remember, we observed her settling very rapidly, with the bows and the bridge completely under water, and concluded it was now only a question of minutes before she went, and so it proved. She slowly tilted straight on end, with the stern vertically upward, and, as she did, the light in the cabins and saloons, which had not flickered for a moment since we left, died out, came on again for a single flash, and finally went out altogether. At the same time the machinery roared down through the vessel with a rattle and a groaning that could be heard for miles, the weirdest sound, surely, that could be heard in the middle of the ocean a thousand miles away from land.
“But this was not quite the end. To our amazement, she remained in that upright position for a time which I estimate at five minutes; others in the boat say less, but it was certainly some minutes while we watched at least one hundred and fifty feet of the Titanic towering up above the level of the sea and looming black against the sky.
“Then, with a quiet, slanting dive, she disappeared beneath the waters. And there was left to us the gently heaving sea, the boat filled to standing room with men and women in every conceivable condition of dress and undress; above, the perfect sky of brilliant stars, with not a cloud in the sky, all tempered with a bitter cold that made us all long to be one of the crew who toiled away with the oars and kept themselves warm thereby—a curious, deadening, bitter cold unlike anything we had felt before.
“And then, with all these, there fell on the ear the most appalling noise that ever human ear listened to—the cries of hundreds of our fellow-beings struggling in the icy-cold water, crying for help with a cry that we knew could not be answered. We longed to return and pick up some of those swimming, but this would have meant swamping our boat and further loss of the lives of all of us. We tried to sing to keep the women from hearing the cries, and rowed hard to get away from the scene of the wreck.