They had been confidently posting the names of the recovered as the wireless brought the news in from the Atlantic. When the suspicion arose that some of the identified might have been buried at sea the White Star people said that they did not know, but they were working on the assumption that Capt. Lardner would bring them all to port, and that only the unidentifiable had been recommitted to the sea.
THE UNNAMED DEAD.
Then they learned that the Mackay-Bennett had brought in sixty unidentified. The hallway of the curling rink where the dead were removed from the cable ship was thronged all afternoon with friends and relatives eager beyond expression to see those unnamed dead, but the attention of the embalmers was turned to those already identified, for whom the claimants were waiting. For the most part the unidentified could not be viewed until the next morning.
One of them was thought to be Arthur White, a member of the Titanic’s crew.
The suspense was acute. Yet those who were most anxious for the morrow to come knew that hope was of the slenderest. They knew that the nameless sixty were almost all members of the crew. Capt. Lardner said that he was sure of it. He knew it by the clothes they wore.
As to the fifty-seven identified dead that were buried at sea, the whole colony was stirred by pity that it had to be, and not a few wonder if it really had to be, a wonder fed by the talk of some of the embalmers. Yet few were immediately concerned, most of those in Halifax were waiting for men who sailed first cabin of the Titanic. It appears that only one of these was among the ones who were buried at sea. This was Frederick Sutton, of Philadelphia. The large majority were either members of the Titanic’s crew or steerage passengers.
Of the 116 that Capt. Lardner thought best to return to the sea, he explained that the unidentified seemed unidentifiable, that the identified were too mutilated to bring to shore.
“Let me say first of all,” he announced when the reporters gathered around him, “that I was commissioned to bring aboard all the bodies found floating, but owing to the unanticipated number of bodies found, owing to the bad weather and other conditions it was impossible to carry out instructions, so some were committed to the deep after service, conducted by Canon Hind.”
Capt. Lardner explained that neither he nor any of his people had dreamed that so many of the Titanic’s dead would be found floating on the surface of the Atlantic.