R. Norris Williams, a Philadelphia youth on his way home from England to take the Harvard entrance examinations, was one of the few saloon passengers at the rail excluded by the women-first order from the boats who was saved. His father, Duane Williams, was lost.
“There is much, and yet there is little, to tell of my experience,” said young Williams. “My father and I had about given up our hope for life and were standing together, resolved to jump together and keep together if we could, so long as either of us lived. I had on my fur coat.
“The forward end, where we stood, was sinking rapidly, and before we could jump together the water washed my father over. Then, with the explosions, the ship seemed to break in two, and the forward end bounded up again for an instant. I leaped, but with dozens in the water between us my father was lost to me.
SWAM AND DRIFTED NEARLY TWO HOURS.
“I swam and drifted nearly two hours before I was pulled aboard the raft or collapsible boat which served for a time as a raft. Later, with the abandonment of the raft, I was taken aboard a boat.”
Frederic K. Seward, who sat next to W. T. Stead at the Titanic’s saloon table, told of the veteran English journalist’s plans for his American visit. His immediate purpose was to aid in the New York campaign of the Men and Religion Forward Movement.
“Mr. Stead talked much of spiritualism, thought transference and the occult,” said Seward. “He told a story of a mummy case in the British Museum which, he said, had had amazing adventures, but which punished with great calamities any person who wrote its story. He told of one person after another who, he said, had come to grief after writing the story, and added that, although he knew it, he would never write it. He did not say whether ill-luck attached to the mere telling of it.”
Stead also told, Seward said, of a strange adventure of a young woman with an admirer in an English railroad coach, which was known to him as it happened, and which he afterward repeated to the young woman, amazing her by repeating everything correctly save for one small detail.
Had Harold Cotton, Marconi operator on the Carpathia, gone to bed Sunday night at his usual time, the Carpathia would have known nothing of the Titanic’s plight, and the lifeboats, without food or water, might have been the scenes of even greater tragedy than the great death ship itself.
The Carpathia, an easy going Mediterranean ship, has only one Marconi man, and when Cotton had not the receiver on his head the ship was out of communication with the world.