Cotton, an Englishman of twenty-one years, told me the morning after the wreck how he came to receive the Titanic’s C Q D.
JUST ABOUT TO TURN IN WHEN CALLED BY C. Q. D.
“I was relaying a message to the Titanic Sunday night, shortly after 11 o’clock by my time,” he said, “and told Phillips, the Titanic’s Marconi man, that I had been doing quite a bit of work for him, and that if he had nothing else for me I would quit and turn in for the night. Just as I was about to take the receiver off my head came ‘C Q D.’ This was followed with ‘We’ve hit something. Come at once.’
“I called a sailor and sent word to an officer, and a few minutes later the Captain turned the Carpathia, at eighteen knots, in the direction of the Titanic, which was sixty miles or more from us.
“Before I could tell the Titanic we were coming, came their ‘S O S,’ and the operator added ‘I’m afraid we’re gone.’ I told him we were coming, and he went on sending out signals in every direction.”
An assistant Marconi man from the Titanic, not on duty at the time of the wreck, was among the survivors and assisted Cotton in his work after Wednesday, having been laid up the two previous days by the shock of the chill he suffered in the water and by injuries to his legs.
He denied a report, generally circulated on this ship, that Jack Binns, of Republic fame, was on the Titanic. He said Phillips, the Titanic’s chief operator, was lost.
Mrs. Edward S. Robert, whose husband, a leading St. Louis attorney, died last December during her absence in England, and her daughter, Miss Georgette Madill, have been in close seclusion on the Carpathia since their rescue from the Titanic. They are accompanied by Mrs. Robert’s maid.
S. V. Silverthorne, buyer for Nugent’s, was one of three or four saloon passengers on the Titanic who saw the deadly iceberg just after the collision.
“I was in the smoking room reading near a bridge whist game at one of the tables,” he said, “when the crash came. I said, ‘We’ve hit something,’ and went out on the starboard side to look. None of us was alarmed. It occurred to me that we might have bumped a whale, or at most, ran down some small craft.