Like simultaneous photographs of the same tragedy etched on the brains of 745 persons, survivors of the Titanic tell of their experiences and what they saw in those pitifully few hours between the great ship’s impact on the iceberg and the appalling moment when she disappeared.
As the survivors came, half fainting, half hysterical, down the Carpathia’s gang plank, they began to relate these narratives. Many of these were disjointed, fragmentary—a picture here, a frightful flash of recollection there, some bordered on hallucination, some were more connected as one of those who are now beginning to realize the horror through which they came. A few strangely enough, are calm and lucid. But every one thrills with some part of the awful truth as its narrator saw it.
INDIVIDUALLY CONFLICTING STORIES OF THE WRECK.
Each tale is like another view of the same many-sided shield. Sometimes they seem to contradict each other, but that is because those who witness such scenes see them as individuals. There is not a survivor but has something new and startling and dramatic to tell.
Taken altogether their accounts are a composite picture of 700 separate experiences.
The shock of the collision had barely jarred the ship. One man who was directing letters in his cabin kept on with his work until he felt a sudden shift in the position of the ship and rushed to the deck in time to leap into a lifeboat. Some of the passengers had returned to their berths.
Nothing occurred to indicate to the passengers aboard the Titanic or moving away from the ship in lifeboats that the vessel would not remain afloat until help should arrive, until the boilers exploded. Then the end was apparent to all.
Men with life-preservers strapped about their waists, jumped overboard by scores and some were picked up by boats which had not got far from the ship.
As the last three lifeboats were launched the restriction as to women and children was removed. It was a free-for-all then on the deck, where unskilled men, principally stewards, were trying to get the cumbersome boats overboard. Nearly all those who took part in that struggle for life are dead. Those who survived are not anxious to talk about it.
Just before the Titanic disappeared from view men and women leaped from the stern. As the portion of vessel remaining above water swung up to an almost perpendicular position hundreds on the upper decks were thrown into the sea and were pulled down in the vortex. The biggest, most thrilling moments of the wreck were those last moments when the air-tight compartments in the after part of the Titanic were supporting the balance of the ship.