“I did not see the iceberg. When we got into the boat she was gone.
“As the Titanic went down, Major Archibald Butt was standing on the deck. I saw him.”
The body of one black coward, a member of the Titanic’s crew, lies alone in the wireless “coop” on the highest deck of the shadowy bulk of what was once the world’s greatest ship two miles down in the dark of unplumbed ocean depths. There is a bullet hole in the back of his skull.
This man was shot by Harold Bride, the second wireless man aboard the Titanic, and assistant to the heroic Phillips, chief operator, who lost his life. Bride shot him from behind just at the instant that the coward was about to plunge a knife into Phillips’ back and rob him of the life preserver which was strapped under his arm pits. He died instantly and Phillips, all unconscious at that instant that Bride was saving his life, had but a brief little quarter of an hour added to his span by the act of his assistant, and then went down to death.
This grim bit of tragedy, only a little interlude in the whole terrible procession of horror aboard the sinking boat, occurred high above the heads of the doomed men and women who waited death in the bleak galleys of the decks.
“I had to do it,” was the way Bride put it.
“I could not let that coward die a decent sailor’s death, so I shot him down and left him alone there in the wireless coop to go down with the hulk of the ship. He is there yet, the only one in the wireless room where Phillips, a real hero, worked madly to save the lives of two thousand and more people.”
NEW YORK PHYSICIAN’S ESCAPE.
Miss Alice Farnan Leader, a New York physician, escaped from the Titanic on the same boat which carried the Countess Rothes.
“The Countess is an expert oarswoman,” said Dr. Leader, “and thoroughly at home on the water. She took command of our boat, when it was found that the seamen who had been placed at the oars could not row skilfully. Several of the women took their places with the Countess at the oars and rowed in turns while the weak and unskilled stewards sat quietly in one end of the boat.”