REFUSED TO LEAVE HUSBAND.
“Where You Are I Shall Be,” Said Mrs. Isidor Straus--He Begged Her in
Vain to Enter the Waiting Lifeboat--Women Row Lifeboats--Stokers no
Oarsmen--Crazed Men Rescued--Collapsible Boats Failed to Work.
The story of how Mrs. Isidor Straus, wife of the New York merchant, met
death with her husband on the Titanic rather than be separated from
him, was rendered complete when Miss Ellen Bird, maid to Mrs. Straus,
told how the self-sacrifice of Mrs. Straus made it possible for her to
escape a watery grave.
Miss Bird also supplied details of the appealing scenes between Mrs.
Straus and her husband when the elderly though heroic woman brushed
aside three opportunities to be saved, declaring to solicitous
passengers that death in her husband’s arms was more to be desired than
life without him.
Miss Bird’s narrative was repeated by Sylvester Byrnes, general manager
of R. H. Macy & Co. He said:
“When the Titanic struck the iceberg Mr. and Mrs. Straus were walking
arm in arm on the upperdeck. Although assured by the officers that
there was no immediate cause for alarm, Mrs. Straus, with her husband,
hurried to the stateroom of her maid, cautioning Miss Bird to dress
hurriedly and as comfortably as she could, because the passengers might
have to take to the lifeboats. Then Mr. and Mrs. Straus returned to the
deck, where, shortly after, they were joined by Miss Bird.
“Mr. Straus stepped aside when the first boat was being filled,
explaining that he could not go until all the women and children had
been given places. ‘Where you are, Papa, I shall be,’ spoke up Mrs.
Straus, rejecting all entreaties to enter the boat.
“Mr. Straus vainly attempted to persuade his wife to enter the second
boat, assuring her that eventually he would find a place after all the
women and children had been taken off.
“Miss Bird, who was making her first trip across, having been engaged
in London by Mrs. Straus, joined other passengers in urging Mrs. Straus
to enter the boat, but she clung closer to her husband and repeated
previous declarations that unless Mr. Straus accompanied her she would
remain behind. Mr. Straus only shook his head.
“One after another the boats were lowered. Finally that in which Mrs.
John Jacob Astor was rescued was made ready. ‘Here is a place for you,
Mrs. Straus!’ cried Mrs. Astor. Mrs. Straus only shrank closer to her
husband.
“Several passengers, at least two of them being women, attempted to
force Mrs. Straus into the boat, but she cried out against separation
from her husband and ordered her maid, Miss Bird, to take the place
beside Mrs. Astor.
“‘You go,’ said Mrs. Straus to the maid. ‘I must stay with my husband.’
CLASPED IN EACH OTHERS ARMS.
“Seeing it was useless to argue with Mrs. Straus, several men
passengers lifted Miss Bird into the boat, which was lowered with all
haste. As this boat and two others, comprising the last to leave the
vessel, glided across the waters into the black night the last glimpse
caught of Mr. and Mrs. Straus showed them standing on the deck, clasped
in each other’s arms, weeping.”
Mr. and Mrs. C. E. Henry Stengel, of Newark, N. J., received the
congratulations of friends on their rescue in their home at Broad
street and Lincoln Park.
Mr. and Mrs. Stengel left the Titanic in different boats. Mr. Stengel
first saw his wife safely aboard one boat, then assisted other women to
leave. As a small boat, half full, was being lowered, Mr. Stengel says
he asked the officer in charge if he should come aboard.
“He replied, ‘Sure, come on in,’ said Mr. Stengel.
“I jumped and was rolled along the bottom of the boat. The man in
charge said, ‘That’s the funniest drop I have seen in a long while.’
“Every one in the boat was laughing. There was no real thought of
danger among the passengers, and we all expected to return to the
steamer within a few hours.
“In our boat was Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff-Gordon, Miss Francatolla, A.
L. Solomon, three stokers and two sailors. We tried to keep near the
other boats, but, finding it hard to do so, tied three of the boats
together.
An officer on one of the boats had provided himself with some blue
fire, and so when the Carpathia arrived at the scene we were the second
or third boat to be picked up.
“I cannot tell the time of events. For a long time after we left the
Titanic her lights were all burning, and we were trying to keep as
close as possible to her. She settled so slowly that I did not notice
anything unusual, until suddenly all the lights of the steamer went out.
CAPTAIN KEEPS EVERY BODY IN GOOD SPIRITS.
“Then I realized that every one was in danger. I saw the captain twice
after the collision with the iceberg. His face showed great anxiety,
but his words were so reassuring that every one kept in good spirits.”
Mrs. Stengel said:
“When the shock came I was retiring. At first I was not going to leave
the stateroom, but we heard some loud talking, and Mr. Stengel urged
me to go. I put on a coat and tied a veil over my head. He put on his
trousers and wore a coat. As we reached the deck a loud order was given
of ‘Women and children into the lifeboats!’ There did not appear to be
any danger, but my husband insisted I should get into one of the boats.
He walked away and I could see him assisting other women into boats.
“Suddenly our boat was lowered. I could still see my husband, and waved
my veil, and he waved a handkerchief. Our boat was crowded with women.
There were three stokers and one officer. The stokers knew nothing
about the use of oars, and we women took the oars.
“We stayed close by another boat in which three Chinamen had been found
lying face down at the bottom of the boat. They could not be made to do
anything. There was little alarm. The band was playing on the steamer
and most every one wished to get back.
“Suddenly the lights on the steamer went out, and then we realized what
had happened. At first several of the boats kept together, as there was
something in the distance that appeared to be a light. We all tried to
get to the light, but after an hour or so found that it was simply some
light reflection from the tip of an iceberg.
“Just before leaving the steamer I saw Col. Astor. He was with his
wife, and was insisting that she get into a lifeboat that was being
filled. She seemed to resist, and Mr. Astor picked her up and put her
in a seat. He was smiling all the time. There was some difficulty in
the next boat, and Col. Astor was laughing as he helped several women
into the boat.
ALL THE MEN ACTED CALMLY AND CHEERFULLY.
“All the men among the passengers, so far as I could see, acted calmly,
cheerfully, masterfully. Among the stokers and others who were sent to
man the lifeboats there were many cowards.”
Mrs. Emily Richards, who with her mother and her two children was on
the Titanic, journeying from Penzance, Cornwall, to join her husband in
Akron, O., said:
“I had put the children in bed and had gone to bed myself. We had
been making good time all day, the ship rushing through the sea at a
tremendous rate, and the air on deck was cold and crisp. I didn’t hear
the collision, for I was asleep. But my mother came and shook me.
“‘There is surely danger,’ said mamma. ‘Something has gone wrong.’
“So we put on our slippers and outside coats and got the children into
theirs and went on deck. We had on our night gowns under our coats. As
we went up the stairway some one was shouting down in a calm voice:
‘Everybody put on their life preservers before coming on deck!’
“We went back and put them on, assuring each other that it was nothing.
When we got on deck we were told to pass through the dining room to a
ladder that was placed against the side of the cabins and led to the
upper deck.
“We were put through the portholes into the boats, and the boat I was
in had a foot of water in it. As soon as we were in we were told to sit
down on the bottom. In that position we were so low that we could not
see out over the gunwale.
“Once the boat had started away some of the women stood up, and the
seamen, with their hands full with the oars, simply put their feet on
them and forced them back into the sitting position.
“We had not got far away by the time the ship went down, and after that
there were men floating in the water all around, and seven of them were
picked up by us in the hours that followed between that and daybreak.
MAD WITH EXPOSURE.
“Some of these seven were already mad with exposure, and babbled
gibberish, and kept trying to get up and overturn the boat. The other
men had to sit upon them to hold them down.
“Two of the men picked up were so overcome with the cold of the water
that they died before we reached the Carpathia, and their dead bodies
were taken aboard. One woman, who spoke a tongue none of us could
understand, was picked up by the boat and believed that her children
were lost.
“She was entirely mad. When her children were brought to her on the
Carpathia she was wild with joy, and lay down on the children on the
floor, trying to cover them with her body, like a wild beast protecting
its young, and they had to take her children away from her for the time
to save them from being suffocated.”
Miss Caroline Bonnell, of Youngstown, O., one of the survivors, said
that passengers who got into lifeboats were led to believe that a
steamship was near and that the lives of all would be saved.
Miss Bonnell and her aunt, Miss Lily Bonnell, of London, England,
were traveling with George D. Wick, an iron and steel manufacturer of
Youngstown, his wife and daughter, Mary Natalie Wick. The women were
saved. Mr. Wick went down with the ship. Like hundreds of others, he
stood aside to give the women and children first chance.
“Miss Wick and I occupied a stateroom together,” said Miss Bonnell. “We
were awakened shortly before midnight by a sudden shock, a grinding
concussion. Miss Wick arose and looked out of the stateroom window. She
saw some men playfully throwing particles of ice at one another, and
realized that we had struck an iceberg.
“She and I dressed, not hastily, for we were not greatly alarmed, and
went on deck.
“There we found a number of passengers. Naturally they were all
somewhat nervous, but there was nothing approaching a panic. The other
members of our party also had come on deck, and we formed a little
group by ourselves.
HAD NO IDEA THE SHIP WAS SINKING.
“We were told to put on life belts, and obeyed. Then the sailors began
to launch the lifeboats. Still we were not alarmed. We had no doubt
that all on board would be saved. In fact, we had no idea that the ship
was sinking and believed that the resort to the lifeboats was merely a
precaution.
“Mr. Wick kissed his wife good-by, and our boat, the first on that side
of the ship, was lowered to the sea. There were about twenty-five women
in the boat, with two sailors and a steward to row. These were the only
men. The boat would have held many more.
“As the boat was being loaded the officer in charge pointed out a
light that glowed dimly in the distance on the surface of the sea and
directed our sailors to row to that, land their passengers and return
to the Titanic for more.
“As we were rowed away we saw that the great liner was settling. We
kept our boat pointed toward the light to which we were to row. As a
matter of fact, there were two lights--one red and the other white.
Sailormen on the Carpathia told us subsequently that the lights might
have been those of a fishing boat caught in the ice and drifting with
it--but who can tell?
“After a while our sailors ceased rowing, saying it was of no use
to keep on. Then we women tried to row, with the double light our
objective. We rowed and rowed, but did not seem to gain on the light,
which, like a will-o’-the-wisp, seemed ever to evade us. Finally we
gave up and sat huddled in the lifeboat.
“Some of the women complained of the cold, but the members of our own
party did not suffer, being provided with plenty of wraps.
“From the distance of a mile or more we heard the explosion and saw
the Titanic go down. The lights did not go out all at once. As the
ship slowly settled the rows of lights, one after another, winked out,
disappearing beneath the surface. Finally the ship plunged down, bow
first, and the stern slipped beneath the waves.
HAD HOPED ALL ON BOARD WOULD BE SAVED.
“Even then we had hoped that all on board might be saved. It was only
after we had been taken aboard the Carpathia, and somehow few of us
there were compared with the great company aboard the Titanic, that we
got the first glimmer of the appalling reality.”
“I never dreamed that it was serious,” said Alfred White, one of the
two oilers from the engine room who were saved by being picked up.
“I was on the whale deck in the bow calling the watch that was to
relieve me when the ice first came aboard. It was a black berg that we
struck--that is, it was composed of black ice. It could not be seen at
all at night.
“The striking opened seams below the water line, but did not even
scratch the paint above the line. I know that because I was one of
those who helped make an examination over the side with a lantern.
“I went down into the light engine room, where my station was, at 12.40
o’clock. We even made coffee, showing that there wasn’t much thought of
danger. An hour later I was still working around the light engines.
I heard the chief engineer tell one of his subordinates that No. 6
bulkhead had given away.
“At that time things began to look bad, for the Titanic was far down by
the bow. I was told to go up and see how things were going, and made my
way up through the dummy funnel to the bridge deck.
“By that time all the boats had left the ship and yet every one in the
engine room was at his post. I was near the captain and heard him say:
‘Well, boys, I guess it’s every man for himself now.’
“I slipped down some loose boat falls and dropped into the water. There
was a boat not far away, which later picked me up. There were five
firemen in her as a crew, forty-nine women and sixteen children. There
was no officer.
“THE MILLIONAIRES BOAT.”
“During the six hours we were afloat we were near what we boys
later called the millionaries’ boat. That lifeboat had only sixteen
passengers in her. When all were put aboard the Carpathia the six men
who were the crew of that millionaires’ boat each got £5. Those who had
worked harder saving second-class passengers didn’t get a cent.”
White then told of the way in which the children from the open boats
were swung aboard the Carpathia in sacks, while the women were hoisted
up in rope swings.
“Near the boat in which I was,” White went on, “were two collapsible
boats which had failed to work and were not better than rafts. They
had thirty-two men clinging to them who were later picked up by the
lifeboats.
“The other two collapsible boats which had about sixty persons in them
deposited what women they carried in the regular lifeboats and went to
the scene of the sinking.
“From the water were picked up perhaps fifty of the crew who had
floated off when she sank or else who had jumped before. The second
officer was picked up, too, and took command of a boat.
“Now, about the sinking itself. There was some sort of an explosion
just about 2 o’clock, or shortly after I had gone overboard. It was
not until this explosion, the nature of which I do not know, that the
lights went out. They had been fed by steam from oil boilers.
“The explosion caused a break in the ship just aft of the third funnel.
The forward section went down bow first. The after part then seemed
almost to right itself, and we thought she might keep afloat.
“But it wasn’t long before the propellers shot out of the water, and
down she went. A steward who stood on the poop deck had the ship go
down under him. He was picked up later, and his watch was found to have
stopped at 2.20 A. M., so we knew that that was the time she foundered.
There was no apparent suction when she foundered.
CONTINUALLY BUMPED INTO DEAD BODIES.
While we were cruising about the place our oars continually bumped
into dead bodies, wearing life belts. Some of the bodies were of the
half-naked stokers. They were killed by the shock. We knew that the
temperature of the water had been 28 degrees at 11 o’clock the same
evening. While we were waiting for the boat to go down we heard some
fifteen or twenty shots from the rail of the ship. We only surmised
what they were.”
There was a fireman who told of a woman in the boat which he helped man
who started up “Pull for the Shore” and “Nearer My God, to Thee” after
his boat had left the wreck. This kept up all night until the Carpathia
arrived.
Laurence Beasley, a Cambridge University man, who was a second-cabin
passenger on the Titanic, amplified his previous account while visiting
the White Star offices. After describing events immediately following
the collision with the iceberg and his departure in a lifeboat, Mr.
Beasley is quoted as saying:
“We drifted away easily as the oars were got out, and headed directly
away from the ship. Our crew seemed to be mostly cooks in white
jackets, two at an oar, with a stoker at the tiller, who had been
elected captain. He told us he had been at sea twenty-six years and had
never yet seen such a calm night on the Atlantic.
“As we rowed away from the Titanic we looked back from time to time
to watch her, and a more striking spectacle it was not possible for
any one to see. In the distance she looked an enormous length, her
great bulk outlined in black against the starry sky, every porthole
and saloon blazing with light. It was impossible to think anything
could be wrong with such a leviathan, were it not for that ominous tilt
downward in the bows where the water was by now up to the lowest row of
portholes.
SHIP’S END ONLY A QUESTION OF MINUTES.
“About 2 A. M., as near as I can remember, we observed her settling
very rapidly, with the bows and the bridge completely under water, and
concluded it was now only a question of minutes before she went, and so
it proved. She slowly tilted straight on end, with the stern vertically
upward, and, as she did, the light in the cabins and saloons, which had
not flickered for a moment since we left, died out, came on again for
a single flash, and finally went out altogether. At the same time the
machinery roared down through the vessel with a rattle and a groaning
that could be heard for miles, the weirdest sound, surely, that could
be heard in the middle of the ocean a thousand miles away from land.
“But this was not quite the end. To our amazement, she remained in that
upright position for a time which I estimate at five minutes; others in
the boat say less, but it was certainly some minutes while we watched
at least one hundred and fifty feet of the Titanic towering up above
the level of the sea and looming black against the sky.
“Then, with a quiet, slanting dive, she disappeared beneath the waters.
And there was left to us the gently heaving sea, the boat filled to
standing room with men and women in every conceivable condition of
dress and undress; above, the perfect sky of brilliant stars, with
not a cloud in the sky, all tempered with a bitter cold that made us
all long to be one of the crew who toiled away with the oars and kept
themselves warm thereby--a curious, deadening, bitter cold unlike
anything we had felt before.
“And then, with all these, there fell on the ear the most appalling
noise that ever human ear listened to--the cries of hundreds of our
fellow-beings struggling in the icy-cold water, crying for help with a
cry that we knew could not be answered. We longed to return and pick up
some of those swimming, but this would have meant swamping our boat and
further loss of the lives of all of us. We tried to sing to keep the
women from hearing the cries, and rowed hard to get away from the scene
of the wreck.
“We kept a lookout for lights, and several times it was shouted that
steamers’ lights were seen. Presently, low down on the horizon, we saw
a light that slowly resolved itself into a double light, and we watched
eagerly to see if the two would separate and so prove to be only two of
our boats. To our joy they moved as one, and round we swung the boat
and headed for her.
“The steersman shouted: ‘Now, boys, sing!’ and for the first time the
boat broke into song, ‘Row for the Shore, Sailors,’ and for the first
time tears came to the eyes of us all as we realized that safety was at
hand. Our rescuer showed up rapidly, and as she swung around we saw her
cabins all alight, and knew she must be a large steamship. She was now
motionless and we had to row to her. Just then day broke--a beautiful,
quiet dawn. We were received with a welcome that was overwhelming in
its warmth.”