No matter how they reported the sinking of the big ship, nearly all the Titanic’s survivors shared the same terrible memory: They were haunted by the cries from people in the icy water. First-class passenger Archibald Gracie had still been clinging to the Titanic’s rail when the ship went down. He held on and was pulled so far underwater that he felt the pressure in his ears. Once he regained his bearings and swam to the surface, he found some wooden wreckage, perhaps from a crate, and grabbed that to help him stay afloat. He couldn’t see the ship anymore at that point, but he heard voices calling out for help.

Gracie said the cries went on for an hour, “but as time went on, growing weaker and weaker until they died out entirely.” Eventually, Gracie spotted collapsible lifeboat B overturned in the water, swam to it, and climbed aboard. A dozen other swimmers followed him, but by then, the boat was sitting much lower in the water.

“There were men swimming in the water all about us,” Gracie wrote. “One more clambering aboard would have swamped our already crowded craft. The situation was a desperate one, and was only saved by the refusal of the crew, especially those at the stern of the boat, to take board another passenger.” Gracie said the men used paddles to steer the boat away from others who were floating on debris in the water.

“Hold on to what you have, old boy,” the crew told one man. “One more of you aboard would sink us all.”

Gracie said the man replied:

ABOUT THOSE LIFE JACKETS

Most of the people who ended up in the water when the Titanic went down were wearing life jackets. The ship had no shortage of those. They were filled with cork, and the crew had even given a safety talk on how to use them. But a life jacket keeping you afloat in icy water doesn’t protect you from the cold.

To get some sense for how cold the water of the North Atlantic was that night, fill a big bowl with ice cubes, add water, and swish it around for a minute. Now plunge your hand into the water and hold it there for a few seconds. Painful, isn’t it? Imagine trying to swim with your whole body immersed in that painful, frigid water. You wouldn’t last long.

The night of the Titanic disaster, the water was only twenty-eight degrees. At that temperature, a person would be exhausted or unconscious within just fifteen minutes and dead less than half an hour later. Life jackets simply weren’t enough, and many of the Titanic’s victims died from the cold.

By now you might be remembering all those lifeboats that launched half-full. Where were they? And how come they weren’t picking up some of those people in the water? The answer is that people were afraid. They worried that the frantic, desperate people in the water would grab on to their lifeboat all at once and end up capsizing it.

“We longed to return and pick up some of those swimming,” said Ruth Becker, who was in lifeboat 13, “but that should have meant swamping our boat and further loss of lives of us all.”

A few lifeboats did go back, rescuing another fourteen people. But the water was frigid and the night was cold, and some of those rescued were already in bad shape. Only half of those saved in lifeboats after the ship went down survived.

Meanwhile, those in the lifeboats waited and waited. When Archibald Gracie realized that wireless operator Harold Bride was on the same lifeboat, he asked which boats he’d been able to contact. Bride told him how the Baltic, the Olympic, and the Carpathia had all responded. The men strained their eyes, searching the horizon. Finally, lights appeared.

The Carpathia rescued more than seven hundred Titanic survivors. Once they were all aboard, the ship turned and began steaming back to New York, where the newspapers were waiting to share the survivors’ stories.

Early news coverage of the disaster was spotty. In fact, some of it really couldn’t have been farther from the truth.

titanic sinking; no lives lost, one read.

titanic’s passengers saved: liner being towed to halifax, another proclaimed. The mistakes likely happened because there was so much wireless traffic that night, and people got confused. While the Titanic was sinking, there was also an oil tanker that was having problems in the Atlantic and being towed to shore. It’s possible that people heard about a ship being towed and assumed it was the Titanic.

It wasn’t. And by the time those papers hit the streets, the ship was at the bottom of the Atlantic. The papers that got it wrong ran corrections later.

Other newspapers waited for facts and got the story right, or at least mostly right. The New York Times headline read:

When the Carpathia arrived in New York, the big newspapers sent tugboats out to meet it. Reporters tried to talk their way onto the ship to interview survivors, but only two had any luck. The New York Times managed to sneak a reporter on board with Guglielmo Marconi, who went to talk with the wireless operators, and they scored an interview with Harold Bride that was published as a big story the next day.

But perhaps the biggest Titanic scoop went to a reporter named Carlos Hurd. He was supposed to be on vacation, traveling to the Mediterranean on the Carpathia with his wife, Katherine. Before the couple left on their voyage, they had to travel to New York to board the ship. While they were in the city, Hurd visited the offices of the New York World, a big paper owned by the Pulitzer family, who also owned the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where Hurd worked. When the Carpathia’s voyage was cut short due to the rescue mission, Hurd realized he was in the middle of a huge news story and recruited his wife to help interview Titanic survivors.

It was a tricky job because the captain of the Carpathia had ordered a news blackout. Passengers weren’t allowed to send or receive wireless messages, and the Hurds couldn’t even buy paper to write on. So Carlos and his wife had to sneak around interviewing survivors. In an effort to keep the story from getting out, the ship’s officers even searched their cabin sometimes. When that happened, Carlos put all his notes and his story on a chair, and his wife sat on them so they couldn’t be found. When the Hurds left the cabin, Katherine hid the papers in her underwear.

When the Carpathia arrived in New York, one of the tugboats that pulled up alongside it was from the New York World, whose editor had remembered that Hurd was on board the rescue ship. Hurd had tied his story up in a cigar box and added corks so it would float if he had to throw it. And that’s what he did. It got snagged in a line, but a crew member freed it and tossed it to the editor of the World, who rushed back to the office to get the story printed. Finally, the world would hear the story of the Titanic’s survivors, how they’d spent a long night in lifeboats, waiting to be rescued after one of the worst maritime disasters in history.

HEROES AND VILLAINS

As newspaper reports about the Titanic disaster were published, stories of heroes and villains emerged. Some of those were true. Some were fair characterizations. Others, not so much.

One of the most heroic stories was that Captain Edward Smith rescued a child just before he went down with his ship. One account had him leaping from the bridge with a baby, swimming to a nearby lifeboat (while somehow still holding on to the baby!), and giving the child to someone in the boat before refusing to take a seat himself and swimming away.

If you’re thinking that it seems impossible to leap from a ship, surface, and swim to a lifeboat while holding a baby, you’re probably right. There’s little evidence to support this heroic tale, but it was a story that made people feel better, so many shared it. Shipbuilder Thomas Andrews was also painted as a hero in early news reports, and the story about him throwing deck chairs into the water to help people seems more plausible.

Meanwhile, American newspapers pounced on Bruce Ismay’s escape in a lifeboat and wrote stories that painted him as a villain. Many reports portrayed Ismay as a greedy White Star Line owner who should have gone down with the ship but instead jumped into a lifeboat, leaving women and children on board. One of those stories was published in a newspaper owned by William Randolph Hearst, who was said not to have liked Ismay very much to begin with.

Despite all the stories that showed Ismay as one of the Titanic’s villains, the official British inquiry into the disaster concluded that he hadn’t really done anything wrong. High Court judge Lord Mersey said Ismay had helped lots of passengers before he got into a lifeboat himself, and when he did, it was because the boat was being lowered and there was nobody else around.