CHAPTER 19 Where’s Daddy?

Straight away all the extraordinary things of yesterday and all that incredible, wild night, with its almost impossible adventures, at once, suddenly, in all their terrifying fullness, appeared to his imagination and memory.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Double (1846)

JACK THAYER’S LIFEBOAT, A DIFFERENT one from the overturned craft from which he had been pulled from the water by a stoker, was the last to reach the Carpathia, pulling up alongside her at about 8:15 a.m. In the small hours, everyone on Collapsible B had been transferred to one of the less full boats, from which they eventually boarded the Carpathia. Her battered contingent included an Irish immigrant who had lost consciousness, one of the ship’s wireless operators suffering from hypothermia, and a crew member whose feet were so swollen he climbed up the rope ladder to the Carpathia on his knees.¹ When Jack, with the hands of his watch stopped at 2:22 a.m., reached the top of the ladder, he saw his disheveled mother, who had joined many other survivors in gathering to greet the arriving lifeboats. Glancing over her son’s shoulder, the “overjoyed” Marian asked, “Where’s Daddy?”² To which Jack replied, “I don’t know, Mother.”³ Marian had apparently assumed, until that moment, that her husband and their son had reunited after she was evacuated.⁴ For at least a few more hours she, along with many on the Carpathia, nurtured the comforting chimera that there could be another rescue ship nearby, which might have picked up more survivors. Shipboard rumor had it that White Star’s Baltic might be in the vicinity. The Titanic’s senior surviving officer, Charles Lightoller, who had been saved in the same lifeboats as Jack, found himself fielding questions about these other liners. “After serious consideration it seemed the kindest way to be perfectly frank and give the one reply possible,” Lightoller explained later, when justifying why he told survivors that if someone had not made it to the Carpathia then there was no hope. “What kindness was there in holding out a hope, knowing full well that there was not even the shadow of hope. Cold comfort, and possibly cruel, but I could see no help for it.”⁵

Since picking up the Titanic’s distress call and rushing to the disaster site, the Carpathia’s passengers and crew had organized themselves to help the influx of émigrés as best they could. As Jack and his mother talked,

somebody gave me a coffee cup full of brandy. It was the first drink of an alcoholic beverage I had ever had. It warmed as though I had put hot coals in my stomach, and did more too. A man kindly loaned me his pajamas and his bunk, then my wet clothes were taken to be dried, and with the help of the brandy I went to sleep till almost noon. I got up feeling fit and well, just as though nothing bad had happened. After putting on my clothes, which were entirely dry, I hurried out to look for Mother. We were then passing to the south of a solid ice field, which I was told was over twenty miles long and four miles wide. I found that Captain Arthur H. Rostron, Commander of the “CARPATHIA,” of the Cunard Line, had given up his cabin to my Mother, Mrs. George D. Widener, and Mrs. John Jacob Astor. I slept on the floor of the cabin every night until we reached New York.⁶

One account claimed later that when he first woke up on the Carpathia, Jack pitifully assured his mother as she hovered over him that he had endeavored to be brave, or, as he allegedly put it, “I tried to play the man.”⁷ What Jack had seen and endured in the hours between escape and rescue had been horrific enough to haunt him for the rest of his life. As his overturned lifeboat had reached capacity, he had seen men beaten away with oars and Second Officer Lightoller pleading with those seeking to climb on, “It’s thirty-one lives against yours. You can’t come aboard. There’s not room.”⁸ Collapsible B had been so close to the site of the Titanic’s final plunge that she was also at the heart of the anguish that followed: it took the only other lifeboat that eventually returned to try to rescue those in the water nearly half an hour to row twenty yards, so thick had the field of bodies become—a sight “enough to break the stoutest heart” according to one of the sailors.⁹ On his boat, Jack had cradled Harold Bride, the Titanic’s only surviving wireless operator, and had tried to keep Bride’s feet out of the water when he realized they had already started to succumb to frostbite. It is possible that Bride’s colleague Jack Phillips, who had also stayed at his post until the power failed, was one of those who died on their lifeboat and then slid into the sea.¹⁰ Jack Thayer saw John Collins, a crew member from Belfast who had helped prepare meals for the first-class Dining Saloon and, at seventeen, Jack’s contemporary, shivering meekly in the water, waiting for somebody to die so he could take their place on the boat.¹¹ One of those who, like Jack, had made it to the overturned boat before it became too crowded was the Strauses’ shipboard friend Colonel Gracie, who witnessed “one transcendent piece of heroism that will remain fixed in my memory as the most sublime and coolest exhibition of courage and cheerful resignation to fate and fearlessness of death.” It came from a man who swam to their lifeboat and asked to be helped up, but, when told he might capsize them, Gracie and other eyewitnesses remembered the “deep manly voice of a powerful man, who, in his extremity, replied: ‘All right, boys; good luck and God bless you.’ ” The man swam off without further comment to his death, and a rumor arose later that it had been Captain Smith, although Gracie, who knew the Captain, was emphatic that it had not been: “He was not an acquaintance of mine, for the tones of his voice would have enabled me to recognize him.”¹² “During all this time,” Jack wrote in his memoirs, “nobody dared to move, for we did not know at what moment our perilous support might overturn, throwing us all into the sea.”¹³

Lifeboat 8, one of the lifeboats which Ida had refused to enter, carries her maid Ellen and the Countess of Rothes to the Carpathia.

From where he was clutched by a kneeling, terrified Jack, Harold Bride gave them some good news—that, of all the ships they had managed to contact by wireless after the collision, one of them, the Cunard Line’s Carpathia, was close enough to reach them by about four o’clock that morning.¹⁴ Another moment of comfort arrived when the group, in Colonel Gracie’s words, elected to say the Lord’s Prayer and “our voices with one accord burst forth in repeating that great appeal to the Creator and Preserver of all mankind, and the only prayer that everyone of us knew and could unite in, thereby manifesting that we were all sons of God and brothers to each other whatever our sphere in life or creed might be.”¹⁵

In the succeeding hours, Jack had narrowly missed an earlier reunion with his mother. As the weather shed its previous calm, the upturned collapsible pitched in the revived waves, allowing air to leak out from under the boat, which thus settled further into the water. Second Officer Lightoller organized the men into two rows and subsequently called out orders for them to lean in different directions to help steady the craft, which they all obeyed. Two lifeboats, numbers 4 and 12, later came by in time to help empty Collapsible B, and in the dark neither Marian, who was in Lifeboat 4, nor Jack, who was helped into 12, realized they had been so close to one another.¹⁶ Also moved into boat 12 were the ailing wireless operator Harold Bride, Colonel Gracie, and another first-class passenger, the Yorkshire landowner Algernon Barkworth, who sat next to Gracie in their new boat with a blanket, gifted by a female survivor, over their knees and a corpse, another victim of hypothermia, next to them.¹⁷ Gracie was moved by Barkworth’s kindness and thought his “tender heart is creditable to his character.”¹⁸ For his part, Barkworth was impressed by Jack, describing him in an interview given later that year as a “clear-cut chap.”¹⁹ Jack had initially been intimidated by the stokers and sailors on the now abandoned boat B, a view which he had discarded in the course of the morning, explaining later that “they surely were a grimy, wiry, dishevelled hard looking lot. Under the surface they were brave human beings, with generous and charitable hearts.”²⁰ Along with his first sip of alcohol, that night was also Jack’s first time of prolonged contact with anyone outside his own class, with the exception of his family’s servants.²¹

By the time Jack emerged from his first sleep in twenty-four hours, a short service of thanksgiving and prayer had been led by one of the Carpathia’s passengers, an Anglican clergyman.²² It had temporarily soothed some of the passengers, and while they were thus occupied belowdecks, it enabled the Carpathia’s Captain Rostron to conduct one last search of the vicinity, after which he slowly navigated his ship away from the ice field and turned her back towards New York.²³ It was to the credit of Rostron’s passengers that none apparently objected to their trip being postponed by this return to their point of origin. The Carpathia’s passengers behaved as beautifully as possible to the Titanic’s survivors, offering up cabins and clothes. They were soon aided by some of the Titanic’s surviving stewards, who, although they were no longer technically employed, began “looking after the passengers as though on our own ship.”²⁴ Public rooms were cleared to become dormitories. Over forty years later, Bertha Watt, then a twelve-year-old survivor from the Titanic’s Second Class, told the historian and novelist Walter Lord that it was on the Carpathia that “I learned a great deal of the fundamentals I have built a happy life on, such as faith, hope, and charity.”²⁵

At about four o’clock that afternoon, the bodies of several of those who had died in the lifeboats or shortly after boarding the Carpathia were buried at sea.²⁶ Among them was first-class passenger William Hoyt, a businessman from Ohio, who had been one of the few victims heavy enough to survive in the waters for any length of time.²⁷ He had been hauled from the ocean almost an hour after the Titanic disappeared. Even then, he had been retrieved bleeding from his mouth and nose and died within a few moments of being rescued.²⁸ Two of those buried in the same ceremony as Hoyt were almost certainly the swimmers who had made it, “raving and delirious,” into Marian Thayer’s lifeboat, where they had expired next to an unconscious crew member who, when he came to, understandably began screaming.²⁹ From the Carpathia’s rails, the bodies in their canvas shrouds were committed to the sea with the traditional words:

For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God to take unto Himself the soul of our dear brother departed, we therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned to corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body (when the sea shall give up her dead) and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who at His coming shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto His glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby He is able to subdue all things to himself.³⁰

Between the service of thanksgiving and the first of the Titanic funerals, a roll call was taken of the survivors. The stewardess Violet Jessop, who had greeted the Strauses on their first day on board, realized at the name-gathering that “dear Tommy Andrews” was not on the list of survivors; neither were the Strauses, nor “the good doctor,” O’Loughlin. She called the roll call “the saddest search it has ever been my lot to witness.”³¹ For Jack and his mother, it confirmed too that his father was dead. It confirmed that their family friend Emily Ryerson had lost her husband as they had sailed home for the funeral of their eldest son. The other two Society women with whom Jack and Marian now shared a cabin had also been bereaved—Eleanor Widener, the Thayers’ host at the dinner party held the night before in the Titanic’s Restaurant, had lost her husband and her son; Madeleine Astor, only a year older than Jack, had become a pregnant widow with her arm badly hurt from boarding the lifeboats.

The scenes of distress throughout the Carpathia are painful enough to read about; to have lived through them borders on the unimaginable. Tennis champion Karl Behr considered that although “the sinking of the Titanic was dreadful, to my mind the four days among the sufferers on the Carpathia was much worse and more difficult to try and forget.”³² During his time in the lifeboats, when Behr had struggled to warm the feet of the woman he subsequently married, another passenger sitting next to them nudged him and showed him a gun from his coat, then whispered, “Should the worst come to the worst, you can use this revolver for your wife, after my wife and I have finished with it.”³³ The man speaking to Behr was calm and his offer reflects the despair rampant in most of the lifeboats between the sinking and the first sighting of the Carpathia. Yet even the rescue that spared them from dying adrift offered horrible scenes to the survivors. An acquaintance of Jack Thayer’s, Richard Norris Williams, who was preparing to start his first semester at Harvard that autumn, was begging the Carpathia’s doctors not to amputate his legs. He had felt fine when he climbed on board, but within a day his frostbite was so bad that the physicians told him that both of his legs needed to be removed. They eventually yielded to the patient’s wishes and, in time, Williams made a full recovery, offering one of the few happiness-tinged epilogues from the Carpathia.³⁴ Elsewhere on board, an Irish passenger from Third Class, with strands of her hair still frozen together, lay on the deck, eschewing the offer of a cabin since the hard floor was the only way to ease the pain in her back.³⁵ Some women had emerged from hours in the lifeboats with their lips cracked and bleeding from the cold and the ocean spray.³⁶ At least two widowed passengers threatened to commit suicide; another, a young Swedish woman, who had been traveling in Second Class with her fiancé and her brother, realized she had lost them both, and wrote to her uncle, “I would have been glad if I had been permitted to die, because life no longer has any value for me since I lost my beloved.”³⁷ An Italian child from Third Class was taken to the Carpathia’s airing cupboard to try to warm him up, prompting panic in his confused mother, who thought she had lost him.³⁸

A British survivor, Charlotte Collyer, had a chunk of hair pulled from her head so violently it had left her scalp bleeding; she had caught her hair on one of the lifeboat’s oar locks, yet did not feel the pain until she reached the Carpathia.³⁹ Like many widowed mothers, she was struggling to deal with her own sudden grief while explaining to her children what had happened. Another former second-class passenger, Sylvia Caldwell, had already witnessed Charlotte Collyer’s attempts in the lifeboat to explain to her seven-year-old daughter, Marjorie:

[The child] leaned over to her mother and said, “Mother, do you think daddy is alright? Do you think he is safe in a boat?” And the mother answered, “I don’t know, darling, but I hope so.” “Mother,” said Marjorie, “do you think if I pray to Jesus it would help daddy?” And the trembling lips of the mother said, “Yes, dear, I am sure it would.” She put up her dear little hands and asked God to save her daddy. Her prayer was not answered on earth, but I feel sure that she will find her father saved in that bright Beyond.⁴⁰

Not everyone was comforted by their religion. Irene Harris, the Broadway producer’s wife who still had her arm in a sling from her Saturday-afternoon fall on the Titanic’s Grand Staircase, remembered that, as her lifeboat left the liner, the Strauses had called out to her, “God go with you,” but once on the Carpathia, widowed and in shock, she thought, “No, God is not with me. He is with you and my beloved.… He too went down on the Titanic.”⁴¹ Whether she meant God or her husband is unclear.

One of the Carpathia’s passengers, en route to a holiday in the Mediterranean, was John A. Badenoch, a buyer for Macy’s, who received a telegram from one of Ida’s sons, Percy, asking him to find out what he could about Percy’s parents, who were also Badenoch’s employers. Badenoch had first approached the Titanic’s Third Officer, Herbert Pitman, to confirm that the lifeboats picked up by the Carpathia were indeed the only ones that had made it from the Titanic:

When I stated my reason for knowing and insisted on an answer, he told me that all the boats had been accounted for and that in his judgement there was almost no hope for those who were not already rescued. Thinking possibly that your father and mother had been taken aboard and I had missed them, I covered the entire ship from bow to stern, and searched the saloon, second and steerage. Also looked in every stateroom, irrespective of its occupants so that I could satisfy myself beyond doubt whether or not they were aboard.⁴²

Badenoch then circulated among the survivors, attempting to find out what had happened to the Strauses, and eventually he located Ida’s maid, Ellen Bird, still wearing the fur coat Ida had given her just before she left. She was the only one of their party of four who had survived; Isidor’s valet, John Farthing, had also perished, although information about his final few hours alive was scanty.

Upon waking from her faint, the Countess of Rothes had taken some broth and sent her maid to order two telegrams, which could be sent once the congestion in sending had cleared—one to request an update on the health of her son Malcolm and another to her parents in France, informing them that she had survived.⁴³ After that, she worked with the other survivors. The Countess had kept her promise to the bridegroom on deck who had asked her to look after his wife, and she kept a traumatized María-Josefa de Peñasco close to her throughout the voyage.⁴⁴ Watching the grief of María-Josefa and others unfold around them, Lady Rothes and Gladys Cherry felt deep gratitude that they had not been traveling with any male relatives.⁴⁵ The Countess volunteered her services as a nurse, utilizing the training she had received a few months earlier from the Red Cross, and Gladys admitted that the Countess was relieved to be busy over the next three days:

I think we all feel a little better this morning. We, that are so fortunate, having lost no one; but all the poor women’s faces are piteous to see; yesterday morning I was very busy with a Ship’s Bosun, cutting out garments for the Steerage and Second Class children, some of whom had no [day] clothes at all, we made little coats and leggings out of the blankets.

Then I went round the Steerage and Hospitals with the Doctor, who is a charming man, and he said a cheery face and word did so much for them, our Titanic men most of them with legs and feet frozen are wonderful when you think what they have been through.… If only you could imagine how we long for land—This water all round is terrible, and one’s nerves now seem worse than on that dreadful night. The Doctor gave me a little Bromide last night and I slept a little better, but one wakens terrified, which is very silly, as we have nothing to grumble at in comparison with the poor widows. Oh it is too dreadful to see them. Noëlle and I have helped in seeing after these poor distressed souls, and it has helped us, so much.

Gladys added:

I dread the voyage back [to England] again.… All the crew, Captain, passengers, and stewards are perfectly sweet to us; there are two little French children 3 years and 20 months old, who have lost their father and I take one of them every day for a bit while the mother rests.

I love to do something, as it stops one thinking. I hope we shan’t have another accident in this fog—Noëlle’s poor maid is very sick, she was sick all the way from Cherbourg but she behaved splendidly in the boat that night.⁴⁶

The third-class section for survivors on the Carpathia. It is almost certain that the lady seated and sewing in the center is the Countess of Rothes.

Many passengers had left the Titanic in their evening attire or pajamas and soon, despite the generosity of the Carpathia’s contingent, there was a clothes shortage for survivors.⁴⁷ Gladys, along with several other women, including Daisy Spedden, a Tuxedo Park resident, attempted to tackle that want.⁴⁸ Wrote Spedden, “Yesterday was spent in cutting up blankets and making garments for the women and children and loads of clothes have been ordered by wireless from the N.Y. Stores. I feel so sorry for the five officers rescued from our ship, for people are questioning them to death and criticising everything that was done, but the more sane passengers are going to do their utmost to contradict any statements derogatory to officers and crew, for they are a noble lot and did their very best.” She also recorded the most viciously amoral comments overheard by “the more sane passengers”: “We spend our time sitting on people who are cruel enough to say that no steerage should have been saved, as if they weren’t human beings!”⁴⁹ In deference to US immigration laws, the Carpathia’s crew attempted to separate the third-class survivors from the others, a policy at which Lady Rothes seems to have taken umbrage and which she disregarded, since most of her time during that voyage was spent helping third-class passengers.⁵⁰ Second Officer Charles Lightoller was particularly impressed by her actions, remembering the Countess as “one of the foremost amongst those trying to carry comfort to others.”⁵¹

Of all the hideous tragedies encountered by Lady Rothes between April 15 and 18, few were more obviously painful than that of third-class passenger Rhoda Abbott, a thirty-nine-year-old Salvation Army member from Buckinghamshire, who had left an abusive marriage with her two teenaged sons, sixteen-year-old Rossmore and eleven-year-old Eugene.⁵² When she reached the Carpathia, Rhoda had been taken to the ship’s hospital, where she had been treated for hypothermia, leg contusions, burns, frostbite, and shock.⁵³ She had stayed on board after her elder son, because of his strength and maturity, was judged a man by the Titanic’s crew and refused entry to the lifeboats.⁵⁴ The family had been swept overboard and Rhoda had felt her youngest son’s hand slip from her own.⁵⁵ Both boys had perished. Even decades later, one of the Countess’s grandsons told the historian Randy Bryan Bigham that the memory of what had happened to the Abbott family had pained his grandmother, who also became worried that since Rhoda was “very poor” and their tickets had apparently been paid for by their church congregation, there might be no one to greet her or care for her when they reached New York.⁵⁶

That arrival was postponed by the weather, which deteriorated further after Monday the 15th. On the night of Tuesday the 16th, they encountered a “most awful thunder storm” and the sound made one passenger scream that distress rockets were being released.⁵⁷ Gladys Cherry was not the only survivor to request a sedative to help her sleep. As the storm gave way to “a dense fog” on the 17th, the Carpathia slowed again and fear of a second accident settled over many survivors.⁵⁸ During the purgatorial wait, rumors, often contradictory, spread among the survivors, one of whom admitted later that, initially, “I did not think for a moment that any passengers had remained on the ship” when it sank.⁵⁹ Some had initially believed the sounds of the screams they heard in the minutes afterwards had been crew members. Now that the truth dawned that “there has probably never been a bigger disaster at sea,” some claimed that nearly two thousand had been lost; others that “not more than 100 out of the 3,000” had lived.⁶⁰ The Countess and Gladys heard a rumor that Captain Smith had been trying to take the Blue Riband; they also heard that he had shot himself moments before the Titanic disappeared.⁶¹ Both were untrue. Stories circulated that there had been more lifeboats, some of which had capsized, drowning everybody on board.⁶² The news that many had died since being rescued was running alongside gossip that Colonel Astor, Major Butt, and George Widener had entered into a murder-suicide pact during the ship’s final moments, that Captain Smith had jumped only to swim back to die at his post, that one of the senior officers, Wilde or Murdoch, had committed suicide on deck.⁶³ It was the reports of ice warnings received and a speed unreduced that began to turn the mood from wounded credulity to anger at “such reckless waste of lives.”⁶⁴ On the 16th, a committee of survivors, consisting mainly of second-class passengers, was formed. A member reported: “Yesterday we stated our case before a committee of ladies and gentlemen, who intend to get as much as possible from the White Star Company.”⁶⁵

Feelings also hardened against many of the male survivors. Margaret Brown told a journalist later that “the attitude of the men who were rescued was indeed pathetic. Each and all seemed as though they were trying to efface themselves when they were encountered passing to and fro. It was noticed how they all tried to explain how it came about like a miracle that their lives were saved, with an expression of apology as though it were a blight on their manhood.”⁶⁶ A yachtsman who had been asked by Lightoller to help with one of the lifeboats, and whose life was subsequently ruined by accusations that he had disguised himself as a woman in order to escape, approached Lightoller on the Carpathia and asked for an affidavit, which the officer provided, stating, “Major Arthur Peuchen was ordered into the boat by me, owing to the fact that I required a seaman, which he proved himself to be, as well as a brave man. C. H. Lightoller, Second Officer late S.S. Titanic.”⁶⁷ When Dr. Henry Frauenthal, a New York–based surgeon, came to check on Irene Harris’s arm—he had helped the late Dr. O’Loughlin set it after her fall on Saturday—he began to discuss how he had escaped the Titanic, at which point Irene brutally told him, “I wouldn’t have my husband back at the cost of a woman’s life.”⁶⁸ Other male survivors, admittedly, did nothing to endear themselves to the freshly bereaved widows. Alfred Nourney, the Dutch citizen traveling under the pseudonym of a German nobleman, went to the Carpathia’s Smoking Room, where he lay down on a pile of blankets, using them as a comfortable bed for himself. When a woman asked him to move so that she could wrap herself in some of the blankets, he refused and she shouted at him, “To think of it: the like of you saved and women left to drown; shame on you.” She then yanked a blanket from beneath Nourney, causing him to roll on the floor and bystanders to cheer so loudly that he retreated from the room.⁶⁹

Men like Colonel Gracie, Algernon Barkworth, and Jack Thayer, those who had jumped and survived rather than leaving in one of the lifeboats, were generally spared the opprobrium gathering around the others. In Jack’s case, the story of his escape had already been heard and repeated by other survivors. Margaret Brown described him as “one of the heroes on board.… While swimming, he was drawn twice under the keel by the suction.” Brown also noticed how Marian Thayer juxtaposed grief at losing her husband with joy at her son’s survival, and “in her great thankfulness in having one spared her, for the rest of the voyage not more than a few minutes at a time would she permit him to be separate from her.”⁷⁰ Marian did, however, allow, and perhaps even encourage, a temporary separation when Jack went to check on the mental well-being of Bruce Ismay. They were nearing New York when the Carpathia’s doctor called on the Thayers, expressing his worry about Ismay, who had described the Thayers as his friends. In the years ahead, no figure was to suffer more from the resentment against male survivors than Bruce Ismay; even Maggie Brown, who expressed sympathy for the other gentlemen who had lived, was revolted by Ismay, referring to his cabin on the Carpathia as “the quarters of the secluded plutocrat.”⁷¹ Having helped with loading the earlier lifeboats, Ismay had escaped in one of the last and arrived on the Carpathia in a state that bordered on the catatonic. The ship’s doctor, Dr. Frank McGee, had approached him at that point and asked him, “Will you not go into the saloon and get some soup, or something to drink?” Ismay answered, “No, I really do not want anything at all.” “Do go and get something.” Ismay again refused: “If you will leave me alone I will be very much happier here. If you will get me some room where I can be quiet, I wish you would.” The doctor found a cabin for him, where he stayed until they reached New York, eating nothing but soup, repeating over and over again to Charles Lightoller “that he ought to have gone down with the ship because he found that women had gone down.”⁷²

This was the state, “the terribly nervous condition,” in which Ismay was found by Jack on Thursday the 18th:

As there was no answer to my knock, I went right in. He was seated, in his pajamas, on his bunk, staring straight ahead, shaking all over like a leaf. My entrance apparently did not dawn on his consciousness. Even when I spoke to him and tried to engage him in conversation, telling him that he had a perfect right to take the last boat, he paid absolutely no attention and continued to look ahead with his fixed stare.… I have never seen a man so completely wrecked. Nothing I could do or say brought any response. As I closed the door, he was still looking fixedly ahead.⁷³

Lady Rothes found relief in being useful, both in Lifeboat 8 and on the Carpathia. Four decades later, in her correspondence with a historian, she remembered, “All on board the Carpathia were wonderful to us & there was a lot to do for the orphaned children.… Of course I made various friends on the Carpathia. Capt. Rostron was a wonderful man. Also the ship’s Dr.”⁷⁴ For others, like Dorothy Gibson, the voyage from the disaster site to New York was spent more quietly. After their lifeboat had reached the Carpathia, Dorothy was standing on the deck, still wearing the evening gown she had worn to her last dinner on the Titanic, when a couple approached her to offer their cabin for her use and her mother’s. There, as Dorothy remembered it, “I was so tired I slept twenty six hours.”⁷⁵ She emerged in time to see her former lifeboat companion Alfred Nourney unceremoniously hurled from his monopolization of the blankets and to listen to the stories of other survivors.⁷⁶ Generally, however, she concentrated on trying to get a telegram through to her lover, Jules Brulatour. The Carpathia’s operator was under so much pressure that Harold Bride had hauled himself from the hospital to assist him with the flow of outbound and inbound telegrams. One of the few incoming messages that was directly answered was from President Taft, seeking information about Major Butt, to which the Carpathia’s chief purser authorized the terse reply, “Not on board.”⁷⁷ Eventually, a telegram arrived for Dorothy, which Brulatour signed off with their shared nickname for him: “Will be worried to death till I hear from you, what awful agony, Julie.” On the last day of the trip, Dorothy’s reply got through: “Safe, picked up by Carpathia, don’t worry, Dorothy” was received by Brulatour.⁷⁸

With the approach to New York, some of those who had been emigrating on the Titanic tried to adjust to the horrible fact that most of their earthly possessions had been lost. Huddled on the floor of one of the dining saloons, an American passenger overheard one immigrant say, “I have nothing in the world and I have no place to go since my husband is lost. But I am not afraid. I have always heard that the Americans were the kindest people in the world.” Another suggested, “Never mind, I never saw an American who didn’t have a big heart. I am sure they will take good care of us.” In a letter penned a few days later, the lady listening to them wrote, “I think I was never so proud that I was an American as then.”⁷⁹ Their faith seemed to be justified by a telegram received by the Carpathia stating that the requirement to disembark immigrants at Ellis Island had been waived for the Titanic’s survivors. The United States Commissioner for Immigration had also sent a handwritten note to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor announcing his intention to “supervise the work of caring for them.… This is likely to be a terrible night.”⁸⁰

They arrived late on Thursday the 18th, in a torrential downpour.⁸¹ As the Carpathia approached the harbor, strange flares went off from the impromptu flotilla of small boats that had sped out to meet her; the flares were lit to help newspaper photographers get snaps of the survivors lining the decks. One journalist even made it on board the Carpathia, using the rope ladder dropped for the harbor pilot, but he was apprehended and detained on the Bridge before he could question any of the survivors. Nearly ten thousand people stared in confusion as the Carpathia passed her designated Pier 54 and steamed to the White Star Line’s Pier 59, where she slowly, eerily unloaded the thirteen empty white lifeboats, returning them to their owners.^I The Carpathia then returned to Pier 54, where the crowd was swelling to thirty thousand. The Mayor of New York and the city’s Police Commissioner had authorized a heavy police presence to control the curious. Mrs. Virginia Fair Vanderbilt had persuaded her socialite friends to donate their cars to help transport survivors to wherever they needed to go in New York. The Municipal Lodging House, the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army had already offered lodgings. Donations were pouring in to relief funds to help the immigrant survivors. White Star had promised to pay for railway tickets for any third-class passengers to reach their final US destination or tickets on White Star ships back to Europe, if they preferred. Thirty-five ambulances had lined up nearby, sent gratis from every hospital in Manhattan.⁸²

The survivors were disembarked in order of class.⁸³ A weeping Dorothy and her mother, Pauline, flung themselves into the arms of Dorothy’s stepfather, Leonard, who had joined the throng of worried relatives at the Cunard docks. Pauline’s sister, Dorothy’s agent, an actress colleague called Muriel Ostriche, and several of Pauline’s friends from Hoboken First Baptist had accompanied Leonard to the dock and witnessed the reunion. When a young porter approached offering to help them with their luggage, Pauline told him they had saved nothing, which prompted Leonard to give the boy a tip anyway, saying, “But they are saved, my child. Praise God!” He immediately took them away to a nearby hotel restaurant, to reunite with other friends. Muriel had brought a change of clothes for them.⁸⁴ Jack joined his mother, her maid, and any surviving friends from their home county who had been offered a place on their private railway carriage, which took them home to Pennsylvania. In a telegram she had sent to make the arrangements, Marian had issued the instruction, “Let anybody meet us but not children. My hope [is] gone.”⁸⁵ She still could not face breaking the news to her other children—fifteen-year-old Frederick, thirteen-year-old Margaret, and eleven-year-old Pauline. Lady Rothes did not disembark with the other first-class passengers, instead opting to stay with Rhoda Abbott until the Salvation Army came to provide help and a home for her.⁸⁶ She then left with Gladys, Cissy, and María-Josefa de Peñasco. They seem to have spent at least a night at the Great Northern Hotel, but within a day or two they had relocated to the Ritz, where they were reunited with Lord Rothes, who had traveled to New York upon reading of the Titanic’s sinking, and with Gladys’s brother, Charles.⁸⁷ Their walk along the pier, away from the Carpathia, was an unpleasant one, through anxious relations and volunteer medical staff. For many, the worst part was the journalists, who even swarmed around the pregnant Madeleine Astor, trying to get her to confirm whether her husband was alive or not, despite the fact she was so overwhelmed she had to be helped into the car on her sister’s arm.⁸⁸ The fashion correspondent Edith Rosenbaum, who disembarked with the other survivors, remembered for the rest of her life how “the cannonade of flashes from photographers’ lamps as we went into the street seemed a cruelly inappropriate thing.”⁸⁹

I. Damaged lifeboats and the collapsibles had been set adrift after their passengers were rescued by the Carpathia.