I Survived True Stories: Five Epic Disasters
Page 3
stood what was really happening on the Titanic , it
was the man who knew the ship inside and out.
And the truth was terrifying. The iceberg’s
jagged fingers had clawed through the steel hull.
Water was gushing into the ship’s lower levels.
“The Titanic will sink,” Andrews said. “We have
one hour.”
That, though, was only half of the horrifying
story. As Jack would soon learn, the Titanic had
twenty lifeboats. That was more than the law
required. But it was only enough for about half of
the passengers and crew. Looking around the
ship, he knew that many of the passengers were
doomed. The Titanic was eight hundred miles
from New York. The temperature of the ocean
was 28 degrees Fahrenheit. Immersed in water
that cold, a human body goes into shock almost
immediately. The heart slows. The skin begins to
freeze. Death comes within eighty minutes.
For those who couldn’t escape by lifeboat, there
was almost no hope of survival.
LOST IN THE CROWD
Jack put on a warm wool suit and a sweater. He
tied on his life preserver and slipped into his
overcoat, and then he rushed back up to the deck
with his parents. What they found was confusion
and noise — people shouting, rockets being fired
into the air. Jack was with his parents and his
mother’s maid, Margaret Fleming. A young man
named Milton Long, whom Jack had befriended
at dinner earlier that night, soon joined them.
The group made their way through the ship,
hoping to find a lifeboat.
Suddenly they were in the middle of a crowd
of panicked passengers. To Jack’s horror, he
and Milton were separated from his parents and
Margaret. He searched desperately but could not
find them. He became convinced that they had
all boarded a lifeboat, leaving him behind. And
there were no lifeboats left.
Jack and Milton were on their own.
Amid the noise and panic, the screams and
shouts and explosions, Jack and Milton tried to
bolster each other’s courage as the ship continued
to sink. “I sincerely pitied myself,” Jack said, “but
we did not give up hope.”
They decided that their best chance for survival
was to wait until the ship was low enough in the
water that they could jump in without injuring
themselves. This would be difficult. Already the
water around the ship was filled with chairs and
objects that had slid off the sinking ship. If Jack
hit something on his way down, he could be
knocked unconscious. But Jack tried not to think
about that as he waited for the right time.
That moment came at about 2:15 a.m. The ship
lurched forward, its bow plunging deeper into the
black waters of the Atlantic. Jack and Milton
shook hands and wished each other luck.
Milton went first, climbing over the railing and
sliding down the side of the ship. Jack would
never see him again.
Jack threw off his overcoat and, he later said,
“With a push of my arms and hands, [I] jumped
into the water as far out from the ship as I could. . . .
Down, down I went, spinning in all directions.”
He struggled to the surface, gasping from the cold,
his lungs near bursting. He had been floating for
only a few minutes when one of the ship’s enormous
funnels broke free. In a shower of sparks and black
smoke, it crashed into the water just twenty feet from
Jack. The suction pulled him under the water once
again. This time he barely made it back up.
But as he surfaced, his hand hit something —
an overturned lifeboat. Four men were balancing
on its flat bottom. One of them helped Jack up.
From there, they watched the Titanic in its final
agonizing moments — the stern rising high into
the sky, hundreds of people dropping into the
sea, the lights finally going out.
Then, in a moment of eerie quiet, the ship
disappeared into the dark water.
“A WAILING CHANT”
The silence was broken by the first frantic cries
for help. People — hundreds of them — were
scattered everywhere in the water, kept afloat by
their life vests. The individual cries became “a
continuous wailing chant” of terror and pain and
desperation, Jack said.
Over the next few minutes, he and the others
on the lifeboat managed to pull twenty-four men
out of the water alive. The group was “packed
like sardines” on the boat, their arms and legs
tangled together. Freezing waves washed over them.
Nobody moved for fear of slipping into the water.
A photographer on the
Carpathia
captures
Titanic
survivors
huddled on a lifeboat.
Little by little, the terrible wailing faded.
Floating in the silent blackness, numb with
cold and terror, Jack waited for death.
But then came a light — at 4:10 a.m., a ship
called the Carpathia broke through the darkness.
Its captain had received the Titanic’s distress call
and rushed his ship through the icy waters.
Among the first faces Jack saw when he boarded
the rescue ship was his mother’s. Margaret was
also aboard.
The joy of their reunion was overwhelming —
but so was the shock when Jack’s mother asked a
simple question.
“Where is your father?”
As it turned out, Mr. Thayer had not boarded a
lifeboat.
“Of course, I should have known that he would
never have left without me,” Jack later said.
The Carpathia , carrying the Titanic’s 705 grief-
stricken survivors, docked in New York City on
April 18, and was greeted by a crowd of thirty
thousand people. For months after, the Titanic
was front-page news. People around the world
demanded answers. How could the mighty
Titanic be lost? Who was to blame? There was no
doubt that Titanic ’s crew knew that there were
icebergs looming in the North Atlantic. Indeed,
they had received several urgent warnings from
ships traveling the same route. And yet the ship
had been traveling at high speeds. Many wondered
if the ship’s captain, Edward Smith, had felt
A newsboy,
Ned Parfett,
holds a paper
announcing
the sinking
of the
Titanic
.
pressure to make the voyage as speedy as possible,
to showcase Titanic’s state-of-the-art engines. But
Captain Smith went down with his ship, as
did Mr. Andrews and other senior members of
the crew.
And so in the end, many directed their fury
toward a man named Bruce Ismay. He was the
president of the company that owned the Titanic,
the White St
ar Line. Ismay had been on the ship’s
doomed voyage. Unlike Titanic’s captain and Mr.
Andrews, Mr. Ismay had escaped on a lifeboat.
Ismay was accused of
ordering Captain Smith
to ignore the iceberg
risks. Some reports even
suggested that he had
pushed aside women
and children to take a
precious spot on a
lifeboat. There was
no proof of any of this.
Edward J. Smith,
captain of the
Titanic
Ismay denied that he’d pressured Captain Smith
to ignore the iceberg warnings. And those who
knew Captain Smith doubted that the respected
seaman would knowingly endanger his ship and
passengers. Ismay insisted that the lifeboat he’d
boarded had been half-empty, and witnesses
supported this. In fact, many saw Ismay helping
women and children onto the boats, and assisting
the crew in lowering the boats into the sea. The
British government cleared Ismay of any wrong-
doing. But his reputation never recovered, and he
was forever branded a coward.
After docking in New York, Jack and his
mother returned to Philadelphia. He wrote a long
letter to the parents of Milton Long, describing
their friendship and their last moments together.
Jack went on to marry, have two sons, and attain a
powerful position at the University of Pennsylvania.
Years later he wrote his own account of the
sinking of the Titanic, dedicated to his father’s
memory. In it he described his last glimpse of the
ship, breaking in two as it sank. Most experts
disputed this. But many decades later, when the
wreckage of the Titanic was finally located, Jack’s
account was proven correct.
Today, more than one hundred years after the
ship’s sinking, stories of its survivors still fascinate
and inspire. In this way the mighty ship sails on.
The
New York Times
describes the
Titanic
disaster
and provides a partial list of those saved.
Said to be Jack Thayer’s description of the
Titanic
’s
sinking, sketched by Thayer and filled in later by
L. P. Skidmore
11:45 p.m. Strikes starboard bow
12:05 a.m. Settles by head
12:45 a.m. Boats ordered out
1:40 a.m. Settles to forward stack
Breaks between stacks
1:50 A.M. Forward end floats, then sinks
2:00 A.M. Stern section pivots amidships and
swings over spot where forward section sank
Last position in which
Titanic
stayed, five minutes
before the final plunge
L. P. Skidmore, S.S.
Carpathia
, April 15, 1912
THE
TITANIC
FILES
There are more books written about the
Titanic than any other disaster in history, and
I read dozens of them while researching my
book, I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic,
1912. That’s when I first discovered the story
of Jack Thayer — plus many other amazing
facts and details about the ship and its tragic
voyage. Turn the page to find out more.
Saved
from the
wreckage!
The
Titanic
used 800
tons a
day of
this
!
The ship cost $7.5 million to build. That equals
$185 million in today’s dollars, about the same
price as building one Boeing 767 jet.
Titanic’s top speed was 23 knots, which is 26
miles per hour. Today’s cruise ships can move
much faster, but most actually maintain speeds that are slower
than the Titanic’s, about 22 knots. The reason? Moving faster
burns more fuel, which costs more money.
Titanic was steam
powered. Steam was
created by burning massive amounts
of coal. It took two hundred
men — stokers, firemen, and
trimmers — to tend to the ship’s
162 coal furnaces. The ship
burned eight hundred tons of coal each day.
There were 1,317 passengers on
the ship, only about half as
many as there was room for. A strike of coal workers in
England had caused many people to postpone their travel plans.
The strike had ended only a few days before Titanic sailed.
COST
SPEED
POWER
PASSENGERS
SOME SURPRISING
TITANIC
FACTS
Coal
The most expensive
ticket was about
$4,500, equivalent to
about $103,000 in
today’s dollars. The
cheapest tickets cost
about $40, about $172
today — the same as it might cost
to fly today from New York to Miami.
The ship’s cargo included huge amounts of food
for the passengers and crew — 40 tons of
potatoes, 40,000 eggs, 6,000 apples, and 86,000 pounds of meat.
Eight hundred eighty-five people made up
Titanic’s crew. Sixty-six worked on the decks,
325 were in the engine room, and the rest were maids,
stewards, cooks, waiters, and others who tended to the
passengers.
The last letter written on
Titanic recently sold for
more than $200,000. It was written by survivors Esther Hart
and her seven-year-old daughter Eva eight hours before the
ship hit the iceberg. Mrs. Hart wrote that they were enjoying
“a wonderful journey.”
CREW
FOOD
LAST LETTER
A
first-class ticket
from the
Titanic
TICKET PRICE
Dr. Robert Ballard
FINDING
THE
TITANIC
The
Titanic
was
lost in the North
Atlantic, eight
hundred miles from
land. For decades
people searched for
the wreckage. Finally,
on September 2, 1985,
the
Titanic
was
found by Dr. Robert
Ballard.
TREASURE TROVE
OR GRAVEYARD?
Dr. Ballard and others believe that the
Titanic
should not have been touched — that it is a
graveyard. Others disagree. They say that
bacteria and salt water will slowly eat
away at what remains and that
artifacts should be collected and
studied. There have been eight
expeditions to the
Titanic
to collect
artifacts. RMS TITANIC Inc (RMTI)
has recovered more than 5,500 artifacts,
including some on the
next pages.
The bow of the
Titanic
, on the
ocean floor
Conti
nued
>
A pair of binoculars
TITANIC
’S PRICELESS
TREASURES
A bronze
ship’s bell
Some of the
thousands
of dishes
salvaged
from the
wreck were
not even
chipped.
Few people wore wristwatches.
Men carried pocket watches,
like this one.
Lockets were extremely
fashionable. Somehow,
the photograph inside
was not destroyed.
In 1912, glasses were
called
spectacles
.
YES OR
NO?
Should
Titanic
’s
artifacts be
salvaged, or
left alone?
#3
THE GREAT
BOSTON MOLASSES
FLOOD, 1919
It was a sunny January day in 1919, and eight-
year-old Anthony di Stasio hurried along a
crowded sidewalk in Boston’s North End. As
usual, the streets were packed with honking
motorcars and clattering horse-drawn wagons.
After weeks of freezing cold, the day was warm
and bright. Anthony’s tattered wool coat flapped
open as he rushed toward the tiny apartment
where he lived with his parents and four sisters.
Like most of the people who lived in this poor
Boston neighborhood, Anthony’s family had come
from southern Italy, eager to start a new and
happier life in America. What they found instead
was hardship. Jobs were scarce. Anthony’s father
worked long, bone-crushing hours on Boston’s
waterfront. Anthony’s mother struggled to make
their dingy apartment into a decent home — to
chase away the cockroaches, to cover up the stink
of garbage and horse manure that wafted up from
the streets. Life had always been tough for the
people of the North End. But the past two years
had been especially challenging for them — and
most Americans.
World War I had raged in Europe since 1914.
More than four million American soldiers had
joined the fight to defeat Germany and its allies.
For four years the fighting had dragged on.