Lifeboat No. 8

XV

They left Lifeboat No. 8 by climbing, one by one, onto a wooden seat two feet long and a foot wide that was suspended on vertical ropes that raised them to the deck. It must have seemed appropriate to them that seamen called this device a Jacob’s Ladder, named for the stairway to heaven described in the Book of Genesis. On the deck of the Carpathia, stewards wrapped them in blankets and offered tumblers of hot brandy, holding the glass to the lips of the many whose hands shook too much to grip it.

It took several hours to evacuate all the lifeboats, which were then set adrift or hoisted onto the Carpathia’s deck. There, wives sought their husbands, and children sought their fathers, and some rejoiced while others were forced to grapple with irredeemable loss and misery.

One of the first people Caroline Bonnell saw was Hugh Woolner, who had tried to persuade Isidor and Ida Straus to save themselves. She searched in vain for Washington Roebling, the cheerful protector who had put her into Lifeboat No. 8. Sarah Daniels looked for the Allisons, only to learn that they had not survived, and that her young charge, Helen Loraine, was the only child to be lost from first class or second class. Marie Grice Young looked for the kindly carpenter, John Hutchinson, but he was not to be found.

Nor was Mrs. White’s twenty-two-year-old manservant; nor Mr. Lambert-Williams, who had reassured the Countess that the watertight compartments would hold; nor the sad older gentleman who had told Roberta that something terrible was about to happen.

Mrs. Taussig, Mrs. Kenyon, and Mrs. Wick were frantic as they scanned the decks for their husbands, but they were three of the reasons the Carpathia had already been dubbed “the ship of widows.” Another widow was the young bride, Maria Penasco.

In the course of the morning, Mrs. Bucknell met up with Molly Brown, who had laughed at her several days before when she said she had “evil forebodings” about the voyage.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Mrs. Bucknell exclaimed. “I knew it.”

The sun was still rising when the Carpathia’s engines started up again, while high above the crowded deck, her house flag flew at half-mast. Can a ship move in a dignified manner? If so, the Carpathia was supremely dignified as she headed slowly toward the Titanic’s last position in search of any possible survivors. As they approached the site of the sinking, the Countess, Gladys, and Roberta stood at the rail, taking in the extraordinary sight: ice floes as far as the eye could see, and a field of icebergs—glassy, defiant, towering peaks standing up to two hundred feet high, glistening in the harsh morning light.

The Carpathia threaded its way through the ice until it reached the spot where, two and a half miles below, the Titanic lay in pieces on the ocean floor. There were no survivors to be found, only bits of wreckage. Caroline leaned over the rail and saw a man’s glove and a baby’s bonnet floating on the water.

As the Carpathia headed toward New York, the Countess sent Roberta to the wireless shack with messages for her parents and husband. There, helping the Carpathia’s operator, was Harold Bride, the Titanic’s assistant operator. His ankles, possibly broken, were swathed in heavy bandages, and his eyes were as dark and deadened as the tips of matchsticks whose flames had been blown out. It was from Harold that Roberta learned what had become of Jack.

After the sinking, Jack had clung to the same overturned boat that Harold held on to, a boat that had gone into the water upside down and become the refuge of the fifteen or so crew members who managed to reach it. Did Jack feel that he had failed when he heard the cries of the dying? We will never know. What can be said is that his hopes seemed to be high as he speculated, throughout the night, about ships—in addition to the Carpathia—that might be on the way. He had sent distress messages to ten ships in all, among them the Olympic, the Baltic, the Virginian, the Mount Temple, the Celtic, and the Asian, and he was certain that at any moment one of them—or perhaps all—would come to save the few who were still living.

But Jack Phillips had been “all done in” before the crisis occurred. At some point before the dawn broke, his heart gave out, and his voice was no longer heard.

“He was a brave man,” said Harold. “I learned to love him that night.”

XVI

The Carpathia’s passengers collected clothes for the survivors, many of whom preferred to remain in the dressing gowns and suits and cloaks they had been wearing when they came away from the Titanic, as if, by so doing, they could reverse time and return to life as it had been.

At night, the men slept on the smoking-room floor or on the decks while the women were given straw mattresses set side by side on the floors of the saloons and the library. The exceptions were Mrs. Astor, who remained cloistered in a suite a passenger had vacated for her, and Bruce Ismay, the chairman and managing director of the White Star Line, who also was given a suite and enough opiates to keep him sedated.

All but four of the 144 first-class women had been saved, along with three of the four children, but only 57 of the 175 men. The numbers were even grimmer in second class, where all 25 children survived but death had come to 13 of the 92 women and 135 of the 152 men; third class had lost 91 of 179 women, 55 of 80 children, and 381 of 440 men. These incontrovertible figures meant that days and nights aboard the Carpathia were filled with unquenchable grief and sobbing and praying.

Makeshift hospitals were set up in each of the Carpathia’s three dining rooms. There, English doctors attended first-class passengers; Italian doctors took care of passengers from second class, and Hungarian doctors cared for those who traveled in steerage. The Countess of Rothes and Gladys Cherry set aside their own sorrow by assisting them as they tended to the men, women, and children Gladys described as “these poor distressed souls.”

The Countess was one of few upper-class ladies to be trained as a nurse, which qualified her to apply braces and bandages and administer medications. Of the 908 crew members, 713 had been saved, and she gave special attention to those among them who had had to swim away from the ship and whose legs and feet were still frozen. “Our Titanic men are amazing,” Gladys exclaimed, “when you think of all they have been through.”

The two women also comforted children from steerage and second class, most of whom had lost at least one parent. Many had nothing to wear, so they cut up spare blankets and linens to fashion leggings and coats for them.

By the end of that first day on the Carpathia, the ship’s crew was marveling at the woman they dubbed “the plucky little Countess.”

“You have made yourself famous by rowing the boat,” a stewardess told her.

“I hope not,” the Countess said. “I have done nothing.”

Many women aboard the Carpathia were sustained only by the blind, unavailing hope that their missing men would be returned to them. “Oh, if I only knew,” they would say, “whether my husband has been saved.”

Caroline Bonnell harbored no such illusions. Her cable to her mother, who awaited word of her fate and that of her cousins Natalie, Mollie, and George Wick, was blunt and to the point: “All women saved… George lost.”

As Caroline lay on her straw mat, surrounded by suffering, one discomfiting thought came repeatedly to mind: To think that Natalie and I wished to see an iceberg all the way over.

After three days at sea, the Carpathia finally reached New York Harbor. In a cable