Marie Grice Young rowed, too, though she had to stop now and again to throw up over the side of the boat as Mrs. White tended to her.

Roberta was so shaken that she was convinced she saw something that she could not possibly have seen: “that dreadful iceberg,” as she put it, “towering above us, like some grim monster about to devour its prey.”

Still she rowed, and beside her rowed Albina Bazzani, Mrs. Bucknell’s personal maid. Roberta’s long blond hair kept getting caught between the oars and her bare hands, but she kept up her strokes even as her hair was tugged and pulled until it was torn to tatters.

They pulled steadily, still in pursuit of the two masthead lights that shone ever more brightly in the darkness. Mrs. Smith suggested that they keep their spirits up by singing; they started out with “Pull for the Shore.”

Drear was the voyage, sailor, now almost o’er,

Safe within the life boat, sailor, pull for the shore…

Safe in the life boat, sailor, sing evermore;

Glory, glory, hallelujah! Pull for the shore.

For three long hours the passengers in Lifeboat No. 8 rowed until they could finally see the glow of the ship’s red port light moving toward them. Then suddenly the light vanished and the masthead lights grew dimmer and dimmer until they, too, were gone. The singing stopped. For the first time all night, the Countess despaired. The pitiful sadness of our rowing, she thought, rowing toward the lights of a ship that disappeared.

Now it seemed they were lost in the boundless dark in a boat that had been set to sea without drinking water or a compass. Having chased the phantom lights for so long, they had rowed far from the other lifeboats, and, as the wind kicked up, bringing with it white-capped waves, the boat heaved and tossed in the choppy water. We are a handful of people in an open boat, thought Roberta Maioni, faced with a worse fate than drowning.

They had been provided a small oil lamp that could be used to signal other boats, but it lacked kerosene and went out as quickly as they could ignite it. The only available light was the small electric bulb in Mrs. White’s cane. So while some women rowed and others wept, Ella White waved her cane over her head, back and forth, over and over again, silently praying that someone would see it.

They rowed and they sang. One of their songs was a hymn the Countess especially favored, and her voice could be heard above all the others.

Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom,

Lead Thou me on!

The night is dark, and I am far from home,

Lead Thou me on!

In the far distance, Able Seaman Jones detected a bright, moving object. He could not tell what it was, but it seemed to be headed directly toward them. He called out to the Countess, asking if she could see it. At first she couldn’t, but then she discerned a glowing light. As it drew nearer, they saw that it was a searchlight on the prow of a liner. The ship was the Carpathia, and she was steaming toward them from the southeast, firing rockets to signal her presence.

Ella White waved her cane joyously. The other women looked up to the heavens, clasped their hands, and offered a prayer of thanks for this unexpected deliverance.

It took them another hour to row to the Carpathia, and in that time came the dawn, a heart-moving sight that filled the canvas of the cloudless sky with giant brushstrokes of pink and gold and tangerine. With all the lifeboats headed in the same direction, the passengers in No. 8 heard the jubilant shouts and cries of fellow travelers who had endured the long and fateful night.

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 Peñasco.

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.”