Adventures of a Sea Hunter (13 page)

On
Titanic
, Phillips and assistant wireless operator Harold Bride stayed at their posts nearly to the very end, frantically working the radio to urge the ships racing to
Titanic
to hurry. As
Titanic’s
stern rose higher in the air, the engineers—all of whom had remained at their posts, knowing that they would die, but who nonetheless kept the dynamos running to keep the lights burning and to give “Sparks” every remaining bit of electricity to call for help—lost their battle as the machinery tore free of its mounts. The lights blinked out, surged on briefly, then went out forever. Once the power was gone, Phillips and Bride joined the crowd of people on the sloping decks.
Titanic
, straining in the water, half submerged, tore apart. The stern bobbed free for a minute, then joined the bow in a 2¼ mile fall to the ocean floor.

It was 2:20 a.m., and
Carpathia
was still nowhere in sight. Hundreds of people huddled in twenty lifeboats, while in the water more than fifteen hundred people thrashed, struggled and screamed for help until the icy water took their lives. “The cries, which were loud and numerous at first, died away gradually one by one… I think the last of them must have been heard nearly forty minutes after the
Titanic
sank,” reported survivor Lawrence Beesley, floating in the distance in the relative safety of a lifeboat.

Two of those struggling in the water were Phillips and Bride. They made their way to one of the ship’s collapsible boats that had been washed off the deck when
Titanic
sank. Floating half submerged on the overturned boat through the night, they suffered from the cold with a handful of passengers and crew. As the long night wore on into early morning, Phillips died. Second Officer Charles H. Lightoller, washed into the sea as the ship sank, had also struggled onto the overturned lifeboat and took command of the precarious perch. “We were painfully conscious of that icy water, slowly but surely creeping up our legs. Some quietly lost
consciousness, subsided into the water, and slipped overboard… No one was in a condition to help, and the fact that a slight but distinct swell had started to roll up, rendered help from the still living an impossibility.”

Lightoller hoped that help would come soon. “We knew that ships were racing to our rescue, though the chances of our keeping up our efforts of balancing until one came along seemed very, very remote.”

Rostron kept a careful lookout as
Carpathia
rushed into the darkness. “Into that zone of danger we raced… every nerve strained watching for the ice. Once I saw one huge fellow towering into the sky quite near— saw it because a star was reflected on its surface—a tiny beam of warning which guided us safely past.” At 2:40 a.m., he spotted a green flare on the horizon, just as the first icebergs came into view, but he did not slacken speed. Firing rockets and flares to signal his arrival, Rostron dodged the ice and he pressed on. He knew that the
Titanic
was probably gone, but he also knew that every minute counted for the survivors on—or in—the frigid sea. “It was an anxious time,” he later recalled. “There were seven hundred souls on the
Carpathia;
these lives, as well as all the survivors of the
Titanic
herself, depended on a sudden turn of the wheel.”

At 3:50 a.m.,
Carpathia
slowed, and at 4:00 stopped. She was at
Titanic’
s position, but the ship was gone. Then, ahead, just a few miles off, a green flare blazed up from the water, and the dim outline of first one, then several lifeboats, came into view. In the boats, the survivors, many of them sitting in stunned silence, watched as
Carpathia
slowly approached, picking her way through the ice. As the profile of the ship, portholes filled with light, came into sight of the survivors in the boats,
Titanic
passenger Lawrence Beesley recalled: “The way those lights came into view was one of the most wonderful things we shall ever see. It meant deliverance at once… everyone’s eyes filled with tears … and ‘Thank God’ was murmured in heartfelt tones round the boat.”

As
Titanic’s
lifeboats rowed towards
Carpathia
, the sun rose to reveal that rescuer and rescued were in the midst of a field of ice—it lay everywhere, from bergs 200 feet high to chunks “as big as a man’s fist” bobbing in the swell. Beesley said that when his boat rowed past a berg and alongside their rescuer, “We could read the Cunarder’s name—
CARPATHIA
—a name we are not likely ever to forget.” Another passenger, Colonel Archibald Gracie, reported that when he climbed up a ladder and into an open companionway hatch, he “felt like falling down on my knees and kissing the deck in gratitude for the preservation of my life.”

As No. 2 lifeboat came alongside, the first to reach
Carpathia, Titanic’s
fourth officer, Joseph G. Boxhall, went to the bridge to report to Captain Rostron. Rostron knew the answer, but he asked Boxhall a “heartrending inquiry.” Had
Titanic
sunk? “Yes,” answered Boxhall, “she went down around 2:30.” His composure broke when Rostron asked how many people had been left aboard. “Hundreds and hundreds! Perhaps a thousand! Perhaps more! My God, sir, they’ve gone down with her. They couldn’t live in this icy water.” Rostron thanked the distraught officer and sent him below to get some coffee and warm up.

By 8:00 a.m.,
Carpathia
had taken aboard more than seven hundred of
Titanic’s
crew and passengers, many of them stunned by shock.

As
Carpathia
stood by,
Titanic’s
survivors waited at the rails, looking out at the water. Husbands, fathers, sons—as well as women and children—would never return. Rostron held a service of thanksgiving for the saved and a memorial service for the lost, then left the scene of the disaster at 9:00 a.m., just as the Leyland Line’s
Californian
arrived to offer assistance. Ironically,
Californian
had been closer than
Carpathia
to
Titanic
, and her deck officers had seen the sinking liner’s distress signals—but the wireless operator had gone to bed so they had not received
Titanic’s
frantic calls for help.

Carpathia
headed for New York, her passengers divided by the gulf of the tragedy. Many
of Titanic’s
survivors kept to themselves. J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line, sequestered himself in
Carpathia’s
doctor’s cabin, refusing contact. His actions on
Carpathia
— and his survival when so many others had died—only reinforced the criticisms leveled against him in the aftermath
of Titanic’s
loss. Sadder yet, and perhaps more typical, was the reaction of two women who sat wrapped in blankets on
Carpathia’s
deck chairs, staring at the sea as a steward approached to ask if they wanted coffee. “Go away,” they answered. “We’ve just seen our husbands drown.”

After running through a storm at sea,
Carpathia
arrived at New York, reaching Pier 54 at 8:00 p.m. A crowd of thirty thousand had gathered. The news of
Titanic’s
sinking was the focus of world attention. Wireless operators ashore had intercepted the distress calls, and Rostron had broadcast a brief message to the Associated Press, informing the world
Titanic
was gone, along with two-thirds of the people who had sailed in her.

At the Cunard Pier, a clutch of anxious families and eager reporters stood by. After
Carpathia’s
own passengers disembarked,
Titanic’s
survivors filed off, many of them wearing clothes donated by
Carpathia’s
passengers and crew, some of the children dressed in makeshift smocks sewn from steamer blankets.

The daring dash through the dark and ice-filled seas to rescue the survivors of
Titanic
earned world fame for
Carpathia
and her captain. Both received a number of awards—plaques, engraved silver cups and plate, and medals, many of them displayed in a special case aboard
Carpathia.
The ship returned to her regular run between New York and the Mediterranean, sailing again on April 20 to resume her interrupted voyage.

The coming of war in 1914 disrupted
Carpathia’s
usual routes, and in 1915 she began running from Liverpool to New York and Boston. After leaving Liverpool with just fifty-seven passengers as part of a convoy on July 15, 1918,
Carpathia’s
luck finally ran out in the Celtic Sea as she left the British Isles. Just after midnight, in the early moments of July 17, the German submarine
U-55
intercepted
Carpathia
with two torpedoes. The first ripped into the port side and the second went into the engine room. The blasts killed five of the ship’s firemen and injured two engineers. Dead in the water,
Carpathia
began to sink by the bow as the sea poured in. Captain William Prothero gave the order to “abandon ship” and fired distress rockets to warn the other ships in the convoy that a submarine was nearby.

Carpathia’s
passengers and the 218 surviving crew members climbed into the lifeboats as the ship sank. The U-boat surfaced and
fired another torpedo into the ship to hurry the end, and
Carpathia
finally went under. The submarine was approaching the lifeboats when the armed sloop
HMS
Snowdrop
hove into view and fired her deck guns to drive away
U-55
, then came about to pick up
Carpathia’s
survivors.

At 12:40 a.m.,
Carpathia
sank at a position that
Snowdrop
recorded as 49.25 N 10.25 W, off the southern coast of Ireland about 120 miles west of the famous Fastnet. The loss of the famous ship was one of many during the war and was overshadowed by the sinking of other liners, such as the well-known tragedy of
Lusitania
and the loss of
Titanic’s
sister ship
Britannic
in the Mediterranean. But the memory of the gallant liner never faded. Her former captain, Arthur Rostron, eulogized
Carpathia
in 1931: “It was a sorry end to a fine ship … She had done her bit both in peace and war, and she lies in her natural element, resting her long rest on a bed of sand.”

Exactly where
Carpathia
rested spurred the efforts of many shipwreck hunters, particularly Clive Cussler, the famous author whose bestseller
Raise the Titanic
had launched not only the fictional career of Dirk Pitt of the National Underwater and Marine Agency (
NUMA
), but also fueled Clive’s real-life
NUMA
and its quest, funded largely by his book royalties, to search for famous shipwrecks.
Carpathia
was high on Clive’s list of ships to find, and in 1999, when John Davis of Eco-Nova Productions proposed a television series based on Clive’s book
The Sea Hunters
, they chose
Carpathia
as the first wreck to look for. When
The Sea Hunters
crew was assembled, I had the good fortune to be selected as Clive’s co-host for the show and as the team’s archeologist, joining veteran diver Mike Fletcher.

The search for
Carpathia
was more daunting than it sounds, because the general location of
Carpathia’s
loss was a U-boat killing ground during two world wars, and hundreds of sunken vessels lay on the seabed. It would take systematic searching and as comprehensive a survey as possible to try to find
Carpathia.

Under
NUMA’S
sponsorship, British explorer Graham Jessop mounted a search for
Carpathia.
In September 1999, he thought that he had discovered the wreck in 600 feet of water, 185 miles west of Land’s End, England, but bad weather drove off his ship before he could verify the discovery by sending down underwater cameras. When Jessop later returned to the site, he found that it was not
Carpathia.
A dinner plate lying on the sand, marked with the crest of the Hamburg-America Line, was one of several clues that finally identified the wreck as Hamburg-America’s
Isis
, lost in a storm in November 1936. Only one of the crew, a cabin boy, survived the sinking.

Mike Fletcher headed out to sea in May 2000 for another try at finding
Carpathia.
He watched the side-scan sonar pen trace black-and-white images of the ocean floor. At the same time, he also checked a magnetometer as it scanned the seabed for a large metallic object—like a sunken ship. After a month of surveying, slowly running straight lanes in what ocean searchers call “mowing the lawn,” he felt that at last the survey was narrowing down where
Carpathia
should be.

Finally, on May 22, 2000, as Mike watched the side-scan sonar and magnetometer, he was rewarded by the ghostly outline of a sunken ship in profile, rising clear of the bottom, and by the shadowy image of it from reflected sound waves. But the weather was getting bad, and again there was no opportunity to drop in a camera to take a look at the wreck up close. The wreck was the right size for
Carpathia
and was in the right spot, just a few miles from where
Snowdrop
had placed it. However,
The Sea Hunters
kept the news under wraps until we could mount a second expedition to confirm the facts. “You don’t know till you go” is tried and true wisdom in the difficult task of shipwreck identification.