The Great Events by Famous Historians

One can imagine with what frantic but impotent hope, as the sinking decks and menacing plash of waters within told of the imminent last plunge, those thousands of eyes strained at the misty wall of grayish black that enclosed them on every hand. Not one gleam of light in any quarter. The last horrible gurglings within the waterlogged shell of steel that a little while before had been the proudest ship of all the seas told unmistakably that the end was at hand. Down by the head went the giant Titanic at twenty minutes past two o'clock on Monday morning, April 15th. And she took fifteen hundred people with her.

Four hours passed before the shivering people in the small boats heard the siren whistle that announced the approach of a steamship from the south. There was a heavy fog and they could not see one hundred fathoms off over the clashing and grinding ice that floated in fields on every side. Soon after seven o'clock in the morning the ship came in sight and presently hove to among the fleet of boats and liferafts—the steamship Carpathia, out of New York on April 11th for Mediterranean ports. She began at once to take aboard the survivors, and in a few hours had every boat hoisted aboard. The Olympic and Baltic, learning by wireless that the rescues had all been effected, proceeded on their way.

The Virginian and the Parisian, which arrived at the scene of the disaster a few hours later, could find no sign of any living person afloat, though they cruised for a long time among the wreckage before standing away on their courses. The Carpathia at first was headed for Halifax, but upon learning by wireless that that harbor was ice-bound, Mr. J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the Board of Directors of the White Star Line, suggested that the ship head for New York. This was done. The Carpathia, with nine hundred passengers of her own and the seven hundred survivors, reached New York in safety.

The sad international tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic touched men's souls more deeply than any other disaster in many years. To English-speaking races in particular the horror of the occasion pressed close home; for here was the best of British ships bearing many of the most prominent of America's people. To these seasoned voyagers, crossing the Atlantic had become a mere pleasant trifle, seeming no more dangerous than an afternoon's shopping in town. Then suddenly there was thrust upon all of them that ancient, awful knowledge that "in the midst of life we are in death."

Both American passengers and English crew lived up to the best traditions of their race. There was no panic, no fighting for places in the boats on the doomed ship. On the contrary, people refused to believe in the imminence of danger. The idea that the ship was unsinkable had been so borne in on them that even when summoned upon deck and ordered to put on life-belts, many of them refused. In the first boats gotten away from the ship, there were not many people. Some refused to climb down through the deep blackness into the tiny craft. They thought the tumult all an empty scare that would soon pass.

When the steady, ominous settling of the huge ship's bulk broke through this shallow confidence, there was a solemn change. Grand and tender scenes there were on those sinking decks; of husbands and wives parting with the utterance of a hope, turned suddenly to terror, that they would soon meet again; of other wives who refused to leave their husbands and deliberately stayed to share their fate. Few of the more noted passengers were among those saved. Bruce Ismay, director of the steamship line, was one. The captain went down with his ship, as did most of his officers, though some of the latter saved themselves by clinging to the wreckage which rose after the vessel's plunge. While she was sinking her band still played "Nearer, my God, to thee," and other earnest hymns. Death did not find the old Saxon stock cringing from him with hysteria and frenzy. Sudden as was his coming, wholly unexpected as was his hideous visage, he was met with the calm courage which is the best tradition of the race.

And what have been the consequences of this overwhelming tragedy? An investigation was immediately begun in America by the United States Government. Another, slower, dignified and ponderous, was afterward undertaken by the British Government. Both of them in the end attributed the disaster to practically the same cause, the speed mania which has overtaken the nations, the heedlessness of man's over-confidence which takes risks so many times successfully that it grows to forget that risks exist.