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 to her parents, the Countess echoed what must have been the sentiments of every Titanic survivor. “At last I am safe and sound. Am resting, I am so tired. Thank God I am here.”
Two days after the Carpathia docked, the steamship Bremen was advancing through the North Atlantic Ocean when passengers were told they were within a few miles of the Titanic’s last position. Soon an iceberg was sighted off the bow to starboard. It was, said the Bremen’s officers, most probably the iceberg that had doomed the great ship, so everyone ran to see the luminescent, intractable mountain of ice beaming absurdly in the late-day sun.
As the Bremen moved on, it passed through the southernmost drift of the wreckage, and the excited, chattering passengers looked down into the water and fell silent.
Floating near them was the corpse of a woman in her nightdress clasping a baby to her breast. Nearby were the bodies of three men clinging to a steamer chair, and the body of another woman holding tight to one of the many dogs that had been brought aboard the Titanic. This one, it appeared, was a Saint Bernard.
Further away, they could see white cork-filled life belts bobbing on the water. There were bodies in them: the frozen human detritus of what was now—officially—history’s most devastating maritime disaster.