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.