On April 10, 1912, the Titanic, owned by The White Star Line shipping company, departed from the port of Southampton, England, to New York City, USA, and this was also the first voyage since launch. After 5 days of crossing the Atlantic Ocean, at 23:40 on April 15, Titanic hit an iceberg in the sea and sank 2 and a half hours later.
Titnic carried 2,435 passengers. When the disaster struck, 1,571 people died, most of them drowning because they did not escape from their bedrooms on the lower floors when the water flooded in, or jumped into the sea and had to stay in the cold water for many hours. . Only 864 people were saved by the Carpathia. Of those 864 people, 9 escaped death under very special circumstances…
1. Elizabeth Shutes was 40 years old when the Titanic sank. As a maid to an English aristocratic family, buy tickets on the first-class deck. As a rule, when Captain Edward Smith issued an evacuation order, the passengers on the first-class deck should be given priority to board the lifeboat, but somehow, the name Elizabeth Shutes was number one on the list.
At first, Elizabeth Shutes assumed that there had been a mistake. She tried to explain to the officer in charge of the rescue on the Titanic that it was her grandparents and their four children who needed to be saved. However, the officer ignored Elizabeth Shutes’ opinion and pushed her into the boat, causing her to fall on her stomach, breaking her front tooth.
Five hours later, Elizabeth Shutes was picked up by the Carpathia with 27 other people while, by design, the boat’s capacity was 65 people. No one in her host family is still alive.
2 . Laura Mabel Francatelli, a secretary at a London silk company, was just 30 years old at the time of the Titanic disaster. Buying a ticket in third class, Laura, wearing only her pajamas, barefoot, ran up the stairs to the deck when she heard the cabin attendant announce the order to leave the ship.
Unable to climb into the lifeboat because of the crowd, Laura picked up a life jacket and put it around her neck. As the sinking Titanic approached her, she and the others jumped into the freezing cold water. Luckily for Laura, only about 40 minutes later, a lifeboat picked her up.
When she saw the light on the Carpathia – the first ship to rescue the victims – which was traveling more than 8km away, Laura and 42 others held oars and rowed like crazy. To climb to the deck of nearly 10m high, all must cling to the rope ladder. Of the 43 people, only 20 made it to the Carpathia – including Laura. The remaining 23 people, perhaps because they were too tired and freezing cold, fell into the sea and disappeared.
3. Charlotte Collyer is the 3rd out of 9 passengers to escape death in very special circumstances after the Titanic disaster. She, her husband and daughter bought second class tickets. When the order to leave the ship was announced, her husband dragged her and her daughter to the deck. Three times, the rescue officer gave priority to the lifeboats for women and children, but her husband still wanted the whole family to go together so they missed the chance to survive.
Finally, when jostling, jostling, trampling each other to get on the number 16 canoe and when the boat was lowered into the sea, Charlotte Collyer could no longer see her husband and daughter. When the Carpathia docked in New York, Charlotte Collyer disembarked alone.
4. Lawrence Beesley , a professor of physics at Downing University, UK, bought a second-class ticket on the Titanic to go to Toronto, Canada, to visit his brother. When the Titanic sank, he easily climbed into the lifeboat with the number 13 because so many passengers stood in front of him, everyone was afraid of that number… unlucky!
When it was picked up by the Carpathia, there were only 13 people on Lawrence Beesley’s boat! Later, Lawrence always considered the number 13 to be the number that brought him the luckiest in his life. When his wife gave birth to their first son, Lawrence named the baby Lawrence Thirteen (Lawrence Thirteen).
5. Eva Hart is one of the very few children who survived the Titanic disaster. At the age of seven, Hart was traveling with his parents with a ticket in third class. Perhaps it was fate because at first, when the Hart family decided to move to Manitoba, Maryland, USA, to open a pharmacy, they booked tickets on the Philadelphia train.
Eva Hart (centre).
However, near the departure date, a strike by coal workers at the port of Southampton prevented the Philadelphia from leaving the port on time. So Father Hart decided to change his ticket to the Titanic.
As soon as she boarded the train, Hart’s mother did not like the ship because she suffered from a disease called “crowsy of small spaces”. She called the Titanic “a fish box” because the rooms in the third-class cabin were quite small and cramped.
The night of the disaster, she asked her husband and daughter to come up on deck and play in the pool chairs. When the Titanic sank, Hart was taken by a sailor to lifeboat number 4 because of the priority for children. Since then, the girl never saw her parents again.
6. Jack Thayer , 17, and his family bought first class tickets. When the Titanic collided with the iceberg and began to sink, Jack and his friend Milton were at the ballroom. Running back to first class to find their parents, but not finding them, Jack and Milton decided to jump into the sea because they couldn’t squeeze to get into the lifeboat. The whirlpool created when the Titanic sank pulled Jack and Milton along, but he was lucky to escape.
Jack Thayer and Milton on the Titanic.
Coming to the surface, Jack could no longer see Milton. After swimming for a while, Jack was about to freeze to death when he saw a lifeboat lying face down. With all his might, he flipped the boat over and climbed in. Over the next four hours, Jack paddled around the area where the Titanic sank and rescued a total of 57 people. When boarding the rescue ship Carpathia, Jack reunites with his mother and his father is missing.
7. Rhoda Abbott and 2 sons live in the US. They went to London to visit a relative and returned by the Titanic when it made its first transatlantic voyage. When the Titanic began to sink, Rhoda Abbott and two of them quickly ran to the deck and this turned out to be lucky because most passengers buying third-class tickets drowned when the sea flooded in.
But just a few minutes later, what Rhoda Abbott thought was luck turns into unhappiness. When the mother and daughter ran to the lifeboat, Abbott’s two sons were given priority to board the lifeboat and Abbott was not because although she was a woman, she was considered… too old! In her place is J. Bruce Ismay – the 9th person to survive because of “cowardice”.
However, when Abbott’s two children were holding hands and climbing into the lifeboat, the older one slipped, dragging the younger one into the sea. Witnessing the deaths of his two children, Abbott fainted. Lifted to a lifeboat by a kind man, Abbott survived, but from then until his death (1966) in a mental hospital, Abbott never returned to his normal state.
8. Michael (2 years old) and Edmond (4 years old) are 2 French boys who live with their parents in London, UK. Due to conflicts with his wife, Navratil, the father of two children planned to kidnap them both and bring them to the US using the fake name Hoffman to buy tickets for the Titanic.
Michael and Edmond were abducted by their biological father and brought to the US by the Titanic (photo posted by Mrs. Navratil in search of children).
When the Titanic sank, both Michael and Edmond were put on a lifeboat and the father, being a man, had to stay. Meanwhile, in London, Mrs. Navratil – a mother of two boys – is constantly searching for her son.
By asking some newspapers to publish pictures of Michael and Edmond, more than a month later, Navratil learned that her two sons were on the Titanic at the time of the disaster and were lucky to be rescued by the Carpathia. Her husband is on the list of missing people.
9 . The ninth of 864 Titanic survivors was J. Bruce Ismay. He was the chairman of the White Star Line Company, which owned the Titanic and many other ships.
On April 10, 1912, when the Titanic made its first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, J. Bruce Ismay was also the first passenger on the list in first class. When the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank, J. Bruce Ismay was still the first to jump into the lifeboat, taking the place of Rhoda Abbott because although being a woman had the right of way, but on the orders of J. Bruce Ismay, Rhoda Abbott was left behind because… too old!
After the Titanic disaster, investigators discovered that by design, the Titanic had to have 48 lifeboats, each carrying 65 people, but J. Bruce Ismay ordered it reduced to only 16 because according to him , too many lifeboats will “decrease the confidence of passengers, especially those of the upper class and aristocracy because the Titanic is an unsinkable ship”. J. Bruce Ismay’s act of jumping on a lifeboat was called ” Sir Ismay survived by cowardice” by the public.
Also according to the results of the investigation, at 23:00 on April 15, Cyril Evans, a telegraph officer on the Californian – at that time about 12km from the Titanic – sent a warning message to the Titanic, that there was an iceberg. big drifting ahead. When duty officer Jack Phillips gave the news to Captain Edward Smith and the ship’s owner J. Bruce Ismay, Ismay replied: “Stop it, shut up! I’m busy!”.
At 1:16 a.m., two officers, Stone and Gibson, aboard the Californian, saw several red flares appear in the sky. They immediately alerted Captain Stanley Lord. However, due to the lack of consensus on the common regulations on the meaning of the color of the beacon at that time, Captain Lord was not sure if it was a distress signal or not. Finally Stanley Lord ordered “keep watching” and went to bed until the next morning, he learned that the Titanic had sunk…