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"Soon afterward Captain Rostron and Chief Steward Hughes were welcoming the chilled and bedraggled arrivals over the Carpathia's side. "Terrible as were the San Francisco, Slocum and Iroquois disasters, they shrink to local events in comparison with this world-catastrophe.
Captain A. H. Rostron, of the Carpathia, addressed an official report, giving his account of the Carpathia's rescue work, to the general manager of the Cunard Line, Liverpool. The report read: "I beg to report that at 12.35 A. M. Monday 18th inst. I was informed of urgent message from Titanic with her position.
The stoker who had lain all night under the tiller sat up suddenly as if from a dream, the overcoat hanging from his shoulders. I can see him now, staring out across the sea, to where the sound had come from, and hear him shout, "That was a cannon!" But it was not: it was the Carpathia's rocket, though we did not know it until later.
The Carpathia was moving slowly about, looking for boats, rafts or anything which might be afloat. Exhausted with their efforts, weak from lack of food and exposure to the cutting wind and terror-stricken, the men and women in the fourth boat had drifted under the Carpathia's starboard bow.
Some said the Olympic would come out and meet us and take them on to New York, but others said they would die if they had to be lowered again into small boats to be taken up by another, so we finally turned toward New York, delaying the Carpathia's passengers eight days in reaching Gibraltar."
Then came a man and woman of the Carpathia's own passengers, as their orderly dress showed them to be. Again a sigh like a sob swept over the crowd, and again they turned back to the canopied gangplank. Several minutes passed and then out of the first cabin gangway; tunneled by a somber awning, streamed the first survivors.
But we did not know the messages were held back, and imagined our friends were aware of our safety; then, too, a roll-call of the rescued was held in the Carpathia's saloon on the Monday, and this was Marconied to land in advance of all messages. It seemed certain, then, that friends at home would have all anxiety removed, but there were mistakes in the official list first telegraphed.
"After we got the Titanic's passengers on board our ship," said one of the Carpathia's officers, "it was a question as to where we should take them.
We saw her trying to climb the swinging rope ladder up the Carpathia's side a few hours later, and she had the same difficulty.
This same lady was able to distribute more of her wraps to the passengers, a rug to one, a fur boa to another; and she has related with amusement that at the moment of climbing up the Carpathia's side, those to whom these articles had been lent offered them all back to her; but as, like the rest of us, she was encumbered with a lifebelt, she had to say she would receive them back at the end of the climb, I had not seen my dressing-gown since I dropped into the boat, but some time in the night a steerage passenger found it on the floor and put it on.
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