MFDJ 03/31/18: Retrieving Bodies – Morbid Fact Du Jour!

Today’s Disbelieving Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

At 4:30 a.m. on April 15, 1912, dawn at last began to break in the Atlantic Ocean, revealing the tiny lifeboats adrift in fields of ice, surrounded by towering bergs, some the height of the sunken Titanic. One – spotted by a passing ship later that day – had a scar of red paint along its base. The sea had turned rough, but one by one the ragtag fleet of lifeboats rowed gratefully toward rescue. The Cunard liner Carpathiahad finally arrived, after hearing the Titanic’s plea for help and speeding through the night toward her position. By 8:30, all of the survivors – many of them soaking wet and frightened, their bodies rigid with the cold – had groped their way up rope ladders or were hauled in slings to the Carpathia’s deck, while children were put into canvas sacks and pulled aboard. Comforted by warm food, blankets, borrowed clothing, and the caring ministrations of the Carpathia’s passengers and crew, the stunned survivors slowly came to grips with the scope of the personal losses they had suffered. Of the Titanic’s 2,228 passengers and crew, only 705 were rescued; 1,523 men, women, and children – friends and loved ones – had perished when the Titanic had gone down. At last, on Thursday, April 18, after three more anguished days at sea, the witnesses to the disaster ended their nightmarish journey in New York, where the public waited desperately, disbelievingly, for news. While reports and photographers mobbed the dazed survivors on the pier, a cable ship – the Mackay-Bennett from Halifax, Nova Scotia – was already steaming toward the site of the Titanic’s sinking to recover victims’ bodies from the sea.

Crew from the Mackay Bennett retrieving bodies

Two days later, on Saturday, April 20, the German liner Bremen passed within a few miles of where the Titanic had gone down. “It was a beautiful afternoon,” recalled a woman passenger, “and the sun glistening on the big iceberg was a wonderful picture.” As the ship drew nearer, however, those aboard could make out small dots floating in the sea. A “feeling of awe and sadness crept over everyone, and the ship proceeded in absolute silence.” Looking down over the rail, passengers “distinctly saw a number of bodies so clearly that we could make out what they were wearing, and whether they were men or women. We saw one woman in her nightdress with a baby clasped closely to her breast… There was another woman, fully dressed, with her arms tight around the body of a shaggy dog that looked like a St. Bernard. The bodies of three men, all in a group, all clinging to one steamer chair floated close by, and just beyond them were a dozen bodies of men, all in life-preservers, clinging together as though in the last desperate struggle for life… We could see the white life preservers of many more dotting the sea… The scene,” she said, “moved everyone on board to the point of tears…”

A Titanic Victim Being Embalmed Aboard the Mackay Bennett