“Women and children first,” the order long enforced among all decent men who use the sea, was the word passed from man to man as the boats were filled, the boatfalls rattled, and the frail little cockleshells were lowered into the calm sea.  What farewells there were on those dark and reeking decks between husbands and wives and all other men and women of the same family one can hardly dare think about.  Steadily the work of filling the boats and lowering away went on until the last frail craft had been dropped upon the ocean from the sides of the liner and the whole little fleet rose and fell on the sea beside the great black hulk.  And when the last crowded boat had come down and there was no possibility of removing one more human being from the wreck, there were still more than fifteen hundred men on her decks.  So far had belief in the invulnerability of the modern ship curtailed sane and proper provision for taking care of her people in time of calamity.

One can imagine with what frantic but impotent hope, as the sinking decks and menacing plash of waters within told of the imminent last plunge, those thousands of eyes strained at the misty wall of grayish black that enclosed them on every hand.  Not one gleam of light in any quarter.  The last horrible gurglings within the waterlogged shell of steel that a little while before had been the proudest ship of all the seas told unmistakably that the end was at hand.  Down by the head went the giant Titanic at twenty minutes past two o’clock on Monday morning, April 15th.  And she took fifteen hundred people with her.

Four hours passed before the shivering people in the small boats heard the siren whistle that announced the approach of a steamship from the south.  There was a heavy fog and they could not see one hundred fathoms off over the clashing and grinding ice that floated in fields on every side.  Soon after seven o’clock in the morning the ship came in sight and presently hove to among the fleet of boats and liferafts—­the steamship Carpathia, out of New York on April 11th for Mediterranean ports.  She began at once to take aboard the survivors, and in a few hours had every boat hoisted aboard.  The Olympic and Baltic, learning by wireless that the rescues had all been effected, proceeded on their way.

The Virginian and the Parisian, which arrived at the scene of the disaster a few hours later, could find no sign of any living person afloat, though they cruised for a long time among the wreckage before standing away on their courses.  The Carpathia at first was headed for Halifax, but upon learning by wireless that that harbor was ice-bound, Mr. J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the Board of Directors of the White Star Line, suggested that the ship head for New York.  This was done.  The Carpathia, with nine hundred passengers of her own and the seven hundred survivors, reached New York in safety.