A month after the Titanic sank, crew from a passing ship rowed out to recover the floating lifeboat and found three decomposing bodies on board. Picture: Haldridge/BNPS
WITH a groan of tortured metal and the screams of the remaining passengers still clinging to her hull, Titanic sank beneath the waves and the last unlaunched canvas lifeboat was washed from her deck into the foaming, whirlpool of freezing water.
The Sun reports that third class passenger Edvard Lindell, floundering in the maelstrom, struck out desperately in the direction of the half-submerged craft and managed to drag himself aboard but wife Gerda, already exhausted by the numbingly-cold water, did not have the strength to clamber into the swamped Collapsible Lifeboat A.
Like a scene from James Cameron’s Titanic movie, she held on for as long as she could but, as she finally lost her grip and sunk beneath the waves, all husband Edvard had left grasped in his hand was the wedding ring that had slipped from her finger.
Edvard did not last much longer himself and, having succumbed to the cold, his fellow survivors pushed his body overboard to lighten the load in the stricken vessel until the few that were still alive hours later were rescued and Collapsible Lifeboat A was abandoned to drift off into the Atlantic.
Crewmen from the RMS Oceanic on board the Titanic lifeboat spotted in the Atlantic. Picture: Haldridge/BNPSSource:Picture Media
Now, 104 years later, photos and eyewitness testimony have emerged of the dramatic moment, a month later, when the ghost lifeboat was spotted by another White Star Line ship, RMS Oceanic, floating 320km away, still with three bodies in it.
Whitened by the chill wind and salt spray, two dead Titanic firemen lay prone in the waterlogged wreck. Beside them was the corpse of first class passenger Thomson Beattie, 37, still in his dinner suit and, in the bottom of the boat, a gold wedding ring inscribed ‘Edvard to Gerda’.
The long-hidden account of the recovery has come to light because the photos and gruesome testimony of the discovery, and of the reburial at sea of the decomposed bodies, are being put up for sale on Saturday, St George’s Day, by auctioneers Henry Aldridge and Son in Devizes, Wiltshire.
A log from the RMS Oceanic, which recovered a lifeboat from the Titanic nearly a month after it sunk. Picture: Haldridge/BNPSSource:Picture Media
Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said: “These are three first generation photographs of the recovery of Titanic’s last lifeboat.
“Accompanying them is a very graphic handwritten description by a passenger of the condition of those on board and the recovery operation.”
The first grainy black and white photo shows six Oceanic crew members being lowered on a tender while a second picture shows them rowing towards the abandoned lifeboat in the distance.
The third snap shows where Oceanic seamen standing on the wooden base of Titanic’s Collapsible Lifeboat A, still with its canvas sides down and still partially submerged in the water.
A lifeboat from the passing liner investigates the lifeboat from the doomed Titanic, marked with an ‘X’. Picture: Haldridge/BNPSSource:Picture Media
Sadly it is not known who the Oceanic passenger was who wrote the ghoulish accompanying statement, but on May 13th, 1912, he wrote: “I crossed the Atlantic one month after the Titanic catastrophe. We picked up one of the lifeboats with two n****r-like unrecognisable corpses of a passenger in evening dress and two firemen, wedged below the seats.
“The arms came off in the hands of the Oceanic boarding officer.
“Women’s rings were found.”
“The bodies were buried and the prayer service read. The lifeboat then hauled on to our deck when I cut this piece out of the boat covering.”
Shoemaker Edvard Lindell, 36, and wife Gerda, 30, from Helsingborg, Sweden, were emigrating to the US, bound for Connecticut, when they boarded Titanic at Southampton as third class passengers.
RMS Titanic, which was believed to be unsinkable, was sunk by an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912, just five days into its maiden voyage. Picture: Anton Logvynenko/titanic-in-colour.comSource:Supplied
As the ship sank, they struggled with fellow Swedes August Wennerstrom and Gunnar Tenglin to climb up the sloping deck towards the stern until it became too steep and they slid back down towards the officers’ quarters where the only two unlaunched lifeboats — Collapsible boats A and B — were situated.
As Lifeboat A was washed off the deck, so were they and Edvard and Wennerstrom climbed into it. It was Wennerstrom who tried to help Gerda into the boat but he did not have the strength to do it and she perished.
He said later: “Edvard’s hair turned all grey in lesser time than 30 minutes,” and he died soon after. Neither his nor Gerda’s bodies were ever found and Gerda’s father Nils Persson was eventually given his daughter’s wedding ring, but only after he had shown proof of his right to have it.
A portion of an account penned by a passenger on board RMS Oceanic. Picture: Haldridge/BNPSSource:Picture Media
Around 30 people had desperately climbed aboard the lifeboat but many had perished and just 13 were eventually rescued alive.
Thomson Beattie was a Canadian land owner and successful businessman who had gone to Europe with two friends for a holiday but, exhausted, they had decided to return.
He wrote to his mother in Ontario three days before they boarded Titanic at Southampton: “We are changing ships and coming home in a new, unsinkable boat.”
He paid £75 4s 10d for first class cabin C-6 which he shared with his friend Thomas McCaffry, and when Titanic slipped beneath the water he had been on the roof near to the officers’ quarters and managed to climb into Collapsible Lifeboat A after he and it were washed overboard, but he died from exposure.
A Canadian newspaper, four days after the grisly discovery of the drifting raft, ran the headline: ‘Tooth marks on cork and collapsible lifeboat tell grim tale — Liner found three.’
It went on to report: “Two of the bodies were secured to thwarts by pieces of chains. The body of a cabin passenger was identified by the clothing as that of Thomson Beattie. The other two were members of the crew.”
The long-hidden account of the recovery has come to light as the photos and gruesome testimony of the discovery, and of the reburial at sea of the decomposed bodies, are being put up for auction in the UK this weekend. Picture: Haldridge/BNPSSource:Picture Media
Sir Shane Leslie, who had been aboard the RMS Oceanic when the lifeboat was found, recalled: “The sea was calm at noon when the watch called out that something could be seen floating ahead. The ship slowed down and it was apparent that the object was an open ship’s lifeboat floating in mid-Atlantic.
“What was horrifying is that it contained three prostate figures. Orders from the bridge dispatched a lifeboat with an officer and a medical officer.
“What followed was ghastly. Two sailors could be seen, their hair bleached by exposure to sun and salt, and a third figure, wearing evening dress, flat on the benches.
“All three were dead and the bodies had been tossing on the Atlantic swell under the open sky ever since it had seen the greatest of ocean liners sink.
“The three bodies were sewn into canvas bags with a steel bar at the end of each. Then one after the other the bodies were draped in the Union Jack, the burial services was read, and they splashed into the sea.”
In a final, ironic twist, it turned out that Beattie’s body was buried at sea on his mother’s birthday, almost at the exact spot in the Atlantic where she had been born 82 years previously on a ship bound for Canada.
This article originally appeared in The Sun and was reproduced with permission.
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