The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks

I Savior of the Seas 1912,1918

“Bridge!” wireless operator Harold Cottam shouted into the speaking tube.

A few seconds passed before the booming voice of Carpathia’s second in command, Miles Dean, answered.

“Bridge, go ahead,” Dean said.

“I have received a CQD,” the operator said.

“CQD,” Dean boomed, “from what vessel?”

“Let me adjust the radio,” Cottam said. “Hold one second, please.”

Straining to hear through the speaking tube, Dean could just make out the faint wavering sounds of the radio. The radio shack was less than a hundred yards aft, but as Dean waited, the source of the noise seemed miles distant. Keeping his ear close to the speaking tube, Dean scanned the water with a pair of binoculars. A full moon was reflecting off the water, which allowed night visibility, and Dean was concerned with ice floes. Twice already tonight, Dean had ordered course corrections, and he wanted to be alert in case another was necessary.

“Sir,” Cottam said, “I have a complete message now.”

“Go ahead, then,” Dean said.

“It’s Titanic, sir,” the operator said slowly.

“What about her?” Dean said.

“She’s struck an iceberg, sir,” the operator said, “and reports she’s sinking.”

“What’s her location?”

“Latitude 41 degrees, 46 minutes north,” the operator read from his pad, “50 degrees, 41 minutes west.”

“Stand by,” Dean said.

Racing over to the chart table, he plotted out the location on a chart.

“Telegraph Titanic that we are forty-eight miles distant,” Dean said. “Explain that with all the ice floes in the area, we cannot steam at full speed.”

“How long, sir?” the operator said quickly. “How long should I tell them?”

“Tell them we’re at most four hours away,” Dean said.

“Yes, sir,” the operator said.

Dean turned to the watch officer. “Awake Captain Rostron. Tell him we have received a distress call from Titanic and I’ve set a course north.”

The man sprinted from the wheelhouse and raced down the deck.

“Helmsman,” Dean said, “Starboard one-half, increase speed one-quarter.”

The helmsman repeated the commands while Dean once again scanned the surface of the water with his binoculars.

“God in heaven,” he muttered to himself, “take us through in safety and speed.”

As Titanic filled with water, First Operator John George Phillips continued transmitting as long as possible. CQD followed by MGY, the call sign for Titanic.

“Have you tried the new sign?” Second Operator Harold Bride asked.

“SOS?” Phillips asked, as the carpet under his feet became soaked.

“Yes,” Bride said.

“No,” Phillips said, “but I will now.”

Phillips began tapping the keys. It was the first SOS ever sent.

From the deck of Titanic, seamen began firing rockets into the air.

After streaking skyward, they exploded in a crescendo of white.

From a floating palace of heat and light to a dreary place of haze and cold — the shock must have been incredible for the passengers of Titanic.

In a lifeboat two hundred yards south of Titanic, Molly Brown watched the scene unfold in horror. The lights on the great liner remained burning as she groaned and creaked while the thousands of gallons of water filled her breached hull. From a distance, it seemed like a horrible joke, only the screams of the dying intruding.

Then, all at once, Titanic’s giant stern rose in the air as if to wave good-bye.

She slipped below the surface with one final burp.

Ten miles and a thousand lives from Titanic, the vessel Californian was dead in the water. Just to be safe, her captain was awaiting the light of dawn to try to pick her way through the ice field. Californian was an awkward six-thousand-ton vessel owned by the Leyland Lines and was designed more for cargo than passengers. Though she had cabin space for forty-seven passengers, tonight she carried none. Her route for this journey was London to Boston, but at this instant she was surrounded by an ice field that allowed for no safe movement.

Second Officer Harold Stone waited for morning in the bridge. He watched the ship in the distance through binoculars. Whatever vessel it was had also stopped. Stone did not know Titanic had struck an iceberg. Californian’s wireless operator had shut the set off for the night before the distress call had been sent, so those on watch just assumed the ship on the horizon was waiting for first light to continue on.

Captain Rostron burst into the wheelhouse, still buttoning the top few buttons on his starched white shirt.

“Captain on the bridge,” Dean shouted.

“How far away do you place us?” Rostron said without preamble.

“Forty-six miles and just under four hours, sir,” Rostron said quickly.

“Watch?” Rostron shouted.

A seaman stood next to the window with a pair of binoculars trained on the sea.

“Sir, I have bergs to both sides,” the seaman answered. “Seems like a field ahead.”

Rostron turned to Dean. “What speed have you ordered?”

“Three-quarters ahead, sir,” Dean noted.

“Roger,” Rostron said. “Sound the alarm to awake the crew, Mr. Dean, then alert the galley to start as much soup and other hot liquids as they possibly can.”

“Yes, sir,” Dean said.

“Then place two sailors on the bow and one in the crow’s nest as lookouts.”

“Yes, sir,” Dean said.

Rostron turned to another brass speaking tube. “Engine room.”

“This is Engineer Sullivan,” a sleepy sounding voice answered.

“Sullivan,” Rostron shouted, “Titanic has struck an iceberg forty-five miles distant and we’ve been called to help with the rescue.”

“Yes, sir,” Sullivan said quickly.

“I’m going to need every ounce of steam you can give me, Sullivan,” Rostron said. “The crew is being wakened now.”

“I understand, sir,” Sullivan said. “You can count on us.”

“Full steam ahead, then, Mr. Sullivan,” Rostron said.

“Full steam ahead,” Sullivan answered.

Carpathia’s top speed was rated at fourteen knots.

Within a quarter hour, Sullivan had her flying through the water at just over seventeen.

Carpathia was a buzz of activity. She was flying across the water like a winning thoroughbred. From her stack, a thick stream of smoke and ash trailed off the stern. At 560 feet in length, with a breadth of 64 feet 3 inches, she could not be called a nimble ship. Still, Rostron was steering her through the ice fields as if she were a pleasure yacht. With a gross tonnage of 13,555 tons, Carpathia threw a large wake as she raced north. To the front, her bow parted the icy water like a razor through a hair. Twice already Captain Rostron had felt his keel scrape across underwater ice as his command had come close to icebergs. Even with that, he refused to back off the pace.

“Signal from the bow lookout,” the helmsman shouted, “ice to port.”

“Starboard an eight,” Rostron ordered.

Ship’s engineer Patrick Sullivan wiped his forehead with a rag, then stared again at the wall of gauges. Sullivan loved Carpathia and her inner workings, loved the feeling of power that was now surging through her hull. Built by C. S. Swan & Hunter with engineering by Wallsend Slipway Company for the Cunard Line, Carpathia featured a stack that rose a full 130 feet above the bottom of the vessel, and for Sullivan this was a blessing. The immense height of the stack created a great draft for the fires that supplied her power, and at this exact instant the fires were raging.

Sullivan stared aft, where teams of firemen were singing a ditty while shoveling ton after ton of coal into the fireboxes. At each of the seven scotch boilers, a pair of men with loaded shovels would approach the open doors and heave their fuel into the flames. After stepping to the side to refill their shovels at a bunker port, another pair with loaded shovels would step forward and fling their contents into the inferno, only to be followed by another pair of men. There were three pairs of shovelers per boiler, forty-two men in all. The chanting men were stripped to the waist, covered with sweat and coal dust and constantly in motion.

Cold and fear. A stabbing cold from frozen water and frigid air. A palpable fear from witnessing death. The screams of the dying surrounded the few lifeboats that had been launched. To mark Titanic’s grave, the sea was littered with chunks of cork, floating deck chairs, and lifeless bodies bound in life belts. High overhead, a hoar frost framed the moon. Down at sea level, puffs of steam from the lungs of the survivors marked the presence of those who were lucky.

On Carpathia, Captain Rostron never wavered, never faltered.

He kept his command running at full speed through a field of ice floes that could spell the same doom for him that Titanic had met. On April 11, Carpathia had left New York bound for Gibraltar, Genoa, Trieste, and Fiume. She carried a total of 725 passengers in first and second class. The passengers were seeking warmth and sun, so it came as a surprise when the few that began awaking that night did so from the chill. As soon as Carpathia had turned north, the temperature began falling. It was cold — bitterly cold.

Ten miles from Titanic’s last position, Second Officer Stone had watched the rockets light the night sky. He alerted Captain Lord, who was sleeping on the couch in the chart room. Lord inquired as to whether the rockets had all been white. After receiving a yes from Stone, Lord had gone back to sleep.

Then the lights of the liner had sunk lower in the water, as if she were steaming away.

The time was 2:45 A.M.

At 4 A.M., Stone was relieved by Chief Officer Frederick Stewart. He related the strange events to Stewart, then went belowdecks to sleep.

Smoke trailing from her towering stack and rockets blasting from her decks, Carpathia arrived at the reported coordinates at 4 A.M. Captain Rostron expected to see the Titanic still afloat.

After ordering the engines stopped, he ordered the lookouts to scan the surrounding area.

There was nothing.

Eight hundred and eighty-two feet of the finest ship yet constructed had vanished.

To the north, Rostron could see an unbroken line of ice. At the spot where Carpathia was stopped, the sea was littered with chunks of ice and several large bergs. Minute by minute, the sky began to lighten. The flickering stars overhead began to disappear as the coming light fought the darkness. Slowly, the scene came into focus.

At that instant, a green flare streaked skyward.

“Starboard a quarter,” Rostron ordered.

Carefully maneuvering through the chunks of ice, Carpathia pulled abreast of a lifeboat.

Mrs. Walter Douglas in Lifeboat 2 was hysterical. “Titanic has gone down with all hands,” she screamed up at those on the deck of Carpathia.

As deckhands secured Lifeboat 2 and began to unload the passengers, Rostron scanned the sea in the growing light. He could make out lifeboats on all sides now, along with the flotsam from a ship now dead.

A thick fur coat rolled on the light waves. A swamped steamer trunk was just barely above water. Wooden deck chairs, planks, and empty life vests. To add to the chaotic scene were chunks of ice and a pair of nearby bergs, which towered nearly two hundred feet over Carpathia’s highest point. Seat cushions and ornate rugs floated past. Hundreds of sheets of paper formed a floating parquet of a story never to be read. A case of champagne, another filled with tins of snails. Bottles and casks and wooden slats ripped from Titanic on her plunge to the depths.

A Bible, a hatbox, several pair of shoes. A single body dead for hours.

“Get the survivors off the boats and into the salon,” Rostron ordered.

One by one, the lifeboats rowed closer.

The nagging doubts that had plagued Chief Officer Stewart finally proved too much.

At 5:40 A.M., he woke the Californian’s wireless operator, Cyril Evans, and related what Stone had told him. Evans struggled to awake, then warmed up his wireless set and adjusted the dial. Seconds later, he heard the news.

“Titanic has sunk,” he shouted to Stewart.

Stewart immediately raced back to the bridge with the news and woke Captain Lord.

Within minutes, Lord began to steer a course for Titanic’s last position.

The sun was above the horizon, and the temperature had warmed some.

Carpathia was a blur of activity, as more lifeboats arrived and the passengers were off-loaded. The passengers stumbled onto the deck in a daze. Most were dressed in a haphazard fashion — some in formal attire, others in everything from silk kimonos to velvet smoking jackets. Most were wearing hats, as was the fashion: the men in fedoras and bowlers with a sprinkling of tall top hats and a few snap-brim tweed caps; the women in a variety of headgear, from Russian fur caps to formal black boaters. The survivors’ shoes were a study in contrasts as well-an eclectic collection from silk opera slippers to rubber boots to polished black evening shoes to high-heeled pumps.

All the passengers were wet, and all were cold.

The passengers on Carpathia raided their trunks for dry clothes that were passed out by the crew. The kitchen kept vats of soup, coffee, and cocoa filled, along with large silver platters piled with sandwiches of ham, turkey, and roast beef, but few of the survivors could muster an appetite.

The shock, cold, and horror they had witnessed rendered many mute, their senses numb.

At 8:30 A.M., Lifeboat 12, the last still afloat, was secured and the survivors unloaded. Harold Bride, the brave wireless operator from Titanic, had stayed on his station until the last possible instant, radioing the distress calls to sea. Ordered into a lifeboat, he had survived the ordeal.

Crewmen from Carpathia pulled him from the last lifeboat as much dead as alive. As soon as he reached the deck, Bride collapsed. The surgeon on Carpathia would need to administer stimulants to revive him enough to tell his story.

Captain Rostron had the 705 survivors safely on board — now what would he do with them? The Olympic, Titanic’s sister ship, was drawing nearer. She radioed Carpathia and offered to take survivors on board.

“Absolutely not,” Rostron told Second Officer Dean. “Can you imagine the shock to the survivors if they saw a near mirror image of their sunken vessel come alongside and ask them to come aboard? These people have suffered enough.”

“What, then, Captain?” Dean asked.

“New York,” Rostron said quietly. “We turn around and take them home.”

“Very good, sir,” Dean said.

“But first have the clergy aboard come to the bridge,” Rostron said.

The sun was burning brightly over the scene of the disaster at 8:50 A.M.

After a brief multidenominational ceremony to honor the dead, there was nothing more Carpathia could do. Captain Rostron ordered a course set for New York City.

At full steam, Carpathia was four days away.

A crowd numbering ten thousand milled around the Battery in New York City as Carpathia steamed past the Statue of Liberty, carrying the Titanic survivors. Captain Rostron had no way of knowing how much the story of the sinking of the great liner had captivated the public’s attention.

“Look at the crowds,” Rostron said to Dean, who stood alongside him on the bridge.

“That’s the last thing the survivors need,” Dean said quietly. Rostron nodded. The last few days had given him an opportunity to observe some of the survivors firsthand. Most were still suffering from a deep shock. Captain Rostron had noted two distinct feelings. The first was surprise. Surprise at how quickly they had been thrown from a floating palace into a freezing hell. The second was grief, tinged with remorse. Grief that others had died; remorse that they had somehow survived.

“I want you to take charge of boarding at quarantine,” Rostron said to Dean, “and keep the reporters from boarding.”

“Yes, sir,” Dean said.

Rostron knew this was but a stopgap. Once Carpathia was moored along the White Star Pier on the East River and the survivors had disembarked, there was nothing he would be able to do to protect them from the hordes. Still, he wanted to give them as much time as possible to collect their thoughts.

UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN had fared better than most. Her hardscrabble existence in the mining camps of Colorado had given her an inner strength on which she could call in times of trouble. Even so, as Carpathia left quarantine and steamed up the East River, surrounded by tugboats and pleasure craft, she realized she was party to an event that defined an era. The great industrial age of which she was a part had shown its rotting underbelly. The ship that “God himself could not sink” lay far below the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, and people would no longer place their faith blindly in the creations of man.

Spitting into the water alongside, she turned to a crewman nearby.

“From this day forward,” she said, “I shall always be defined by what happened.”

“What do you mean, Mrs. Brown?” the crewman asked.

“Whatever I do in the future will pale,” Brown said, “and when I die, the first sentence they write will be that I was a survivor of Titanic.”

“You and the others,” the crewman agreed.

“I wonder why I lived when others died?” Brown said.

“I think,” the crewman said quietly, “that that is a question only God can answer.”

At 8:37, Carpathia began unloading the Titanic’s lifeboats so she could moor. At 9:35 Thursday evening, she was finally tied fast, and the journey was at an end. Captain Rostron had done all he could. He and the entire crew of Carpathia had performed their jobs with honor.

“Lower the gangplank,” Rostron ordered.

Three minutes later, the first survivors struggled onto land. Not one of the survivors imagined their savior would meet a similar fate.

A pair of tugs began pushing Carpathia from the pier in Liverpool. July 15, 1918, was a typical summer day in Great Britain — it was raining. But it was not the type of rain that plagued the island in the North Sea in winter, spring, and fall. This sprinkle was a halfhearted affair, lacking purpose and strength. At first it came from the north, then switched directions from east to west. It ebbed and flowed like a dying tide, at times opening to pockets of sunlight and dry air.

Captain William Prothero stood on the bridge as the tugs pushed his ship from port.

The Great War that now enveloped Europe had begun nearly four years before, yet it was only some fifteen months since the United States had entered the conflict. The prowling German submarines had finally wrested the country from neutrality. The Lusitania had been sunk in 1915, scores of other ships since. At first the German submarines were an annoyance, now they were threatening the very concept of open seas. Losses of 100,000 tons a month had now grown to nearly a million, with no end in sight. Cargo ships, passenger carriers, warships — all were fair game for the fleet of German U-boats.

Captain Prothero was a stout man with a black mustache that perched on his upper lip like a bristle brush. Those who served under him found him to be a consummate professional, firm but fair. While Prothero believed in protocol, he was not without a sense of humor.

“I hear there’s a chance of rain later,” he said to his second officer, John Smyth.

“In England?” Smyth said, smiling. “In summer? I find that hard to believe.”

Prothero thanked a steward who entered the bridge with a silver pot of tea, then poured himself a cup and added milk and sugar. “Would you check with the wireless shack,” he said to Smyth, “and see if they have received the latest warnings?”

“Very good, sir,” Smyth said.

Prothero sipped the tea and stared at his chart. The thought of German submarines was never far from his mind. They hid in wait off the ports until the ships had cleared and were in deep enough water to make salvage impossible. To reduce their losses, the Allies had taken to traveling in convoys with gunboat escorts, zigzagging through the water like snakes and running their vessels at the fastest possible speed so they might outrun any torpedoes that were fired. Even so, hardly a day went by when a ship was not sunk or fired at. The battle in the North Atlantic was a watery war of attrition.

A beam of light pierced the clouds and lit a patch of water directly ahead of U-55. Commander Gerhart Werner stared at the patch of sea through his binoculars. U-Boat 55, like most in the German fleet, spent a great deal of time above water— in fact, as much as was safely possible. Batteries could be recharged while it surfaced, fresh air allowed into the always foul-smelling hull.

No matter what Werner and his crew tried, there was no way to wash away the smell of diesel fuel, sweaty bodies, and fear that permeated every square inch of the inside of U-55. The smell was part of the duty, and the duty was hazardous at best.

Werner turned his binoculars from the spot of light and scanned the horizon. Five days before, U-55 had managed to board a small cargo ship at sea off Cork, and he was hoping for another. Before scuttling the vessel, the Germans had raided the stores for fresh food. Ham and bacon, potatoes, and some dairy. The confiscated food was a welcome change for his crew. For the most part, they survived off tins of meat and cans of vegetables from their pantry. At times the cook could make fresh bread, but it was not often — flour soon went bad in the galley, and yeast grew a strange fungus that looked like fur.

Submarine duty was not for a budding gourmet.

Swiveling in the conning tower, he turned to the stem. There a seaman was reeling in a perforated barrel they had been dragging behind on a line. The crew’s clothes were inside, along with a measure of powdered soap. After being agitated by the current and rinsed by the seawater, the barrel was being brought back on deck so the clothes could be unloaded and hung from a line running from the conning tower to a stern support.

Wemer stared to the west, where the sky was clearing. Hopefully, the weather would hold and no ships would approach. Then the clothes would have a chance to dry some before they needed to dive once again. Just then, Second Officer Franz Dieter climbed through the hatch in the conning tower with a folded slip of paper in his hands. Saluting Werner, he handed him the paper.

“There is a convoy assembling off Liverpool,” Werner said.

“Yes, sir,” Dieter said.

“That means they are still several hours away,” Werner noted. “Have the men check the torpedoes and the batteries, and mop the inner deck. Then allow them to rotate topside four at a time. Provided no ships pass by, each group will be allowed to spend ten minutes in the fresh air.”

“Yes, sir,” Dieter said, climbing below.

Carpathia steamed through the Irish Sea approaching Carmel Head. In the next few hours, she would enter St. George’s Channel, then follow the curve of Ireland along her southern shore. Once past Fastnet Rock on the southeast tip, the convoy would set a course west for Boston.

Captain Prothero stepped from the bridge and glanced back at the stern. Now that they had reached cruising speed, the powerful twin-screws of his command whipped the water into a foamy froth that trailed behind the vessel for nearly a mile. Far to the rear, past six other ships of the convoy, was a trailing British destroyer. Far to the front, nearly a half-mile distant, was the leading destroyer. The destroyers would stay with them through St. George’s before turning back.

After that, the convoy of seven needed to rely on themselves. Carpathia had been selected as commodore ship for the trip across the Atlantic Ocean, and with good reason — Prothero was a skilled captain who had made the crossing many times before. Last year, while captain of Carpathia, he’d had the honor of transporting the first American troops to Great Britain to join the Great War. After safely dropping off the soldiers, Carpathia had been on her way to London to replenish her stores when a torpedo had fired off Star Point. Prothero had ordered an evasive action and the torpedo had run past Carpathia, instead striking a U.S. oil tanker running nearby.

Another incident bears noting. Not long after the near miss by the torpedo, Prothero saw what he thought was a lifeboat on the water. Watching through his glasses, he was surprised to see a German U-boat surface nearby to retrieve the object. Prothero reported that the Germans were using decoys, thus saving a few more ships.

In short, there were few captains with the breadth of experience possessed by Prothero.

Commander Werner had yet to leave the conning tower. His people were farmers, and his ancestral genes were used to open spaces. The cramped inner hull of a U-boat was as foreign to him as Chinese fireworks, so he spent as much time abovedecks as possible. Even with his dislike of confined spaces, Werner was a competent leader.

He and the crew of U-55 had more than a handful of kills under their belt.

“That’s the last of the rotation,” Dieter said. “The men are now being fed in shifts.”

“What’s our location?” Werner inquired. “Still approximately a hundred miles off Fastnet Rock,” Dieter noted.

“It will be night soon,” Werner said, “so we might as well remain above water. Why don’t you take the first watch?”

“Yes, sir,” Dieter said.

“Unless we see something that makes me change my mind,” Werner said, “we’ll just wait for the next convoy to happen along.”

Werner began climbing down the ladder in the center of the conning tower.

“Sir?” Dieter said.

“Yes, Dieter,” Werner said, pausing.

“We’re down to four torpedoes.”

“Duly noted,” Werner said.

When Carpathia passed Fastnet Rock, it was 11 P.M. and pitch black.

Already, there had been trouble. One of the ships in the convoy was having problems maintaining speed. She could make the prescribed ten knots, but when she did, the huge volumes of smoke from her funnels could be seen nearly twenty miles away.

Prothero knew that at sunrise they would be sixty miles into the Atlantic Ocean, and if the skies were clear, the plume of smoke would be a beacon to any nearby U-boats. The captain of the vessel reported that his engineers were working on the problem with little result, and Prothero knew it was a lost cause. Most likely the ship’s bunkers were filled with bad coal. There was no way to change that while at sea.

Prothero walked Carpathia’s passageways toward his cabin.

He would deal with the problem in the morning.

It smelled like feet. Werner’s pillow smelled like feet. Rolling over on his back, he stared at the deck above his hammock bunk. As soon as these last four torpedoes were expended, U-55 could make her way back to the submarine base at Bremerhaven for a long-needed cleaning and refit. Hopefully, he would receive enough liberty time to go home and see his wife. His wife was a fine cook and housekeeper — her house never smelled of feet — and she had yet to serve Werner meat from a can.

On the conning tower above, it was as dark as a madman’s moods. Franz Dieter stared skyward, waiting for the stars to appear. Tonight they were hiding behind the clouds. Some nights the air was playful and fresh, but tonight it had all the comfort of a lead blanket. Dieter reached into the tin pail by his side and removed a slab of slightly moldy cheese and a hunk of blood sausage. Taking his pocketknife out of his uniform pants, he sliced the food, then nibbled it slowly.

It was going to be a long night.

As though in a maze with no barriers, the convoy zigged and zagged as it made its way west. So many minutes at this heading, then a change. So many minutes at that heading, then a turn. To a plane passing overhead, the wakes of the convoy looked like the jagged steps from lightning flashes. To those on board, however, the constant changes meant safety.

Carpathia carried a total of 215 passengers and crew. At this instant, half of the crew and most of the passengers were asleep in their berths.

“Captain,” Dieter whispered.

Werner bolted upright, rubbing his eyes. Dieter’s breath smelled of sausage.

“Yes, Dieter.”

“Destroyers in the distance.”

Wemer stared at his watch; it was just past 1:30 in the morning.

“Have you ordered a dive?” he asked.

“No, sir,” Dieter said. “They’re still far in the distance.”

“What’s our position?” Werner asked.

“Approximately a hundred and ten miles from Fastnet,” Dieter said.

“The destroyers will be turning back soon,” Werner said. “Stay above water and maintain a safe distance. Stalk the prey until the time is right.”

Then Werner rolled over and went back to sleep. The hunt would take hours.

Breakfast was served on Carpathia at 8 A.M. Oatmeal porridge and milk, fried fish and onions, bread and butter and marmalade. Tea or coffee to drink. The passengers and crew ate their meal in leisure, never knowing a wraith from below was slowly stalking them.

Captain Prothero stared back at the smoking vessel. The repairs had made little difference in the emissions from the stacks. A black rope trailed in the sky far behind the ship.

“Mark,” he said.

The helmsman changed course and began a zag to the north.

On U-55, breakfast was powdered eggs and coffee that tasted like diesel fuel.

“The lead vessel has a single stack and ample beam,” Werner said. “If I was to hazard a guess, I’d say she might be Carpathia.”

“The Cunarder?” Dieter asked.

“Yes,” Werner said.

“Is she your intended target?” Dieter asked.

“She’s the lead vessel,” Werner said, “and the largest. We might as well try for the best.”

A crewman handed Dieter a slip of paper.

“The latest position, as you requested, Captain,” he said.

“What is it?” Werner asked.

“Forty-nine degrees, 41 minutes north,” Dieter said. “10 degrees, 45 minutes west.”

“Good. Sound the alarm and have the torpedoes readied,” Werner said. “It’ll be a twin shot from the surface.”

“Yes, sir,” Dieter said.

Wemer scanned the ship in the distance with binoculars.

“Fire two,” he shouted into the speaking tube a few seconds later.

Nine-fifteen in the morning. Captain Prothero was scanning the water with a pair of binoculars, but he didn’t see the wake of the first torpedo until it was almost upon them. He sounded the alarm only seconds before the first torpedo struck Carpathia just below the bridge. This was followed a minute later by a second explosion directly in the engine room. The second torpedo would be the one that claimed five lives.

“Sound the alert,” Captain Prothero said loudly, “and get me a damage report.”

“Yes, sir,” Second Officer Smyth said.

Five minutes passed before the voice of Smyth called from the engine room.

“Sir,” Smyth said into the speaking tube, “we have five dead — three firemen and two trimmers.”

“Damage?”

“It’s bad,” Smyth said, “but it might be contained. The engineer has the pumps operating, and he’s attempting to fill the hole below the waterline so we might have a chance at port.”

“Good,” Prothero said, “keep me posted.”

Scanning the water with his binoculars, he caught a glimpse of the German U-boat in the distance. One of the new types, five hundred feet in length.

Prothero considered firing the deck guns, but the U-boat was too far away to hit.

“They can see us,” Werner said. “Dive.”

U-55 slipped beneath the waves and moved closer to Carpathia.

Raising the periscope, Werner studied his prey.

The torpedoes had run true. One had struck below the bridge, the other where Werner felt the engine room was located. Even with the fine shooting, the steamer was still afloat. Through the periscope, he could see the pumps below dispelling water over the sides in ever-increasing amounts. If this continued and they could get another ship alongside Carpathia for a tow, they might be able to pull her back to port.

“Prepare to fire another,” Werner ordered.

“That will leave us only one for the trip home,” Dieter noted.

“Then you’d better hope that puts her down,” Werner said, “or I’ll fire that one, too, and we’ll have none.”

“Yes, sir,” Dieter said.

“Loose it as soon as ready,” Werner shouted.

“I think we’re gaining,” Smyth shouted through the speaking tube.

“A ship will be alongside in minutes,” Prothero said. “We’ll try to make Ireland.”

“I could use a few more seamen down here,” Smyth said.

“They’ll be down directly,” Prothero said.

Then he scanned the sea again.

To see it coming is sometimes worse. A bulge on the top of the water as the torpedo raced toward them just below the surface. Lines like a bullwhip, with a sting that went far deeper. A visible death with nowhere to hide.

“Straight and true,” Werner said. “That should finish the job.”

He held his breath as the torpedo drew closer to Carpathia. Time seemed to slow to a crawl. The twin propellers of the torpedo bit at the seawater and moved the weapon forward. Her nose cone was packed with explosives, and her fuselage was filled with fuel that would burn. Yards, then feet, then inches. Slamming into the hull at the gunner’s room, the charge exploded and shredded the iron like a paper bag blown full of air and ruptured.

The explosion ignited the powder and shells in the hold. It made the hole in the hull larger, and much more water than the pumps could ever handle flooded into the hull. Carpathia settled lower in the water.

No one needed to tell Captain Prothero the seriousness of the situation, but they did.

The order was given to abandon ship.

Those still alive aboard Carpathia were rescued, and at just past 11 A.M., she slipped below the waves for the final time.

II It’s Never Easy 2000

I’ve always been amazed at how the obituaries of ships of historic significance end up lost and forgotten. No curiosity seems to exist over what happened to them after their moment of tragedy or triumph. Mary Celeste was like that, and the ship that performed what is perhaps the greatest rescue in the annals of the sea, Carpathia, was another. Few of the marine enthusiasts whom I contacted knew what had happened to Carpathia after her intrepid dash to save Titanic’s survivors. Most simply thought she had outlived her time and was sent to the scrappers like so many of her ocean liner sisters.

Intrigued by a ship whose story has never been fully told, I decided to delve into her epilogue, along with that of the Californian, the cargo ship that has come down through legend as the ship that stood by, silent and unresponsive in the ice floes, as more than fifteen hundred souls perished in the icy Atlantic water a few miles away. Her failure to come to Titanic’s rescue has all the makings of a classic mystery.

Both ships are irrevocably linked with the most famous ocean liner in history. No story of Tetanic is complete without Carpathia and Californian. Unlike Captain Smith of Titanic, Captain Stanley Lord of Californian was more cautious. Rather than navigate through the huge ice floes at night, he prudently stopped and drifted among the bergs until daylight. After midnight, members of his crew saw flares rising across the ice pack to the south. Tragically, the ship’s radio operator had gone to bed and did not receive Titantic’s frantic SOS. Alerted by his crew, Captain Lord ignored the flares and chose to believe they were simply fireworks fired during festivities on the passenger liner and lamentably failed to see a calamity in the making.

The questions without hard answers still persist.

Could the Californian have responded in time and saved the poor souls of Titanic? Or was she too distant to reach the stricken liner before she sank? The controversy rages. There are revisionists who believe the lights seen by Titanic’s officers during the sinking came from a sailing ship, called Samson, that was engaged in illegal seal-fishing. Mistaking the flares for a government patrol boat out of Halifax, the crew of Samson fled the scene out of fear of being arrested. They didn’t find out about their part in the tragedy until almost a month later.

What became of Carpathia and Californian, the two ships forever linked together in one of the sea’s great disasters? Were they scrapped at the end of their shipping careers? Or do they lie in solitude beneath the sea?

In a strange historical coincidence, they were both torpedoed by German U-boats in World War I. One lies in the Mediterranean, the other in the Atlantic, but exactly where?

To find keys to their final resting places, I went directly to the most knowledgeable source, Ed Kamuda of the Titanic Historical Society in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts. Ed sent me not only charts showing the approximate positions of the wrecks but also reports of the sinkings.

The S.S. Californian was torpedoed on November 11, 1915, off Cape Matapan in the Mediterranean Sea, thirty miles from the coast of Greece. She slipped under the sea at 7:45 in the morning while on a voyage from Saloniki to Marseilles. She had been sailing as a troopship, but fortunately she was empty when she was struck by a single torpedo. Most of the crew escaped, and a French patrol boat took her under tow. But later in the afternoon, the persistent captain of the U-boat threw another torpedo at her, and she sank in thirteen thousand feet of water.

I scratched Californian off my wish list. The reported position of the sinking given by the ship’s officers, the patrol boat, and the U-boat captain was not a good match. The site was quite vague. This is understandable, though. It’s hard to take a sun sighting with a sextant — these were the days before LORAN and GPS — while a disaster is going on around you. You can’t operate on luck alone, however, and searching the seafloor for a shipwreck lying over two and a half miles deep within a two-hundred-mile search grid, and operating strictly on guesswork, is certain folly.

So I left the Californian, along with her legacy of what-might-have-been, alone in the depths.

The Carpathia was a different story. Here we stood a fighting chance of finding her. That’s all I ever ask. If the odds are a hundred or fifty to one, forget it. But I’m a sucker for a ten-toone bet. Perhaps that’s why the red carpet is always out for Cussler in Las Vegas and at Indian casinos. I simply give my money to the croupier and dealer, then walk away. Why waste time suffering the agony of losing? It’s much simpler doing it my way.

I learned that Carpathia had been torpedoed by U-55 on the morning of July 17, 1918, while sailing as part of a convoy carrying 225 military passengers and crew. The U-boat pumped two torpedoes into her, instantly killing five men in the engine room. Amazingly, Carpathia remained afloat. Captain William Prothero gave the order to abandon ship and lower the lifeboats. Impatient to finish the job, the U-boat’s commander sent a third torpedo into the battered liner. Ten minutes later, she went down. Interestingly, Lusitania sank in eighteen minutes after a single torpedo strike and lies just forty miles west of Carpathia.

Again we were confronted with conflicting position reports of the Carpathia’s sinking. The H.M.S. Snowdrop, the ship that rescued the 225 survivors, gave one position while the officer from Carpathia gave another one 4 miles away. The U-boat’s commander put the sinking 6 miles north of the others. Admiralty charts showed a wreck in the general vicinity, about 4 miles from Carpathia’s last visual sighting, but it failed to coincide with the other sightings. The search grid now worked out to a lengthy area 12 miles by 12 miles, or a box covering 144 square miles.

The dilemma never ends. This wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought.

About this time, Keith Jessup contacted me. He is the legendary British diver who found and directed the salvage operations of the H.M.S. Edinburgh, the British cruiser sunk in the Baltic Sea during World War II with millions in Russian gold aboard. More than ninety percent of the gold was brought up by divers living in a decompression tank eight hundred feet deep.

During our conversation, I asked Keith if he knew anybody with a boat that I might charter to search for Carpathia. He replied that his son Graham was in the shipwreck survey business and would be delighted to join in and oversee the search. Graham and I hit it off, and plans were under way to form an expedition, funded by me and directed by Graham through his company, Argosy International. I would have given my left arm to lead it myself, but I was buried in work, my wife Barbara was suffering serious health problems, and negotiations were under way to sell my books to Hollywood. As much as I would have enjoyed participating, there was simply too much hanging over my head to leave the homestead in search of an old shipwreck.

Graham chartered a survey boat called Ocean Venture, skippered by an experienced seaman named Gary Goodyear. After loading the remote operating vehicle (ROV) on board to take underwater video and photos, the ship and crew cast off during the middle of April from Penzance, England, the town made famous by Gilbert and Sullivan.

The weather was not kind, and it was a rough trip to the search area in the North Atlantic off southern Ireland. Once on-site, they began to run survey lines in a box between the positions given by Carpathia, Snowdrop, and U-55, using a forward-seeking sonar that sent out sweeping arcs ahead of the ship and a sidescan sonar that threw out signals to both sides of the boat to detect any objects rising from the seafloor. The sonar units were backed up with a magnetometer to detect magnetic anomalies.

On the second day, the forward sonar turned up a target. They had a wreck with the approximate dimensions of Carpathia located almost seven miles from her last reported position. The sidescan sonar showed a sunken vessel that appeared to be lying upside down with scattered debris along her hull, a common situation with ships that invert on the way down.

With great anticipation and excitement, the crew prepared to explore the wreck. At 550 feet, the depth was too great for divers, so the crew prepared to deploy the ROV and its cameras to examine the wrecks. There were high hopes that it was indeed Carpathia. The weather was choppy and the waves high for such an operation. With the forecast calling for storms, they rushed to shoot the video and head for harbor before the seas turned uglier.

Captain Goodyear positioned Ocean Venture over the wreck site. To minimize the length of cable between the ship and the ROV and to reduce the effects of a strong current, they employed a tether management system. Along with the ROV, a cage is lowered near the wreck with a winch that reels out a shorter length of cable to prevent the vehicle from bouncing around and becoming entangled in the wreckage.

Unfortunately, at this point, Graham jumped the gun and made the announcement over the radio that Carpathia had been found.

Not so.

The video cameras revealed a large wreck similar to Carpathia lying atop her crushed superstructure, rudder and propellers rising toward the surface like grotesque fingered hands. The first tip-off came from the propellers. They were four-bladed, and Carpathia’s were known to have been three-bladed. Her length was also a hundred feet short.

This was not looking good.

It proved impossible to make a positive identification. The only hope was to stumble onto something in the extensive debris field around the wreck. The ROV and its cameras were sent over to videotape the objects lying like trash along a freeway.

Then came a gruesome find. The cameras revealed a human bone protruding from the silt, a visible reminder of those who had gone down with the ship. Although NUMA is not in the artifact-removal business, the team decided to bring up for identification a piece of the ship’s china that was found resting in the silt not far from the bone. Rigging a wire, the ROV operator maneuvered his joystick and managed to hook the wire into the handle of what was soon seen as a soup tureen. Once the tureen was on board and delicately cleaned, the script on the base could be read: H.A.L

This was definitely not Carpathia. But what was this wreck, and how had it come to be here?

With time now run out, Ocean Venture set a course for home, and I went back to the archives.

Research identified the wreck as the Hamburg American Lines ship Isis, a cargo/passenger ship of 4,454 tons built in Hamburg, Germany, and launched in 1922. Newspaper accounts reported that she had gone down in a raging storm on November 8, 1936. Thirty-five died. Only the cabin boy that tied himself under the seat of a lifeboat survived. One can only imagine the horror in the ship’s final moments as a huge wave crushed her superstructure and rolled her upside down before sending her to the bottom.

It might be said that some wreck is better than no wreck at all. But that’s no compensation when we had our hearts set on finding Carpathia.

Return to Go and wish for luckier dice.

For the next try, Graham was joined by John Davis and his film crew from ECO-NOVA, along with master diver Mike Fletcher. Setting out from Penzance for the second attempt, Ocean Venture stopped in the fishing town of Baltimore, Ireland, where Graham and John talked to the local fishermen. Ocean fishermen are a great source for locating shipwrecks. They take great pains to carefully mark hangers or snags on their charts — any objects protruding from the bottom that cause them to tear or lose their expensive nets and trawl gear.

They were kind enough to provide a list of eighteen spots where they had hooked their nets. One of them might be Carpathia. One trawler belonged to a Spanish fisherman who had programmed snags in and around the Carpathia search area. The boat’s new owner was helpful in supplying the GPS coordinates that revealed the exact locations. There was one snag he thought had a high potential, and he suggested we search it first.

But it was not to be. The famous old liner was still not ready to be found. Fate in the form of nasty weather set in, and a near disaster dropped on our doorstop.

When we reached the first prime target, the Ocean Venture’s ROV was dropped into the deep and moved around a wreck that proved to be a large trawler that had sunk in a storm in 1996. If nothing else, our position was right on the money. The fix couldn’t have been more accurate. Then came a break in the umbilical cable, and cold salt water began causing electrical shorts in the delicate wiring. There would be no more underwater images this trip. The cable could not be repaired, only replaced, and there was no spare on board. With disappointment written in everyone’s eyes, the ship turned for port.

There are times I’d like to strangle the guy who wrote, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Not that I haven’t taken his advice on occasion. It’s just that I have this feeling that he never succeeded in anything he ever attempted.

We decided that next time, provided my hand wasn’t tired of writing checks to pay for the madness, it would be pointless to continue search grids because of the vagaries of the sea and weather.

Given the accuracy of the fishermen’s positions, it seemed more expedient and less time-consuming to simply check out each individual hanger. Running search lanes was like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack, one straw at a time. But now the stormy season was coming on. We would have to hang tough before making another effort.

Graham Jessup fitted out a new ship and headed for the Titanic site to bring up artifacts, but luckily, John Davis of ECO-NOVA, who had involved me in the Sea Hunters documentaries, offered to joint-venture the third Carpathia expedition. John would direct operations, as well as bring along a film crew to videotape the seafloor using a newer and larger ROV — with better capabilities — than the one used previously.

In December, during a lull in the weather and restocked with food, water, and fuel, Ocean Venture, with reliable Gary Goodyear at the helm, set out once again. During the voyage to the search area, the remaining seventeen snag positions provided by the fishermen were plotted into the ship’s computer. The plan was to start at the north end and zigzag down south, hitting the marked snags as they went

The first target was a mystery we still haven’t solved. The sonar readings showed what is most definitely a destroyer, with the aft hundred feet totally missing — almost as if a giant hand had sliced it off with a knife. The stem could not be found on either forward or sidescan sonar. The best guess is that the ship was torpedoed but did not sink right away. The stem pulled free and sank, but the rest of the ship floated long enough to be towed until it sank, too. There were no records of a warship going down in this area. Hopefully, someday we’ll be able to identify her.

The following days passed without a solid strike on which we could hang our hat. Operating twenty-four hours a day, the ship and crew began to show signs of frustration and fatigue. Still, anxiety ran high as Ocean Venture neared the seventeenth and last target in the extreme end of the southern search area.

Then, at last, the gods smiled, and the sonar reading began revealing what looked like a large ship on the bottom. Everyone in the wheelhouse stood in silent anticipation as the target began to increase in size, until Goodyear pointed and said, “There’s your ship.”

Optimism was high, but failure is always standing behind those who look for sunken ships. Despite the advances in equipment technology and computer projections, shipwreck-searching is not an exact science. The lesson of Isis, and at least two other wrecks that NUMA misidentified over twenty years, came back to haunt everyone. Several more passes were made over the remains of the ship far below. The dimensions checked out. So far, so good. Now it was the turn of the robotic vehicle and its cameras to probe the carcass.

While Goodyear’s first mate jockeyed Ocean Venture’s thrusters, fighting the current and waves to keep the ship stabilized above the wreck, the ROV was lowered over the stern. As the deck crane swung it over, the winch slowly played out the umbilical cord, sending the little unmanned craft into a sea turned gray from the dark, menacing clouds above. Inside the wheelhouse, Goodyear sat in front of a video monitor with a remote-control unit perched in his lap, moving the joysticks and switches that maneuvered the underwater vehicle’s motors and cameras.

Now every eye was locked on the monitor, waiting for the ROV to drop through the gloomy void to the bottom. After what seemed a millennium, we could see the drab, sunless silt spread across the sea bottom.

“I think we’re about fifty feet north of her,” said Davis.

“Turning south,” acknowledged Goodyear.

Plankton and sediment swirled like chaff in a windstorm, kicked up by a strong current. Visibility on the seafloor was poor, no more than six or seven feet. It was like looking through a lace curtain on a window as it swayed in the breeze.

Then a huge, dark shape began to loom in the murk before materializing into the hull of the ship. Unlike Isis, which had turned turtle on its descent, this wreck was sitting upright. She looked for all the world like a haunted castle or, better yet, the ominous house that belonged to Norman Bates and his mother in Psycho. Her black paint no longer showed, and her steel hull and remaining bulkheads had long been covered with marine incrustations and silt.

“Come around to the stem so we can count the prop blades,” said Davis.

“Heading toward the stern,” replied Goodyear, as he manipulated the ROV controls.

Large openings in the hull appeared, their steel borders disjointed and jagged, with debris spilling out from them.

“Could be where the torpedoes struck,” observed Fletcher.

Soon, a massive rudder and bronze propellers came into view.

“She’s got three blades,” Davis noted excitedly.

“The number of spindles holding the rudder look right,” added Goodyear.

“She’s got to be Carpathia,” Fletcher said, in growing excitement.

“What’s that lying in the sand off to the side of the hull?” Davis said, pointing.

Everyone stared intently at the monitor’s screen and the object half-buried in the silt.

“By God, a ship’s bell,” muttered Goodyear. “It’s Carpathia’s bell!”

He zoomed in with the ROV’s cameras, but the raised letters identifying the ship were too encrusted to read. The ravages of time and sea life had laid a blanket over them. Unable to make a positive identification from the bell or the bow proved irritating to the men in the wheelhouse.

The ROV rose from the bottom and moved along the dead hull, past rows of portholes, some still with glass in them, past the hatches through which Tetanic’s survivors had entered that cold dawn six years before Carpathia went down. The Ocean Venture’s crew could almost envision the slightly more than seven hundred people — pitifully few men, heartbroken wives, fatherless children — who had either climbed the ladders or been hoisted aboard Carpathia’s decks.

Dozens of trawl nets were entangled in the wreckage, making Goodyear’s job very tricky indeed. The upper superstructure and funnel were gone, collapsed into a great tangle of shattered wreckage. A huge conger eel came out of a jumbled mess to stare at the intruder to its domain. The ROV sailed over the forecastle, focusing on the deck winches, finding the fallen forward mast.

Suddenly, the cable became snagged, wedged in the twisted metal on the main deck.

It seemed as though, after eighty years in black solitude, Carpathia didn’t want to be left alone again. With a sensitive touch, Goodyear feathered the joysticks on the remote, retracing the ROV’s path until the umbilical cord finally pulled free. With a sigh of relief, he brought up the ROV and the first images of Carpathia since 1918.

With nothing more to be accomplished, the weary but exhilarated crew reluctantly stowed the ROV and the sonar and magnetometer gear and set a course back to Penzance, England. The disappointment over the Isis hung heavily on their minds. The big question was whether they had truly discovered Carpathia, or some other ship of the same design.

The absolute proof came in Halifax a few weeks later, when the renowned marine archaeologist James Delgado sat down and systematically compared the video images with the original blueprints of Carpathia. The rudder, the propellers, the sternpost, the position of the portholes all matched. Delgado made the final pronouncement.

“Carpathia has been found!”

Thanks to the crew of the Ocean Venture and John Davis, the search is over. Here at last was the ship forever tied to that fateful day in April 1912. I can’t help but wonder who will be the next to see her bones. She has no treasure on board, certainly not in the usual sense. However, in the glass case in the purser’s office are the many medals, cups, plaques, and mementos commemorating her gallant role in rescuing the Titanic survivors. But I doubt they can be recovered, so deep are they within the collapsed superstructure. Carpathia’s trophies will probably rest with her forever.

She lies in five hundred feet of water about three miles from the original Carpathia coordinates and a hundred and twenty miles off Fastnet, Ireland. Somehow, it almost seems fitting that she joined the White Star liner in the depths of the cruel sea.

NUMA and ECO-NOVA are proud to have recaptured a celebrated piece of history. Carpathia left us all with an inspiring legend that will be cherished by all who love the sea and her rich history.