Page 67 - Titanic: Forbidden Stories Hollywood Forgot

Titanic! 53

“Edward will be in one of the other boats,” Molly said.
At 4:10, less than two hours after Titanic’s sinking,
Carpathia loaded the first of the survivors up from the
sea. Dawn and Titanic both lay eastwards behind us.
Carpathia’s passen gers, standing at first in awed silence,
lined the rails as we were hoisted aboard in slings and
bosuns’ chairs. They cried for us. They pointed their fin-
gers, and held their hands to their mouths, and lamented
the boats, carrying only 5 or 25, designed for 40.
“You see,” Maggie said, strip ping her ballgown from
me in the privacy of a stateroom. “You took no one’s place.”
Second Officer Charles H. Lightoller was the last
survivor hoisted from the sea by creaking pulley to the
deck of Carpathia. In all, only 706 souls of Titanic’s 2,228
passengers and crew survived the sinking.
1,522 died.
Including Edward Wedding.
My love. My lover.
Asleep in the deep, hopefully held in the strong arms
of the Stoker.
The world was stunned. The only land station, imme-
diately after the sinking of Titanic, powerful enough to
receive the Carpathia’s messages sat atop Wanamaker’s
Department Store in Manhattan, where its 21-year-old
operator, David Sarnoff, who was soon to found CBS,
scribbled the garbled names of the survivors for release
to the press.
On Carpathia’s return to New York, more than 10,000
people gathered on the Battery, at Manhattan’s southern
tip, as we passed, docking at 8:30 PM, at pier 54, at the
foot of West 14th Street, where photographers’ mag-
nesium flares exploded like rock ets in the dark of the

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