Free Titanic: A Survivor's Story by Archibald Gracie

feet of the ship stood outlined against the star-specked sky, looming black in the darkness, and in this position she continued for some minutes – I think as much as five minutes, but it may have been less.’ Now, when I disappeared under the sea, sinking with the ship, there is nothing more surely established in my testimony than that about nine-sixteenths of the Titanic was still out of the water, and when my head reached the surface she had entirely disappeared.
    The New York Times , of April 19, 1912, contained the story of Mr. and Mrs. D.H. Bishop, first cabin passengers from Dowagiac, Michigan. Their short account is one of the best I have read. As they wrote it independently of Beesley’s account, and from a different point of view, being in another lifeboat (No. 7, the first to leave the ship), the following corroborative testimony, taken from their story, helps to establish the truth:
    ‘We did not begin to understand the situation till we were perhaps a mile away from the Titanic . Then we could see the row of lights along the deck begin to slant gradually upward from the bow. Very slowly the lines of light began to point downward at a greater and greater angle. The sinking was so slow that you could not perceive the lights of the deck changing their position. The slant seemed to be greater about every quarter of an hour. That was the only difference.
    ‘In a couple of hours she began to go down more rapidly…. Suddenly the ship seemed to shoot up out of the water and stand there perpendicularly. It seemed to us that it stood upright in the water for four full minutes . 1 Then it began to slide gently downwards. Its speed increased as it went down head first, so that the stern shot down with a rush.’
    Harold Bride, who was swept from the Boat Deck, held on to an oarlock of the Engelhardt boat (which Clinch Smith and I had left a few moments before, as has already been described). I have cited his account of coming up under the boat and then clambering upon it. He testifies to there being no suction and adds the following:
I suppose I was 150 feet away when the Titanic , on her nose with her after-quarter sticking straight up into the air, began to settle – slowly. When at last the waves washed over her rudder, there was not the least bit of suction I could feel. She must have kept going just so slowly as she had been.’ Second Officer Lightoller too, in his conversation with me, verified his testimony before the Senate Committee that, ‘The last boat, a flat collapsible (the Engelhardt) to put off was the one on top of the officers’ quarters. Men jumped upon it on deck and waited for the water to float it off. The forward funnel fell into the water, just missing the raft (as he calls our upset boat). This was the boat I eventually got on. About thirty men clambered out of the water on to it.
    Seventeen year old ‘Jack’ Thayer was also on the starboard side of the ship, and jumped from the rail before the Engelhardt boat was swept from the Boat Deck by the ‘giant wave.’ Young Thayer’s reported description of this is as follows:
I jumped out, feet first, went down, and as I came up I was pushed away from the ship by some force. I was sucked down again, and as I came up I was pushed out again and twisted around by a large wave, coming up in the midst of a great deal of small wreckage. My hand touched the canvas fender of an overturned lifeboat. I looked up and saw some men on the top. One of them helped me up. In a short time the bottom was covered with twenty-five or thirty men. The assistant wireless operator (Bride) was right next to me holding on to me and kneeling in the water.
    In my conversations with Thayer, Lightoller and others, it appears that the funnel fell in the water between the Engelhardt boat and the ship, washing the former further away from the Titanic ’s starboard side.
    Since the foregoing was written, the testimony before the United States Senate Committee has been