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As Carpathia raced northwest towards Titanic, Rostron was well aware that he was steaming into danger. Numerous warnings of ice from other ships and Titanic’s own collision with an iceberg made him wary. But he couldn’t slow down. Rostron posted extra lookouts, including Second Officer James Bisset, who stood in the open, the frigid wind blasting his face as he stared into the darkness. When Bisset looked back at the bridge, he saw his deeply religious captain, hat lifted, lips moving quietly in silent prayer.

Carpathia’s crew was at hard at work, clearing the ship’s dining saloons to receive Titanic’s passengers, gathering blankets, uncovering the lifeboats and running them out. Stewards manned each passageway to calm Carpathia’s passengers and keep them in their rooms, out of the way. The galley staff brewed coffee and made hot soup, while the ship’s doctors readied emergency supplies and stimulants in makeshift wards. The deck crew rigged lines, ladders and slings to bring survivors aboard.

Aboard Titanic, the end was fast approaching. At 1:45 a.m., Phillips called Cottam to plead, “Come as quickly as possible, old man; engine room filling up to the boilers.” The last boats had pulled away—many only half full—as a crowd of some fifteen hundred people raced towards the stern, which was rising out of the sea as Titanic’s bow went under.

Cottam kept trying to raise Phillips, but Titanic’s faint signals showed that power was failing aboard the sinking liner. At 2:17 a.m., Cottam heard the beginning of a call from Titanic, then nothing but silence.

On Titanic, Phillips and assistant wireless operator Harold Bride stayed at their posts nearly to the very end, frantically working the radio to urge the ships racing to Titanic to hurry. As Titanic’s stern rose higher in the air, the engineers—all of whom had remained at their posts, knowing that they would die, but who nonetheless kept the dynamos running to keep the lights burning and to give “Sparks” every remaining bit of electricity to call for help—lost their battle as the machinery tore free of its mounts. The lights blinked out, surged on briefly, then went out forever. Once the power was gone, Phillips and Bride joined the crowd of people on the sloping decks. Titanic, straining in the water, half submerged, tore apart. The stern bobbed free for a minute, then joined the bow in a 2¼ mile fall to the ocean floor.

It was 2:20 a.m., and Carpathia was still nowhere in sight. Hundreds of people huddled in twenty lifeboats, while in the water more than fifteen hundred people thrashed, struggled and screamed for help until the icy water took their lives. “The cries, which were loud and numerous at first, died away gradually one by one… I think the last of them must have been heard nearly forty minutes after the Titanic sank,” reported survivor Lawrence Beesley, floating in the distance in the relative safety of a lifeboat.

Two of those struggling in the water were Phillips and Bride. They made their way to one of the ship’s collapsible boats that had been washed off the deck when Titanic sank. Floating half submerged on the overturned boat through the night, they suffered from the cold with a handful of passengers and crew. As the long night wore on into early morning, Phillips died. Second Officer Charles H. Lightoller, washed into the sea as the ship sank, had also struggled onto the overturned lifeboat and took command of the precarious perch. “We were painfully conscious of that icy water, slowly but surely creeping up our legs. Some quietly lost consciousness, subsided into the water, and slipped overboard… No one was in a condition to help, and the fact that a slight but distinct swell had started to roll up, rendered help from the still living an impossibility.”

Lightoller hoped that help would come soon. “We knew that ships were racing to our rescue, though the chances of our keeping up our efforts of balancing until one came along seemed very, very remote.”

Rostron kept a careful lookout as Carpathia rushed into the